The Best Cheeseburger Sliders You’ll Ever Make | Epicurious 101

In this edition of Epicurious 101, professional chef and culinary instructor Frank Proto demonstrates how to make the best cheeseburger sliders at home. If you need to feed a crowd fast, sliders are your secret weapon; small, quick to assemble, and easily batchable, these delicious beef sliders in Hawaiian rolls are sure to go down a treat at any occasion.

00:00 Intro
00:19 Preparing the Meat
02:18 Preparing the Garlic Butter Buns
04:05 Broiling and Building the Sliders

Start your free trial and access over 50,000 expertly-tested recipes from Epicurious, Bon Appétit and more on the Epicurious app. https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id312101965?pt=45076&ct=EpiVideoDescriptionYT&mt=8

Still haven’t subscribed to Epicurious on YouTube? ►► http://bit.ly/epiyoutubesub

ABOUT EPICURIOUS
Browse thousands of recipes and videos from Bon Appétit, Gourmet, and more. Find inventive cooking ideas, ingredients, and restaurant menus from the world’s largest food archive.

– If you need to feed a crowd fast, sliders are your secret weapon. They’re small, quick to assemble, and you can build a whole
tray in about 15 minutes. The meat is one slab.
The buns are in a slab. All you really gotta do
is give it a little cut, stack everything up and
everyone has burgers. This is everything you love
about a White Castle slider, but homemade and much better. [upbeat music]
[logo whooshes] This method starts out with a cookie sheet or a half sheet tray. I have two pounds of 80/20 ground beef. That means there’s 80% meat, 20% fat. That’s a really good meat
to fat ratio for a burger. I have some finely diced
white onions, salt and pepper. It’s really that easy. You
don’t even need to oil the pan. There’s enough fat in
the meat to oil the pan, and all you really have
to do is take the meat out of the packages and press it in. This is a critical part to our recipe ’cause you really want
this to fit the tray, so it’s almost like you’re
patting out pizza dough into your tray. This is gonna make the
burger bind together so it’s not crumbly. It’s also gonna make our sliders nice and even when we cut them. The 80/20 has a good fat-to-lean ratio. I feel like if you’re
gonna use a leaner meat you’re gonna get a dry and crumbly slider and that’s not what we want. We want this to have a little meatiness, a little juiciness to it. Basically fat equals flavor
and that’s what we want. As you pat this down, I
want you to also remember that when this cooks,
it’s gonna shrink up. Take the time to spread
it out as even as possible so that when it does shrink
up, you have nice even slider. So that’s good. I have
my meat evenly spread. I take my onions and I just
spread them on the top. Make sure you get in the
corners and on the edges. The finer the onions the better because you don’t wanna
have big chunks of onions. You want these to kind of melt away and steam a little when we
actually put these in the oven, that’s beautiful. And then of course we’re
gonna season this up. Some fresh cracked black pepper [pepper mill grinding] and some salt, now don’t
be skimpy with the salt, I know a lot of people like, “Oh chef you put too much salt on things.” I feel like I have a pretty
good practice hand on salt. I’m not just dumping it on.
I’m going high when I season. I’m trying to get a nice
dispersion on my salt, but you want this to be seasoned well, you want to taste that
meat, and that’s it. That’s the burger meat in the
pan ready to go into the oven. What I’m gonna do now is I’m
gonna pop this in the fridge, get all of my toppings and my buns ready right,
before the party starts, I can pop these in the
broiler, cook ’em up, and finish assembling my sliders. [upbeat music]
[logo whooshes] So I have the buns and I
have prep for garlic butter. I like to put a little bit of
topping on the top of my buns, so I’m gonna make a garlic
butter with some parsley and just brush it on top
before they go in the oven. I think it just gives you a little more kind of that savoriness to our dish and it makes ’em just
slightly more impressive than just a plain slider. I have a pot. I have a stick of butter. As this butter starts to
melt, I’m gonna get my garlic and I’m gonna add it to the pot. I don’t really want this to brown at all. I just want to kind of scent the butter with the chopped garlic. And I’m not too worried
that the butter’s not melted because I really want a
nice strong garlicky flavor. My heat’s at medium high right now, but I’m just trying to
melt it a little quicker. I’m gonna lower it down
once the butter melts to about medium, I have some
fresh chopped parsley here, so I’m gonna wait till
add my parsley to the end right before we put
the burgers in the oven so it stays nice and green. I can smell my garlic. It’s a nice kind of mellow, sweet flavor. And that’s it. The butter is melted, the
