This easy vegan black bean burger is bursting with flavor: the patties are also gluten free and topped with spicy mayo & sprouts.

This post was created in partnership with Bob’s Red Mill. All opinions are our own.

Life is full of unexpected twist and turns, and if you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know it doesn’t always go as planned. Your friend bags on you for coffee. Your flight is cancelled. Your job is downsized. You don’t get in to your dream school. You were supposed to be married by now. You weren’t supposed to be divorced by now. You’re unexpectedly diagnosed with a disease, or living with un-diagnosed pain. Keep reading for a bit more on unexpected twists and turns, and how this relates to this vegan black bean burger recipe.

Related: Best Vegan Dinner Recipes

Unexpected twists and turns

Our minds may stray to the unexpected negative scenarios first, but there are positives too of course. And sometimes they sneak up on us. You find a person you want to spend your life with. You find joy in a long-lost creative outlet. You give birth to a baby, or adopt a baby. A broken relationship if your life is healed. You come to peace with a past trauma.

Such a crazy roller coaster, this life. Creating recipes and taking photographs of food is the last thing I thought I’d be doing with mine. Collaborating creatively with my husband, starting a podcast — all fairly unexpected. And the food? I never dreamed I would have a passion for healthy eating. The thought that I’d create a vegan black bean burger recipe? Literally, the last thing I’d imagine doing in my life. Yet here we are, and healthy plant based food has become a long-standing passion for me.

How about you: do you have thoughts on unexpected life twists and turns, and where your road has taken you? We’d love to hear – let us know in the comments below.

How to make this vegan black bean burger

This vegan black bean burger was created especially for our friends at Bob’s Red Mill using their gluten-free oats. And it’s one of our favorite vegan recipes to date! The trick to making a vegan black bean burger recipe is finding a binder that avoids the eggs or bread crumbs used in many typical veggie burgers. Here we’ve used sweet potato, which becomes a fantastic glue-like substance, along with oats for some texture.

For flavor, we took some cues from a recent visit to a fantastic Japanese restaurant in Santa Fe. We’ve used soy sauce and mirin to simulate a teriyaki flavor in the burger, and a few sauteed shiitake mushrooms are the perfect topping. Along with some sriracha mayo, it makes a killer combination. Or course if you want to go big on teriyaki, you could brush the entire burger with our Easy Homemade Teriyaki Sauce! Or you could go another direction with homemade BBQ sauce.

If you’re gluten-free, feel free to serve this vegan black bean burger on a gluten-free English muffin. If you’re vegan, use vegan mayo. It turns out seriously flavorful, with the perfect texture: one of our very best bean recipes!

This vegan black bean burger is baked (not grillable — here’s our Grilled Veggie Burger). It takes about 1 hour to prepare. To us, the effort was well worth it. We made them on the weekend when we had a bit more time and they made great leftovers. Feel free to double the recipe and freeze leftovers for quick meals as well. Let us know if you try out this vegan black bean burger — as well as whether you have any life twists and turns to share.

Looking for more vegan recipes?

Outside of this vegan black bean burger, here are some of our favorite vegan recipes:

This vegan black bean burger recipe is…

Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, plant-based, dairy-free, and sugar-free.