10 Wildly Delicious Vegetarian Mushroom Recipes

There’s no question that mushrooms tend to be a go-to food for vegetarian recipes: they’re delicious, nutritious, and relatively affordable. But they’re also something of culinary chameleons, meaning they can be just as at home in a delicate crepe as they are in a rich and creamy pasta dish — no meat necessary. Not sure where to start? We’ve rounded up a bunch of our favorite ways to weave mushrooms into vegetarian breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Savory crepes — delightfully light and thin pancakes — make an easy vehicle for transporting herby sautéed wild mushrooms with the whole thing tied together with the nutty cheese for what the author dubs a “French quesadilla.”

Savory oats are life-changing, explains the intro to this recipe. They work for any meal and open up worlds of flavor opportunities. This version, with tons of umami from the miso paste and sautéed mushrooms and shallots, is a terrific starting point — and the poached egg drizzling rich yolk in like a sauce is just an extra bonus.

Grain bowls aren’t just a trend: they’re an easy, fun, and tasty lunch. Long after they fade from Instagram front pages, they’ll still be around. This is a classic of the form, marrying warm mushroom flavors with plenty of herbs and stirring it into the farro, with a crowning touch of lemon-garlic yogurt.

Salad can be so many things, and it’s often at its best when it departs from the traditional idea of cold, crisp lettuce. This version makes a prime example, using sautéed shiitake mushrooms to warm up baby arugula with dried cranberries for sweetness and toasted walnuts for crunch.

This paleo, grain-free tart starts with a tapioca and coconut flour shell, then fills up with eggs, coconut milk, chard, sweet caramelized onions, and, of course, plenty of mushrooms. The result is a beautiful brunch centerpiece or easy make-ahead meal.

This is an easy one pot meal that extends the flavor of the mushrooms across an entire meal, using their flavor and that of the garlic and butter they were sautéed with to season the rice — along with plenty of sherry.

While the author presents this as a vegetarian appetizer, there’s no reason this wouldn’t make an ideal lunch or main: the cheesy, herb-filled polenta serves as a base for meat-like hearty mushrooms. Plenty of cream in the mushrooms and Romano cheese in the polenta bring it together as a single cohesive dish, more than a base and topping.

While we’re long past the era of vegetarian food where mushrooms were just randomly substituted for meat, willy-nilly, there are still some times when using mushrooms where beef traditionally was works so well we can’t abandon it. Case in point: stroganoff. The mushrooms settle in comfortably to the creamy sauce and provide just the hearty lift the egg noodles need.

Most of these recipes show you how to integrate mushrooms into a larger dish, but having the building blocks of these simple sautéed mushrooms allows you to keep them on hand for slipping into omelets, breakfast tacos, or stir-fries whenever you please.

Mushrooms have a tendency to turn nearly any dish they enter into a bleak, brown shade. The dishes are, of course, delicious, but not the most pleasing to the eye. This dish bucks that trend, using the bright orange of the squash to bring light and the green of the sage to pop from the bowl.