Last week’s Who Cooked It Better aroused quite the display of passion in you folks, finally giving America’s pissed-off vegans a chance to vent their frustrations against that scourge of vegans everywhere, Anthony Bourdain. This was Endless Simmer’s most popular poll to date, and with 800 of you weighing in, Hezbollah Tofu crushed Anthony Bourdain, 83 to 17 percent. Many congrats to HT on a truly winning original recipe.
In a shameless ploy to hold on to our newly expanded vegan readership base, we’re continuing with the “hold the bacon” theme for this week’s Who Cooked It Better, a search for the ultimate veggie burger. But before you meat-lovers tune out, let’s remember that grillin’ season is just around the corner, and if you expect to keep your veggie friends around for the summer, you better have a good faux-burger recipe. And don’t say, “Oh, I already know about Boca Burgers,” because when your vegan friends respond “that’s so considerate of you to think of me,” what they really mean is “Great. I can’t wait to eat this same store-bought patty every weekend for the rest of the summer. By the way, I’m a vegan and this has cheese in it.”
Seeing as how veggie burgers are kind of an anti-establishment thing anyway, we decided to go all-blogger for this challenge. Our first cheftestant is Swell Vegan, whose tasty-looking seitan burger (top left) is accented with chopped sesame seeds, red pepper and carrots. In a twist that could have you choosing this over steak at your next BBQ, Swell Vegan mixes chimichurri sauce into the veggie patty, and tops it off with more of this savory green stuff, along with tomato, onion, and tofutti cheese. SV says the recipe is still a work in progress, but this one already looks like a winner.
Moving to the top right, Eat Air is hoping to take down yet another meat-worshiping TV star with their veganized version of Paula Deen’s Big Mike Burger. The Big V replaces Paula’s butter burger/pecan burger double patty with an amped up seitan burger that includes shittake mushrooms and vegan cheese, along with a tempeh-pecan patty complete with maple syrup and liquid smoke (!) Complete directions here.
On the bottom right corner is a beautiful pic from 101 Cookbooks, whose use of eggs may turn off you vegan voters, but these garbanzo bean-cilantro-sprout burgers are so tasty looking we had to include them. Most originally, 101 C loses the bread buns altogether and uses her two patties as the buns, filling the inside with avocado slices, cipollini onions, and more. Full recipe over at 101 Cookbooks.
In the bottom-left corner is a great-looking burger from The Accidental Vegetarian, which looks most like a real burger of anything we could find, even though instead of fake meat, the AV goes for a mix of eggplant, zucchini, onion and garlic, kicked up a notch with an inventive almond paste concoction. Full recipe here.
Your votes and thoughts please…
[poll id=”9″]
ps – did we miss any of the best? Let us know!
