I have been wanting to try and make a vegetarian hamburger for a while and last night decided it was time to experiment. I was very pleased with the results. I have to say that both I and my wife enjoyed the resulting vegetarian hamburgers as much as real hamburgers.
Having never done this before I searched online for veggie burger recipes. I didn’t have all the ingredients that any of the recipes had in them so I just sort of winged it by taking a little here and a little there out of several recipes. Though this is vegetarian it can’t be considered vegan as there is one egg used in its making.
This recipe was enough to make 6 medium sized burgers.
The ingredients that I end up using this time were
1 ½ cups of oatmeal. I don’t think they type of oatmeal matters. What I had on hand was some Quaker Oatmeal.
1 tablespoon of olive oil.. (this is just to sauté the ingredients in. )
1 small onion grated (had a good cry on this one)
4 or 5 cloves of garlic. I used a garlic press to process this but you could dice it up fine and then crush it with the flat of a knife blade also.
1/3 of a cup of grated carrot
1/3 of a cub of grated mushrooms ( I had never grated mushrooms before.. kinda weird. None of the recipes I read had mushrooms in them but I had them around and thought they would do well.
¼ cup of grated/shredded cheese. (the recipes I read used cheddar but I had some apple smoked cheese sitting around so I used that..Think very sharp cheese)
2 tablespoons yoshidas sauce. (The recipes I looked at called for 1 tablespoon of soy sauce. I normally used yoshidas sauce instead and did so here)
1 ½ cups all purpose flour. (I actually didn’t use the flour because I forgot to when doing the burgers. I think it would be good to though.. I have to admit that they turned out great without it though.)
1 egg beaten
I also just remembered that I threw in just under a 1/4 cup of my Caribean Black Bean Soup after mashing it through the grater. You could skip this part or just use a few canned black beans. The seasoning in the black bean soup that would have come through in the flavour would be ginger and maybe a hint of orange. To replicate this you might instead of adding water as the recipie calls for squeeze a half a orange into the ingredients in place of and also add a very small pinch of ginger powder. I think that you could omit the ginger and orange if you want though. Maybe add some pepper an salt in in place of those for a more normal seasoning.
1st after preparing all the ingredients I sautéed the onions and garlic in a skillet on high… Maybe 2 or 3 minutes.. I had the skillet high enough that they started to brown a bit.. I then threw in the carrot, mushrooms, black bean soup, and cheese. I continued to cook all of it for another two or three minutes on high heat. I then threw in the oats and stirred it in for a minute or so, until the oats were all evenly moist.
I then dumped it all out into a big stainless mixing bowl.
I added a couple tablespoons of yoshidas sauce and the one egg that I had beaten with a fork in a small bowl. I then just stirred it all up. I added maybe a ¼ cup of water to moisten it just a bit more after stirring it for a minute or so. At this point I placed the mixture in the fridge for a while.. I’m not sure that this was necessary but one of the recipes I had looked at called for this.. I think it was merely to let the mixture thicken up a bit before forming it into patties.
I formed the patties by hand. Just grabbed a handful of mixture just like as if it had been hamburger and shaped it into a medium sized patty. The directions I read then took the patties and used the flour to bread them top and bottom, however I forgot to do that and cooked them without this step. I’m looking forward to doing it again after breading them.
You can cook the burgers in a skillet, on a grill or like I did with a george forman grill that cooks from the top and bottom at the same time. I found that with the george forman grill that it compressed the patties and browned them top and bottom at the same time. I’m not sure if it would give different results on a grill or skillet but I found that the patties after cooking for 10 to 15 minutes were very cohesive and not prone to fall apart.
We found the flavor to be really good and the texture was very burger like. This is going to be a regular on the menu from now on. It will be interesting as we try this again and play with the ingredients to see what we can come up with.
Garnish with a little ketchup and mustard and top with lettuce and onions on home made bread to make an exceptional burger.
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