Nut burgers are made with nuts, obviously, which gives them the protein richness lacking from the spring veg burger. But are they better in other ways as well?
Ingredients
1 onion
150 g nuts, raw (can be walnuts, pecan nuts, almonds, cashew nuts or any other kind)
80 g oats (not instant)
2 tablespoons ketchup, miso, tomato puree or nut paste (I used curry sauce)
1 tablespoon chili powder or other spice mix
salt and pepper
1 egg
peanut oil (Mark specifically states to use peanut oil or any other kind of flavourless oil, as otherwise the burgers will simply taste of oil)
Like with the bean burger, you need a food processor. Chop up the onion until fine. Add the nuts and oats and pulse to combine. Add the ketchup, spices, pepper, salt and egg. Pulse until the mixture combines, but it is good to leave some bigger chunks in there. Add some more moisture (water, wine, soy sauce) if the mixture is too dry.
Leave the mixture to settle for a couple of minutes and then shape four burgers (it is probably a good idea to do this with 'wet hands', although the recipe doesn't state this specifically, as my hands were covered in oats and bits of nut afterwards).
Heat the peanut oil in a frying pan, bake the burgers for about 5 minutes on each side, and serve any way you like.
Sounds pretty familiar, right? The recipe is pretty much like the bean burgers recipe of my first attempt and like those consisted mostly of beans, these burgers are basically made of nothing but nuts. The mixture looks pretty similar too.
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| Pre-processing mixture. It felt like I was making a very healthy breakfast. |
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| Post-processing mixture. Doesn't look too appealing. |
Right, this might be good time to mention that I have two cats in the house, but they had nothing to do with making this burger mixture...
The mixture was a bit dry. I added the right amount of moisture at the right moments, but somehow it didn't feel the way the bean mixture felt, so I was pretty convinced these burgers were going to fall apart upon baking. Anyway, after shaping the mixture into four burgers, I was determined not to flunk on the baking aspect again. I was gently reminded of this by my meat eater fellow burger tester, so I heated the oil for a bit longer to properly sear the burgers.
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| Too much searing going on... |
Yes, well, I may have overdone that a little bit. Also, two of the burgers did actually fall apart into crumbly pieces, but the other two turned out fine (if a bit black).
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| Pretty burger end result. |
Right, so what were they like? Surprisingly not-dry! For something that fell apart in the pan, the burgers were pretty moist. Also, very very tasty. Nutty, a little bit spicy, probably what flavour experts would call 'umami'. My meat eater burger companion thought these the best burgers so far. And they were stomach filling! It took a while to finish them off.
I would add some more spices next time, and probably add a bit more moisture to keep the burgers from falling apart, but otherwise this was probably the most successful attempt so far.
Now I feel like I've had the main three categories of burgers: bean burgers, nut burgers and potato burgers. You can always make burgers out of tofu or seitan, but I hardly ever eat that normally, so I don't really plan on turning those into burgers. So with the three main burger food groups under my belt, I feel ready to experiment with some more combinations, flavours and textures. I'd love to replicate the sweet potato burger I had in a restaurant recently, and I also want to attempt a black bean burger steal from another restaurant. Also, I'd like to add some cheese to some of my burgers, just to see how that turns out. And maybe some vegetables, apart from the peas. The possibilities are almost endless... I will keep you posted on my culinary experiments!
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