Recipes Discovered

Black Bean Burger with Chipotle Ketchup

I recently got a new Mayo Clinic cookbookthat had a recipe for black bean burgers. Since I really enjoyed the black bean burgers I made a few months ago, I though it would be fun to try a new recipe to compare them. The Mayo Clinic recipe was a lot more complex, but it had a lot different ingredients to add flavor. Plus, included in the recipe was chipotle ketchup, which sounded really good.

I made the ketchup first by combining fresh tomatoes, sweet onion, garlic, tomato paste, vinegar, a chipotle chili, cumin, and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat. Chipotle chilis are smoked jalpenos, and the adobe sauce is a sweet vinegar sauce the chilis marinate in. They are a fairly spicy, so I like to scrape as many seeds out of the chili as I can, so the heat doesn’t overwhelm the dish. I let the ketchup simmer for 15 minutes until it was thick enough to qualify as ketchup, and then I removed it from the heat and let it cool. >>

The burgers start with dried black beans. Canned black beans seemed so much easier to me, and elsewhere in the cookbook, there was a substitution ratio for dried to canned beans, so I used two cans of black beans (14.5 ounces each) instead of the dried beans. It saved a ton of time. I did drain and rinse the canned beans though so get the salty liquid off. I added the beans to the food processor and then heated a skillet over medium heat with some oil. To the skillet, I added onion, bell pepper, and garlic and cooked them in stages until they were soft. I seasoned the mixture with a little salt, and then added it to the beans in the food processor. I also added brown rice, pecans, scallions, cumin and salt to the food processor and pulsed everything together until it was coarsely chopped. Then I added a beaten egg and bread crumbs, and mixed until combined. I learned some interesting things while mixing the burgers together. First, make sure the pecans are finely chopped before adding them to the food processor, otherwise, they don’t mix in so well. Second, it takes a quarter cup of dry rice to make a half cup of prepared rice. I actually made the rice in the microwave, which worked out pretty well. I cut down on the water a little bit though, so the rice wasn’t too wet for the burgers. Third, it takes 2 sliced of regular wheat bread to made ¾ cup of bread crumbs. Some good things to know. Anyway, once the burger mixture was combined, I carefully shaped them into patties. The mixture was a little soft, but the patties kept their shape once in the skillet. I cooked the patties over medium heat for about 8 minutes on each side before serving them with lettuce, tomato, onion, and the chipotle ketchup.

I’m not sure what to say about these burgers. They were good, but not great. I thought they were a little dry, but I also think I may have overcooked them a little bit. They had a good flavor, and I really liked the hint of pecans. The ketchup was spicy, even though I removed the seeds from the chili. I mixed it with a little regular ketchup and that helped out dramatically. I liked the texture that the ketchup had. I guess the reason I’m not raving about the burgers is because of all the prep that went into them. There are a lot of steps and it took a lot of time. The burgers were good, but I would probably find a simpler recipe next time I make them.