Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
Poor veggie burgers. They have a whole lot of ground to make up in our imaginations. So many are crumbly and dry; others disintegrate as they hit the pan or squish out the back of the bun on first chomp.
So as I was reading Cool Beans, the stunning (and I mean stunning in every sense—it’s a glossy, glamorous, colorful bean book) new cookbook—out this week!—from Washington PostFood & Dining Editor Joe Yonan, I was delighted to read the following line:
In the ongoing quest for the perfect veggie burger recipe, at a certain point a realization occurs: Wasn’t the perfect veggie burger created long ago—in falafel?
Joe is, of course, correct. Chickpea-based falafel are, in a sense, vegan bean burgers by another name, and both are far simpler to make at home than I’d ever have thought.
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Top Comment:
“My aioli didn't set up and came out instead as a tasty aioli soup which will be drizzled on the burgers, soon to be fried. Any suggestions for next time, so that I can get more of a mayo consistency? (Followed the recipe as written and shown on the video.)”
The secret to the success of both is starting with dried beans, which are soaked but not simmered till tender. Tender beans are inherently mushy beans, especially once blended with onions and garlic and other moisture and flavor powerhouses. Only by binding them together with flour or other drying ingredients to compensate will they hold together in a patty. So pre-cooked beans leave you with a singular choice: mushy or dry. Pick your poison.
So don’t cook them! At least not in the sense you’re thinking. By soaking the dried beans overnight, you’re getting a head start on hydrating and tenderizing them, so all that’s left to do is blitz them into teeny pieces in a food processor (or, more traditionally, a meat grinder) and shallow-fry, crisping every craggy bit of exposed surface in good, hot oil.
I had to wonder, about both traditional falafel and Joe’s falafel burger: How do these seemingly uncooked beans have time to soften and cook through in a skillet at just 3 minutes per side? Simmering can take hours! Lucky for me, J. Kenji López-Alt over at the Food Lab at Serious Eats had chased down the answer himself years ago:
The trick is to remember that cooking beans is a two-step process. One step is adding water (hydration), while the second step is adding heat (actual cooking). To get tender, cooked chickpeas, you need to complete both steps. But nobody ever said they have to be done at the same time.
Instead of chickpeas, Joe swaps in black beans and the flavors he loves with them—the onion and garlic from their falafel namesake, plus chipotle and cilantro—then folds in a bit of mashed sweet potato, for extra moisture and binding power. Aside from remembering to soak the beans ahead and leaving your patties time to chill and set up, all of this happens in moments, so you’ll have plenty of time to buzz up his garlicky aquafaba aioli, too.
The result is a veggie burger that will be unlike any you’ve had before: A crispy, golden shell. A tender, but not mushy, interior. Enough flavor and texture that you don’t even need to toast the bun.
A fully vegan burger—with no ground to make up—that everyone will love just as it is.
From our new podcast network, The Genius Recipe Tapes is lifelong Genius hunter Kristen Miglore’s 10-year-strong column in audio form, featuring all the uncut gems from the weekly column and video series. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss out.
I'm an ex-economist, lifelong-Californian who moved to New York to work in food media in 2007, before returning to the land of Dutch Crunch bread and tri-tip barbecues in 2020. Dodgy career choices aside, I can't help but apply the rational tendencies of my former life to things like: recipe tweaking, digging up obscure facts about pizza, and deciding how many pastries to put in my purse for "later."
My aioli didn't set up and came out instead as a tasty aioli soup which will be drizzled on the burgers, soon to be fried. Any suggestions for next time, so that I can get more of a mayo consistency? (Followed the recipe as written and shown on the video.)
anybody try and make "meatballs" outa these things? I love making "bowls" and thought that having these on hand frozen for those would be awesome. I'm going to do it!!
Click the “View Recipe” button and it’ll take you to the full recipe (including all steps!). There’s a printer icon there that gives you a printable version.
They're using aquafaba to make a faux mayonnaise. If you don't want to use aquafaba, make a traditional mayonnaise with eggs...or do as I do and break out the Hellman's!
Kenji Lopez-Alt has a recipe on Serious Eats that calls for drying out canned black beans in the oven. It’s my favorite recipe and the flavor profile seems similar to this one so possibly a good swap.
These might give my beloved walnut burgers (from a Sunset magazine recipe years ago) a run for the money! One question: would these freeze well, either cooked or uncooked?
My guess is that cooked burgers would freeze. I made a version with black-eyed peas, similar technique and recipe, fried them up. The leftovers were good for 5 days in the fridge. They deflated when cold, but puffed up nicely when I heated them in the toaster oven.
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