If you’re anything like the vegetarians on staff at Freezer Meal Frenzy, then Morningstar Farms veggie burgers are probably a staple of your comfort food diet. We just love these things, and we’ve been eating them quite a bit lately. So when we stumbled over the new Morningstar Farms Cheezeburger veggie burgers at our local grocery store, we knew right away that we had to give these a try.
The gimmick here is a simple one — these veggie burger patties come with chunks of cheese inside. We have to admit, this is a gimmick that has our attention. See, we hail from Minnesota, which proudly claims to be the state where the Juicy Lucy was born. What’s a Juicy Lucy, you ask? Well, it’s a hamburger that has big gob of melty cheese stuffed into the center of the meat. These veggie burgers are a little bit like that, though they’re vegetarian-friendly.
Each patty is considerably larger than the standard Morningstar Farms veggie burger. If you eat a lot of Morningstar Farms products, you’ll probably notice this larger size immediately. According to the package, these are quarter-pound patties.
There are several ways to cook these, and we always opt for the skillet. We should warn you, however, that you’ll want to heat these on a medium or even low setting. They’re so thick that a high heat might scorch the outsides while leaving the center a bit cold. Plus, the places where cheese touches the skillet tend to burn really quickly. Using a lower heat will allow these to cook more evenly.
That cheese isn’t concentrated at the edges, like it would be in our beloved Juicy Lucy. Instead, it’s broken into pieces that are mashed into each patty. It makes its presence quite a bit less pronounced. In fact, the cheese here is pretty similar in execution to the stuff in Morningstar’s Pizza Burgers, which we reviewed a while back.
The texture of the patty is a bit strange. One of our non-vegetarian staffers said it reminded them of the texture of a tuna patty. When you break it apart, there are sticky fibers at the edges. This isn’t a bad thing at all; it’s just sort of unexpected.
The overall flavor is pretty decent. The patty is not beefy at all, but it’s also not grainy, which some veggie patties tend to be. This actually has a pretty muted flavor that gives the small amount of cheese a share of the flavor profile (though that share is definitely not huge). All things considered, this is a really good all-around veggie burger.
Of course, the real fun is dressing this thing up. We added lettuce and tomato to ours, and because we were feeling saucy, we added extra cheese. The extra cheese ended up being a really good choice due to how little the cheese in the patty actually stands out.
We found these burgers in packs of two, which surprised us because prior to this we’d only ever seen Morningstar Farms veggie burgers in packs of four or eight. The package considers one burger to be a serving, and a patty contains 280 calories and 630 mg of sodium. That’s actually quite a bit for a veggie burger, but we suppose that’s just what happens when you make a bigger burger and stuff cheese into it. (For reference, the Grillers Prime contain 150 calories each.)
The Morningstar Farms Cheezeburger patties are larger than your average veggie burger patties and they contain cheese. Of these two qualities, we actually found the former to be a bigger deal than the latter. Sometimes, veggie burger patties get buried underneath a heap of toppings to the point where they just become another topping rather than the centerpoint of the sandwich. Here, they’re large enough that they easily become the star of your burger show.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen veggie burgers, check out our package scan below.
