For its season finale, FOODBEAST’s For the Love of the Slider series has brought us to Columbus, Ohio. It is here where we meet up with Chef Marcus Meacham, and it is here where the White Castle Red Eye Gravy Sausage and Poached Egg Breakfast Slider was first brought to life.
With a background in personal training, Chef Meacham, owner and founder of Steam Kitchen in Columbus, is a self-taught culinary guru who cooks with a tough love philosophy, in which food is his weapon of choice.
“It’s been said that food is my assault. I want to constantly punch my customers in the mouth with flavor,” Meach explained jokingly. “In a nice way—punch them, and hold them.”
When it came to Meachum’s out-of-the-box take on the savory breakfast slider, the punch would involve a White Castle beverage that was essential to creating what he calls, ‘red-eye gravy.’
Coffee.
“There’s something people don’t know about White Castle’s coffee,” Meacham explained. “It’s delicious and it also makes a great sauce.”
But before he could make the sauce, Chef Meach first needed to begin the slider remix process by turning some White Castle Original Sliders and Sausage Breakfast Sliders into sausages via food processor.
To the patties, he adds:
- toasted fennel seeds
- jalapeños
- some locally grown spices
- manchego cheese.
He then individually cases the sausages and sets them on the smoker for 45 minutes. Then as they smoked, he’d move onto his one-of-a-kind and White Castle coffee-infused red-eye gravy.
Meach’s red-eye gravy includes:
- duck fat
- Steam Kitchen house mustard
- molasses
- Thai chili paste
- White Castle coffee
- habanero hot sauce
Meacham created this non-traditional mashup of flavor profiles that has never been seen before—because that’s just how he rolls.
At his Columbus-based restaurant Steam Kitchen, Meacham is known for his unique approach to steam buns, which seem to elevate the taste, texture and flavor of all his brilliant dishes. Additionally, Meacham takes pride in not following a specific genre of the food he serves and keeps his ears to the streets to see what his customer are truly looking for. For the past six years, Meacham’s strategy is to use social media as a looking glass into the mind of his followers.
“I would blow a feature up, [on social media] and I would put a time limit on it, and people would come in,” he said. “So, I realized what the people of Columbus wanted.”
Meacham is good at what he does, and just by the look of the slider he created for FOODBEAST, it’s like he read our minds. Geoff from FOODBEAST described it perfectly as Meacham and him sat down to take their first bites of the world’s first White Castle Red Eye Gravy And Poached Egg Sausage Breakfast Slider.
“We’ve seen nicely plated sliders on our show—this, though, looks like the epitome of what a FOODBEAST slider should be,” Geoff explained.
With so many flavors packed into one slider, Meacham explained exactly what he created for his ‘Love of The Slider.’
“I took something that wasn’t broken, broke it, and made it better,” he said. “By adding more layers of flavor, going over the top, and being bold with it. It’s sausage egg and cheese—but to the extreme limits.”
Created in partnership with White Castle
