A black bean and sweet potato burger recipe for Vegan Burger Day

Happy Vegan Burger Day!

Like you need any excuse to eat vegan burgers, but if you do, I'm happy to provide one! I read on Tea and Sympatico the other day that a bunch of Belgian vegans had decided to start the event as a plant-based alternative to the omni burger day.

When it comes to burgers, normally I just reach for something out of the freezer (Fry's, I'm looking at you here). Given the importance of today's festival though, I thought I should actually try making my own and seeing what happens.

The result, accompanied by sweet and normal potato fries and coleslaw, was surprisingly tasty!

Here's what I did:

Ingredients
One small sweet potato
One white onion
One red chilli
Three garlic cloves
One tin of black beans, drained
One grated carrot
One teaspoon of coriander seeds, lightly toasted and ground
Two teaspoons of cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground
One chopped chilli in adobo, plus half teaspoon of adobo
Half teaspoon of soy sauce
One ounce of oats

How you do it
Roast a small sweet potato  in the oven until soft (or microwave it).

Sweat off one onion in 1 tbsp of oil. Once it's softened, add a chopped red chilli and three chopped up cloves of garlic and fry another couple of minutes.

Pile the sweet potato, onion, garlic, chilli into a bowl with the black beans, grated carrot, spices, chilli, soy sauce, and oats.

Take out a quarter of the mix, and blend to a paste. Add another quarter, pulse a couple of times, then add the rest of the mix and stir. If it looks a bit wet, add more oats.

Shape into patties and bake at 200C for 20-25 minutes, flipping over mid-way through cooking. They firm up a bit the next day, so they're good to reheat if you want a rerun of Vegan Burger Day tomorrow.