Recipe of the Month: Mushroom Seitan Burgers

Last month, we tried a recipe for seitan burgers that was not a resounding success. The texture was just about perfect, satisfyingly chewy and able to hold up well on the grill. But the recipe's secret ingredient, raw beet, gave the flavor a note that was, to my taste, distinctly off-putting. 

When I inquired on the recipe site about substituting something else for the beet, one of the bloggers suggested sweet potato. Brian tried this version of the dish, and it did indeed work better, but it was sort of lacking in oomph. The burgers had the same meaty chew without the odd bitter flavor from the beets, but they also didn't have much flavor, period. None of the main ingredients—lentils, wheat gluten, sweet potato—had a strong enough taste to carry the dish.

However, Brian wasn't prepared to give up yet. While searching for ideas to replace the beet, I'd come across another seitan burger recipe that used black beans and mushrooms along with the seitan. Brian decided to combine these two recipes, substituting black beans for the lentils in the original dish and sauteed mushrooms for the raw beet. For a half-recipe, he used 7 ounces of raw mushrooms, which cooked down to about 3.5 ounces. He also decided, on the spur of the moment, to substitute tamari for the soy sauce in the original recipe, mainly because the soy sauce bottle was empty and he didn't feel like going downstairs to grab a new one.

This revised recipe was a vast improvement on either of the versions we'd tried before. The burgers were still hearty, chewy, and easy to grill, and the new combination of ingredients gave them a rich, earthy, savory flavor. If they had a fault, it was that they were a trifle on the dry side, not juicy like a real beef burger. That's a flaw we might be able to amend by adding a little more fat to the burgers, possibly by upping the amount of peanut butter in the mixture. 

But even as they are, these are far superior to any commercial plant-based burger we've ever tried to grill. They're also much more affordable than most. Based on a quick calculation, it looks like the half-sized batch we made cost us a total of $2.85, or about 71 cents per burger. And that's with the tamari, which is significantly costlier than soy sauce and probably doesn't make that big a difference to the taste. Switching back to soy sauce could knock it down to around 62 cents per burger; doubling the volume of peanut butter would increase that to around 67 cents. But no matter how you make them, they're less than one-third the cost of Impossible Burgers, which run around $2.25 per patty, and less than half the price of Morningstar Farms Grillers.

In short, these Mushroom Seitan Burgers are our new go-to protein for grilling. That's not to say we're planning to ditch our Soykebabs, which are quicker to prepare, or to give up on experimenting with ways to grill tofu. But with this burger recipe, we'll always have something to toss on the grill at a picnic or any other event where carnivores and herbivores mix. Indeed, I suspect that we might even be able to impress the carnivores with these burgers if we could persuade any of them to try one.