If you’ve never encountered a Juicy Lucy, you have no idea what you’re missing – it’s a burger that has cheese on the inside, so that when you cook it the cheese melts within the patty.  It’s a delicious burger variation, but so far we’ve never seen a vegetarian version anywhere.  So, being the creative people that we are, we decided to make our own.

Here’s what we used:

• An onion
• A shallot
• 5 portobello mushrooms
• A package of Morningstar Farms Garden Veggie Burgers
• Butter
• 3 Massel 7’s Beef Style Bouillon Cubes
• Canned beets
• 2 eggs
• Breadcrumbs
• An 8 ounce package of cheddar cheese
• Sesame seed buns

The first thing we did was dice up our onion and shallot and sauté them in olive oil until they turned translucent.

Then we sliced up our portobello mushrooms and added those to the pan, along with 2 tablespoons of butter.

Once the mushrooms began to brown, we crumbled up 3 Massel 7’s Beef Style bouillon cubes and sprinkled them over all the vegetables.

We also cut our entire package of Morningstar Farms burgers into cubes …

… and also diced up 3 beets, and added these to the pan with the mushrooms.

When the mushrooms were fully browned, we poured everything into a bowl and added 2 eggs …

… along with about 1/3 cup of breadcrumbs.

Then we stirred everything together into a weirdly unappetizing mixture (don’t worry, it gets better).

To make this goop into a burger-like substance, we used a food grinder attachment screwed on to our stand mixer.

We poured about half of the mixture into the top of the grinder, turned the mixer on, and pushed everything through with the paddle.

It came through the extruder looking like this:

And this it how it looked when it was all ground up:

To make the burger patties, we brushed some breadcrumbs onto a cutting board and then took a handful of our burger mixture and formed it into a disc.

We cut up our entire block of cheese into slices …

… and placed a few pieces of cheese onto our flattened burger patty.

Then we made a second patty of the same size, placed it on top, and molded it around all the cheese.

To cook our Juicy Lucies, we placed the burger in a cast iron skillet coated with a little vegetable oil and then placed a pot lid on top to create steam and heat the patty enough to melt the cheese inside.

Once it was browned on one side, we flipped the burger over to cook on the other side until the cheese was molten.

And when our burgers were done we served then on grilled buns.

As you can see, these burgers were delicious – nice and gooey and cheesy.  Making the burger mixture ourselves was definitely a process, involving special equipment for our stand mixer, but it allowed us to shape our own burgers and put all that cheese in the middle.  Plus, using this mixture gave our veggie burgers the texture and feel of real burgers.  So while it’s not exactly easy to make these Juicy Lucies, you get an amazing, tasty result that you can’t find anywhere else.