With a major population of the world serving an indefinite period of home quarantine during the COVID-19 outbreak, it has become a necessity to cook all your meals at home. Cooking at home, however, does not have to feel like a task. There are ways to make cooking a fun family affair, a little at-home party among residents if you will.
What is better than a deliciously cooked burger for a change of the platter? Speaking of burgers, as the world is gearing up for a vegan revolution, maybe now is the time to activate your taste buds and learn how to make sumptuous meatless patties. Here are a few ways to go about it.
Traditional Meatless Patties
There are very few things that are as fulfilling as making your food from scratch. When it comes to meatless burgers, you can easily accomplish this by using just a handful of ingredients. To get that burger-like texture, most traditional meatless patty recipes call for the use of black beans.
However, when you begin to experiment with ingredients, you may find that there are other great substitutes too, such as green peas, yellow peas, mushrooms, quinoa, chickpea, lentils, cauliflower, potato, and so on. You may also add whatever vegetables you like to make the burger healthier. When making a traditional meatless patty, the sky is the limit.
Many veggie patties or veggie burgers nowadays come fully cooked, but most nutritionists and chefs recommend cooking them again before consumption for two main reasons. Flavor and safety. Cooking a veggie patty enhances its flavor by attaining that nice crispy golden coating which enhances its flavor. Through cooking of a patty also ensures the elimination of any bacteria that could be lingering on the veggies. Although veggie patties do not contain any meat, vegetable fragments can also carry bacteria especially if they are of organic origin and have not been treated with pesticides.
Most veggie patties are cooked on a non-stick skillet for 1 to 3 minutes on each side. When you are buying veggie patties always check the packaging for cooking instructions. Packaging will usually tell you recommended length of time for cooking or preheating.
Ready-to-cook versions
If you do not wish to do all the work from the beginning and yet must make your meatless patties at home, thanks to the (just like we did during quarantine), do not fret, for there is help at hand. Pioneers such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have both come up with blocks of plant-based ground meat that you could buy and cut up to shape your burger patties (or anything else you are craving). Impossible Foods, for example, will deliver any of their products including the burger patties, directly to your doorstep.
If you want your work more cut out for you, they also sell raw patties that could be just tossed on the grill or the frying pan and you have a burger ready in minutes. Perfect for weeknights when you are staying home but working to finish a deadline. Pre-made plant-based patties are widely available in all grocery stores nowadays. You can select your favorite veggie patty or an alt-meat one and have it delivered to your home in no time.
A lot of us who love plant-based patties are buying plant-based ground “meat” or mince. In that case, you can either shape your own patties or buy a patty press. They are inexpensive and vary in size and materials but they can sure come in handy. Patty Presses tend to keep the size and shape of the patties fairly uniform. You can easily buy them on Amazon or any other store that sells culinary implements.
Looking for Ideas
Regardless of whether you are willing to prepare a traditional meatless patty from the ground up or you wish to give the ready-to-cook ones a shot, customization opportunities can be endless. This is the time to look for ideas and recipes online and make the most of what is out there on the world wide web.
If you have experimented with and perfected one type of meatless burger, there is no need to stick to it for every meal. Several new recipes are just waiting to be explored. You can find some great recipes on this website under the recipes section (scroll to the bottom for more options) or you can browse through websites such as BBC Good Food, Cnet, Delish, and others to try different kinds of traditional meatless burgers. Even Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have their recipe websites that encourage you to try fun things with their patties.
The Chef in You Whether you are bored sitting at home during quarantine or just wish to make simple but delectable dinner, meatless burgers are not going to let you down. The best part of these burgers is that many of them could be made in batches and frozen. Unleash your inner chef and make the best use of this quarantine by cooking at home creatively. This is the best time to give your palate something new to cherish.
Takeaway
As working from home is becoming a new norm, cooking at home and preparing your own meals will come back to life again. Perhaps that is a positive change that not only technology but unfortunate series of events arrived along with the Covid-19 pandemic. Preparing our own plant-based meals and staples will not only happen on meatless Mondays but perhaps a few times a week from now on.