I’m embarrassed to admit there are no photos with this post. Not even an attempt with a phone photo. We were just too hungry.

There’s a bit of a hiatus going on with the Great Gluten-Free Vegan Burger experiment. We’re getting ready to go on a big trip, so I may not be making burgers again until November. However, in keeping with the theme, I am going to be trying to hunt down vegan burgers on our trip and will be writing about them here.

That said, we did have burgers this week, just not homemade. Trader Joe’s have their own label version of the great Wildwood Veggie Burgers. These burgers are really tasty, satisfying, hold together well enough to be cooked on a BBQ, but taste just as good done in a cast iron skillet.

It used to be that we’d stopped having these burgers because we thought the higher fat content in them gave Christie heartburn. After finding out about Christie’s gluten-intolerance it turns out it wasn’t the burgers, but the buns that were causing the problem! Now we’re able to enjoy them again.

A word about buns and bread in general. If you can find it, we cannot recommend Happy Campers Gluten-Free Bakery highly enough. We’re partial to their Stompin’ Good Seedy Buckwheat Molasses bread and everyone of the burgers seen on the blog during the experiment has been served on one of their Wild Buns. This Thanksgiving I’m looking forward to using their Burly Bird Buckwheat Stuffing mix.

The real stand out to this week’s burger dinner were the fries. Usually we make frozen fries. Yep, that’s the truth. Usually the skin on ones from TJ’s.

This week I wanted to use some Yukon Gold potatoes I’d picked up when I made lentil soup since I’m trying to use up a lot of produce before we’re gone. I decided I was going to try my hand at making homemade, convection roasted fries. I feel I under utilize the convection settings on our oven and have had some good luck with roasting potatoes before, so I set out to make our fries.

I cut up all the potatoes into thin slices, tossed in a bowl with a few tablespoons of avocado oil and a couple of teaspoons of the salt blend I’d picked up at Bob’s Red Mill recently. They took a little longer to roast than expected, but were so delicious that I’m posting with out a picture because we ate them all.  In November you can expect a recipe coming soon for these delicious, healthier & budget-mindful fries.

The Whole Grains Store has a bulk spice & herb section where I find “Montreal Seasoning” which contained salt, garlic, black pepper, chili flakes, and dill seed. It was an intriguing combination and smelled awesome, so I had to get some. It seemed like the perfect thing to roast fries with… was I ever right!

The newest entry into the Great Gluten-Free Vegan Burger Experiment is an attempt to make the BBQ Black Bean Burger from Joni Marie Newman’s cookbook, The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet.

I say “attempt” because some things didn’t quite go right, but that’s the whole point in experimentation!

The recipe is gluten-free to begin with, calling for 1/2 cup of soy flour. I assumed we had soy flour and so progressed along with soaking the TVP and adding it with the black beans to a bowl. This would be when I remembered the soy flour.

Quinoa flour, fava flour, besan (chickpea flour), 3 kinds of gluten-free flour mixes, millet flour, almond flour… and…. soy milk powder.

At this point I decided my track record with using gluten-free instant oats had been pretty good and subbed them in for 1/2 cup soy flour I did not have.

Although I decided to start with 2/3 of the BBQ Sauce called for in the recipe, it still seemed very wet. 1/4 of potato flakes was added and I didn’t add in the final 1/3 of the BBQ Sauce called for.

Since I’d gone with oats + potatoes, I wasn’t sure if the fridge might inhibit the water those would soak up, so I let it sit at room temperature in the microwave (a.k.a., “cat safe”).

I’ll admit that I wanted to try baking in the drop-biscuit cast iron since it has been working so well to make very nicely shaped, cooked burgers. That perhaps isn’t a big deal, but I did try to get tricky and cook them at the same time as the french fries. So shorter time, higher temp.

At the halfway point I realized I couldn’t really flip them easily. Nor at the end point. Since the fries too seemed a little off, I switched the oven onto the convection setting and stuck everything back in for 5 minutes. Fries out, burgers another 10 minutes at 325F convection setting. They set up some in the pan, but we finally ate them. Still a little mushy, but way tasty.

The burgers sat in the cast iron for a bit, until they cooled and I put all the leftovers away. By that time they were very nicely set. This morning I had one along with a hashbrown patty from TJ’s, slices of the volunteer tomato that showed up in my zinnias, and a little avocado.

This experiment will be attempted again, this time using soy flour and really watching the liquid added to the TVP. I did sauté the onions, since they were very strong, which may have made for more moisture too. I do really like using the oats, but will see how the soy flour and refrigeration works before changing anything.

Something just seemed too wet with this version using oats, even through they ended up as well shaped burgers that reheated nicely and hold together well. I will add one to the freezer collection as well to see how it does with thawing. It may be these are a “make ahead” burger (the variation with oats), so they bake, set, and are lightly cooked again to heat through.

A while back, when we first got our copy of The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet the first recipe we tried was for the Denver Omelet Burger. While we really the idea, the resulting texture was described as pasty and it felt like the peppers and onions overwhelmed the vegan bac’n bits. I’ve always wanted to return to this and try changing a couple of things to create something very inspired by Joni Marie’s original recipe, but with a bit more texture and less oil. The Great Vegan Gluten-Free Burger Experiment is the perfect time to revisit the recipe!

I actually removed all the oil called for in the recipe save some spray oil for sautéing the pepper, onion, and garlic as well as some for the cast-iron drop biscuit pan. Once again this pan is the perfect thing for baking vegan burgers!

Other changes: I used a single, large orange bell pepper and only half a medium onion, both diced quite small. I used a couple of cloves of chopped garlic too. This I sautéed in a cast iron skillet until the onions started to caramelize.

