The Barbecue Tool That Makes Grilling Veggie Burgers So Much Easier

We're pretty spoiled these days for good vegetarian grilling options, with patties of all kinds gracing our grocery store shelves. Arguably, though, none of them have a leg up on homemade veggie burgers. Whatever your favorite recipe entails, be it a simple black bean patty or one loaded with juicy mushrooms and colorful summer veggies, it's nice to be able to make it exactly the way you like, using fresh ingredients and skipping out on any preservatives or other not-so-desirable additives.

There is one little catch, however. More so than with a beef burger, getting veggie patties to bind together securely can be tough. Ingredients of very different textures tend not to hold together quite so easily, so to keep homemade veggie burgers from falling apart on the grill, they typically need pretty delicate handling. There's one grilling tool, though, that can take the frustration and fuss out of cooking veggie burgers: a veggie grilling basket.

These metal baskets are made to hold veggies or other small food items so that they can cook evenly without falling through the grates. Because the holes in these baskets are much smaller than a standard grill's grates, they're a perfect, secure vessel for cooking veggie patties — or anything else that might need a little help in the structural integrity department.

There are some foods that lend more easily than others to grilling. Big ears of corn, for instance, are a classic grill choice because they're easy to place and rotate without much risk of rolling off the grates. It's not uncommon to use aluminum foil to hold loose items, but a makeshift foil dish can be annoying to maneuver, and besides, it doesn't allow the food the same access to heat and smoke that something with grates would. A vegetable grilling basket solves both of these problems, making it just as easy to cook smaller veggies or patties that are liable to fall apart as it is to cook big steaks of cauliflower or meat.

Veggie grilling baskets come at a pretty wide range of price points, but you can find them for as low as around $20, sometimes less. A larger one that can hold several patties at once might be a smart buy if you're someone who likes to host cookouts, but a smaller one will probably get the job done if you tend to just make one at a time for the vegetarian in your life — just make sure there's ample room to fit a spatula when it comes time to flip the burgers. Baskets made of a fine mesh are a good bet since they'll provide the stability that a softer patty might need while still allowing for airflow as it cooks.

Some veggie burger recipes will call for a binding agent, such as an egg or flaxseed, to hold everything together in a sturdy patty. If your favorite recipe doesn't include a binding agent, or even if it does, but the patties still end up fairly loose, thoughtful handling can save the day.

Another way to help your burger mix adhere to solid patties is to refrigerate them for a bit before throwing them on the grill. Allowing them to chill for half an hour or so will help the ingredients bind together, making each patty more solid and easier to work with. This doesn't just apply to veggie burgers — any sort of burger patty, from something unconventional like salmon burgers to classic beef burgers, can benefit from a trip to the fridge if they need a little help stiffening up.

The great thing about using a grilling basket is that, in the worst-case scenario, the patties might crumble a little, but you won't lose them to the fiery pit of charcoal. And easy, no-brainer grilling means you can spend less time fussing over the grill and more time tucking into juicy burgers with the fam.