Well, it looks like the hot new item at Trader Joe’s in the summer of 2023 is the Trader Joe’s frozen mini cheeseburgers! In time for summer, Trader Joe’s has released a frozen box of mini cheeseburgers that you pop in the microwave and gobble down for a meal. These will be an instant hit!
It’s not like this is a new idea or anything. The burger chain, White Castle, is famous for its small, square burgers that can be ordered in large quantities and come in a bag. I never grew up around a White Castle and it was many years into adulthood when I finally tried them visiting relatives in Ohio. White Castle, if you don’t know is mainly centered around the Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio midwest area with another concentration of locations near the New York City area.
In the old days, you could only get White Castle burgers and fries and they came all jumbled up in a big bag. Things are a little more refined now and they have all sorts of variations on the menu including a fish burger. But let’s just call them what most of us know them by these days, they are SLIDERS. We all know what sliders are. They are mini burgers that you usually get as an appetizer at a fast-casual dining restaurant. They were all the rage a few years ago and have permanently stuck around.
The Trader Joe’s Mini Cheeseburgers are more than sliders, they come in a square form, just like White Castle. It makes me wonder why they didn’t call them sliders instead of mini cheeseburgers. Maybe there is a trademark thing… anyway, let’s just call it what it is Trader Joe’s Mini Cheeseburgers and an exact replica of White Castle sliders with one tiny tweak, which I will get to later.
Ok, so now that we got that White Castle thing out of the way, let’s talk about the Trader Joe’s Mini Cheeseburgers. They come in a fun little box that holds three sliders, I mean mini cheeseburgers. They are seasoned with a burger sauce and a little slab of cheddar cheese. The buns look exactly like White Castle but have a different flavor that I’ll address in a minute.
Each burger is about 190 calories and the whole box of them is 580 calories so the three of them would be a decent meal for me, especially if you fix them up with “stuff”.
Seeing that each burger just has cheese and sauce and meat and nothing else, I think the sky is the limit on what you put on them. At the very least I would put a big pickle slice, ketchup, mustard, and mayo with some lettuce and a tomato slice. Yummy!
No here is the main problem with these darn burgers. They are frozen! I don’t know how else Trader Joe’s would deliver these mini cheeseburgers to the customer but here we have it, frozen cheeseburgers.
Trader Joe’s suggests two ways to prepare these. In the oven and in the microwave. I didn’t have the 30 minutes I needed to do them in the oven so I did them in the microwave per their suggestion, about 90 seconds for all three of them on a microwave safe plate. Make sure you take the plastic off.
But as I expected, the buns got super soft and mushy. But I forged on. You can see I opened the Trader Joe’s mini cheeseburgers after I made them and doctored them up with my favorite condiments but you can see how sloppy they are. Sauce and cheese oozing out of the burgers even before I cooked them.
One suggestion I read on Reddit is to let the burgers thaw in the fridge overnight and then take the top bun off and nuke them for only like 30 seconds. It keeps the top bun from getting mushy but who’s got time for that?
I have to be honest, if these were around when my kids were young and I needed a quick meal, I would have a freezer full of these. Trader Joe’s mini cheese burgers and Trader Joe’s frozen fries. A match made in heaven.
So, I mentioned that the buns had a special thing going for them and that is that they are sweet. They are “mini sweet aloha rolls” or Hawaiian Rolls which have a lot of sugar in them. So, keep that in mind if you don’t like sweet rolls.
My Final Thoughts
I’ll be honest. These Trader Joe’s Mini Cheeseburgers are a blatant ripoff of White Castle burgers, which you can buy in the frozen section of most grocery stores in the USA. The Trader Joe’s are a slight step up from White Castle because they have real cheese, like cheddar, and a dab of sauce. What I didn’t like is how mushy the bun got when you microwaved them and for some reason when I got mine the sauce and cheese were a mess from the factory. But all in all, they are quite enjoyable and at $4.49 per box (or about $1.50) they aren’t all that cheap compared to the frozen White Castle ones and even if you have a White Castle near you they would be cheaper if you just went and got them fresh. One that I looked up in Ohio was $1.10 for a basic cheeseburger. I still think they will be a huge hit with families with kids that like quick and easy cheeseburgers. To that end, I will rate these 7 Bells!
Ingredients
- ROLL (UNBLEACHED ENRICHED FLOUR [WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID], WATER, SUGAR, YEAST, SOYBEAN OIL, DOUGH CONDITIONER [POTATO FLOUR, UNBLEACHED ENRICHED FLOUR {WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID}, MONOGLYCERIDES, YELLOW CORN FLOUR, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF GUAR GUM, NATURAL FLAVOR, ASCORBIC ACID {DOUGH CONDITIONER}, ENZYME], WHEAT GLUTEN, SALT, ENZYME, APPLE CIDER VINEGAR, EGG, EVAPORATED MILK)
- BEEF PATTY (BEEF, ONION, GARLIC POWDER, SEA SALT, BLACK PEPPER)
- CHEDDAR CHEESE (PASTEURIZED MILK, CHEESE CULTURE, SALT, MICROBIAL ENZYME, ANNATTO EXTRACT [COLOR])
- SAUCE (KETCHUP [TOMATO CONCENTRATE, DISTILLED VINEGAR, SUGAR, SALT, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF ONION POWDER, SPICE, NATURAL FLAVOR {INCLUDING CELERY SEED}], SOYBEAN OIL, RELISH [CUCUMBERS, WATER, DISTILLED VINEGAR, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF SALT, CALCIUM CHLORIDE, DEHYDRATED RED BELL PEPPERS, XANTHAN GUM, SPICES {INCLUDING CELERY SEED}, NATURAL FLAVORS], SUGAR, EGG, DISTILLED VINEGAR, SEA SALT, SALTED EGG YOLK [EGG YOLK, SALT], XANTHAN GUM).
- CONTAINS MILK, EGG, WHEAT.
You, they, ruined it for me. Kings Hawaiian style buns? Yuk
These things were terrible. Meaty, almost bad tasting patties with odd sauce and buns. White Castle should not be used as a comparison, they have nothing in common.
These are terrible. The sweet bun sucks, the sauce sucks and the beef itself isn’t even very good. These don’t hold a candle to the frozen White Castle sliders, real cheese or not.
These were so nasty I couldn’t even finish one. The meat is more like meatloaf consistency. The buns and sauce make the whole thing sickeningly sweet.
I started eating White Castles when they were 9 cents (1947) and I still eat ’em. Joes are a much different flavor – though I like them as well. The problem with theTJ burgers is that two of the three packages i’ve bought were so misaligned (patties half way between two buns) that they could not be separated. I just returned the third package.