Really Awesome Black Bean Burgers | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's Kenji uh today we're going to make some black bean burgers and I'm talking like really good black bean burgers these are these are burgers that are so good you're going to want to like put bacon and cheese on them they're not they're not vegan but they are vegetarian um there's a couple tricks here so first I'm going to start actually let's start with a couple of cans of black beans the real trick this is a recipe I developed for a serious seats a few years back um lots of experimentation the real trick to these Burgers is that rather than just incorporating the black beans as is the way most black bean burger recipes go what we're going to do is we're gonna we're gonna drain got two 15 ounce cans here by the way so we're gonna drain them rinse them I'm just putting water in the can to get any of the Stray beans stuck off the bottom rinse them they don't do rinse like super well but you want most of that like starchy water off of them that's good enough give them a little Shake I'm gonna take a sheet tray and I'm going to spread them out single layer and then I'm going to put them in a preheated oven so this oven is heated to 350 degrees and we're going to leave them in there so we're not going to really roast them what we're trying to do is we're kind of we're going to try and kind of dehydrate them a little bit so it's going to take about 20 minutes in there and in the meantime I'm going to get some other ingredients going so it's going to take 20 minutes and what's going to happen you'll see is that the beans um so normal black bean burgers I find they get kind of mushy they get a kind of mushy texture these ones don't they have a nice kind of bite to them and the reason they do is because we dehydrate the beans and so they get that kind of meaty texture to them all right so what I'm doing now is I'm getting an onion foreign like this and then pull off the outer layers not just the skin you want to get that first layer underneath the skin also because it's usually pretty tough make our horizontal or our vertical Cuts first when I make my vertical Cuts I think I said this in another video though but a friend of mine a I have a I'm a mathematician friend who um I he helped me build a um a computer model of an onion that simulates um an onion and basically what it does is it it lets you calculate um how even the size of the pieces you get will be when you cut it to various cut it in various ways so some people say to cut straight up and down some people say to cut radially toward the center um what we discovered was that if you're looking at the onion like this um so if you imagine the onion is a circle and say that has a radius of one what you want to do is look for a point below The Cutting Board that's about 0.6 so it's basically the golden ratio so like one to one point six um so it's about you know about 0.6 the distance down below the top of the cutting board and that's where you want to aim your knife if if you want uh to get the most even number I'm sorry the most even sized pieces with the fewest number of cuts um I don't actually really do that because I don't really care if my onions are that perfectly precise but the the math maybe I'll share that mathematical model sometimes but the math showed that both people who say going straight up and down and people who say go regularly to the center are actually both of them are equally incorrect as far as the most efficient way to cut an onion um you're looking for the Golden Ratio there anyhow so I got onion um normally what I would do also is um I would cut up a poblano pepper but instead today I have these roasted um hatch chilies that I did over the over the the charcoal grill um the other day so normally I would be sauteing a poblano pepper that I've also um dice along with this couple tablespoons of oil and go the onions [Music] a little pinch of salt that helps draw out some of the liquid in them and gives them you know gives them a little bit of a head start as far as sauteing goes [Music] okay well that's cooking down I'm gonna get three cloves of garlic smash smash smash I might speed up some of this part because it's not really that exciting to watch me and I'm chopping some garlic this burger is delicious and it's good even for even from omnivores or even for carnivores even a T-Rex would like this burger it's good for T-Rexes and for hippo dracos and for Pachycephalosaurus those are my daughter's current three favorite dinosaurs are T-Rex's hippo dracos Pachycephalosaurus if you don't want to chop garlic by hand there are other ways you can do this you could also do it in a mortar and pestle which works fine for this or you can do it on a garlic press the only thing I would avoid doing is getting pre-minced garlic um any sort of pre-prepared garlic products um it's not gonna it's never gonna have the same sort of flavor that fresh garlic has it's going to actually have more of the sort of off flavors is going to lose its potency and it's not going to