Vegan Bacon Cheeseburger

Last week I was browsing one of my favourite quirky-lifestyle blogs, Offbeat Home & Life, and was stoked to see this guest post by The Sweetest Vegan about a vegan bacon cheeseburger. I pinned it and facebook shared it, partially to let the Offbeat blog admin people know the post was a good one, but also because - OMG vegan bacon cheeseburger! Sure, I make vegan burgers all the time. I make vegan cheese semi-regularly. And vegan bacon recipes are plentiful. But this recipe was straightforward, and it put all the components together. 

Filed away in the back of my mind, the recipe made its way back to the front on Monday night when I saw this post by Tara. On Tuesday, I decided I just had to make it. I am still on holidays, you see, while Andy is back at work, so I have been getting lost in complicated recipes this week. 

Not that this recipe is complicated, but it was a mammoth effort in multi-tasking (it would be less so if you used canned beans). First I put black beans and white beans on to soak while I went out to grab the few ingredients I didn't have on hand - sweet potato (though I could have probably dug some from the garden), coconut flakes, and bread rolls.

When I got home, I put the first batch of beans into the pressure cooker. Then I peeled my sweet potato (and cooked the peels in the oven for a crunchy snack for Tika), and put it in boiling water to cook.

 I mixed up the marinade for the coconut bacon and put it all in a bowl to soak up the flavours.

When the black beans were done, I put the white ones on to cook while I made the burger patties: mashing together the beans and sweet potato, but leaving out garlic powder (we can't keep it in our humidity), sriracha (we don't have), and onion (I don't love). I had about 1 cup of beans leftover, and 1/4 cup of sweet potato, so I threw them in too, and then folded through the oats. This I set aside while I got on with other things.

I put the coconut bacon in the oven to crisp up. I had it in there for nearly half an hour and it didn't crisp, so I  took it out in case the crisping happened as it cooled. It never did, but oh well.

While the coconut bacon was bakin', I put the cheese together. This is a great recipe, because it doesn't require cooking. I cut the recipe in half, because I only had half a cup of nutritional yeast, and we still have about 4 times as much cheese as we needed. 

I formed my patties and put them in the fridge to chill out, and then it was time for me to chill out myself. Less than an hour and a half in the kitchen and I had cooked two batches of beans from scratch and turned them into the vital components for a vegan bacon cheeseburger. 

The only thing left to do was cook the patties, but instead of putting them in the oven I did them on the BBQ, because we have one, and it's summer.

On the Weber with some okra and a tiny eggplant. 

And because, check out those grill marks. 

Then I put it all together. A bit of mayo on the top of the bun, and some cheese on the bottom. Then lettuce, a burger, some more cheese, some bacon. Andy added tomato sauce, but I didn't think it needed it.

This is a great recipe - aside from a few exceptions, the ingredients are easy to find in most pantries. Aside from some soy sauce, all three components are soy free - no tofu or soy milk here. They also lend themselves to being gluten free, if you used gluten free oats, or subbed in something like quinoa flakes. For vegan junk food, there isn't really too much that is actually unhealthy about any of the meal. And, holy pants it was yummy.