Chris Makes Veggie Burgers | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

I was on vacation and I made this and used it, it was like a packet of pre-cooked lentils, they weren't canned, it's a little strange to see this kind of bag of pre-cooked lentils just sitting there on the shelf but they are really good. I'm not really sure how they are preserved, but I didn't die when I ate them, so that was great. I'm so glad we're making lentil

burgers

today because it was a quick moment. where we were going to make a different

veggie

burger and you know, obviously, I love all my

veggie

burger kids, you know they're all beautiful, they're all special, but the lentil burger for me is the ultimate from a capability standpoint. of preparation and the fact that you could come home from a very busy Monday Tuesday or Wednesday and, you know, put all this together and something like half an hour, you know, 45 minutes or so, this is actually the third veggie burger that I have developed over the last four years. so I average a little less than one a year and the first one was kind of a maximalist hamburger one-upmanship approach where you really try to recreate the feeling of eating meat from the standpoint of having a variety of textures like crunchy. to soft chewy, you know, like give in and then develop tons of flavor, and that was like DA's best veggie burger setup, where it's a little bit more of a no-holds-barred approach, right?

I know you're not that worried about the ingredients list or the time it takes to prepare, whereas this one is completely easy to prepare, you know, and it doesn't have to be any kind of special occasion, so yeah, let's start with the lentils. I feel like rice and lentils, it's like a lot of foods that have instructions on how to cook them on the package and those instructions I feel like most of the time are just completely wrong, completely wrong, completely wrong. I would never use a certain amount. of liquid with something like a lentil. I like to boil it like pasta.

Basically, you know it's okay to start with lentils and water together and put them together, but I find that cooking it like pasta, you know, in plenty of boiling salted water. Firstly, shake the lentils as they cook so you know they are moving and you don't end up with a few that clump up on the bottom and also so it cooks very evenly and you have a better idea of ​​when to take them all out. I mean, I think it's really interesting, you know, I think that's the thing about veggie

burgers

, first of all, the veggie burger, you know, in this case it's a misnomer.

We're not talking about something where we're trying to put carrot and beet and whatever in there, but I would say okay, so veggie burgers fall into two camps: you have veggie burgers that try to be meat and then you have veggie burgers that are real, not really trying to be meat and frankly, I don't know, I celebrate both and that's where I feel like this style of burger that you know comes from, it's not trying to replicate me, it's just trying to be fucking delicious, you know, double check that you're okay. , stay where you are, you think he thinks the strangest things are reductive, besides the lentils, the kind of backbone of the burger, you know the fact that there's a little bit of mushrooms in there for a while. of meatiness and when I say meatiness I don't mean trying to have something that tastes like meat, but it's just going to provide a little bit of negative space in our burger matrix, if you know, if you don't eat. wheat and you don't eat meat, you go to a restaurant and you know the veggie burger isn't gluten free, it's just a fucking bummer, you know that anyway.

I'm just trying to put a little light into the world. there, so I'm just going to cut these mushrooms, you don't have to be very valuable about it and he doesn't look at the traitors, stranger things, we can use a different one of each stranger things, you know what I see, well, there you might ask. if they are, if they've seen the third season of Stranger Things and everyone who's like oh, it's weird, it's just a little spin-off, you know, blah, blah, blah, I got into Handmaid's Tale, which is like I literally liked it. watch half an episode of friends after every episode of handling your deal just - I can't just - put it down and go to bed, but I don't know, I mean, this

makes

me sound like a complete idiot, but I feel like it's a little escape to put egg and breadcrumbs in a veggie burger well chopped mushrooms RTG I have lentils rolling this is what I'm talking about how to cook them like pasta know when you cook them like this when you're not farting like with like very little water, ya You know, they're going to go away quickly, okay, so you can't let them overcook, you have to stay committed, you have to stay involved.

I'm going to set a timer. I have a timer off, oh God, this is terrible. Have a moment, no, Molly had a part of why I love these timers is like the sound and the haptic experience of taking them off, you know, like a boom, okay, okay, here we go back three minutes, we'll see what happens. going on here is irritated, it was like a two hour wait on hold, stirred a little more salt, you know, then people called me slash tried to call me, but it kind of caught my attention by the fact that I called these vegan burgers but I also used a yogurt as a condiment, you know, in my defense look at the burger itself like that's what's hard for a vegan to make, you know?

