Blogger Turns White Castle Slider into $400 Gourmet Burger

— -- There seems to be an unofficial formula to gourmet-ifying food: add gold leaf, caviar, foie gras, truffles and as many other very expensive ingredients as you possibly can.

Which is exactly what Nick Chipman, the blogger behind Dude Foods, did to a White Castle slider, elevating the mini-burger to levels not previously known to be possible.

Chipman, who had never had truffles before, thought “it would be hilarious if I bought these ridiculously priced truffles — the same ones that are used as an ingredient in some of the fanciest restaurant dishes in the world — and added them to a White Castle slider,” he wrote on his blog. “The idea sort of just spiraled out of control from there when I decided to combine the truffles with every other insanely expensive food I could think of to create the most expensive White Castle slider ever assembled.”

Chipman used a $250 Williams-Sonoma gift card he had received for the ingredients – white Italian truffles, Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Hook’s 15-Year Cheddar cheese, a couple ounces of prosciutto, duck foie gras, port wine pate, an ounce of Russian caviar, a fried quail egg and 24K gold flakes. He threw in some money of his own, too, bringing the grand total of the burger to $400.

So how does a $400 single-bite burger taste?

“Terrible,” he wrote. “Everything else just took away from the deliciousness that is the White Castle slider. I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that it looked goddamn beautiful. If I were Leonardo da Vinci this would be my Mona Lisa. If I were Shah Jahan it would be my Taj Mahal. In retrospect, though, I probably should have just spent the $400 on 20 Crave Cases from White Castle, or in other words, 600 sliders.”