In all the work that our engineering, product and other teams have done on Recipes to prepare for launch, one requirement was crucial: Now that readers can more easily find our much older recipes, we knew we needed a way to be quickly notified whenever a reader left a comment. Adding that function has helped us keep up more systematically with your thoughts, opinions and experiences with our recipes. And of all the types of comments we get, the most meaningful are those from readers who have actually cooked it. In addition to answering any substantive questions you ask — unless another smart reader beats us to it, which happens often — we’re also happy to help troubleshoot.
We take our recipe testing seriously, so it is rare that critical comments send us back into the kitchen. But sometimes a problem you experienced will cause us to take a fresh look, and when that happens, we appreciate the chance to set things right — and to increase the odds of success for other readers.
When I first wrote about Brooks Headley’s Superiority Burgers recipe five years ago, I knew veggie burgers could be a little finicky. After all, I’ve spent countless hours developing my own techniques — including staying away from food processors in favor of hand-mashing, and baking them first to help them set before (or instead of) frying. Veggie burger patties can often fail to hold together properly when you pan-fry them, but I thought that through some small adaptations in ingredient amounts and techniques, I had made Headley’s work. They were a little crumbly, but super tasty. There’s a reason they’re the title offering at his New York restaurant.
Not every reader had the same experience, unfortunately. When one wrote a comment describing a disappointing experience (“The issue I had was that they didn’t hold together”), we tried them again in our Food Lab and realized they could use more finessing. In subsequent tests, I ended up decreasing the quinoa by about a third and doubling the potato starch, resulting in sturdier (but no less delicious) patties. I tried pan-frying half the batch and baking the other half, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the fried patties held together nicely, even better than the baked ones, and I (again) loved the crispy texture that resulted.
I made one final tweak: a suggestion to only barely toast the hamburger buns, if at all. That’s because when the bun is heavily toasted, it can compress a veggie patty too much when you take a bite, causing it to squish out. If that happened to a reader, we’d surely hear about it — and would be glad we did.