Ever had to bribe one of your mates to help you out with something? I haven’t, because I have some kind and generous mates. I do, however, offer what I can in the way of a thank you to them when they give up their time and/or energy to assist, and this was the case last night. A couple of large and unwanted items of furniture needed to be removed from my flat so, despite being essentially barefoot in pretty grim Manchester rainy evening weather my friend Sam arrived at mine, to be greeted with a Tempeh Burger, roast broccoli with garlic tahini sauce and a baked potato. Sadly, I failed to take any useable photos of the complete dish so here’s a picture of the first time I made Tempeh Burgers instead:
Last night was only the second time I’d made these but they are seriously so easy to do; the most difficult task is grating a block of Tempeh! The recipe I use for these is this lovely one from the brilliant Vegan Dad blog, and I’d urge you to try it whether you like Tempeh or not. They’re fat free too, which is a bonus as they’re most definitely not flavour free!
When actually forming the mixed ingredients into burger shapes, a nice little trick is to use a rosti/cooking ring in order to get nice perfectly shaped burgers.
Simply place the ring on a piece of greaseproof paper, put the burger mix (that you’ve already seperated into six) into the ring and press it down with the back of a teaspoon. As long as you’ve got the texture of the mix just right, the ring should slide off upwards without any trouble, leaving you with something like these bad boys you see here (these are from last night’s effort this time!). The rings are a very useful thing to have in your kitchen utensil armoury; you can use them to plate up grain dishes (such as rice, cous cous, quinoa), shape burgers (obviously) or even make rosti in them if you must! They’re only a couple of quid too, so you’ve no excuse really.
Finally, these burgers freeze brilliantly too so it’s not a problem if you’re not going to use all six in one go; just stack them with greaseproof paper in between each burger and shove them in a freezer bag in your freezer. Great!
Animal Free Food! 