Fava, spinach, potato burgers

June 21, 2021 at 10:17 pm (Beans, Beans and greens, B_(3 stars, like), Dark leafy greens, Ottolenghi)

We wanted to try a new burger recipe and chose this recipe for fava bean burgers out of the cookbook Plenty by Ottolenghi. It was a lot of work! It has a lot of steps and gets a lot of dishes dirty:

1. Dry-fry some spices then grind them. (Skillet 1, spice grinder)
2. Wilt the spinach, let it cool, squeeze out the water and chop it. (Skillet 1, sieve 1)
3. Blanch the fava beans in boiling water then peel off all the skins. (Pot 1, sieve 1)
4. Boil the potatoes. (Pot 1, sieve 1)
5. Chop garlic, a green chile, and cilantro.
6. Mash up the fava beans, potatoes, ground seeds, green chile, garlic, turmeric and oil, then add in the wilted spinach, chopped cilantro, breadcrumbs, and a egg. (bowl 1, maybe can be done in pot 1?)
7. Chill the mixture for at least 30 minutes.
8. Make patties and fry them in a skillet for 5 minutes on each side. (Skillet 2, or clean skillet 1)

So you can see that this recipe uses at a minimum a skillet, a pot, a sieve, a spice grinder, and a bowl, and probably a bit more than that. Oh man, if I had read the whole thing through carefully I don’t think I would have made this recipe! I thought I was skip peeling the fava beans, but I had some frozen ones from our local Turkish store and they just wouldn’t mash with the skins on, and they were bitter, so I ended up peeling most of them. Derek and I thought the burgers tasted reasonably good, but Alma wouldn’t touch them, even with ketchup.

In the end, I don’t think the recipe is worth all the trouble or oil. (The recipe calls for 3 Tbs. olive oil for the batter and another 1/2 cup sunflower oil to fry the burgers in.)