34 THE NATIONAL CULINARY REVIEW • MAY/JUNE 2018

PLANT-BASED burgers au naturel

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ith all the eating styles of the day, your customers don’t have to be vegetarians to appreciate a good non-beef, plant-based

burger. Thus, it may be time to add one to your menu. But where do you start, especially considering that not all customers think the same way about what you might come up with?

Chicago’s The Growling Rabbit has a large vegetarian and vegan customer base, so it was only natural for owner Laura Soncrant to develop a plant-based patty and offer it as a non-beef burger option. She came up with a pink bean and quinoa patty for her brunch-pub/supper-club operation.

She began asking guests why they ordered what they did, and discovered that older consumers who choose to switch out the beef patty for a plant-based one do so for health reasons—limiting their meat for the day or for the week. Younger consumers who select the plant-based patty often do so with a mindfulness of excessive water use in beef production—a less environmentally sustainable practice than raising plants.

Travis Johnson, CEC, executive culinary director of Sodexo-managed Seminole Dining, with 36 dining outlets at Florida State University, Tallahassee, believes that chefs’ sustainability ethos should extend beyond buying fresh and local ingredients to include exploring and incorporating non-animal proteins. “We know a lot of sustainable practices that are plant-based that carry as much nutrition, whether it be proteins, vitamins or minerals,”

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BURGERS AU NATURELBY OFFERING A PLANT-BASED BURGER ON THE MENU, YOU TELL A GROWING NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS THAT YOU KNOW WHERE THEY’RE COMING FROM. BY JODY SHEE

OPPOSITE: The Good Burger served at Melt Bar and Grilled is the restaurant’s vegetarian/vegan answer to McDonald’s Big Mac.

Photo by C

hris Casella/C

ourtesy of Melt B

ar and Grilled

36 THE NATIONAL CULINARY REVIEW • MAY/JUNE 2018

he says. “As culinarians, we have to start looking at how to integrate plant-based items into the menu.”

The how-to is a matter of finding the right ingredients and experimenting with combinations, consistencies and cooking methods—all the while keeping in mind the end game. Do you want just a vegetarian burger, or would you like to make it vegan, as well? Do you want to also make it gluten-free to appeal to the broadest audience?

BLACK BEAN BURGERSBecause of its growing emphasis on vegetarian and vegan

cuisine, Matt Fish and his culinarians at Melt Bar and Grilled, Lakewood, Ohio, developed a vegan patty in 2010 that customers could order to replace the standard beef burger patty. Owner/founder Fish knew that the restaurant didn’t want to mimic the flavor and experience of eating real beef. When they decided to make it gluten-free, as well, the ingredient possibilities narrowed further.

They settled on a black bean and oat base—which helps the patty hold its shape. Other ingredients include onions, garlic, carrots and spices for flavoring, along with liquid smoke and a vegan “beef” base. Workers in the restaurant’s production facility make large batches once or twice a week, form them into patties and send them out to the units fresh or frozen to be cooked at unit level on the flat-top. “It gets a nice crispy exterior, but stays a little soft inside with a good texture—nice and firm,” Fish says. “The exterior crust helps hold it together and gives it a good mouthfeel.”

In 2016, Fish decided to elevate the patty by making a vegetarian/vegan burger line item. “To be honest, we tried to create a vegetarian and vegan version of McDonald’s Big Mac,” he says. The resulting Good Burger features that same black bean and oat patty topped with pickle chips, sliced tomato and onion, romaine lettuce and zippy sauce. The sauce is based on

a classic Thousand Island/Russian dressing made with soft tofu rather than mayo. The burger also has American cheese available as traditional or vegan.

MORE BEANSAt Temple Bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, executive chef

Richmond Edes’ veggie burger vision was to create something as healthful as possible that was a bit lighter and with Mediterranean flavors. Thus, for the White Bean Burger, he went with a white bean/garbanzo bean base. He tried not to steer it too closely to falafel flavors. Other patty ingredients include shallots, onions, garlic and cauliflower—a vegetable to add texture and that he loves and believes is underutilized. Making it gluten-free, he adds rice flour at the end and lets the mixture sit for a half-hour to absorb some of the natural moisture from the ingredients.

He pan-fries the patty to sear on one side, flips it over for a short time and finishes in the oven. He serves it on a potato bun with a sauce made of Greek yogurt, lemon juice, mint and parsley—like tzatziki sauce without the cucumbers, he says. He finishes it with sweet pickles.

Above all, the burger must have outstanding flavor, he says. When he joined Temple Bar, it already had a veggie burger that he thought only tasted OK. “Start simple with an idea. You could make a burger out of anything,” he says. “Just find a way for it to hold together, and ultimately, how it tastes is the main thing.”

For her plant-based patty, Soncrant with The Growling Rabbit chose canned pink beans to give the beef color she wanted. The beans are meaty like kidney beans, but without the hull. “They are softer, younger and smaller, so it doesn’t take as much to mash up,” she says. She also includes quinoa as a protein that adds marbling, texture and consistency.

Soncrant already was making vegetarian/vegan sausage in-house that incorporated texturized vegetable protein (TVP), so she included that in the burger mixture to create the texture, pull and chew she was after, while keeping it gluten-free—another goal of the burger.