have as many of the sort of fresh sweet allium flavors which are kind of more of what well more of what I want you know that said if you if you've used Jarred garlic in the past Jarred chopped garlic in the past and you like it then don't let me stop you from continuing to use it [Music] oh this is if viewers might note that this pan right here was one of the pans that was in my giveaway pile um what I ended up doing with those pans is I gave them away to my staff at my restaurant so the back of the house staff and the servers everyone got to take home a piece but uh this is that Australian um cast iron pan the house ion pan that well the founder of the company who um who makes them saw my piece um saying that I was going to give away and implored me to try using them again um and so I said I would and so I have and so this one I've actually seasoned um by running it through the oven uh with a thin layer of oil a few times um the way the way you do it is you you rub in some oil and then you basically take a clean towel and you wipe off the oil and the trick is you want to you want to wipe out the oil as if you feel like you've made a mistake and you shouldn't have put the oil in there so you try your best to get all the oil out and then you bake it for an hour at um around 450 degrees let it cool down in there so what I do is I do it I do that at night bake it at 450 degrees and then shut off the oven before I go to go to bed cools down in there overnight and then you repeat the process for multiple days in a row I did it for one week so seven coats of oil and that's how you get this really nice sort of slick dark black layer of seasoning from all that polymerized oil in there I'm just I would do the same thing for carbon steel you know the other good way to season the carbon steel I'm sorry for cast iron the other good way to season the cast iron or carbon steel pan is to just cooking it a lot so cooking a lot especially at the start you want to cook a lot of um uh you want to make sure you fry in it a lot so Charlotte fry or deep fry a lot and don't really don't don't do any sort of simmering especially don't simmer any acid in it for the first few times you use it at least until it gets a good um a good layer of seasoning on it all right so next what we're going to do the other ingredients we got well that onion Cooks down about three quarters of a cup toasted cashews that's about three quarters of a cup a little bit more roasted cashews these are just plain old salted roasted cashews and I'm gonna pulse those [Music] for the reason you pulse instead of just running the food processor straight is that if you run the food processor straight what happens is the pieces of cashew or whatever it is you're trying to chop up um the pieces end up sort of riding around the blade and they don't chop evenly so like the bigger pieces will end up riding around the top of the blade and you end up with sort of like some pasty bits and some whole cashews whereas when you pulse you get more even chopping I mean obviously it's still not perfectly even as you can see but it's a lot more even than you would get as if if you um were to Simply run the uh run the thing as is all right post-up cashews that's going to give it some more texture um so I sauteed my onions first if I had a poblano I would also do that at the same time um I added in my garlic once my onion was mostly softened and then once you start stirring in the garlic and it really comes in contact with the heat you really only want to cook it for maybe 20 to 30 seconds just until you start smelling that nice garlic aroma um you don't need to go any more than that and in fact if you go too much more than that garlic tends to burn faster than onions do which is why you add them sort of just to the very end and you don't really want to once your Garlic's there you don't really want to give it too much more time in the pan [Music] pretty nice pan um I think I'm probably still going to end up giving them away just because I'm I'm purging but um I would recommend that I would recommend those um awesome pens this is a Chipotle pepper which is a Chipotle is a smoked jalapeno smoked red jalapeno pepper that's all it is um and you can buy them dry chipotle peppers but I usually buy them um canned in Adobo sauce which is a sort of vinegary vinegary sauce um just because of the convenience they're very easy to store I have like I always have a couple cans in my pantry they're easy to incorporate into dishes they're delicious and even once they're opened I'm going to transfer this to a separate container like a little Deli container and put it in the fridge or maybe a mason jar and put in the fridge and it'll last for for months and months that Adobo sauce is salty and vinegary so it basically acts as a natural preservative foreign now that this is done um I'm going to what I'm going to do is I'm going to wait until my black beans are done and I will come back when that happens so I will come back in 10 minutes all right so um all right sun is moving I got this uh big screen up here this time because I've been bothered by the Shadows the bright sunlight on my uh work surface um has screwed up the video anyhow it's been another 10 minutes this is about 20 minutes total um and this is what your beans are going to look like so you see that you see how they're kind of splitting open and a little dry um that is what you're looking for here's let me see if I can get a closer look can you see I think you can see um all right so now I'm going to set this aside to cool just a little bit um and in the meantime what I'm going to do is I've decided I'm going to make a little um chipotle mayonnaise to go on this um some mini chopper you can either do it in your food processor or like with a hand blender you can also do it by hand um mini chopper clove of garlic I'm gonna grab a another Chipotle drop them in there some of that liquid and then I'm gonna take some mayonnaise um and actually meantime I'm going to take I'm going to also add about um has a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise to the uh the burger mixture that's gonna help it bind but for this let's do about it was one Chipotle and like a couple teaspoon maybe a tablespoon of sauce and I'm gonna do maybe about a third of a cup maybe half a cup of mayonnaise in there it's delicious on tacos especially fish tacos it's great on fish tacos it's great on grilled fish great on grilled vegetables to dip into it's great on sausages and hot dogs things like that it's just one of those condiments that once you taste it you're gonna be like mmm why did not why did I not do this why did I not do this before or if I had did do this before why haven't I not been doing it more frequently and that's what I always say if you're the kind of person who likes to count if you're a bean counter you want to make sure that you only have 239 of them because otherwise otherwise your burgers are too farty the rest of that will go in the fridge this stuff will stay keep in the fridge for um I mean basically as long as Mayo does at least as long as Mayo so you know several weeks if not longer so now these are going to go into the food processor so they are you can you can kind of hear them how nice and dry they are um so they're you know they're still a little moist in the center but the edges you know they're split open the edges are starting to dry out a little bit and they're gonna what they get is like a really nice sort of chew to them also going to grab some Cotija cheese you can use feta cheese um you could also use something like pecorino Romano and do that let's say about half cup once crumbled so two to three ounces would be my my estimate I'll link to this full recipe by the way this is a recipe oh it's on serious seeds you can get the full recipe for free all right so you want to pull it just a few times that looks good and then we go straight into the mixture like the onions we're done with the food processor now a couple more things go in there so these panko panko breadcrumbs about about half a cup maybe three quarters of a cup this is going to be enough to make six to eight burgers or so at least um an egg oh and I'm gonna add these roasted hatch chilies so you can what like I said you can start with um a raw poblano pepper and um saute it along with the onion at the start um or you can use um these you know fire roast you know your homemade fire roasted Anaheim or hatch chilies these are Hatch um hatch anaheims same same variety of pepper um New Mexico pepper uh or you can use if you want you can also use a can of um chopped green chilies um you can find those easily easily in the international section of any pretty much any Supermarket I've never seen a supermarket that doesn't carry them maybe maybe very very small ones or maybe in certain parts of the country that I'm unfamiliar with but every every Supermarket anywhere I've lived has always carried them foreign that is our mix so you just kind of wanna fold everything together just until it sort of forms a cohesive homogeneous Mass and just make sure you can make a head um so I'm probably actually not gonna I'll cook one one right now just to show you and just for my own personal lunch but uh my wife is cooking dinner tonight so I'm going to leave this mixture in the fridge until tomorrow um when I'll feed my family with it tomorrow um it'll actually be become easy sort of a little bit easier to handle even the second day as a as the breadcrumbs and everything starts to sort of rehydrate a little bit it becomes a little bit more cohesive it smells really good all right look at me so it's much easier to form patties or balls with wet hands I'm gonna go for about about four ounces it looks about right um and these patties unlike a you know meat Patty They Don't Really they don't really shrink um when you cook them so you can make them just about you know the size that you want them to be um so what I do is make them slightly slightly wider than my actual bun all right let's go outside now okay all right so this girl is preheating over uh high heat for me to sort of moderately high heat for a few minutes now you want to brush one side with salt all right sorry brush one side with oil carefully pick it up and put it that side down and what we're going to do is we're going to brush that second side with oil now I'm just going to help it brown a little bit and season it you know I'll get my bun toasting as well um I don't know if you noticed when I was inside but I um I had that uh carbon steel pan on the burner after I'd used it earlier so what I did was I basically wiped it out it cleaned it out with soap and water um you can use you can use soap on a carbon steel or cast iron it's not going to get rid of the coating it's not going to get rid of the seasoning soaps so old-fashioned soaps that have lye those could eat through the um the polymerized coating of um the polymerized coating that the polymerized coating that makes the seasoning on cast iron or carbon steel but modern soaps don't have lye in them they're just detergents that act on fats so um those are not going to actually eat away at your seasoning at all all they're going to do is get rid of the excess fat on your pan which is what you do want to do so what I do is I wipe them out clean them uh with soap and water if necessary then I put them right back over a burner I turn the burner on and I let it dry out over the Heat and then I generally let it keep keep on heating until it's sort of lightly smoking and then at the very end I'll rub in a little bit of oil just to keep the surface protected and that's how you keep your seasoning nice between uh between uses all right let's get in there good looking bun a little bit more time on there cast uh grill grates by the way are very similar to carbon steel or cast iron in that you can season them so the more you cook on them the better they're going to get and you know a lot of people recommend cleaning your grill grates after you're done cooking I actually find it's much easier to clean them uh the next time you know you can give them a good once over with the grill brush if you want but I find it's much easier to clean them the next time you start cooking you preheat your grill once it's nice and hot then all the sort of crud that was left over from the last time you cooked is very easy to to um to get off it comes right off and then you end up with clean grates I didn't do it this time but you can of course every time you grill brush them rub the rub the grates down with a paper towel that's sort of saturated with oil and if you're really doing something sensitive like say fish that you're afraid is going to stick and tear up you can do that multiple times so you you brush on oil wait wait uh 20 seconds or so brush on some more wait another 20 seconds brush on some more oil and what that's going to do is it's going to build up a layer of seasoning very similar to how a carbon steel pan works or cast iron pan that where your fish is not going to stick all right this guy's probably ready to flip good these are seriously um I mean seriously the best the best veggie burgers I know of you may you may disagree but I defy you to try them and tell me that they're not delicious [Laughter] mm-hmm all right you know what else I decided to do is I'm going to take some of those chilies I had and do this sort of in the style of a green chili cheeseburger Chili's on top there's a slice of a pepper jack that's going on top on my burger I'm gonna spread this Chipotle mayo on the bottom I feel like your Mayo a bit Tangier you can also by the way add a little lime juice to it that flavor goes real well with Chipotle got some onions and then uh that's just some arugula from uh from the garden you can use whatever you want I'm going onions and arugula today because that's what I got Spring by the way I you're not it's a little hard to tell from all the cuts I did but it's going to cook for a total of about five or six minutes that is done so three to four minutes on the first side just a couple minutes on the second side that's what I usually like to do my Burgers veggie or not I'm cooking most cook them a little longer on the first side than the second side so that you get some really nice searing on that first side and then you flip them over and the second side you kind of just do do there to get some color a little bit of color on the outside and let them cook through but I think it's better than letting it sort of then flipping it over and getting sort of mediocre searing on both sides is to get really good searing on one side all right this looks good to me she's a beaut so what this really does is it solves that kind of mushiness problem that a lot of um veggie burgers have good come on you want a little come on guys come here good boy good boy I think shop is in the room with my wife who's good girl all right guys gals non-binary Pals I will see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 1,425,804

Keywords:

Id: BMgLRD2v5w0

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/smushy_face]

How long could you keep the patty mix in the fridge? Or could they be frozen?