All New Sideways Burgers!!

A couple of weeks ago, I travelled down to Victoria for Frankie’s 60th birthday celebration. Frankie is American and born on the 4th of July, so she chose an Independence Day theme with appropriate barbecue-type food, but all vegan…and ALL MINIATURE!

One of my chosen tasks was to make miniature vegan burgers, and we spent quite a bit of time discussing the recipe. Frankie and Henrik liked the Gaz Oakley Quarter-Pounder burgers, but felt they needed more texture, so suggested using his recipe but adding jackfruit to the seitan.

I was worried the jackfruit would interfere with the structure of the burgers, and they’d fall apart at the simmering stage, so I decided to bake the tiny burgers for twenty minutes before simmering them. The method worked a treat, and the result was an absolutely perfect vegan burger.

And I’ve made enough changes to the original Gaz Oakley recipe now that I can reproduce my adaptation.

And I can even make them regular size! Btw, if you make these as one-ounce sliders, you can get about forty-eight little burgers.

Now, buckle up because this is THE most labour-intensive vegan burger recipe you’ll ever make!

New Sideways Burgers

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

First, add the following to the Vitamix (or other high-speed blender) and allow to sit for five minutes to allow the mushrooms to re-hydrate:

300 ml vegetable stock
3 dried shiitake mushrooms

Next, saute for two or three minutes in a splash of oil until soft:

1 finely chopped onion
2 finely chopped garlic cloves

Add sauteed onion and garlic to blender, as well as the following:

50 gm canned black beans
3 TBS soy sauce or tamari
1 TBS miso
3 TBS tomato paste
1 TBS balsamic vinegar
1 TBS Better Than Bouillon vegetable base
1/2 tsp rosemary
1/4 tsp cayenne
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
2 tsp dried chilli flakes
1 tsp sea salt
1 TBS cracked black pepper

Blend until smooth. Next, in the bowl of a stand mixer, mix together…

270 gm vital wheat gluten
50 gm chickpea flour
1 TBS nutritional yeast

Add the contents of the blender and…

1 can drained, chopped young jackfruit

Mix until none of the dry ingredients are visible. Knead in the stand mixer for ten minutes.

Cover and allow to rest for fifteen minutes.

Next, form the dough into three-ounce patties and place on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. You should get fifteen or sixteen patties, so you’ll need three cookie sheets.

Bake the patties for twenty minutes, flipping at the halfway mark.

While the patties are baking, prepare the broth for the Instant Pot and click the “Saute” button to ensure that the broth is simmering when you add your patties:

4 cups vegetable broth
1 onion, quartered
3 dried shiitake mushrooms
1 TBS miso
a few sprigs of fresh rosemary

When the patties have baked and the broth is simmering, turn off the Instant Pot, slide the patties into the broth, close and seal the lid and set it to low pressure for forty-five minutes.

Once complete, do a quick release, and remove the patties to a cooling rack with a couple of paper towels underneath.

At this point, you can grill them right away–about 5 minutes per side–or freeze them for later!

I recommend making these vegan tangzhong buns to go with the burgers!

Delicious with a slab of vegan cheddar on a vegan tangzhong bun

Now, you may be wondering about that mise-en-place photo earlier in this post. I am enrolled in a new Rouxbe course called Plants Plus–it’s more advanced than the earlier vegan Rouxbe course I completed a few years ago and includes units on food photography. So I spent about an hour arranging and rearranging the above mise-en-place and was actually quite pleased with it. I was going for a kind of Caravaggio effect (probably not the best effect for such a task).

Then I showed it to Em, who has taken a number of university photography and design courses, and she made a few suggestions regarding light, alignment, colour, etc. I ended up spending another hour moving and rearranging the mise-en-place outside because Em mentioned the light would be much better. The result is below, but I still have a bit of a soft spot for my Caravaggio Mise-En-Place, so I included it as well.