Plant Based U

Fat-Free and Low Fat Vegan Plant Based Recipes

Burgers

Vegan Chickpea Quinoa Burgers with Lemon and Thyme (Gluten Free)

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Summer is here and it’s the perfect time to be enjoying outdoor barbecues and picnics. Everyone wants to enjoy a freshly grilled hamburger or veggie burger. But making your own is quite easy and insanely tasty without using oils or refined soy products. My chickpea quinoa burgers are soy-free, nut-free and gluten-free so they will work for everyone no matter how they eat. If you’ve ever made homemade hamburgers or wanted to, you can make these.

A simple food processor is such a versatile tool for making your own chickpea quinoa burgers. Mine isn’t anything fancy, just a basic mid sized one and it’s perfect for pulsing various ingredients to use in veggie burgers.

I like to top my veggie burgers with some fresh hummus (see my chickpea hummus here or my yam/sweet potato hummus here), sautéed mushrooms and onions (I use a little soy sauce and maple syrup to flavor them), lettuce, tomatoes and pickles. Cucumbers also work well in place of tomatoes for this chickpea quinoa burger as well as spicy mustard.

Find a nice whole grain bun or roll, toast the insides and top your veggie burger with all your favorite toppings. I also highly recommend some of my Summer salad recipes to go along with it such as Avocado Dill Potato Salad, Strawberry Spinach Salad, Shaved Asparagus Salad, Costa Rican Cabbage Salad, Sweet and Savory Asian Salad, or Rock my Broccoli Salad. So now that your head is spinning with delicious Summer recipes let’s get grillin’! Mmm hmm.

Vegan Chickpea Quinoa Burgers with Lemon and Thyme

 
Makes 10-12 patties (depending on size)

Ingredients:

1 cup mashed yam/sweet potato, cooled (1 medium yam, cooked)
4 cloves garlic
3/4 cup chopped red onion
2 cans chickpeas, drained and patted dry
2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves (stems removed)
2 tbsp lemon zest
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup cooked quinoa, cooled (I used 1/2 cup dry mix of white and red)
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp Herbamare or salt *or to taste

Directions:

1. Poke holes in your yam and bake at 400 F for an hour or until tender inside. Set aside until cool.

2. Cook quinoa with a 1:1 ratio of vegetable broth or water in a pressure cooker or on the stove. (See my directions here)

3. In a food processor, add the garlic and onion and pulse until chopped finely. Add the chickpeas, thyme, lemon zest and juice and pulse until chopped and well combined. Scoop out flesh from yam (discard peel) and to food processor along with quinoa, pepper and salt. Pulse until well combined.

4. Form into equal sized balls and place on a non stick sheet or plate lined with parchment paper. Refrigerate until needed.

5. Pre heat a pan or barbecue and press patties gently until slightly flatted and cook for 4-5 minutes per side, flipping once. Be careful to move gently so they don’t fall apart.

6. Serve on buns or lettuce wraps. (I find using a bun slightly bigger than the patty works best as they will squish a bit when eaten.

7. Store any patties in an air tight container and refrigerate or freeze until needed. (Leaving them uncooked is best).

Variations:

You can also use fresh dill instead of thyme if you wish for variety.

Also check out my Smoky Yam Black Bean Burger Recipe.

Have you ever made your own veggie burgers? What do you like to top your burgers with?

Gluten Free Vegan Yam Black Bean Burgers (Adapted From TheGlutenFreeVegan.com)

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Here we go with another yam recipe! Ahem… “sweet potato” if you are in the states and kumara if you are in Australia. This recipe is an adaptation of fellow blogger Megan Lust whom I met at the International Food Blogger conference in Portland, Oregon last August.

Funny story, so we sort of found each other with a few other vegan bloggers (there weren’t many!) and bonded over the lack of vegan food at the conference and being pretty hungry. We hung out and then after we saw each others’s business cards we were like hey you sound familiar…. I found out we’ were both Canadian and she was from Saskatoon. Then I thought odd… I swear I know a gluten free vegan in Saskatoon.

And we find out we had actually been vegan food swap buddies a few months before. We tried it out this Canada blogger vegan food swap for 2 months when it first started before giving up (because too many people were sending prepackaged vegan junk you could easily get at the store.) But the cool thing was she had lovingly made me some HOMEMADE ginger pear jam because I begged to not be sent anything junkie with oil and said anything else would be awesome. Here is my previous blog post about the lovely things she sent me.

Faster forward to a few months later and the other day I was cruising her website The Gluten Free Vegan and saw these yummy homemade “sweet potato” burgers. (We Canadians use that word online generally so Americans know what we’re talking about! and most of our blog traffic comes from the USA and not Canada) and I decided to make them myself.

I wanted to try these. I JUST HAD TO.

So in my version of course I stripped the oil out of it and tried to make it lower fat, and also changed up the seasonings to it as well. If you like smokey black bean yam burgers that have a South Western taste you’re going to love these!

These vegan patties also stay together really well because Megan (the genius that she is) uses spiralized or shredded yam pieces in the patty to help it stay together without needing breadcrumbs which makes for a tasty gluten free vegan yam burger! (Much tastier than my previous attempt of yams with black beans and breadcrumbs, that recipe has never seen the light of day because it just wasn’t delicious enough lol.)

You end up with a delicious and crispy on the outside moist in the middle veggie patty that is perfect to serve between burger buns, or even set it atop of some rice or pilaff. So check it out!

Gluten Free Yam Potato Black Bean Burgers

Adapted from Megan Lust’s recipe at The Gluten Free Vegan

Makes 6-8 patties

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups grated or spiralized yams/sweet potato (about 2 small ones)
1 19 oz.(large) can low sodium black beans, drained and rinsed well
6 green onions/scallions/spring onions, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
6 cloves garlic
3/4 cup walnut pieces
1 tsp smoked paprika
1/4-1/2 tsp chipotle chili powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground pepper

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 400°F/205°C.
2. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
3. Add walnuts to the bowl of your food processor and pulse until finely ground.
4. Add in the carrot, celery, green onions and garlic and pulse to finely chop. Be careful not to let it become a paste. Remove contents and set aside in a bowl.
5. Add in the black beans to the food processor and gently pulse until chopped. Add 1 1/2 cups of the grated yams and pulse into a chunky puree. Scrape out into same bowl.
6. Add the remaining 1 cup  of grated yams and seasonings. Stir and combine well.
7. Form into 8 patties with your hands and place on the parchment-lined baking sheet.
8. Bake for 25 minutes until lightly browned and set.
9. Garnish with condiments and serve as desired. (I use hummus instead of Veganaise, ketchup and relish or pickles and lettuce.)

Additional Tips:

If you don’t have smoked paprika or chipotle pepper, I recommend it, but you can use regular. It just won’t have that full bodied smokey flavor to it.

For a gluten free option, serve patties in a large lettuce leaf or use gluten free buns.

Additionally you can serve these like sweet potato cakes over top of rice.

Store remaining patties in between sheets of parchment paper, either in the fridge or seal and place in freezer. To reheat, place into a non stick pan and heat over medium heat until warmed through.

Have you ever made your own vegan burger patties? What do you put in them?