Cajun Burger Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna make some Cajun veggie burgers which sounds pretty exciting to me.

So, what I’m starting with is buckwheat that has been toasted which is called kasha, so you may see it in your grocery store as buckwheat, toasted buckwheat, kasha.

The toasted buckwheat is a little bit of a brownish red colour. They do also sell raw buckwheat at my grocery store which is a pale, beiges colour like most other grains, like a rice kind of color.

The toasted buckwheat cooks super fast so that’s why I’m using it. It’s also super sticky which will be great to form into a veggie burger.

So I’ve got one cup of buckwheat here and two cups of water with a pinch of salt. I’ll put that on to boil and it’ll take about ten minutes once the water is boiling for ten minutes to cook that’s really fast.

So while that’s going on, I’m going to take these carrots that I’ve washed and scrubbed and grate them which is not my favorite thing in the world but I’m gonna do it.

Once I get going it’s not really that bad but I don’t know I just dread it for some reason. The other bonus of grating is I eat the last little bit of carrot rather than cut my fingers up.

Yes! Take that carrot! Alright! Next thing I’m gonna do is chopped up some parsley and any excuse I can take to get fresh parsley in there I take it because parsley is actually loaded with nutrients.

It may look innocent enough but trust me it can do some damage to any free radicals soaking in your body because it has ton of antioxidants in there.

So just chopped that up, buckwheat is staring to boil, staring to soften, things are going well. Like I said this stuff cooks really quickly because it was the toasted buckwheat, smells really good.

So, I use a small pot and I’m going to need to put this out into a bowl so that I have enough more room to mix the rest of the goodness in there.

Very sticky this stuff hence why we are using it to make a veggie burger but it sticks to the bottom of the pot so just get some water in there you’ll be all good to go.

So here is the kasha up close and personal, it’s quite beautiful really. It’s a triangular shape grain which a lot of it can just really turns to mushier but some of them are still intact. Really what you’re going for on this because it’s a veggie burger is the mush factor.

So what we’ll do is stir in the carrots and the parsley. So we are going for some Cajun flavour here and Cajun they use a lot of seasoning.

Ok! I’m gonna start with the herbs. I’ve got some oregano and whenever you use dry herbs pinch it between your fingers to get the flavor out of them. I’m gonna use some basil and some thyme then were gonna add the spicy stuff, ok! Paprika.

You want quite a bit if this unless you don’t actually want a Cajun flavored burger in which case you can do whatever seasonings you want. I’ve got some ground mustard and this is actually, I taken mustard seeds, toasted them and ground them so I don’t have about too much ground mustard at hand because I don’t use a lot of it.

And some cayenne pepper, you know sometimes it seems ironic that people that lived in hot climate like the really spicy food but the reason is the spice mix makes you sweat and sweat is your body’s way to cool off right? So really when you think about it – makes sense.

So you might smell like paprika coming out of you when you sweat but hey your cool so who cares right?

Black pepper and some salt! Salt to bring the flavors together and help the carrots cooks so stir that together! I can smell it. The smell of the spices is coming up in the steam.

Really make sure you stir this through well because you don’t wanna have one chunk that doesn’t have any flavor and then another chunk that just like “BBAAA”

So I’ve got everything mix together here and you can see that it’s really sticking nicely, the buckwheat has made things really nice and sticky.

Now if you’re frying you just go ahead and make these into patties. Heat up a pan, get a little bit of oil in the pan. Cooked them five minutes on each side. What I’m gonna do is bake them in which case you need to add a little bit of oil to the actual batter and this is because things will first of all dry out which won’t make a nice texture but they also will not have any flavor.

So you need to add a little bit of oil and that was about two teaspoons right there. This spoon holds two teaspoons. Again it needs just a little bit more. Think of it as sun block for you food it needs protection from the hot oven.

So this point you just gonna form these into patties, whatever shape you like. You can probably even use cookie powder didn’t wanna make them kinda exciting. And the put them -I recommend using parchment in your baking sheet. I’ve already used my parchment a few times so it’s already been used a little bit.

Then you’re gonna pop these into theoven. Somewhere around 350F is good and you just wait until they’re a little bit crispy on the outside which shouldn’t take more than about 30 minutes.

Alright! Here are my oven baked Cajun veggie burgers looking nice and brown on the outside. They are ready to go. You can put those on a burger buns with your favorite fix on. What Phil and I usually do is put them over a salad which is excellent as well. However you like them.

You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.