Vegetarian Spicy Black Bean Burgers

Have you ever bought frozen veggie burgers? They usually come in hockey puck form and retain that shape even after you cook them. I guess they have veggie burger molds that they use when making them so that they all have perfectly angled edges.

I’ve never seen one in a rounded edge, burger shape. Vegetarian doesn’t always mean vegan so The Kid can’t have a lot of the veggie burgers. Unless they are specifically marked as vegan, they are a no go due to the dairy in them. Big issue, not to mention those things are pretty expensive considering they don’t even contain meat!

I’ve never attempted to make my own because I thought it would be an ordeal. I guess it was more just lack of knowledge that made me think that way. It turns out that it wasn’t half the effort that I expected it to be. It was actually quite simple. Just throw a mix of ingredients into a food processor, blend, and cook in a pan like burgers.

Yep, that’s it. The hardest part was draining the beans and chopping part of an onion. Since you’re blending, you could even skip the onion chopping if you wanted to. I had already chopped mine when I had that light bulb moment. Make sure to read my notes at the end so you can avoid the trial and error that I went through and get them right from the start.

Vegetarian Spicy Black Bean Burgers 

• 15 oz can of black beans
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 1/2 cup (40g) old fashioned oats
• 1/4 cup (30g) black walnuts
• 1/4 cup fresh salsa
• 1 Tbsp chili garlic sauce
• 2 Tbsp all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp chili powder
• 1 egg white

Rinse and drain the black beans. Make sure they are well drained so your burgers aren’t extra mushy. Place all ingredients in a food processor or blender, and pulse several times until the burger “batter” is pretty smooth. It will be the texture of thick oatmeal or pudding. If you put some on a spoon and turned the spoon over, it should pretty much stick on the spoon.

Preheat a frying pan over medium heat and spray with non-stick spray. Don’t skip the non-stick spray. If you don’t have any, lightly oil the pan. Use a rubber spatula to drop the burger batter onto the hot pan and use the back to spread it into a burger shape. Repeat this to form 4 equal sized patties.

Cook the patties for approximately 5 minutes until browned on the first side. Carefully flip the patties over and cook for another 5 minutes on the other side. Remove from heat when done and serve on hamburger buns or rolls with your typical burger fixins.

Makes 4 patties at approximately 207 calories each – 10g protein, 30g carbs and 5g fat.

Notes

• I first attempted to form these into patties with my hands and it was a mess. I had goo all over my hands and had trouble getting the burgers off my hands into the pan. I found that plopping them in with the rubber spatula and forming a burger shaped worked perfectly.
• I used a metal fish spatula when checking the burgers for doneness and flipping them so that I could scrape them off the pan instead of leaving a crispy crust behind. You could also use a metal pancake flipper. Fish spatulas by the way are one of the best kitchen inventions ever. If you don’t have one, you might want one. They are the perfect shape to flip all kinds of things with ease.
• Get creative with your burger flavors here if you’d like. You can use a different nut like pecans or different spices to completely change the flavor.

We had ours with vegan provolone cheese, lettuce, salsa, ketchup and mustard. Next time I might try using portobello mushrooms instead of some of the nuts to see how that turns out. I’m thrilled that these are so easy to make because they are quite a bit cheaper than buying the premade version. You know how I love a bargain!