Shroomify October!

Let's get swept up in a collective reimagining of meat as mushrooms

Happy October! With summer plants shriveling, temperatures dropping, and more rain falling, this is one of the best times of the year for wild mushroom foraging. There are so many walks and events happening nearby that I wish I could attend. The New York Mycological Society is hosting a public Fungus Festival on October 23rd. I’m also testing and prepping for two sit-down mushroom dinners in November.

To celebrate this moment, I want to try an experiment with all of you. For the month of October, I’ll be taking dishes that I love or crave and swapping in mushrooms as the primary ingredient. I’m going to use the hashtag #shroomify on Instagram and encourage you to join me. If it goes well, I might ask for some of your recipes at the end of the month and print a little cookbook zine, free to those who contribute.

In particular, I’ll mostly be replacing meat/seafood, although you can shroomify anything (I’ll share my shiitake cookie recipe soon). I have a long-held belief that mushrooms can replace the meat in any recipe, so we’ll be putting that to the test. Replacing meat with mushrooms is a good cooking challenge for those of you trying to go off-script in the kitchen but don’t know where to start, and it might help you find new ways to feel satisfied from a meat-free meal.

I’ll share more mushroom cooking tips throughout the month and go in-depth on some of the more widely available varieties. For now, you can take a look at this post from a couple years ago about a few of my favorite ways to prepare mushrooms (sauté, freeze, bake, marinate). I’ve also published a bunch of mushroom recipes in this newsletter:

Slow-roasted portobello fajitas with spicy cashew cream (v)

Dan dan noodles with mushrooms (v)

Fried Potatoes with Mushrooms (v, gf)

Oyster Mushroom Pot Roast (v, gf)

Warming mushroom ginger jiaozi (v)

Pancit with mushrooms and carrots (v, gf)

Squash and bean stew with shiitake bacon and charred scallion sauce (v)

Mushrooms with olives and nori (v, gf)

Chewy rye berry salad with mushrooms, parsley and walnuts (v)

Mushrooms with coconut galangal sauce and pickled mango (v, gf)

Mushroom BLTs (v)

Mushroom gravy (v)

Golubtsi (cabbage rolls) with mushrooms and pine nuts (v)

Crispy Lion Sandwich

Mushroom, Olive, & Black-eyed Pea Pastelitos (v)

Here are a few items from my personal wishlist to get your creative umami juices flowing. Please comment below with more ideas or tell me if there’s something you want me to shroomify!

Hamburger Helper — I grew up eating this extremely American convenience food, based on powdered cheese and cheaply available beef. It should be pretty straightforward to sauté a combination of chopped button mushrooms and crumbled tempeh into a ground-beef concoction, and just add it to a Hamburger Helper mix, or make the seasoning yourself. Generally I’m not a fan of vegan cheese, but in this case Daiya would probably work, since it’s supposed to taste pretty artificial.

IKEA-style Swedish meatballs — Another childhood taste memory, I remember being shocked and excited by the idea of eating meat with (lingonberry) jam. I tried making mushroom meatballs once and they turned out too soft, so make sure you use enough binding agents (eggs, ground flaxseeds, flour, breadcrumbs, potato flakes, arrowroot starch, etc).

Char siu — Buddhist Chinese restaurants tend to make this savory-sweet roast meat dish with seitan (and it’s the best use of seitan I’ve encountered) but I’d be interested in a mushroom version. It’s very chewy and crisp on the outside, so I’d probably go with oyster mushrooms, keeping them whole and marinating them for a long time.

Halal Cart-style chicken & rice — Even though I rarely crave meat after almost 20 years of not eating it, when I pass by a halal cart in Manhattan, I feel so much longing that I’ve thought of ordering some chicken and rice and just eating the rice with white sauce. Lion’s Mane tends to be one of the best chicken substitutes — just make sure you cook it all the way through or it’ll taste bitter.

Philly Cheesesteak or Pulled Pork sandwiches — Two very different messy, meaty sandwiches that I think shredded oysters or maybe enoki mushrooms could find a home in. They both have powerful seasonings and other ingredients that carry most of the flavor, so I bet the final result will be pretty convincing.

Lox or Smoked Salmon — Just throwing this one out there because I think it could be interesting, though tricky. I’m pretty happy with the beet lox I published a little while ago, so you could try something similar with thinly sliced portobellos or king oysters, blanched and then marinated. I really don’t know if the flavor profile would be the same, but the slippery texture that some people don’t like about mushrooms could work in your favor here.

What I’m Cooking

Egg(plant) chive pockets (v)

This egg(plant) chive pockets are almost more dumpling than bread, but are perfect to-go treats, great hot off the stove or at room temperature. Make sure you dip them in black vinegar, which adds the tang they need.

Egg(plant) chive pockets (v)