As you well know, we’re always on the hunt for a good, non-mushy vegan burger. We’ll latch onto one (homemade or commercially prepared) for a little while, and then quickly grow tired of that particular burger, and toss it aside for the next flashy new vegan burger product or recipe.

When it comes to food, we are just that fickle.

That said, I have high hopes for this newly devised recipe because I’ve been thinking about grating my seitan “pork” for some time. I tried grating it recently for a vegan picadillo recipe and the texture was bang on, so I thought I’d try it in a burger recipe.

Now my darling James is both delighted and exhausted today because we had two years’ worth of wood delivered over the past couple of days, and he’s been stacking wood for hours. Nothing makes the man happier than stacking an enormous pile of wood…..and nothing makes him hungrier, so he is realllly looking forward to a couple of burgers and home fries for dinner.

So here we go!

New Sideways Burgers

450 grams seitan pork, grated

1/2 an onion, very finely chopped

1/4 cup panko crumbs

1/4 cup BBQ sauce (I used my Irish Whiskey BBQ sauce, but commercial is fine)

1 TBS Better Than Bouillon Vegetable base

2 tsp vegan Worcestershire powder (or 1 tsp sauce if you don’t have the powder)

1 flax egg (for binding)

1 tsp sea salt

1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper

If you want a smokier flavour, you can add a few dashes of liquid smoke, and if you want the burgers to be pinker, you can add some beet powder. I may do both in the future, but I wanted to try the basic burger the first time I tried these!

So, first off, you’ll need to grate the seitan pork. I recently replaced my T-Fall Fresh Express with a grating/slicing attachment for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer and it works a treat. Failing that, you can use the grating blade in a food processor or a box grater.

The seitan comes out looking like cooked ground turkey!

Next, add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl with the grated seitan, mix well with your hands, and form into half cup patties. You should get six patties from this recipe.

One problem with veggie burgers is that they often fall apart during cooking (or even moving them into the frying pan!), but these patties are quite robust in texture.

Now your burgers are ready for you to prepare any way you please. I prepared ours in a lightly oiled grill pan, but I think they’ll be just as good cooked in the air fryer.

Serve with air-fried potatoes on freshly baked burger buns…with all the fixings, of course! And James deserves two burgers for all the hard labour he performed today (not to mention the fact that he eats only one meal a day these days!).

And the song of the day is Alexi Murdoch’s “Through the Dark”: