Bind my (veggie) burger, please

For the second time, I tried making "smoky" beetroot and bean based burger patties on the weekend.  (It's the use of smoked paprika that gives them that flavour.)  The recipe I followed this time is here.    

The taste is pretty nice, and it's interesting, because I am pretty sure it's a psychological association of the colour of red with meat which gives the brain the impression that a beet burger is going to be more substantial and filling than some other forms of vegan or vegetarian burger.  

But - as with a previous attempt, using a different but similar recipe, there is a problem with getting home made veggie burgers to stick together in a similar way to meat burgers.

This seems to be a well recognised problem - see this article Tricks for Making Veggie Burgers That Won't Fall Apart, for example.  The trouble is, none of those suggestions sound very convincing to me.

I am sure the problem comes from the hard to avoid fact that frying (or baking) the patty makes the semi cooked vegetables inside release steam/water, which loosens the whole thing.   I doubt egg works, as I have never found it helps much with salmon patties, which can also suffer structural integrity issues. 

It was suggested to me yesterday, in a discussion which went on for far too long in the dog park, that perhaps the answer would be xanthan gum, which I didn't realise you could use in baked products as a thickening agent.

I also wonder whether the common ingredient you see on a lot of the imitation meat products you see lately - pea protein (or pea protein isolate) - itself binds somewhat when cooked.   Now that I look around, one other veggie burger suggest wheat gluten - so maybe just adding flour or cornflower does help?   Not sure how it would affect the taste, though.  (As a side note, I also see coconut oil in a lot of fake meat products now.  I can imagine that could help in taste and mouth feel too, so maybe it's time I start just experimenting with my own additions to a veggie burger recipe.)

I suspect that reader Tim might have an idea about this.  Help me, please.

Update:  because Google knows what I want to know, I found that Youtube suggested a Canadian video which showed a chef making a vegan burger with all the usual suspects (beans, lentils, chickpeas,  mushrooms, spices) but also oats and - I think this may make the difference - tapioca starch.

That sounds plausible to me - it would avoid the possible floury taste of wheat flour or cornflower.

Someone who watched the video guessed at the quantities:

1 cup - Black Beans

1 cup - Chickpeas

1 cup - Lentils 1 cup 

Mushrooms (cooked) 1/2 cup

Rolled Oats 1/4 cup 

Beets (Shredded) 

1/4 cup - Nutritional Yeast

1 tsp - Tapioca Starch

1/4 tsp - Salt 1/4 tsp - Pepper 1/8 tsp - Chili Powder 1 tsp - Parsley 1 tsp - Rosemary  

 

I think there was more tapioca starch than that. 

Sounds worth a try...