Nacho mince is such a versatile dish. You can obviously use it with nachos and their brother, haystacks, but it can also serve on sloppy joes, as pasta or spaghetti sauce, pie filling, a dish on it’s own, and no doubt many other things. You can make it based entirely on beans, but I like to add some vegan mince into it for a bit more textural variety, and it can also add some more flavour too.
The challenge though is that most vegan mince mixtures are not gluten-free. Many rely heavily on textured wheat protein which, of course, doesn’t go down well with those that have coeliac disease.
So, after much frustration reviewing the ingredients on all the myriad vegan mince products, we realised: patties are essentially made from similar mince mixtures, and there are a lot more choices that are gluten-free and vegan in patties.
So, we tried a bunch of different options for taste, texture and, of course, crumbleability (being patties they need to break up easily). We finally settled on our favourite: UnrealCo’s Italian Beefy Burger.
These burger patties are currently only available from Woolworths in a two pack. I use one pack (two patties) in this recipe.
Ingredients
- 1x brown onion (diced)
- 2x tbsp oil (we usually use rice bran oil but you can use others)
- 2x tbsp minced garlic (or 2 cloves)
- 1x pack (260g) UnrealCo Italian Beefy Burgers
- 2x cans of mixed beans or equivalent dried beans rehydrated (approx. 800g of rehydrated beans) – If we aren’t rehydrating our own we usually use Woolworths Macro Organic Mexican Style 3 Bean Mix or the Macro Organic 4 Bean Mix.
- 1x can of diced tomato (approx. 400g)
- 2 tbsp tamari
- 1 tbsp lemon or lime juice
Optional ingredients
- 1x bottle passata (approx. 700g)
- BBQ sauce
Method
- Put a large frypan on the stove on high heat and add the oil, diced onion and garlic. Fry until the onion is soft and translucent.
- Break up the burger patties and add them to the fry pan and cook until the pieces start to darken.
- Add the mixed beans, diced tomato, tamari and lemon juice.
- Mix together and fry until everything is heated through.
- Depending on your taste, add more lemon/lime juice and tamari until you are happy with the flavour. BBQ sauce is also a great addition to tweak the flavour.
Optional steps
- To make the mince go further and give it more of a tomato base for use with other dishes (eg pasta sauce), add 1x bottle of passata to the fry pan.
- Add BBQ sauce, tamari and lemon/lime juice to balance the tomato flavour coming from the passata.
- Keep on the heat until everything is heated through.
Notes
That’s it. Very straight-forward and easy to make.
If you don’t need your nacho mince to be gluten-free, you could use soy sauce instead of tamari, and you could use any other vegan mince.
However, I will say, the flavour that comes through with the UnrealCo Italian Beefy patties is (in my opinion) better than most other mince options anyway. You would need to add a blend of Italian herbs and spices to other mince options to get a similar flavour.
