veggie burger fail

This post describes a veggie burger fail. Here is a veggie burger win. 

I caught a portion of a segment on the Travel Channel about veggie burgers. The customers that are featured in the video shot at The Spot located in Hermosa Beach, apparently a well-known location, rave about all the items on the menu. But the Travel Channel is not the only place one can see reviews of The Spot and its menu. Yelp reviewers are less enthusiastic. The TC video can be seen here. In the video one sees the owner say that the burgers are made of:

* beans

* rice

* nuts

* seeds

The camera speeds across bowls of ingredients, but one can make out white beans, and regular rice, walnuts, and sunflower seeds. The magic ingredient that brings it together is

* soy cheese. 

This attempt is fail because I used way too much soy cheese, worse, the ersatz cheese I used was rice-cheese and not soy-cheese, worse worse, I used way too much so my burgers spread out while baking. The burgers, if you can call mine burgers, taste fine but their structure and their texture need some work. 

In the video, the beans and rice are already cooked. The ratios are not clear, but I should have known not to use the whole package of rice-cheese. Truth is, I wanted it to go away. Again, it doesn't taste bad, it's just weird, and I didn't want to store it. Had I used less then my burgers might have stood a chance of holding together. 

For some reason unknown even to myself I decided to soak the rice overnight along with the dry beans. I do not recommend doing this.

After soaking, the rice and beans cooked up with 25 minutes steaming plus 10 minutes more covered but off the heat. 

Here's the tragedy, when I blended the cooked rice and beans loosened with olive oil and fairly heavily seasoned, resembling humus, it proved to be too much for the immersion blender and the motor burned out just as I was finishing. This is the second heavy-duty immersion blender that I burned out by overworking the poor things. They do have their limitations. When will I learn? I do not know when, maybe this time, maybe never. The stick blender is indispensable for the things I do. Since I've been through this before I know the unit cannot be opened and fixed so I went online and ordered another one. The new one will be here in two days. The new one will be the third immersion blender. The good thing is that I end up with quite a good collection of attachments which means they don't have to be cleaned immediately. This probably teaches me not to bog down the machine by overworking it with thick sludge, but we'll see how well I learned that lesson. 

I like these alternatives to meat. I've been in the habit already of mixing grain with meat, not to stretch it but rather to make it less beefy or less lamb-y. I like mixtures a lot. My next attempts will not be to emulate of what I see other people do on TV but rather expand on what I already do. In the video the beans and the rice were pre-cooked separately. I did not see the point of that. Why not cook them together? Now that my burgers have spread out like cookies from too much fake cheese, and now that I burned out another blender by overworking it, I realize I could have turned the beans and rice to powder first in the coffee mill then cooked them together like polenta, and then add nuts and seeds to suit the cooked mixture that results. I also learned that maybe soy cheese might or might not be the way to go. I could try adding tofu directly which can add silkiness and moisture, and I can also try adding nutritional yeast, which apparently tastes like cheese, or so some people claim. So there are still a lot of things for me to try to attain a tasty and moist veggie burger -- the best veggie burger ever! I am not against meat, but long the way I might discover new ways to extend meat mixtures so that they are not so thickly heavily clunky pure ground meat with all that animal fat and bones and blood that make me a little bit sad. And maybe I'll like it so much that I abandon meat burgers altogether. All I know right now is that I do not object to this, even though it's fail it made a very enjoyable sandwich and no animals were harmed in its production.

Well maybe one animal was harmed. I added a slice of regular cheese and maybe the cows involved in that didn't appreciate having their nipples rudely yanked on all over the place by a milking machine. Then again, maybe it did appreciate it considering it was most likely purposefully bred specifically for the obscene overproduction of milk, a situation that does not occur in nature. 

Dune Unrelated to veggie burgers and mechanically milking cows, I am reminded somehow of the scene in the movie Dune where on the planet Geidi Prime, Baron Harkonnen and his nephew Feyed Rayutha (Sting) are instructing their captive mentat Thufir Hawat that he must inject himself daily with an antidote for the poison they've given him, or die. Thufir is a mess. The Baron shows Thufir the organic contraption from which the antidote is derived, milked actually, a rat piggybacked onto a cat with tubing and tape, neither of which can freely move. In Herbert's book, all the reader knows is that Thufir has been given a heart-plug like every other non-royal on the planet, along with a poison which he must treat himself, so this cat/rat thing is entirely Lynch's conceptualization. Ask him why he felt it necessary, if not only to be perverse. In the book, Thufir uses his (spice enhanced) mental prowess to formulate a plan whereby the various enemies destroy themselves, while he is in that woeful predicament, an important subplot in the book but this cat/rat thing is all you have from Lynch in substitution for all of that.