Vegan Burger Buns

Vegan burger buns are easy to make and have way fewer ingredients than the buns you buy in the store. They have that perfect fluffy consistency that a burger bun should have, but they’re cuter because they’re naturally colored with beetroot powder and blue spirulina. You can omit the superfood powders from the recipe to make traditional burger buns. Or substitute colorful gel food coloring for brighter, but slightly less healthy buns.

This recipe makes 4-5 burger buns, depending how big you like them.

Table of Contents

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• Ingredients
• Colored Burger Buns
• Ingredient Substitutions
• Contact Me with Questions
• Similar Recipes

The idea for this recipe was born from my trip to Italy, where I ate at Flower Burger (multiple times). Flower Burger is an all-vegan burger place where all the buns are different colors and they’re all colored naturally with superfoods! Since my trip to Italy, I got a burger from freedom cakes in Madrid, Spain, and it came on a marble swirled bun! I bet you could use this recipe and a technique similar to how I made my marble cookies to make marble colored buns.

I recipe tested these buns 4 or 5 times before I got them perfect. I’m really happy with these, but just to warn you, they are best eaten fresh. I tried storing them in the fridge, and they lost that perfect consistency, and I tried freezing them and defrosting them for future use, and the consistency wasn’t as good then either.

You can make these with vegan food coloring if you don’t have superfoods by just omitting the superfood powders and adding the food coloring to the liquid. These buns are great for sloppy joe’s or for veggie burgers, but my kiddos also just eat them plain, because they’re that good.

Colored Burger Buns Ingredients

• ¾ cup (180g) warm water (100º F)
• 1 tablespoon (16g) organic, vegan, or raw sugar
• 1 teaspoon (5g) active yeast
• 1 ¾ cup (225g) all-purpose flour
• 18 grams sunflower oil (4 teaspoons)
• 1 teaspoon (6g) salt
• superfood powders (2 teaspoons beetroot powder or 1 teaspoon beetroot + 1 teaspoon pink pitaya or 1 teaspoon blue spirulina)

Colored Burger Buns Directions

Prep time: 20 min; rise time: 90 min; bake time: 13 min

Measure ¾ cup warm water in a glass measuring cup. If your kettle doesn’t have a temperature reading and you don’t have a thermometer, just heat it like you’re heating a baby bottle. Test the water on the inside of your wrist.

Whisk 1 tablespoon (16g) sugar and 1 teaspoon (5g) yeast into the warm water. Let sit for around 5 minutes. Keep whisking periodically until the yeast has dissolved. This should take the same amount of time as measuring out your other ingredients.

Measure or weigh 1 ¾ cup (225g) flour into a mixing bowl.

Stir in a teaspoon of salt and your superfood powder. For my pink buns, I added 1 teaspoon (4-5g) of beetroot powder and 1 teaspoon of pink pitaya powder (I use a mortar and pestle to break up the lumps that inherently start to spawn in your bag of pink pitaya powder once you’ve opened it - then I sift that). I added 1 teaspoon of blue spirulina for my blue buns.

Attach a dough hook to a stand mixer and combine your liquid and dry ingredients together in the mixing bowl.

Mix on medium speed for 5 minutes, adding the oil while it mixes.

Line a lasagna pan with parchment paper on the bottom.

Dip your hands into flour before this next step, to keep the dough from sticking to your hands when you touch it.

Divide the dough into 4 or 5 equal pieces, depending on how large you want the buns. You can use a kitchen scale for this step to make sure they’re all the same size, but I usually just eyeball it, and they all still bake evenly, even if they’re not all the same size.

Stretch the dough over itself and tuck the edges under on the bottoms to form each round burger bun in a way that makes them smooth on top. They may not look perfect, but don’t worry. Most imperfections disappear after they rise.

Set the buns into the lasagna pan lined with parchment paper leaving around an inch of space in between each one so they don’t stick together when they rise.

Cover the buns with cling wrap , pulling it taught across the lasagna pan so it doesn’t touch the tops of the buns as they rise. If the cling wrap touches the tops of the buns, they’ll get brown spots on them when you bake them.

Set aside for an hour and a half to rise.

Heat oven to 400º once the buns are done rising.

Remove the cling wrap.

Bake for 12-13 minutes on the bottom rack of the oven. If you bake them on the top rack, the tops of the buns will turn brown.

Cool for a few minutes before slicing.

Leave at room temperature for up to 3 days before using, but they taste best the first day.

Ingredient Substitutions

• Sugar: You can use organic, vegan, or raw sugar. Just be careful of conventional granulated sugar, because it’s sometimes not vegan.
• Yeast: If you have instant yeast at home (instead of active yeast) you can skip all the steps where we activate the yeast. This means you don’t have to warm up the ¾ cup (175g) water or mix the yeast with the water and let it sit. If you’re using instant yeast, just combine all ingredients together in one step.
• Flour: I used all-purpose flour for my buns, but I have used bread flour in the past too. If you do choose to use bread flour instead of all-purpose flour, subtract 1-2 teaspoons of flour.
• Nondairy Milk: Adding plant milk and sesame seeds is optional, but if you do, you can use any plant-based milk you prefer. I used pistachio milk because that’s what I had in my fridge. If you don’t avoid oil, you can use an oil sprayer for this step to save time. You could also use melted vegan butter.
• Oil: If you avoid oil, substitute mashed avocado or sunflower seed butter in place of the sunflower oil.
• Superfood Powders: The beetroot powder, pink pitaya powder and blue spirulian powder make the dough pink and blue so that you can have colored burger buns. If you’re just trying to make normal burgers and you don’t care about the color of the buns, you can omit these ingredients.

Comments or Questions?

If you make this recipe, I would love it if you’d snap a pic, post to instagram, and tag me @vegandollhouse. It seriously makes my day/week/month!

Please message me (instagram or email) if you have any questions or feedback about the recipe.

Similar Recipes

If you like this recipe, you might also like my mini naturally colored burger buns. They’re a bite-sized version of vegan burger buns, but they’re oil-free and they’re black with black sesame seeds.

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