As promised, I’m about to show you, with photos (I made burgers especially for this blog, and they were absolutely amazing), how I make my beautiful burgers. The recipe is from ‘The Vegetarian Student Cookbook’ which gives you over 100 recipes, including some vegan recipes, with budget friendly (and time friendly) ingredients.
I can’t find the exact cookbook, it must have been discontinued as I can’t find it on the publisher’s website, but I found a similar one for anyone interested. Have a look here. The cookbook I use is the one below:
Now, you can’t make burgers without a recipe, right? I’ll run you through the method with my photos, but as for the ingredients, the list goes as follows:
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
- 2 Celery sticks, chopped
- 1 Large red onion, finely chopped
- 1 Large garlic clove, crushed
- 1 small red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
- 1 inch piece of fresh root ginger, peeled and finely grated
- 875g canned mixed beans (I used two 400g cans, and it works fine)
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 2 teaspoons chopped coriander (I don’t put this in)
- I egg, beaten
- 100g (this is a rough estimate, you might need more or less) breadcrumbs
- 6 burger rolls (or however many burger rolls for burgers you make)
- salt and pepper
- lettuce, cheese, tomato, or whatever you like in your burger, to serve
There is a tzatziki sauce that comes with the recipe which I’ve never made before, but I will leave you details on how to make that at the end of this post.
To start off my burgers (and I’m leaving out the ingredients I don’t use – but you can find the method true to the recipe down at the end of this blog), I prep the main ingredients for the body of the burgers. This includes cutting up the celery, onions, chilli, and grating down the garlic and ginger. This helps give the main body of the burger (made from beans) their flavour.
Once these are all prepared, it’s time to let them cook. Add your oil to a frying pan and slide in the celery, onions, garlic, chilli and ginger. Let it cook until soft (which in my experience takes just under five minutes).
While the pan is cooking, I usually take this time to open up the beans, dump them into a fine holed colander (because a colander with big holes will just let the beans fall through, which isn’t great considering they make up the main body of the burgers), and give them a good wash. While you do this, don’t forget to keep an eye on your frying pan.
After you take the celery, onions, garlic, chilli and ginger off the heat, place them to one side to cool slightly as you mush the beans. For this, you will need a food pulser, or a blender of some sort (if you have neither I’m sure a potato masher should do, or maybe a fork if you have a lot of time and energy to individually crush every single bean).
Once this is done, and the beans are nice and mushed, scoop them out into a mixing bowl and add the celery, onion, garlic, chilli and ginger mix. Along with this add the ground cumin, salt and pepper.
You’re going to want to mix all of this together so that the mixture is nice and even, and well seasoned. If you’ve combined it all correctly it should look like unshapped bean burgers (I don’t really know how else to describe it – and the photos I took of the mixture weren’t great so I’ve decided not to use them).
With the mixture, you can either separate it out into however many burgers you need (the recipe says it makes six burgers, but it depends of the size of your onion or celery, if I’m being honest. I once used a huge onion and got eight decent sized burgers out of it). You can refrigerate the burgers for a few days, and I have frozen them before also, so go mad.
Also, a little advice, don’t panic if the mixture is crumbly. I get this a lot. I think you’re meant to use a little bit of flour to help with binding, but I just crack an egg into the mixture if it’s particularly bad. That seems to help. It will make them a little sticky, but that should calm down after the next step. Carefully move your burgers into the fridge and let them chill for thirty minutes.
Once they have chilled they are ready to cover in breadcrumbs. This helps them cook properly (I think, but don’t hold this against me because I’m not a burger chef). In order to breadcrumb them, you will need an egg, and some breadcrumbs – which you can either make yourselves, or buy from your local supermarket. (I use golden breadcrumbs from Tesco, or wherever I can fine them). Coat the burgers in egg and then cover them in breadcrumbs.
After they have been covered in breadcrumbs, you’re gong to need to wash your hands, because that gets you super messy. You should have hopefully laid the crumbed burgers down onto a baking tray (I put baking paper down because I don’t want them to stick to the tray – as that would really suck). At gas mark 6 (200°C (400°F)), put your burgers in the oven to cook for twenty minutes.
And there you have it. Sometimes we like to finish off our burgers by giving them a quick fry, but other than that they are all done. Add your lovely burgers to a bun, with some condiments and fillings of your choice (I usually have mine with ketchup, lettuce and cheese) and you can eat away. I hope you like them as much as I do!
If you’re interested in the recipe for the tzatziki sauce, or are interested in including all of the ingredients from the cookbook, I have added a photo below to help you out. As I said, I can’t find the cookbook I used anywhere, but you can find a similar one from the same publisher by clicking the link here. Happy cooking!
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