The barbecue season is almost over, but not quite! If you’re looking for a vegan option to put on your grill, you’re in the right place. These vegan burgers are full of smoky flavour and sturdy enough to be grilled.
Barbecue used to be all about meat. But in recent years, this has been changing a bit. People are now a lot more inventive about the stuff they rake over the coals. While I do love an old fashioned barbecue now and then, I also like to try other options. So I figured I’d make some meat-free burgers. And if you’re going to go without meat anyway, why not go vegan?
Traditional hamburgers contain egg. This helps to make your ingredients stick together. Obviously, you can’t use egg in a vegan burger, so you need some other way to keep your patties from falling apart. My first attempts at a veggie burger tasted all right but had completely the wrong consistency. (We ended up with burgers that we had to eat like an ice cream: by licking them.) However, after some trial-and-error, I had a mixture that worked. The crucial ingredient? Nutritional yeast.
Anyone who’s not a vegan will probably be asking themselves: “Nutritional yeast? What’s that?” As the name implies, nutritional yeast is well… yeast. Saccharomyces Cerevisiae to be precise. While that is the same type of yeast you use in baking, you can’t use nutritional yeast to make bread. That’s because it is deactivated yeast. Which basically means that it’s dead. This might seem a strange characteristic for a vegan product. However, yeast is not an animal. It’s a member of the fungi family, just like mushrooms.
Nutritional yeast is available as dry flakes or powder. It is often used as a substitute for cheese. While nutritional yeast tastes nothing like active yeast (the kind you use for baking), I don’t think it tastes like cheese either. The taste mostly reminds me of cheese-flavoured crisps. I think we all know that crisps like that, don’t actually taste like cheese. I have read, that the taste can vary between different brands though, so your experience may be different.
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- 125 gr uncooked rice I used white rice
- 250 gr kidney beans canned
- 170 gr mushrooms canned
- 1 small onion
- 80 gr chard or other collard greens
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp ras el hanout
- 1/2 tsp hot smoked paprika powder
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
Ingredients
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- Boil the rice according to the instructions on the packet. After draining, rinse thoroughly with cold water.
- Drain canned kidney beans in a colander. Rinse them thoroughly under cold running water. Do the same with the mushrooms.
- Pat the beans dry with a some of paper kitchen towels and set them aside.
- Finely chop the onion, mushrooms and chard. Cook them in a little bit of oil, until they're nice and soft.
- Add the rice to the pan and cook until the mixture is dry. Then remove from the heat.
- Add the beans, garlic powder, ras el hanout and paprika powder to a foodprocessor and process into a paste.
- Combine the bean-paste with the rice and cooked vegetables and stir well. Finally, add the nutritional yeast and stir again.
- Shape the mixture into 8 equal sized balls. (Or less, if you want your burgers to be bigger.) Gently flatten the balls into burgers.
- Cook the burgers on a contact grill or barbecue. Because all the ingredients have already been cooked, you will only need to cook them a couple of minutes on each side. While these burger will hold their shape, they're not as sturdy as meat burgers. So treat them with care and flip them gently!
- Put them in a burger bun and add all your favourite toppings and sauces.
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