Beety Burger payed me a visit! #TastyTuesday

It’s Tasty Tuesday! So it’s time to be creative and create new, delicious foods and recipes! Today I have something very common, yet very unique. I challenged myself and started to think ”out of the box”. I asked myself: ”what is something that people love, yet are pretty tired of? What is something that people know so well, that it needs redesigning?

The burger.

Yes! People love burgers! We all love burgers! We never get bored of them, because they’re simple and easy. Bút as you all might have noticed, the burger needs innovation. Everybody knows this, even the big fast food providers like McDonald’s and Burger King know this. That’s why they have been coming up with amazing new burger recipes, ideas en menus. People want variation in their food! We can love a certain type of food, but we don’t want to eat the same thing over and over again. It gets boring after a while (I think that’s why sushi started to be really famous, really fast not too long ago!).

So I wanted to try something new, but I still wanted to be able to enjoy such a cheesy burger, you know what I mean. So I went to the supermarket and looked around for weird ingredients that I could use in my yet-to-make cheesy burger. Because I only eat halal I always need to look in the vegan/vegetarian section. That’s when my eyes fell on the package top right at the photo: ”Bieten Burger”. It’s Dutch for Beet Burger. First thing I thought was: ”Who came up with this?”. And then I asked myself: ”Could I combine it with cheese?”. Then my thoughts wobbled for a while through my mind. I wanted to stick to the regular vegan burger, I didn’t want to destroy my appetite with an experiment that might turn out a really bad idea. The curiosity and the excitement to try something new were just too strong.

So to make it even crazier I decided to not use regular bread but currant bread. The excitement got the best of me. Of course I wouldn’t use pickles with this, since it would all be to sweet, so I decided to go for regular cucumber and tomatoes. The cottage cheese was added based on a gut feeling. I know a recipe that makes beet bread and it requires that you also add goat cheese which is seriously super delicious. So I wanted to create a little bit of the same effect, but I was afraid that the goat cheese would set the flavor-balance really good off balance, that it would shot immensely to the one side. I wanted it to keep the flavors a little familiar with each other. My intuition thought that cottage cheese would be good to use for that.

Because the burger is made of beet I didn’t see any necessity to use oil or fats for preparing it. I just used my grill plate without fats and warmed them up until the had a delicious crunch. The step I hesitated to do was grilling the bread with some oil or butter. In the end, I decided not to do it. I was afraid that it would have a bad taste to it after grilling it, because of the currant in the bread.

So I added the rest of the ingredients and decided to cut a couple of leaves of my basilica plant and put them on top. Et voila! Here is the art of my work.

So what did I learn for them next time? A couple of tips I want to share with you in case you want to make this burger for yourself:

• Personally, I didn’t like the currant bread as much I was excited about the idea when I was standing in the supermarket. I would recommend using normal brown bread. But this is my opinion, what I don’t like, you might like a lot. So if you’re up for something new, go ahead and use currant bread. It wasn’t awful, I just thought it would be much nicer.
• I regret that I didn’t grill the bread as well with some butter. I recommend you do that, whether you use currant bread or regular burger bread.
• Make sure you put your cheddar cheese immediately on the hot burger. You want it to melt over it and the rest of the ingredients because it going to hold everything together like glue.
• Because I try not to consume many salty foods, I didn’t put salt on the burgers. But I think it might bring more flavor to it if you do. Just a little bit!
• The basilica was amazing on top of the rest. It gave it a catchy unforgettable taste. Add basilica!

I hope you enjoyed this post and I hope I’ve made you curious about this beety burger. It’s also easy to make at home (the burger itself I mean!), so challenge yourself and try something new. I will be doing too soon!

Lots of love,

Arwa