15 Best Homemade Vegan Burger Recipes | Aglow Lifestyle (2024)

FAQs

How do you make vegan burgers taste better? ›

Spices and tomato paste: Smoked paprika, chili powder, salt, and pepper combine to make these burgers a little smoky and incredibly delicious. Tomato paste adds color, sweetness, and an umami flavor to the burgers (highly recommended!). Cooked rice: Adds more texture to the veggie burgers.

Eggs are the most common and effective binder, and egg replacers are an excellent alternative for vegan burgers. Other common binders include wheat germ, bread crumbs, oats, and ground flaxseeds.

Panko breadcrumbs: breadcrumbs help the burgers bind together and create a nice firm texture. You can use gluten free panko if needed! Regular or Italian-style is great. Flax: ground flaxseed is our egg substitute to help the patties stick together so they don't fall apart when you cook them.

If you want to use a binder in your meat, but don't want to use egg, other alternatives are flour such as wheat flour, cracker crumbs, or even oatmeal.

If you're vegan, there's a great alternative: flaxseed meal. This substitution often appears in vegan baking recipes but works just as much magic here. To replicate 1 large egg, mix 1 tablespoon flaxseed with 2 to 3 tablespoons water and let sit for a few minutes. Add to the veggie burger mix just as you would an egg.

Common binding agents include flax eggs (a mixture of ground flaxseed and water), chia seeds, mashed potatoes, tapioca flour, or even your favorite nut butter. These ingredients help hold everything together and prevent your burger from crumbling.

For the everyday meal, I just use parsley or thyme, and top with caramelized onions, arugula, and avocado. For a Mediterranean flavor, cilantro and mint. For a French touch, tarragon. The porto can also be switched for another liquor or wine.

Umami is what gives savoury dishes that meaty, brothy taste – typically found as MSG. Some manufacturers will use what you might call an “umami bomb” to give plant-based applications the hearty, meaty taste consumers want from traditional meat.

Rice. While cooked rice won't work for fried foods since it can't get crispy, both cooked and uncooked rice is great as a binding agent for things like meatloaf, meatballs, or veggie burgers.

Chia seeds

Similar to flax seeds, chia seeds can be mixed with water and left to thicken, creating what is commonly called a chia egg. The gel-like texture of a chia egg makes this a brilliant binder.

What is a binder for homemade veggie burgers? ›

Common veggie burger binders include eggs, flax egg, wheat germ, breadcrumbs, oats, miso paste, or even water.

Bind the patty together

If you're going for a leaner meat or adding bulky ingredients (eg spring onions, onions, chillies), add an egg and a handful of breadcrumbs to bind the burgers.

In my experience, the best way to prevent your burger patties from falling apart during cooking is to use both egg and breadcrumbs to make them. You can add eggs to the mixture and then, coat them with breadcrumbs before shaping them into burger patties.

Finely chopped garlic and shallots add depth of flavor. Crushed walnuts give them a meaty bite. Short grain brown rice, panko bread crumbs, and ground flaxseed help these burgers hold together. DON'T use long-grain brown rice here.

But through my Made by Lukas veggie burger business, I spent many, many hours cooking off free veggie burger samples for shoppers in frigid dairy departments of grocery stores, where I learned that one way to solve for mushy veggie burgers is to just cook them bit longer, and slower, on sightly lower heat, and to even ...

watch the edges, and don't flip them until the edges are browning. also pay attention to the way you shape your burgers. if they're much thicker in the middle than they are on the edges, the middle will still be loose while the edges of the burger are firm. and then you have the fall-apart thing happening.