Veggie Burger–Animal Style

The invention of the veggie burger–or as he called it, the VegeBurger–is generally credited to a London restaurateur named Gregory Sams. Sams, whose restaurant had been making meatless burgers for the likes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono throughout the 1970s, started selling a dried, rehydratable mix of sesame seed, oats, wheat gluten, and soybean under the VegeBurger name in 1982. Of course meatless proteins like tofu, tempeh, and seitan have been around for hundreds or thousands of years and have been used as meat analogues for their entire existence, and “fake meat” products had been in development by companies like Morningstar Farms (and their predecessors like Worthington Foods) for decades, and other restaurants offered similar mock burger patties since the late 1960s. Other cultures have meatless burgerlike products like falafel or vada pav, and our own culture has since produced the veg-friendly portobello burger.

But VegeBurger appeared to launch a trend of vegetarian burgers that has only grown in the 40 years since it was launched. To my untrained eye, as an ever-so-slightly veg-curious carnivore, there appear to be mainly 3 main divisions of veggie burgers, though variations exist in each. Perhaps that is just my mind making patterns where none exist, or the human tendency to want to group things in 3; I would be happy to learn how other, more knowledgeable people classify their veggie burgers. But here are my categories:

1. Traditional Veggie Burgers. I’m using “traditional” solely because I lack a better term currently. These are the old-school veggie burgers, made from grains and nuts and vegetables, that don’t particularly try to pass themselves off as anything but a garden in patty form
2. Black Bean Veggie Burgers. Similar to the above, but heavily featuring black beans. There are so many of these that they seem to deserve their own category, and many of them are, or claim to be, spicy.
3. Plant-Based Meat Substitute Veggie Burgers. Since Beyond Meat launched their burger product in 2015, this has been a growing category, with Impossible Burger coming along shortly after and many other manufacturers making similar products.

While visiting my hometown over Thanksgiving weekend, I went to a few local grocery stores and bought a representative selection of each of these types to try. It is by no means an exhaustive list, and doing an ultimate veggie burger ranking is not something I will attempt. But even this small selection constitutes a whole lot of veggie burgers.

Traditional Veggie Burgers

For the Traditional style veggie burgers, I chose Wild Harvest brand California-style veggie burgers, Morningstar Farms Garden Veggie burger (a favorite in a 2019 Serious Eats roundup of veggie burgers), Hilary’s Organic “World’s Best” Veggie Burgers, and a weird outlier, Actual Veggies brand Actual Purple Burger which was, as you will notice in subsequent photos, Actually a sort of purplish pink. Each of the veggie burgers I tried was pan-fried and served plain in a hamburger bun so I could focus on the flavor of the patty rather than condiments. My wife and 15yo son helped me finish all these and both hope to never see a veggie burger again in their lives.

I’ve tried to arrange the burgers in the same orientation I have their boxes in for the initial photo while cooking them in the pan and then again while plating them. Clockwise from upper left they are Wild Harvest, Morningstar Farms, Hilary’s, and, unmistakably, the purple one.

Wild Harvest’s burger was just OK, a generic veggie-forward (pea? carrot?) flavor with a wet, mucky texture in the middle, though the edges crisped up OK in the pan.

Morningstar’s veggie burger started out brown and continued to brown nicely in the pan, making it attractive to look at, though nobody would mistake it for meat. The texture was almost meatlike though, possibly due to an egg white binder that disqualifies this particular product for vegans. Bell pepper seemed to be the most prominent flavor, though a medley of vegetables were present. All three of us picked this as our favorite of the veggie burgers.

The Hilary’s burger had the least flavor of any of them, grainy, beany (legumy?), texturally very much like a crabcake or similar bready patty.

This flamboyant-looking veggie burger gets its color from beets, and beets lead the way flavor-wise as well, with onions and carrots not far behind. It’s a sweetish patty with a chunky texture and not unpleasant, but I don’t foresee it upstaging any Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performances with mad guitar work any time soon.

Black Bean Veggie Burgers

Once again, I arranged these burgers on the griddle and on the plate as I had in their boxes during the initial photo. Left to right, we have Wild Harvest Black Bean Chipotle Veggie Burgers, Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean veggie burgers, and Dr. Praeger’s Black Bean Quinoa veggie burgers.

Once the tasting commenced, one black bean burger ran into another though. Were they all spicy, or just two of them? Did this one have a little grainier texture? Wait, was this one the Wild Harvest or the Dr. Praeger’s? And why do they all have corn in them? I’ll try to organize my impressions below.

The texture of this Wild Harvest burger is far superior to that of the California-style veggie burger we tried from the same brand. The promised chipotle does provide a bit of a kick and a slight smokiness. A definite upgrade from their other burger and the best of the black bean versions we tried.

