Mexican Vegetable Burgers

Mexican Vegetable Burgers

~ Makes 6 burgers recipe inspired by Chef Jeena (this recipe has a lot more photos, of all the different stages and a great description of how to makes them).

• 400 grams of potatoes (ones for making mash are preferred – but I just used whichever potatoes I had)
• 1 small onion (diced as small as you can, because you are trying to get the ingredients to stick together smaller makes it more manageable)
• 150 grams of canned black beans (I’ve had this can of black beans for a while, so I needed to finally use them up, other beans might work better)
• 4 small carrots (again diced small)
• 1 large courgette (diced small)
• 1 small red pepper (also diced small)
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 tsp of Cumin powder
• Cornflakes (I didn’t measure out the exact amount I needed, although it wasn’t a lot – these are used instead of bread crumbs in the recipe)
• Vegetable Oil

Method

1. Make mashed potato, by boiling your potatoes, then mashing to form a smooth paste (don’t add milk or butter, just the potatoes). Pushing them through a sieve works well.
2. Boil your carrots till softened, drain as much water as you can, then set aside.
3. In a frying pan add the onions and garlic, cook until the onions start to go transparent then add the red pepper and courgette, and continue to fry until softened. You don’t want to brown this, you want it to be soft. Add the cumin, salt and pepper to season, and cook for a further few minutes.
4. Add the carrots to the mashed potato and mix, then add in the onion, red pepper and courgette mixture, mixing all the time. Finally stir in your strained black beans.
5. In a separate bowl, mash up your cornflakes to a thin powder.
6. Taking about 1/6th of the mixture and use your hands to make a burger shape. Place the burger in the bowl of cornflakes making sure it is entirely coated. Repeat this with the rest of the mixture. (In the recipe I followed they used proper metal rings for shaping the burgers – but I don’t have any of these. Using the ring may give better results as you can pack the mixture tighter.)
7. In a hot frying pan, with oil (while you may want to keep the oil to a minimum but you do need quite a bit to keep the burger from sticking). Cook each side for around 2 minutes, then set aside. While flipping them over be careful as they are very fragile.
8. At this point you can either plate them and serve, or you can leave to cool. I left mine in the fridge overnight then cooked them in a 200oC oven for 15-20 minutes the next day.

I served mine with a Tomato and Broad Bean salsa (recipe to follow).