| I’m surprised that I haven’t run across this recipe before. It’s very simple. I has only a few ingredients. It’s nearly foolproof. It’s just the type of recipe that I had been looking for back when I was hosting dinners that included my vegetarian friends. Here’s the breakdown. |
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Step 1: Pearl barley is found on the cereal aisle. It’s cooked by boiling it in lightly salted water for twenty-five to thirty minutes. I used eight cups of water with a teaspoon of salt for one cup of uncooked barley. When done, drain off the water and set aside. |
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Step 2: You’ll need to use just about anybody’s 15oz can of black beans. You could probably use seasoned if you wanted. I chose unseasoned (because I had it on-hand as a pantry staple). Here’s about the only tricky part. The beans need to be drained, washed and dried. And by dried I mean put in a frying pan under low heat and sauteed until the water from washing the beans is gone and they start to leave a residue in the bottom of the skillet. Once they’re dry, remove them from heat and set aside. |
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Step 3: The last bits to add to the mix are one envelope of Lipton’s Onion Soup mix, one half cup of bread crumbs and one egg.. Lipton makes a Beefy Onion and a Mushroom Onion Soup mix as well. I’m sure that you could substitute either if you so desired. |
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Step 4: Combine everything in a bowl and stir it together then move it to the processor. I have an eight cup food processor. This is probably only five cups of ingredients total. But the blades on my processor only process the lower two cups of the processors bowl. So I processed in two batches. |
| Step 5: When I was done processing, I weighed it out. I had 738 grams of mix. I wanted each patty to be the size of a standard burger. So I figured that I could make six or eight patties from that much mix. I took out 120 grams of mix and shaped it into a three inch disk. It was over a half inch thick. That seemed like overkill. When I shaped 90 grams of mix, it came out to about a centimeter thick. That seemed about right. So I made eight 90ish gram burger patties. |
| Step 6: Heat oven to 425°F. Place burger patties on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Bake for fifteen minutes or until the bottom and top of the patty have a light brown cast. Remove them and let cool. In this state you can store them in the refrigerator probably for a couple of weeks. To finish the burgers, heat them in an oiled skillet over medium heat to get an even browning on the top and bottom. |
