Not So Superior Burger @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: I’ve recently subscribed to a substack from the cookbook/writer Jenny Rosenstratch. I love her writing and I like her decision to lean vegetarian, at least during the week. In one of those recent newsletters, she described a trip to the East Village in New York to the home of the superiority burger. It sounded so amazing! But on the other hand, what were the chances of convincing John to truck into the city for a veggie burger? Not that great.

So I tracked down two versions of this no meat burger recipe made of chickpeas and quinoa and various other ingredients (many of them). As I alluded to, the recipe includes multiple ingredients, many pans, and results in what is more or less a crumbly pile. The end result was certainly good enough to eat, with lots of ‘burgers’ leftover to add to our freezer, but I will probably not make them again. If I do end up in the East Village one of these days and the line is not around the block, I would love to taste the real superiority burger that people rave about.

For this recipe, I leaned on one I found in the Washington Post and another in Forbes magazine. I made a few tweaks as per usual!

Ingredients 

One medium or two small yellow onions

2 teaspoons fennel seeds, toasted and ground

1 teaspoon chili powder

Salt and pepper

One cup cooked chickpeas (you can use a can, but better still is cooking a bag of dried chickpeas ahead of time and stashing one cup containers in your freezer)

2/3 cup quinoa

Three small carrots

1/2 cup Panko

3/4 cup pecans (the other recipes called for walnuts, which I do not prefer)

One lemon

1 tablespoon hot chili sauce of your choice.

1/4 cup potato starch

One and a half cups water +2 tablespoons, divided

Toasted buns, mustard, pickles, lettuce, avocado, all the fixings of your choosing

Simmer the quinoa in a cup and a half of water for about half an hour until the water is absorbed. Set this aside to cool and fluff up.

Chop the onions and the carrots and sauté them until soft in a bit of oil. Add the toasted ground fennel seeds, and the chili powder to the sauté, and continue cooking until everything is fragrant. Add the chickpeas and cook them until warm then mash them in with the other vegetables and spices. (I used the bottom of a metal measuring cup, but use the implement of your choice.)

Toast the pecans lightly, and grind them. Add these to the cooled quinoa and the ingredients from the frying pan. Mix in the Panko and lemon juice.

In another small bowl, stir the potato starch with 2 tablespoons of water, adding a little more if needed to create a thick slurry. Mix this into the quinoa. Scoop out balls of the veggie burger mix and sauté them in a bit of oil, about three minutes per side. 

Serve on a nice bun with condiments of your choice.

This made nine burgers for me, so I wrapped and froze the leftovers. Phew!

Don’t forget to pre-order LUCY BURDETTE’S KITCHEN, Recipes and Stories from the Key West Food Critic mystery series...(No, you will not find this veggie burger recipe in that book!)

Lucy Burdette writes the Key West food critic mystery series including USA Today bestselling and Florida book award winning A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS. You can order that wherever books are sold. 

If you’re all caught up, try Lucy’s first women’s fiction title, THE INGREDIENTS OF HAPPINESS.

Also follow Lucy on Facebook, and sign up for her mailing list right here. 

Build a Better Veggie Burger and the World Will Beat a Path to Your Door

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Today: VEGGIE BURGERS

One of my daughters has gone vegetarian, and in fact, has been meatless for over two years now. Her level of vegetarianism allows for dairy products, and she enjoys cheese, eggs, and an assortment of veggies, so I don’t worry overmuch about her protein intake. There’s a White House Chef mystery recipe for Brussels Sprouts that she absolutely loves. I’ll share that one here another week. But today, let’s talk about Veggie Burgers.

You’ve seen them in the store: Frozen, boxed, and fairly expensive. We’ve tried several brands and lots of varieties. My daughter’s favorite, thus far, is Morningstar Farms, and we often pick up a box of “mushroom,” or “Grillers” for her. But a couple of weeks ago, when the Sunday Chicago Tribune offered a recipe for homemade veggie burgers and promised they would not only be less expensive, but tastier, I knew we had to try it.

The Tribune recipe called for a few ingredients my daughter doesn’t care for: mustard, ketchup, chili powder, and (optional) sautéed sweet potatoes. We decided to improvise. The Trib recipe suggested a base of any of the following: kidney, pinto or black beans. Having never attempted this before, we decided to make a batch of each and do a taste test. So, a shout-out to Zak Stambor of the Trib for inspiring us. Here’s our version of the homemade veggie burger and a step-by-step account of our failures and successes:

1/3 stick butter

1 T chopped onion
1 t minced garlic (someone in the family had bagged my fresh garlic and stuck it in the fridge. It was nasty when I pulled it out. Fortunately, I keep a jar of minced garlic around all the time.)
Salt and pepper to taste
One can “bean of choice”
2 T (give or take) shredded carrots
½ t salt
¼ t pepper
¼ cup Oatmeal
1 t Worcestershire sauce (Some are vegetarian, some are not. Read your ingredients.)

Optional: cooked brown rice as additional filler (see below for our attempts with this)

Melt the butter in a small frying pan, and add the onion. Cook until the onions are soft and translucent, then add garlic and little salt and pepper to taste. When this is cool, you will add it in, but do not wash the pan. You’ll need it again shortly.

We tried mashing beans in a bowl as directed, but that didn’t work at all. Improvising (which I love to do), we transferred the beans into three separate zip-top plastic bags. Using the flat side of a meat tenderizer and our fists, we smashed the beans until they turned into a nice smoosh. At that point we added the carrots, salt, pepper, oatmeal, Worcestershire sauce, and cooled onion/garlic mixture and smashed it around a bit more until well combined. It was at this point my daughter asked how we were going to get the mixtures out of the bag and into patties. Hmm… good point. This stuff is pretty sticky.


Squeezing the zip-tops, as one might a pastry bag, we placed a mound of each on clear plastic wrap, then folded up the edges and roughly formed a patty. Now… time to fry these up as originally directed in the frying pan with the remaining butter/onion/garlic.

Uh…were these supposed to be burgers? Or Sloppy Joes? The kidney beans held the patty shape—sort of. The other two bean varieties did not. Fortunately, we only made one of each. That left lots of mixture remaining for experimentation. We then added cooked brown rice (about a ½ cup) to each of the remaining mixtures and tried again. The patties held up a little better this time, again with kidney beans being our front-runner in keeping its shape.

But how did they taste?

Surprisingly, very good.

My daughter preferred the kidney and pinto bean varieties, and she liked them slightly better with the addition of rice. She said that the black bean version was not her favorite, but still good. I tasted all three, and agree. Were we to do it again, I’d stick with kidney. Easiest to work with, and excellent flavor. The best part? My daughter thinks this experiment was fun, which is high praise from a seventeen-year-old.

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Julie

Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery series features State of the Onion, Hail to the Chef, and Eggsecutive Orders (coming in January). All from Berkley Prime Crime. Sign up for Julie’s newsletter on her website at http://www.juliehyzy.com/