Make your vegan burger savoury and satisfying
Mushrooms and beans give patty its meaty flavour
I will confess that I’m not a big burger eater of either the meat or vegetable persuasion.
I sorely miss the ’80s when I could order a medium-rare beef burger. I can’t do that now so I petulantly and rarely bother. Vegetable burgers generally vary too widely in taste and texture, and I like reliability.
Making a beef burger is fairly easy — a vegetable-based one, and especially a vegan one, not so much.
I had an opportunity and a challenge. And because I like challenges, I decided to go the vegan route.
The burger I wanted to create was not one that imitated meat. I wanted it to be identifiable as a bean burger that was savoury, had texture and held together well.
To construct a vegetable burger — and I’m saying construct because they have to be built — you need ingredients that bind them together. Bread crumbs, oats, sweet potatoes, legumes and semolina are commonly used.
After a few trials, I chose wheat gluten as the binder. I know gluten is a polarizing ingredient, but it gave me binding power. It’s used in countless vegetarian meat analogs that are sitting in grocery coolers all over the country and it’s where I got the idea from. For centuries, it’s been used as a nonmeat protein in China and Japan where it’s known as mian jin or seitan.
With the binder settled, I chose black beans and brown rice for colour and texture.
Moisture is the enemy; too much moisture prevents the burger from holding together well. I roasted the cooked black beans and the mushrooms to drive off the water.
The mushrooms also provided a savoury flavour along with the granulated garlic, nutritional yeast, tomato paste, soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce. All these ingredients are high in naturally occurring umami.
I tried mixing all the ingredients and forming a log which was wrapped and steamed. Nope, too fussy and mushy.
I tried baking, which was marginally better.
Then I realized that I could cook the wheat gluten, mushrooms and seasonings, then fold in the rice and beans to preserve the solid texture.
In a toasted bun with lettuce, tomatoes and onions, it pretty much lived up to what I wanted a bean burger to be, savoury, tender and texturally satisfying.
If you Google “vegan burger recipe,” you get 439,000,000 results. Here’s to burger No. 439,000,001.