The Morningstar black bean burger once again has a great texture, with some crunchy bits of rice aiding the surface browning and a decent amount of spice to rival the Wild Harvest’s chipotles. Flavor-wise, it doesn’t have as much going on, leaning hard into the spicy black bean flavor without much else going on.

A mushy, bready texture like a soggy crab cake and not much flavor to speak of make this the weakest of the black bean burgers we tried

“Plant-Based Meat Substitute” Veggie Burgers

Again, I’ve arranged the patties on the griddle and on the plate in the order they appear in the first photo: Pure Farmland’s “Ultimate Burger” on the upper left, Dr Praeger’s “Perfect Burger” on the right, and Beyond Meat’s “Beyond Burger” on the lower left.

These three were the only clear meat replacement type burgers I was able to identify at the stores in Quincy. Beyond Burger is the big player here, but the Pure Farmland and Dr. Praeger’s versions are clearly trying to play in the same league, with thick patties, beet juice that wells up as the burger cooks, simulating actual meat, and colors that… well they don’t all simulate meat equally successfully. I did not see Impossible Burger at the stores I went to but I know that they sell theirs to the public both in patty and in bulk form.

Pure Farmland’s patty has a texture more like a McChicken than a burger patty, a sort of chopped and formed sausaginess that doesn’t exactly seem un-meatlike but doesn’t scream burger at me either. The flavor just isn’t there though–crumble it and cook it up with spices and serve it with jalapenos and cheese over some nacho chips and I might buy it. In a solid patty, in a burger bun, it doesn’t carry itself as a burger. With some ketchup and pickles and mustard, maybe it would.

Dr. Praeger’s Perfect Burger has a pinkness to it that suggests meat, and there are chewy, irregular bits in it that suggest meat, and there is a hint of smoke that suggests meat cooked over charcoal. It doesn’t quite all come together the way it should though. It has a pastiness to it, a plasticity–a burger wants to hold its shape but this patty pulls apart like a disk of mashed potatoes.

The Beyond Burger is head and shoulders above the other patties in this section. There’s a rugged irregularity to the texture that is very much like actual cooked ground beef. It browns like ground beef and pulls apart under your teeth like ground beef. It tastes almost like ground beef. Is it a perfect replica? No, it isn’t. But it’s good, and it would scratch the itch if you had given up meat and still craved a burger from time to time.

Veggie Burger, Animal-Style

But of course I hadn’t really experienced any of these burgers the way they were intended to be eaten. Nobody but a psychopath would eat a plain hamburger, much less 10 of them in the space of a couple of days. they deserved–ok, well not all of them deserved anything, let’s be honest, and a few of them deserved to be tossed directly in the trash. But I should, at least, make a burger, a real burger, a classic American burger, out of one of them.

The most classic burger I can think of is the lacy-edged double cheeseburger served at Krekel’s in Decatur, Illinois, a pair of tiny 2oz patties smashed hard against a well-seasoned griddle until they overlap the edge of the bun, each topped with hot melted American cheese, stacked and served unpretentiously on a cheap squishy bun with ketchup, pickle, onion, and mustard. But all these veggie burgers were formed into patties already, and even if I’d managed to get my hands on some bulk Impossible Burger, I don’t know that it would brown quite as nicely as those burgers at Krekel’s.

Then it struck me–what is not only a classic American burger that people never shut up about but also just about the funniest way to serve a vegetarian burger to an unspecified sandwich writer with an unsophisticated sense of humor? (it’s me, I’m talking about me, I am a giant child)

Of course, the In-N-Out “secret menu” burger, the Double-Double Animal Style!

I started with 2 of the Morningstar Farms Garden Veggie burgers, which had been the best-received of any of the veggie burgers we tried.

Just before the flip, I squirted mustard on each of them, as “Animal-style” burgers are said to be “mustard-grilled.”

The mustard seared into a thin yellow layer that mostly adhered to the burger patties

Double-double of course means two patties and two slices of cheese, and Animal-style burgers get a layer of grilled onions as well. My caramelized onions, which had spent roughly 12 hours slow-cooking in a crockpot in preparation for this burger, are not chopped as finely as what they serve at In-N-Out. I am 100% OK with that.

To assemble the Double-Double Animal Style, we start with a well-toasted bun in a wax paper wrap

To this we add Thousand Island dr ahem, *secret sauce,* tomato and lettuce

Then the burger patties, cheese, and onions, and pickles. Pickles? Does an Animal Style burger come with pickles? Who cares, I want pickles.

It is… not the most photogenic burger I’ve ever made. Animal style burgers are notoriously sloppy but I may have outdone In-N-Out on that front here. And I wouldn’t say I nailed the ratios here either–that’s a big hit of those sweet caramelized onions, nicely offset by the pickles and mustard but without the big anchoring presence of actual beef patties.

Still, it’s a good burger, and if you’re adding this many toppings to it, maybe it doesn’t need the beef.

Maybe. I gotta think about that one. I’ll give it another shot in a few years.