Black Bean Burgers

So in an effort to use ingredients I already had I decided to make homemade black bean burgers. It's something I've wanted to do for awhile, I was just a little intimidated. I looked at a few different recipes online and then just kinda winged it from what I had on hand. This is basically what I did:

1. Cooked brown rice
2. Drained a can of black beans and smashed them with the back of a spoon (This took forever.. there has to be a better way!)
3. Sauteed an onion, a couple cloves of garlic till they were brown. I seasoned it with cayenne pepper, more garlic, oregano and basil.
4. Lastly I added a cup of the brown rice and the onion/garlic mixture to the bowl of smashed beans. Then I just mix it as thoroughly as I could.



This is what it looked like


It wasn't staying together too well so I tried to refrigerate it for 20 mins to see if that would help. I made a ball in the shape of a burger and cooked it on the stove top with some olive oil. All seemed fine until I tried to flip it and it just completely fell apart. I just kept trying to put it back together as best as I could but it wouldn't really hold the shape.

I still ate that "burger" on an english muffin with tomato and some homemade bbq sauce, and though it was messy, it still tasted really good.

To try to salvage the problem for the remaining mixture I mashed up a bunch of ritz crackers and made "bread crumbs" and then made five more balls out of the mixture and froze it. I'm hoping the combination of the crackers and cooking from frozen will keep them together.

So all in all, it tasted good and I didn't have to go out and buy anything I didn't have so I am going to say it was a success. However, I didn't feel confident enough to bring them to the Memorial Day BBQ I was going to that night which was sort of the original plan. Next time I'm going to try to drain the beans better. I also need to figure out a better way to smash them without some fancy food processor.

I'll still enjoy them today for "Meatless Monday" which I almost forgot about since it's Memorial Day!!


Update** They were delicious the next day. Not sure if it was the freezing or the crackers that did it, but they held together perfectly the next day. I made mini burgers and ate them open on top of a toasted english muffin with salsa and hot sauce. Great Success!