garlic is lightly cooked, not brown at all. I’m gonna take this,
I’m gonna put it aside and then I’m gonna get to my buns. So I’m using Trader Joe’s Hawaiian rolls. The thing here is you do not want to separate these buns at this point. Leave them in a slab. This is what makes everything so quick and easy when we put these together. You can use whatever roll you like, I just happen to prefer the
Trader Joe’s Hawaiian rolls. If you like a potato
roll, use a potato roll. It’s up to you. I just like
the sweetness of these rolls. What we want to do is get our
knife, a nice serrated knife, and cut them down the middle so that I have basically
a slab of slider bun. They are totally intact and
that’s how you want them to be. We are not building
individual sliders here. We’re building them in slabs and this is what makes
it so quick and easy. [upbeat music]
[logo whooshes] We’re gonna broil these burgers for about five to seven minutes and then we’re gonna build our sliders. Broiling these burgers
are gonna keep ’em juicy. They’re not gonna cook for a long time, so we retain a lot of that juiciness. We don’t wanna roast these
in the oven and dry them out. If you’re worried about undercook this, keep it in for a little longer. But basically because the meat is so thin that five to seven
minutes you’re cooking it all the way through. Okay, let’s throw these in the oven. It’s been about six or seven minutes. You’ll notice that there’s a
fair amount of liquid in here. I’m just gonna drain it off into a bowl. Meat is ready to go. We’re ready to build. I have my burgers, I have
my buns, I have my cheese, I have everything next to me here. So I’m gonna take my lids and I’m gonna put them aside for now. I’m gonna get my meat and all I really gotta do
with this is cut it in half with my spatula fairly even. And then the meat, look at how perfectly it
fits onto our slider buns. And then we take our cheese, cheese it up. Don’t be afraid to overlap your cheese. We’re gonna put a fair
amount of cheese on here. I want them to be really nice and cheesy I’m probably gonna do like one and a half slices per, don’t be afraid. I like to use the stuff
that they slice of the deli. I think it has a little more flavor. I think it has a better
texture than the slices that are in cellophane. If that’s all you have, use it. I like to sing the praises
of American cheese. Some people don’t, but I
think it’s really delicious, especially for sliders. And now what we’re gonna do is
we’re gonna top with ketchup. You don’t have to be too precise. [soft upbeat music] Now I have my pickles, one pickle per right on top of your ketchup. Three across, four down, two little ones there. All right, and then we take
the lids, put them on top, and then we’re gonna
take our garlic butter. Now I take the parsley and add it because I want the parsley to kind of have that nice freshness and nice color. Mix it into your garlic butter so you have a nice
garlic, parsley, butter. Brush this really well get all that garlic and that butter onto your buns, like try and scoop up some
of that nice stuff, right? If you don’t want to add the
garlic butter, that’s fine. These burgers are really good. I’m just kind of like making
it a little extra special, Chef Franking it up. You definitely can’t get
this at White Castle, so we’re not even finished yet with these, you can eat them now
and be totally satisfied and happy everyone around
you’ll be satisfied and happy but there’s one last step. I’m gonna cover these with foil. Put ’em in the oven for about five minutes so that everything gets a chance
to steam and meld together. It’s gonna melt the cheese. The buns are gonna get soft and squishy and it’s
just gonna be perfect. The oven’s at 350 and we’re gonna put ’em in
there for about five minutes. Alright, so we ready for the big reveal. Let’s see how they look. I got a little knife, and what I’m gonna do is
I’m gonna cut in-between where all the slices are. I think these look spectacular. Anyone who likes sliders
is gonna love these. Plus we got a big stack
of burgers in fractions of the time it would take
to make this many burgers for everyone on the grill and then making individual patties. We got a big stack of sliders there. Alright, it’s time to taste and I don’t know if I
can eat the whole tray, but I’m gonna just take one for now I’m gonna stay in control, okay, I got one in the back right here. [lively music] I think my bite was a little too big? It’s got everything that
a classic slider has. It’s meaty, it’s cheesy,
the bun is nice and soft. A little sharpness of
that pickle, the ketchup, the garlic butter just kind
of adds that little like, you know, pinch of goodness at the end. And one of the best things about these is that they take little to no time. You can get everyone involved,
they’re fun to assemble. Absolutely delicious. [lively music]