Weeknight Cooking

Veggie Burger

If there's a more common go-to form of food in America than the hamburger, I'd be interested to know what it is.  Spaghetti maybe, mac and cheese, the chicken breast sandwich?  Open up the fridge and these are the ingredients on hand; roll up a patty of burger, dash on the salt, give it a quick flash in the pan and any kind of bread will do to cover.  Thinking about hamburgers just a moment though, you start to wonder about just what it is we're getting?  What is it we like about them, exactly?  All of this came to mind after making an attempt at veggie burgers the other night for the first time.  We've all tried them before from somewhere else, and probably even microwaved at some point those frozen versions that come as discs in the freezer section.  But when we bit into our own version, we were a little bit shocked to find out that not only were these just fine for you, but the taste was more complete – the entire burger tasted good, not just the salty surface or the so called marbling of fat and juices we normally associate with our craving.  This leads me back to the question, just what is a common burger?  In the old days, when beef held more natural flavor due a different quality of meat based on how we fed our cattle, you could assume that the burger you were eating was good because of its internal flavor; add your spices and ketchup and toppings and you probably really had something...hence the true American food, the burger joints galore, etc., etc.  Now, though, for any number of reasons, we may be looking at the burger a little bit differently, depending on how it is prepared and from what meat source.  The common burger on the grocery shelf, tending to be quite lean, carries little or no flavor of its own.  When we cook these burgers, then, what we taste might be texture itself, the salt on the top, and then the toppings.  Add some fat to this equation, and that is what we will taste, more fat, and therefore it might seem more satisfying and fulfilling.  The better the burger joint, usually the higher quality of the beef, and yet I would still say something is lacking.  What's interesting about the veggie burger, or the burgers we made, combining burger and veg, is that the ingredients you add to the meat gives taste throughout the burger and is pretty good for you.

The recipe we looked at – from a sort of farm to table book – was vegetarian, with a wheat bulgar and walnut base.  Looking down the rest of the ingredients list, though, there were a few things like cilantro, cumin and red onion that started to make it feel too much 'veggie,' and not enough burger.  It's one thing to eat a giant hunk of fat, like some burgers, but then it's another to eat a veggie patty.  I liked the idea of finding a balance, so bought our standard pound of turkey and lean beef burger,

processed some walnuts, pinto beans, two cloves of garlic, and a few pinches of soy sauce into a fairly runny paste, which I then folded back into the pound of burger, then added an egg according to needed consistency.

I balled those up and smashed down on the middle with my potato masher, cooking them for the standard burger time of five or so per side, maintaining a pinkness to the middle.  I used only a pinch or two of salt on the outside; cut up large strands of iceberg lettuce; cut open homemade hamburger buns; offered slices of tomato and avocado.  Biting into these burgers, I think the shock of the positive taste was probably moreso than really anything I've cooked at home.  Sometimes good strong flavor comes in small doses: one bite is excellent, but another next to it nothing special.  Because the garlic and soy was built right into the burger, every bite held a strong zing of that saltiness and spice that most of us crave in a hamburger, yet we knew what we were eating was low fat: beans, walnuts, a pinch of soy sauce, just enough garlic and topped off with greens.  The carbs were still there, but the fat had disappeared; fiber replaced cholesterol and there were no oddball bites that were co-op smelling funky vegetarian.  Looking at the burger from the outside, I had laid down a deep brown and plenty of olive oil to impart an oily surface.  The burgers were real in every sense except for the usual two hour stomach ache associated with the fast food version.  We figured if walnuts and beans worked, then any number of other ingredients were possible.  Wild rice burgers with ground mushrooms?  Quinoa?  Chili and bean burgers?  Avocado chunks...inside the beef?  Sounds fun.