keto bread, veggie burgers

Another culinary adventure! This weekend, I worked with two new recipes: (1) a new recipe for veggie burgers, and (2) a new bread recipe. I'll save you the suspense: the bread recipe may be a winner. It's got one major flaw, but it succeeded where previous keto-bread recipes (like that of the "Keto King") have failed.

The bread's ingredients were water, yeast, maple syrup (to help activate the yeast), flaxseed meal, vital-wheat gluten, oat fiber, and salt. If you're already saying to yourself that that's a recipe for bitter-tasting bread, well, you're right. The bread ended up with a somewhat bitter aftertaste, but I think the cure, in subsequent batches, will be a nice dose of erythritol to sweeten things up.

The original recipe calls for making each bread roll into a tapered baguette shape, but I wanted hamburger buns, so I did this:

Next time, for larger buns, I should make only six, not eight.

The recipe also said I'd see such a huge rise that the proofed bread would be three times bigger than the raw dough after 90 minutes. Not so!

Despite the disappointing rise, the bread turned out okay-looking:

Here's one roll cut open, with mayo and cracked black pepper on it:

Here, below, is the veggie-burger mixture after refrigeration. I've also added raw coconut oil, a.k.a. coconut purée, which is solid at room temperature. Coconut oil is a keto favorite, along with olive oil, avocado oil, and clarified butter (which has a far higher smoke point than regular butter). The idea is to mix the solidified coconut in with the "meat" to create random speckles of fat that simulate what might be found in a real beef burger.

I've loosely packed the "meat" and fat to make small, thin patties:

In the frying pan:

Perhaps a bit more burned than is ideal, but not overly so (one patty is broken):

Below: a look at the keto bread's crumb. The bread came out way lighter than anticipated; as I said before, its one flaw is how bitter-tasting it is. I think erythritol, as a keto sweetener, might solve that problem. I can only hope that the addition of a sugar alcohol won't affect baking:

The two keto burgers get mayo; the vegan burger gets ketchup and mustard:

Lettuce on the bottom, patties next, then seasoned maters on top:

Hamburguesas:

Keto burgers in focus:

Final shot: the lone vegan burger:

My tentative conclusion is that methyl cellulose, which I'd been very interested in, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Either that, or I'm not using it correctly. End result: the burger patties were tolerable but mushy; there was no resistance or real chew to them. It was more like a veggie meat loaf than like the Burger King Plant Whopper. I almost felt I could have done without the methyl cellulose completely. Still, my veggie burgers were far better than the nasty cat food that was the Beyond Burger, even if my burgers looked, in their raw state, a lot like Beyond. Meanwhile, I consider the bread to be a 90% success. If I can figure out how to deal with the bread's bitter aftertaste, I may have a winner—something I can use to make regular-beef keto burgers with (although this means I need to stay well-supplied with esoteric ingredients like flaxseed, vital-wheat gluten, and oat fiber).

Next step: try to make the bread again, but with something to take off the bitter edge—maybe via a sweetener like erythritol, maybe by adding "distractors" like poppy and sesame seeds to the dough (and perhaps a tad more salt), maybe both. Eating the bread with butter also definitely helps. I wonder what might happen if I added butter to the dough; my understanding is that butter actually impairs gluten's ability to form the necessary gluten chains that give good bread its soft, bubbly crumb. I don't want to end up with a dense, collapsed mess that looks as if it's trying to become a deflated pancake. It was really just this one problem, the bitter taste: the crust was at least passable if not excellent; the crumb was light and airy, and unlike the disaster that was the Keto King's recipe, this bread, after it cooled down, acted like normal bread when I bit into it: it didn't become impossibly rubbery and chewy. As for the veggie-burger patties: I think I'm going to try again using only TVP, no lentils. If that doesn't work, I'll start looking at nice, fibrous mushrooms.