Miso Paste Is The Key To Preventing Veggie Burger Wreckage

Anyone who's ever tried to switch to a vegetarian diet, eat a little less red meat, or just try out something new knows that the bane of a good veggie burger is texture. We're not just talking about getting the overall texture right either. While it helps to make a veggie burger that feels like a real burger when you bite into it, texture's larger role is keeping your burger from falling apart.

As Detoxinista points out, there are a lot of reasons why your veggie burgers might not make it onto the bun in one piece. Making the patties too big, leaving the ingredients too big, or leaving out a binding agent can all spell disaster for a veggie burger. One Green Planet adds that another reason might have to do with your patties' moisture levels. Vegetables hold a lot of moisture that gets released when they're cooked. Mash a bunch of them together, and you've got a lot of steam, moisture, and undesirable water getting in between you and a delicious, crispy burger.

One easy way to solve this (and add a ton of flavor at the same time) is to use miso paste as your binding agent.

If you've never used miso paste in your cooking before, you've been missing out. Revolution Fermentation says that miso paste is a simple fermented food that adds a delicious flavor to a wide variety of recipes. It's made by fermenting legumes (most often soybeans) with a special mold called koji and salt. The resulting paste is a concentrated punch of umami (savory) and salty flavors. MasterClass adds that miso is best known as the base of miso soup, but it can be used in plenty of other ways as well.

If you've never had miso before, there's no need to worry about finding uses for a whole tub of it either. Miso lasts a long time when refrigerated thanks to its high salt content and plentiful population of beneficial probiotic bacteria. Cook Smarts points out that miso can also be used in a variety of ways. Whether you buy it with the purpose of adding savory, salty notes to your stews, coating your vegetables in miso butter, blending with a breadcrumb crust on meats, or enhancing a marinade, you're guaranteed to discover some use for it.

Virtually anytime you need to add warming savory notes to a dish or recipe, you can use miso. Not only will it add that flavor to your favorite veggie burger recipe, but it will help it stick together too.

Simply Recipes points out a variety of ways to make burgers vegan-friendly. Understandably, the website also makes sure to provide advice on how to make sure your veggie burgers stick together after they've been cooked. In addition to the aforementioned miso, Simply Recipes suggests using things like silken tofu, flax seeds, and starchy aquafaba.

In "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian," Mark Bittman recommends adding miso paste to your veggie burger as a binding agent (via Kitchn). Not only will the sticky paste help all of your patties survive the cooking process, but miso's umami-heavy richness will add to the flavor of the patties as well, per Food52. Kitchn claims that even when veggies and beans have been ground down into a coarse paste, mixing in miso will keep them from falling apart. Once you've ground your main ingredients in a food processor, simply add the miso paste, and give it a quick mix until it starts to come together. From there you should have no trouble forming them into patties ready for the grill.

Be forewarned that miso is known to be fairly salty by most people's tastes, meaning this might be a good time to skip the salt when assembling your patties. Instead, just choose your favorite veggies to put into a burger, bind them together with miso, and become the star of the next cookout.