So I tried to respond to people as needed just to say look, you know, use some vegan. Mayo uses vegan yogurt. I know this is just Greek yogurt with whole milk, well is it? juice, I'm just going to mix this up, six seconds left, like these aren't too far away. I'm doing two minutes. I was in Kingston, upstate New York, and those places are local coffee and produce and they had a lentil burger on the menu which, frankly, is kind. Honestly, after three hours in the car with little kids eating, it was nothing short of a cathartic experience, so thank you to the town cafe in Kingston, New York, so I'm putting a little garlic into it.

With this yogurt it just adds a little bit of oomph, you know, to play with the size of the burger, it's not like a weirdo, but it's not small, Andy and I, you know we're like partners, you know, like a couple of rhythms. cops, you know, and the little good cop, bad cop for a policewoman, so there's texture, you know, and I think this is not like that, you're not lentils for lentil soup, these are nice and intact, we'll take them out here. Notice there's no porridge here, there's no moose shot, drain well, very well, all that excess water, I'm just going to contribute to the biggest factor and you'll add, you'll have to add more flour to account for and it'll just be a pain, so we'll let them cool a little bit before we continue with the rest of this.

Well, although we're not trying to make this taste like meat, we want it to taste good, so things that enhance the taste of mom. and add massive amounts of depth like garlic, the main suspect is mainly that it will cook almost completely through me, so again, this is the product of months of fermentation. We are trying almond flour today and I really hope it works. a little bit just adds a touch of smokiness and richness. I'm going to mash this up before adding the lentils so I can distribute everything evenly, something that this burger doesn't have and that meat-based burgers obviously do have.

Even the leanest ones have fat, you know they have richness, so adding a little bit of fat to this is pretty indispensable on stale burgers and I've used mayonnaise as a source of fat because you know you end up like ice cream. and emulsified fat, so it acts a little like a fat and a little like a binder. This will help separate some of those lentils. Lentils have a somewhat chickpea-like ability to want to bind together. itself okay, so I'm going to add a little more flour, let's start with another two tablespoons, so I need this to hold together when I squeeze it, I say we're almost there, it kind of wants to hold together, this is very intense, I feel like I'm hiding it pretty well.

I'm feeling where you're going with this so I'm just boiling my hands slightly which isn't necessary in the recipe just because I want this to stick to itself and not my hand I'm mashing more no no one will see me fail today well maybe i think they should stick together still a little nervous it's a little bit of salt it tastes pretty good the miso adds a good little bit of salt so Again, mine are a little more delicate in tendency because, frankly, lentils never They got soft enough. you can only hold on to hold it together long enough to turn it into a bun and in your mouth, that's it, that's the whole game, the only thing I would say is that lentils excel with veggie burgers is that when you fry them in olive oil, the ones on the outside will see the heat and they will brown and crisp in olive oil, they will become magical, very good, those will roll up.

I'm going to put buns in the The oven arm sets a timer and adds a little more oil. I could update the recipe to simply say that oat flour or a gluten-free all-purpose mix is ​​probably a better choice than almond flour. I just don't do it. I think almond flour has the same amount of binding capacity as a very fine flour, so do they look better right now? Not necessarily, but they hold together enough that you can put them on burger buns. and I think that's what we should all focus on here, whatever I'm feeling, you know it's good to be wrong once in a while, you know, it's okay, so I lowered the temperature and I think we're good here, I mean, I've got like a really good layer of crunchy, you know, on the top, I've got a good layer of Chris' penis on the bottom, yeah, we're good, get it on the plate, really thick yogurt is great here just because you know when You add lemon juice.

It's going to be diluted a little bit, so this is a little bit looser again, as you know, this is like the benefit of just not having a panic attack and panicking just because something is like behaving slightly badly, you know honestly, to times. If you just like it, keep going and don't get scared, it works. You know, I love pickles on my burger, I love, love, love sprouts, as I celebrate the world of sprouts and all their breadth and diversity, whatever the lettuce. doing to a hamburger, which honestly, I'm sorry let's be real if, so it looks like yeah, sure it's lettuce okay, you know, I see you, but as stars here, I think it's Andy, yeah, in retrospect, I would have cooked the lentils a little longer and I think I would highly recommend using oat flour or a gluten free mix, that's it, it's yours, pick it up and it belongs to you, you've been eating the crunchy, I'm here for the crunchy, I mean you I like to get the crunch, that little bit of smoked paprika.

Well, you know, and then I like the olive oil and the crunch, it's like it's happening in such an intense way, I'm visceral.