I pressed the heck out of the tofu, thinking this was part of the texture problem the first time we tried. Next, rather than blend the tofu with oil and spiced, I just crumbled it up fine in a bowl, added all the spices in with the tofu and mixed it up by hand.

To bind this all I stuck with the chickpea flour (besan), but reduced to 1/2 cup and added 1/2 cup of gluten-free, instant oats as well. I also decided to throw 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast in there for stickiness and saltiness. I left out the salt the original recipe called for, but I think it should stay in with the next try with this revamped recipe.

One little change I make with all recipes calling for liquid smoke; I use smoked paprika instead. Since the original recipe called for 1/4 teaspoon of paprika, I just increased to 1/2 teaspoon of sweet, smoked paprika.

The results, all squished together by hand, were promising and held together well, especially after letting the mixture stand for five minutes to let the oats hydrate.

The drop-biscuit pan came out of the oven, heated to 350. I made 6 good-sized breakfast burgers and put them into the oiled cups.

These baked for 10 minutes. I turned them and then baked for 10 additional minutes. They came out nicely browned. Next attempt I’ll use red bell pepper for a more striking look. The oat/besan mixture gets a nice color and these held together beautifully in a nice patty.

I served them alongside hashbrown squares from Trader Joe’s, a pile of steamed broccoli, and a little avocado on top.

There’s a couple of small changes I’m going to make, and I want to see how these pass the “freeze test”, but these may become a great breakfast to-go, particularly for long travel days.

This week’s Burger Experiment comes to us from Lindsay S. Nixon‘s cookbook, Everyday Happy Herbivore cookbook. I have decided that in the Great Gluten-Free Burger Experiment I’m going to try substituting instant oats (GF, of course) any time I see Vital Wheat Gluten called for in a recipe. I also sub Tamari for anytime soy sauce is called for.

We’d already tried the recipe for the Pinto Burgers (same cookbook, page 86), which is already gluten-free, and loved them. In fact, they inspired my Summer Cilantro Slaw recipe! However, I wanted to try a new recipe and since this book has several bean-burger recipes to try I went for the Kidney-Qunioa Burgers (page 85) merely because I like kidney beans a lot.

First of all, this recipe comes together so quickly it is great. These could be whipped up from scratch on a weeknight. They were very flavorful, even though I totally forgot the tablespoon of Italian Seasoning it called for. The instant, GF oats worked perfectly, especially since I gave the “dough” about 10-15 minutes to rest and let the oats get sticky.

Last week, after the Scarborough Fair Burger Experiment, Christie had the idea of trying out our English muffin cast-iron pan for cooking the burgers. It would heat them more evenly and it would keep them in a nice, uniform burger shape (one which perfectly squishes out to fill an average bun). I heated the pan up in the oven while it preheated and sprayed lightly with oil before putting burger patties into each mini-pan. I must say, this idea is a winner and I will be using it for all burgers despite what cooking directions suggest.

Also known as a Drop Biscuit Pan, this works perfectly for English Muffins and scones too. Oh, and clearly vegan burgers as well!

Once again, the Wild Buns from Happy Campers Gluten-Free were the bun of choice. I loaded mine up with grainy mustard, vegan mayo, avocado, red pepper relish, a little ketchup, and some salad greens. It was pretty awesome (blurry, impatient photo indicates my rush to eat this all up).

On the reheat in the morning these, similarly to the Pinto Burgers, were a little dry. One patty is frozen to see how it does with the thaw/reheat test. One possible idea for these might be to par-bake them to help to retain the shape, freeze, and then reheat in a cast iron skillet.

For over five years Christie has suffered from a severe, life-affecting cough. She’s seen several doctors, had all kinds of tests, and taken several different medications, but nothing really has solved the cough. This year we changed physicians and our new one immediately started doing several tests for food allergies and sensitivities that could be causing systemic inflammation, affecting her lungs.

We were pretty worried it would turn out to be something we really loved, like soy (miso, tofu, tempeh, Soy Curls…) or tree nuts, peanuts, sesame seeds, etc. When the results came back the culprit was gluten. Another round of tests was ordered to rule out Celiac, which thankfully came back clear, leaving only the signs of systemic inflammation severely affecting the lungs. We were hugely relieved and felt like removing gluten was something we could do. Honestly, after so many years it feels good to have anything we can do.

I set about to rid our house of gluten-y goods, giving everything away to friends so that at home Christie would know she could eat most things (I am still getting one of my favorite cold cereal indulgences, Barbara’s Peanut Butter Puffins, which Christie hates and therefore won’t mistakenly eat). What it quickly brought to our attention was how often our “easy dinners” were centered around several products that contained gluten. Tasty things and easy on a busy night, but honestly not so great for either of us.

While I’ve been doing some creative things with tofu (two new recipes coming soon!), and we have several go-to legume recipes, I wanted to start experimenting with veggie burgers and cutlets. Hearty, healthy legume & grain dishes that I  can make up in large batches, cook, and freeze servings of for quick dinners.

One of the first things I’m trying out is my now, newly made gluten-free, Marvelous Quinoa Nut Loaf. A generous slice is in the freezer to see how well it does reheated.

Next up was the lovely looking Scarborough Fair Burger from Joni Marie Newman’s cookbook, The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet. We’d been meaning to try making it for ages, but now we’re extra motivated since the recipe is already gluten-free.

When I got all the ingredients together I felt the mix was a little wet and added an extra 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast to help bind it and also because I’d forgot to make the TVP with broth!

After baking for the full time the burgers still hadn’t formed up fully. So I set our oven on convection and cooked them an additional 5 minutes, which helped a lot. They came out looking very tasty.

We served them on Happy Campers Gluten-Free Wild Buns and they dressed up beautifully!

Next week there will be another Burger Experiment to report on! Please post your suggestions for great gluten-free burgers and cutlets in the comments.