Typo alert!
There is a grave typo in this recipe, as well as a second, possible omission. After doing a little internet snooping, it seems as if there are quite a few known typos in Veganomicon. There's been much discussion on various chat boards, so I've tried to notate in my cookbook as many I could find, and as for the rest, I guess I'll have to uncover them on my own. I'm sure I don't have a first edition (it was printed in 2007) as some of the discussed typos have been corrected, however many of them remain, even in the Kindle version, which I also own. A lot of them are grammatical, but some, more crucially, affect the food itself.
Like today's.
This burger comes together easily, exactly as described. I found it interesting how I&T treated the garlic (grate on microplane) and onion (grate on box grater). Both techniques render these vegetables basically liquid, which is actually a nice way to add moisture to a burger while getting access to all that flavor. Clever...
The possible omission I alluded to above is, again, the absence of salt. Yes, there's salt in canned beans, but it's my belief that I&T intended us to salt this burger base, at least a little. 1/4 teaspoon maybe?
The big problem comes in the description of forming the burgers. The instruction is to roll the mixture into six firm balls, then press each one down to form a 1 1/2" thick patty. I should have realized there was a problem, as the balls themselves were roughly 1 1/2" in diameter. I pressed on the balls lightly, and I ended up with a roughly 3/4"-thick slider-sized thingamajig. Of course, they were too thick to behave in the skillet as intended. I left them in much longer than the projected 5 minutes on each side, and they were still not quite cooked through when I felt I had to take them off, as they had browned to their limit. I feel quite sure the recipe should have read: form into 1/2" patties. A thinner patty would have flattened into a full-burger-sized burger, and it would have cooked through, given the same treatment.
And yet... and yet... even without salt, even with the weird shape and undercooking, they were still amazing! Awesome flavor, awesome texture, great, great recipe! I can't wait to try these again, with the proper thickness!SFO: 9
(So close to a 10, and extremely high marks for a homemade veggie burger. The chunky beans offer a nice meaty texture, but the burger is not quite meaty enough to warrant a perfect score for non-vegans. But VERY close...)
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