The Meatwave

The availability of plant-based meat has been a real game changer for my Meatwaves. Where once my vegetarian constituency were required to partake in completely different dishes than the omnivores, I often find myself able to now make something almost the same, or very close, in both meat and non-meat options. Doing duel recipes has been my go-to strategy, but these teriyaki veggie burgers represented something wholly new at a cookout this past summer—a vegetarian burger where I served no meat-based alternative.

A large part of why that was is thanks to the use of teriyaki sauce. My objective was to inject so much sweet and savory flavor into the Impossible patties that even a meat eater wouldn't miss the beef all that much. I think starting by making my own teriyaki sauce was key to this success since homemade afforded me the opportunity to pack the sauce with a lot more flavor than teriyaki sauces you pull off grocery shelves. It's common for each chef to customize their teriyaki sauce, also known as yakitori tare, and while that gave me a freedom to do what I wanted, I still kept things pretty traditional and simple with the additions of garlic, scallions, and white pepper to the base sauce comprised of soy sauce, brown sugar, mirin, and sake that's boiled down into a medium-thick syrup.

I was serving these teriyaki burgers at a tiki-inspired event, so I went pretty traditional with the toppings as well by using pineapple and sweet onions. I'll always take an excuse to utilize the grill to the max in my recipes, so I took those pineapple slices to the flames to get some nice grill marks and caramelization, which only enhanced their flavor.

I did the same with the onions, which I had cut into roughly three-quarter inch rounds and skewered so they would hold together on the grill. I cooked these until the exteriors were well charred, at which point the center of the onion slices were crisp-tender and the flavor gained an even more pronounced sweetness.

I've been cooking with plant-based meat for a few years now, but it still always surprises me how much they feel and cook up like real ground beef. Over direct high heat, it didn't take long for the patties to develop an attractive deep brown hue with strong grill marks that made them look very akin to a beef patty.

Once they were almost done grilling, I brushed on the teriyaki sauce, which due to its thickness and heavy sugar content, set on the patties very quickly. It was actually faster than I was even expecting and when I started to smell burnt sugar, I got nervous that I had overdone them, but the those odors ended up being emitted from sauce that had dripped down onto the coals and not what was now well adhered to the burgers.

To go all in on the tiki-theme, I decided to serve these on King's Hawaiian sweet buns, which ended up being a little smaller than the standard burger bun, resulting in the patty overflowing past the edges a bit. To finish up the burgers before serving, I topped each with a slice of grilled pineapple, some rings of sweet onion, a sprinkling of scallions, and a finishing drizzle of more teriyaki sauce.

If one thing worries me about using plant-based meat, it's that it could be too close to actual meat and turn off some of my vegetarian friends, but luckily that fear was unfounded as these burgers went quick and were well received. As I had set out to do, they had an incredibly deep sweet and savory flavor with a tiki feel that was cemented by the pineapple and onion toppers. I ended up having to cook up another couple because they went so fast and I'm not totally sure, but I suspect some of the meat eaters grabbed them and enjoyed them just as much as a regular burger, making it my first veggie burger option that did not require a meaty companion for everyone to enjoy it.

Published on Thu Feb 16, 2023 by Joshua Bousel

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