Making Tempeh Burgers

You know tempeh – it’s that tasteless white pap that’s sometimes fried with ikan bilis and chili and eaten with rice. I’ve never been fond of tempeh, in spite of the fact that it’s nothing more than fermented soy beans, and supposed to be protein-rich and good for you in the same way that a juicy steak is bad for you.

The first time I thought of tempeh as real food was at a vegetarian restaurant tucked away off Bali’s Jimbaran beach. Although the shops and restaurants were squeezed shoulder to shoulder, this restaurant opened into a spacious and hidden garden. Balinese in particular, have such a persuasive way with plants. There were lush plants and flowing water, the illusion of being in a private hideaway when the busy street with all its traffic was mere meters away.

I ordered a tempeh burger with no high expectations, but it was a revelation. The burger was thick and succulent and had substance, not the soft mush I was half-expecting. It was infused with limau purut (bergamot) and even had a slight kick in it from chili   cunningly blended into the burger together with other mysterious ingredients. This was tempeh? I was hooked.

A quick search on the Internet will find dozens and dozens of tempeh burger recipes of various types.  Broadly speaking from experience and lots of spoiled tempeh, there are two main categories.  The first is to marinate the tempeh block (usually overnight) in a stew of various herbs and spices and then cook the complete tempeh block itself. The second category treats tempeh as a sort of meat substitute and involves grinding or processing or mashing the tempeh with other ingredients and then reconstituting the whole as a burger patty for cooking.

My first attempt at making my own tempeh burgers had two results: a runny tummy for two days, and the tempeh burger disintegrating into atomic parts when it was cooking. I ended up with a sort of tempeh mash that looked thoroughly dispiriting.

The runny tummy part was easily diagnosed and fixed: ie, COOK the tempeh first before blending it with everything else, as frying it later in patty form wasn’t enough to cook the darn thing. Fortunately semi-raw tempeh isn’t poisonous, which is why I am still writing today.

The second part of the disintegrating tempeh was a problem with the binding agent. Usually the recommended binding agent is egg protein. Not only does egg bind patties beautifully together, it also imbues the cooked burger with a lovely brown colour.  However, purist that I am, I was after a VEGAN tempeh burger, which meant no egg. If you want to make a non-meat burger, I figured you should go all the way.

“Vegan”, by the way, is a form of vegetarianism that doesn’t allow any animal products, such as egg or milk. I’m not vegetarian by a long shot, but this was a matter of principle.  

Attempt Number Two, I am not sorry to say, did use egg as a binder purely as a control experiment, when I confirmed that egg tempeh burgers not only looked good and stayed together in the frying pan, they tasted good as well.

Most of the recipes you’ll find off the Internet are written by Westerners, but I wanted to recreate an Asian style tempeh burger using some of the herbs and spices that we have so abundantly in this part of the world. Now, the easiest thing to do would have been to seek the advice of a seasoned cook, or to buy an Indonesian cookbook on tempeh, but would it have involved so much discovery?

Since tempeh itself is quite flavourless and tasteless, this has to be made up for with other ingredients. You can use lots of healthy things as filling to complement tempeh. Besides the obvious such as potato, mushrooms are commonly used, as are nuts. Nuts impart a nutty flavour and texture that compensates for lack of substance of ground tempeh.

In fact, the more I looked into making tempeh burgers, the more I realized that “tempeh burger” is something of a misnomer. There is no formulaic way of putting together a “tempeh burger”, rather, tempeh can be thought of as a protein base from which to build vegetarian burgers.

Equipped with that startling insight, making “tempeh burgers” became a series of culinary experiments. Rather than following strict recipes, experimentation provided any number of ways to combine ingredients towards a healthy and succulent burger. And I could claim any of these as my own concoction!

Vegetables, such as spring onions (or chives, for that matter) added texture and colour, and could also aid the binding process (the way straw is used in holding a mud brick together, for example).  A generic, rather than a specific way, for making a vegetarian burger, with good protein content, could thus be:

To fry some chopped onions with salt until browned, but not crispy. This isn’t strictly necessary, but I happen to really like onions. You can also add chopped garlic, and for a little wickedness, chopped chili padi as well. Paprika would work too, but I prefer cili padi, because it’s local and fresh and has that little zing that makes your hair curl if you add the right amount.

Add the browned onions to a mixing bowl to which is added coarsely ground – and precooked, please -  tempeh. Tempeh can be easily cooked by steaming, or microwaving beforehand. For that Asian flavour, I blend limau purut leaves, or chopped lemongrass, with the tempeh.  

Coarsely ground nuts, such as walnuts or cashews add flavour and texture, and the discovery of nuggets of nuttiness in the final product when you chew.  Seasoning can be a little imaginative, but a little dollop of honey, a dash of soy sauce, a pinch of salt, and some aromatic spices such as ground cinnamon and ground cumin impart a lovely nostril-tickling flavour and plenty of taste.

Fresh spring onion or chives, either coarsely or finely-chopped, further fine-tune the texture, according to your personal preference.  Cornflour mixed with a little water not only adds the liquid needed to mix the mush; it also acts as the essential binder.    

The final step is to form small flat patties for frying in a little oil in a shallow pan. Done right, the burger will brown nicely and will hold up when you flip it.

When the burger is browned and sizzling hot, flip it onto toasted bread. For garnishing, I add fresh, thick slices of tomato and raw onion rings to my burger.  Add a little chili or tomato sauce, a lick of mint leaf or basil as you prefer, and your vegetarian burger is ready for the chow-down.

So okay, for all my experimentation, the final product is still no threat to the tempeh burger from the Balinese vegetarian restaurant on Jimbaran Beach, but on the other hand, I’ve found lots of ways to make vegetarian burgers of varying tastes. The satisfaction that comes from discovery, and making something like that on your own, is priceless. 

Copyright © 2014 Lee Yu Kit