Recipe Review: Vegan Beet Burgers

In the Halloween menu plan that I posted I included a beet burger recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen. They were right, the beet does make the resulting patties look very "authentic". I made some pretty significant changes though that I thought I would share. The biggest one is that I didn't have any cooked rice so I used cooked oatmeal, which is much faster.

Here is roughly what I used:

1 cup uncooked lentils cooked and drained
1 cup uncooked oatmeal cooked in 1 1/2 cups water
3 to 4 small beets, grated
4 tbsp. finely chopped onions
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp fennel
salt and pepper to taste

I don't have a food processor so I just mixed all of these ingredients together and then used an immersion blender to puree it very slightly. I let the mixture sit in the refrigerator for about an hour. When it was time to prepare the burgers I followed Isa's advice and made very large burgers and cooked them for a full 6 minutes on each side.

Beet burgers with sweet potato fries

I was really happy with how these burgers turned out, and in fact they are making a repeat appearance on this week's menu plan. I liked using oatmeal because it is quicker, and also very sticky so I think it helped the patties hold together without any egg. The fennel taste came through quite strongly, and I realized I am not a big fan of fennel. I will probably change the spices up a bit when I make them again on Thursday.

These patties were also relatively quick to make and the ingredients are very inexpensive, especially if you are buying beets in season (and at the time of writing it is beet season). The most time consuming parts of the process are grating the beets and cooking them on the stove. If you own a food processor, the grating part is no problem at all, and even without a food processor I would estimate it took me 15 to 20 minutes to grate the necessary beets. I made these patties on the stove because I wanted the outside to be slightly charred a la a hamburger, but generally I think it is much easier to make veggie burgers in the oven. I will try the oven method on Thursday and let you know how it turns out.


All in all, I would highly recommend this recipe! Thank you Post Punk Kitchen