The Breakaway Vegetarian Burger

Stuart over at Toque Blanche recently requested that I take a shot at a vegetarian burger. I’m not fan of attempting to make foods look like other foods, especially where meat is concerned, but, since I’ve never had a veggie burger that I’ve actually liked, I thought it might be fun to give it a try. The problem with most fake burgers isn’t really taste — I’ve had some homemade ones that tasted pretty good — it’s texture. They’re always kinda mushy and overprocessed, or something. So my biggest challenge right off the bat was getting a texture that really felt like ground beef, and all its crumbly, juicy glory.

As usual in my kitchen, I didn’t set out with a fixed idea. I had some leftover brown rice in the fridge, and some leftover cooked red beets. That seemed like a promising beginning, since it would give it a crazy color (good), be crazy healthy (good), and would cost just pennies. It would of course require large does of umami to taste good, so I had to think about that, too. That’s why I always have a jar of pulverized shiitake dust sitting around. Sauteed onions are almost always a good thing too, so they would be part of it. I think I had the taste aspect pretty down, but I was worried about texture.

It turned out that the following four ingredients, in equal proportions and diced very finely, gave me the just the crumbly meaty texture I was after:

• cooked red beet
• cooked brown rice
• sauteed onion
• TJ’s English muffin bread (though I’m betting almost any bread would work), soaked in the juice of one meyer lemon

To that I added one egg, a handful of chopped fresh oregano, a tablespoon of shiitake dust, and a tablespoon of flour. I then stuffed a half-cup measuring cup full of the mixture to shape it, and toasted both sides in a hot cast iron pan. It held together beautifully, and tasted great — such a nice change from a regular beef burger! The bun was the same TJ bread, lightly toasted, served with mustard and chutney, with a side of pickled ginger and pickled carrots.

Some of you know this, but I’m hard at work on a vegetarian cookbook, which I hope to finish by spring. Lots more on that to come! In the meantime, if anyone has specific requests that they’d like to see given a breakaway treatment, please let me know. Also: would love feedback on the title. For now it’s The Breakaway Vegetarian Cook: An Umami-Intensive Journey Into Vegetables.