Black bean burger patties, egg + psyllium version

The results of my little experiment described in the previous post into the properties of psyllium mucilage didn't inspire confidence. At no time was a firm gel produced, only an elastic but very soft and easily deformed mass. That didn't seem to promise much use for psyllium in making a vegetarian burger patty that would hold together better than in the first two attempts (here and here). But my search for recipes online turned up this interesting vegan burger receipt (off the FatFree Vegan Kitchen blog), using lentils rather than beans and--crucially--a teaspoonful of chia seeds soaked in water and then added to the mixture.

The outer parts of the chia seed, as with psyllium and many other seeds, contains a polysaccharide that swells many times its volume in water to form a gel-like, mucilaginous dispersion. If chia seed mucilage worked in the recipe cited above, it seemed possible that psyllium mucilage would aid my recipe. Therefore I mixed up another half-sized batch of the black bean patty mixture according to its original  egg-containing recipe (1 cup black beans, ¼ sweated onion, and so forth) but with one addition: ½ tsp of psyllium powder. The resulting mixture was rather difficult to handle for it was very sticky and hard to work by hand. Nevertheless with some trouble I formed three patties from it and, after resting them in the refrigerator for ten or twenty minutes, I fried two of them up as before.

The results were quite pleasing. The burger held together well and there was almost no squeezing-out from between the bun during eating. Neither did the psyllium seem to contribute any "off" taste--or, at least, all the other seasonings succeeded in covering it up.

The next logical experiment is to attempt to use psyllium alone and exclude the egg for a truly vegan recipe. One change at a time...we must keep this as scientific as is possible for home cooking.