Fruity Quorn Burgers

61/70


Hello all, hope your January is not proving too bleak and depressing!


I attempted to cheer up our weekend by making Fruity Quorn Burgers which is the second of two recipes within the book for home made burgers. The other recipe (Cheese & Onion Burgers which you can find on this blog here) was a resounding success and I was therefore hoping for a repeat with this one - I was a little less confident about it being so though, based on two things - the amount of ingredients (substantial) and the amount of sweet things on it.


Don't get me wrong, I do like some sweet and sour combinations (pineapple on pizza for instance) but I could see that the balance in these burgers was towards the sweet, not the savoury, elements. A huge amount of grated carrot, apricots and sultanas are the driving force of the sweetness. The quorn mince is minimal in context.


Anyway, it is actually a very straightforward recipe, once the carrots are cooked and mashed literally everything is mixed together in one bowl. Some very pretty colours as you can see here:

In the bowl is the quorn mince (right at the bottom), the mashed carrots, spring onions, breadcrumbs, chopped rosemary and parsley,  chopped apricots and sultanas, chilli flakes, seasoning, orange zest and fresh chopped mint. The final thing added next was a beaten egg although to be honest you do not really need this to bind the mixture as the moisture from the mashed carrots is enough to hold it together easily.


I used a cookie cutter to help me shape the burgers, because the mixture is very wet it takes a lot of packing to hold it together tightly and I therefore transferred each burger to the hot frying pan in the cutter with a fish slice underneath to ensure they made it to the pan without incident!

I cooked four at a time in the pan, the recipe states it makes 10-12 burgers but these would be tiny, I made 8 and these were a standard size, comparable to a normal quorn burger. This is them in the pan after an initial 6 minutes and a very careful turning over!

You can see that despite my best efforts one of my burgers has started to dissemble a bit in the pan. This is one of the most annoying things about this recipe - it is a lot of faff!


Anyway, once cooked I served them in the traditional way and I apologise for the less than glam presentation here, I had no salad to hand and this looks rather dull!

I calculated propoints for this recipe as a whole and then deduced that a 'portion' would be a quarter as it is intended to serve 4 - from the burgers I made this meant a portion would be two burgers. Amazingly a portion is only 4 propoints (I note no propoints are up on the Quorn website yet but this is my calculation). As most of the ingredients are zero points it worked out like this per portion: quorn mince (1), breadcrumbs (1), apricots and sultanas (1) and oil for frying (1). 


This is amazingly low for a burger but disappointingly for me it did not really taste like a burger or give the same effect. I much prefer the cheese and onion burgers to these ones - both for the simplicity of the recipe and the taste/effect. These are VERY fruity so if you like your sweet/savoury combinations maybe this is one for you - of course the low propoints are handy, even with a roll it makes these acceptable as a main meal. In fact I did not fancy my second burger after I had eaten the first, these were just too sweet for me.


On balance this is not one of my favourite recipes, a lot of prep and faff to make burgers I did not overly enjoy. Notably though the burgers which were chilled in the fridge overnight were easier to cook and held together better the next day so maybe that is the trick as regards keeping them together. Personally I do not think I will be making these again!


We would give these a 4/10.