As she developed the right ingredient mixture that also includes onions, garlic, liquid smoke, a spice blend and a veggie broth in lieu of water, her R&D aha moment came when she realized it was best to treat it like a dough rather than a traditional burger patty. Her bakery mindset took over. She included gluten-free flour with an understanding that in the humid summer it requires less water than in the drier winter. As with dough, she conducts the whole process by hand.

PREINVENTION TO THE RESCUETrial and error can be reduced by finding products or ingredient

blends already on the market. When he developed the plant-based Seminole Burger for Seminole Dining, Johnson utilized two mixes from Bemidji, Minnesota-based InHarvest Inc., a supplier

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IMPOSSIBLE BURGER

With its sustainability mindset, Impossible Foods Inc., Redwood City, California, came at its plant-based Impossible Burger from a decidedly scientific approach. Its beef-imitating burger patty is made from such items as wheat, coconut oil and potatoes, but its burger-mimicking magic ingredient is heme. The company describes heme as a basic building block of life that exists in plants and is also abundant in meat. “We discovered that heme is what makes meat smell, sizzle, bleed and taste gloriously meaty,” according to the company website. The company further states, “compared to cows, the Impossible Burger uses 95% less land, 74% less water and creates 87% less greenhouse gas emissions.” In addition to restaurants, Impossible Foods is aiming at the noncommercial foodservice market with Bon Appétit Management Company, Palo Alto, California, as a supporter. Bon Appétit Management Company runs more than 1,000 cafes for universities, corporations and museums in 33 states.

BEYOND BURGER

Environmental sustainability and animal welfare is the ethos behind the plant-based Beyond Burger by Los Angeles-based Beyond Meat. Company investors include Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio and former McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson. The product is cholesterol-, gluten- and soy-free and contains pea protein among its many ingredients. The company aimed to give customers the traditional burger experience from what looks, cooks and tastes like ground beef without the cow. Foodservice operators aplenty have gone with the Beyond Burger patty, including Applebee’s, TGI Fridays and Epic Burger. Recently, foodservice distributor Sysco entered a partnership to carry the Beyond Burger, making it widely available to foodservice operators.

IMPOSSIBLE AND BEYOND

JODY SHEE, AN OLATHE, KANSAS-BASED FREELANCE WRITER AND EDITOR, PREVIOUSLY WAS EDITOR OF A FOODSERVICE MAGAZINE. SHE HAS MORE THAN 20 YEARS OF FOOD-WRITING EXPERIENCE AND WRITES THE BLOG WWW.SHEEFOOD.COM.

of rice and rice blends, exotic grains and legumes, that worked together to adequately offer protein, texture and flavor.

The Black Forest Blend contains green lentils, split baby garbanzo beans, French green lentils and black beluga lentils. The Naked, Wild & Free blend features oats, wild rice, red sorghum and white sorghum. Besides the two blends, Johnson included parsley, spinach, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, shallots, panko breadcrumbs and fresh-squeezed lime.

His trial and error to obtain the proper mouthfeel led him to hard-pulse about 65% of the ingredients in a Robot Coupe, light pulse 15% and keep the rest whole. “I ended up with a mixture fully blended that was binding,” he says.

To top the burger, he made tomato and avocado relish with heirloom grape tomatoes quartered and tossed in fresh aromatics with a bit of garlic, salt and pepper combined with avocado.

Johnson advises chefs who would add a plant-based burger to the menu to consider the sustainability mindset of customers who order it, and be prepared to tell a story that will resonate with them. For example, a mixed burger available on campus is made partly of beef and partly of mushrooms obtained from a mushroom farm 36 miles away that the college partners with. Students go to the farm and pick mushrooms that will be eaten on campus. It becomes part of the story, creating an experience for the customer.

Michael Neflas, corporate executive chef of BOA Steakhouse with a location each in West Hollywood and Santa Monica, California, was laboring in the kitchen trying to develop a portabella and quinoa burger with red beets for color and including coconut oil. He added nutritional yeast to achieve the umami flavor he was after, but was unable to obtain consistent results. Then he came across the plant-based Beyond Burger that, along with the plant-based Impossible Burger, is emerging in the market to mimic real beef in flavor, texture, appearance and sizzle.

“We were able to get Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger and liked it. It has great flavor and sears nicely for a nice crust,” Neflas says. So he went with it, and had only to develop toppings. The lunch menu features the Vegan “Bacon” Guacamole Burger with a Beyond Beef patty on a vegan brioche bun, while the dinner menu has the Wild Mushroom Burger with a Beyond

Beef patty, arugula aioli and truffle on a potato bun.The patty so convincingly tastes like real beef that, in

the first month, at least six customers sent it back thinking they had accidently received real beef. After a year on the menu, overall, customers love the burgers and don’t feel put off by eating something so similar to beef, Neflas says.

He believes the Beyond Burger is a better choice than the Impossible Burger, because it is gluten- and soy-free. “In LA, that’s important,” he says.

OPPOSITE: BOA Steakhouse uses the plant-based Beyond Burger in its two vegan burgers, including this Wild Mushroom Burger.TOP: Beyond Meat developed the plant-based Beyond Burger patty with environmental sustainability and animal welfare in mind. It mimics a beef burger.BOTTOM: Impossible Foods Inc. developed the plant-based Impossible Burger with heme as the key natural ingredient found in meat that makes it smell, sizzle, bleed and taste “meaty.”

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pposite: Courtesy of B

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Steakhouse; right, top to bottom: C

ourtesy of Beyond M

eat, Courtesy of Im

possible Foods Inc.