Vegan Beanballs

Beanballs
(ever so slightly modified from the Veganomicon – buy it!)
20 oz. (or approx. 3 cups) of cooked kidney beans
1/4 cup vital wheat gluten
1/2 – 1 cup bread crumbs *
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tbsp. steak sauce or tomato paste
2 cloves garlic, pressed or grated
1/4 tsp. lemon zest
dried oregano, basil thyme, and black pepper to taste

extra bonus: throw in some cayenne and the slightest touch of nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375

Chuck all of your kidney beans into a medium sized bowl and mash them suckers. You want them to be fairly well smooshed, but not to the point that they’re unidentifiable as kidney beans. I basically threw in the soy sauce, tomato paste and olive oil (do 1 tbsp. if you want less fat) and stirred it all in with the moosh. Next I added the dried herbs, galic, lemon zest, and the vital wheat gluten. The last step was to stir in the breadcrumbs.

After you have everything stirred up and holding together (without being totally solid, mind you) roll up your beanballs. They should be on the smaller side, rather than epic balls. Rumor has it the texture is going to be better this way, fo’ sure. You can pan fry these, but why bother? I just got a baking sheet, sprayed it with canola oil, and placed the beanballs on there. I cooked them for maybe 15 minutes on one side, gave them a light spray of canola and flipped them. I’m not 100% on the time right now (don’t have the book with me) so keep an eye on them. I let mine get a little browned, because it was fun that way.

You can serve it with tomato sauce on a big ol’ mound of spaghetti, or you could make them into sammiches. We had ours with spaghetti, but neither of us were feeling tomato sauce. They’re plenty tasty on their own. I bet it’d be fun to add some vegan parmesan cheese sprinkles into the mix when stirring these suckers up.

* I’m pretty sure the recipe called for 1/2 cup, but I wound up putting more in to make them reasonably held together. My kidney beans were in a 15 oz. can, so I opened two and measured them by the cupful, based on the book saying it was about 3 cups, without thinking much about that fact that it’d be more like 24oz. I reckon the approx. & the fact that kidney beans aren’t liquid accounts for the other 4 oz. but… yeah. Anyway, I stirred in more breadcrumbs until it got to a consistency I found reasonable.