This build is about one ingredient: onion, cooked down in the beef fat until it’s sweet. Where the drive-in deluxe gets its contrast from cold crunch, this one is sweet and savoury with one soft, even texture. I make these occasionally, especially if I happen to be prepping French onion soup.
I make them with pickles, as I love the crunch and acidity, but if you want to be true to the past skip them.
Picks
Sweet and savoury; one soft, even texture.
- Forming burger patties: Paper thin, smashed
- Seasoning burgers: After cooking
- Cooking patties: Onion grilled in the beef fat alongside the patty, or smashed into it
- Assembling burgers: A pile of cooked onion, a pickle for the only sharp note
- Sauces and condiments: Yellow mustard
There are two ways to get the onion there. Both are variations on the same idea.
Grilled alongside
Slice the onion thin and cook it on the griddle next to the patty, in the fat the patty renders, until it’s soft, browned, and sweet. Pile it on the patty. Cooked down further and seasoned, the same onion becomes a jam: the onion jam on a double smash burger in the October 2026 Food Log was savoury and sweet.
Smashed in
Pile thin-sliced onion on the meatball and smash the patty onion side down, so the onion cooks into the meat. It’s a shortcut for grilling the onion separately: a similar effect in one step, and the onion soaks up the griddle juices instead of leaving them in the pan.
Where it comes from
A lunch counter in El Reno, Oklahoma, a railway town on Route 66. The fried onion burger was made there in the 1920s by Homer and Ross Davis, a father and son, at the Hamburger Inn, to feed striking workers cheaply during the Great Railroad Strike of 1922. Beef was dear and onions were cheap, so a small ball of beef was pressed flat under a pile of onion on the griddle. They called it the Depression Burger and sold it for five cents, and it spread across western Oklahoma through the Depression. Stretching beef with onion was older than that: an 1883 Boston cookbook already mashed onion into ground beef.
| Constraint | Pick it explains |
|---|---|
| Beef was expensive, onions cheap | Onion as half the filling, not a topping |
| One flat-top griddle, no fryer | Patty and onion cooked together, in the beef fat |
| A small ball of beef had to look like a burger | Smashed paper thin, to the edges of the bun |
| No time or space for a toaster | Soft bun, steamed over the patty |
It’s one of the oldest griddled burgers still made, though not the first: cooks were smashing balls of beef on flat-tops from the 1880s (see Smash burger). The slider, the drive-in deluxe, and the fast-food double share its thin patty, its flat-top, and its soft bun, and change what goes on top.
Why these picks
- Onion cooked in the beef fat. The fat browns it and the onion soaks up the beef flavour, so it tastes of the burger, not just of onion.
- A smashed patty. Thin enough to cook in the time the onion takes to soften, with crisp edges against the soft onion.
- Yellow mustard. The only sharp note under all that sweetness.
- A pickle. Not traditional, but it adds the crunch and acid the soft onion can’t.
How it fails
- Raw, sharp onion: sliced too thick, or the heat was too low to soften it before the patty was done.
- Burnt onion: the griddle was too hot or the onion sliced too thin. Pull it to a cooler spot once it browns.
- Cloying: too much onion and nothing sharp. Don’t skip the mustard.
Recipes
Oklahoma fried onion burger is the smashed-in version.