How to make the perfect bean burgers

Can bean burgers ever compete with their meaty equivalents, and if not, which vegetarian option would you rather have at a barbecue?

Felicity Cloake's perfect beanburger. Photographs: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian

Bean burgers are one of those meat-free dishes, like Glamorgan sausages or nut roasts, which suffer unfairly from comparison with what us omnivores like to term "the real thing".

While I'm not wild about the idea of mock meat, these are all foods that don't need to piggyback on any better-known meaty relatives to be worth cooking: they're all great recipes which just happen to be vegetarian, and I'd quite happily eat them instead of the so-called "real thing" any day. (Though not every day. Variety is the spice of life, after all.)

Many vegetables work brilliantly on the barbecue, but summer is Read More>>