Vegan Mushroom Stroganoff: 15 Minutes of Sun Before the Pan
Description
Sliced mushrooms browned hard, then folded into a sauce built on blended silken tofu instead of cashews or coconut milk — vegan mushroom stroganoff over wide pasta ribbons, about 55 minutes with a 15-minute stop in the sun along the way. Per 100 g, USDA puts silken firm tofu at 6.9 g of protein and 2.7 g of fat against 2.02 g and 21.33 g for canned coconut milk, and that is what keeps this sauce light enough to still taste of mushroom.
Ingredients
For the mushrooms
For the sauce
To serve
Instructions
Fifteen minutes of sun
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Slice the mushrooms and set them out
Slice the 600 g (1 lb 5 oz) of mushrooms about 5 mm (1/4 inch) thick and spread them in one layer on a tray, cut faces up. Set the tray outside in direct sun for 15 minutes, then bring it in. If there is no sun today, go straight to the pan — the dish cooks exactly the same either way.
Brown the mushrooms
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Get the pan hot first
Heat 15 ml (1 tablespoon) of the olive oil in a 30 cm (12-inch) skillet (frying pan) over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms — they will heap above the rim, and that is fine. If your pan is smaller than 30 cm, brown them in two batches instead.
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Cook the water off, then brown
Cook for 12 to 15 minutes, stirring every couple of minutes. The mushrooms give up their water in the first five minutes and then sit in it; keep the heat up until the pan is dry again and the edges have gone brown. Add the 1/4 teaspoon of salt only now, at the end.
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Tip them into a bowl
Scrape the mushrooms and any juices into a bowl and set the pan back on the heat. They go back in at the very end, so they keep the browning they just earned.
Blend the cream
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Blend the tofu with half the broth
Blend the whole 349 g (12.3 oz) carton of silken tofu with 150 ml (2/3 cup) of the vegetable broth for 30 to 60 seconds, until it pours off the spatula in a smooth ribbon with no grain left in it. This is the sauce that replaces heavy cream (double cream).
Sauce and pasta together
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Start the pasta
Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add the tablespoon of salt, and cook the 250 g (9 oz) of pappardelle to the time on the packet. Scoop out 120 ml (1/2 cup) of the cooking water before you drain it.
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Soften the onion, wake up the paprika
Add the remaining 15 ml (1 tablespoon) olive oil to the skillet with the chopped onion and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, until soft and translucent. Stir in the garlic, the 2 teaspoons sweet paprika and the 1 teaspoon smoked paprika and keep stirring for 30 seconds, until the pan smells toasted.
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Flour, then the rest of the broth
Scatter the 2 tablespoons of flour over the onion and stir for 1 minute. Pour in the remaining 150 ml (2/3 cup) broth a splash at a time, scraping the brown film off the bottom of the pan, and let it thicken to a loose paste.
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Finish the sauce below a boil
Turn the heat to low and stir in the blended tofu, the tamari, the Dijon and the lemon juice. Hold it at a bare simmer — a rolling boil turns a tofu sauce grainy. Return the mushrooms with their juices, grind in the pepper, and warm through for 3 to 4 minutes.
Serve
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Turn the pasta through the sauce
Add the drained pasta to the pan and turn it through the sauce, loosening with the reserved cooking water a spoonful at a time until the sauce coats every ribbon rather than pooling under it. Scatter the parsley over the top and serve straight from the pan.
Nutrition Facts
Servings 4
Serving Size 1 of 4 plates
- Amount Per Serving
- Calories 430kcal
- % Daily Value *
- Total Fat 11.1g15%
- Saturated Fat 1.7g9%
- Sodium 810mg36%
- Potassium 1067mg23%
- Total Carbohydrate 64g24%
- Dietary Fiber 5.4g20%
- Sugars 7g
- Protein 20g40%
- Vitamin A 62 mcg RAE
- Vitamin C 9 mg
- Calcium 93 mg
- Iron 4.5 mg
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily value may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.
Note
- Fifteen minutes of sun — what was actually measured. Urbain and Jakobsen, writing in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2015, laid sliced Agaricus bisporus out in sunlight and tracked the real-time UV-B dose with a spectroradiometer. After just 15 minutes and a UV-B dose of 0.13 J/cm², vitamin D2 rose from 0.1 to 2.2 ± 0.5 µg per gram of dry weight (P < 0.0001) — which the authors put at 17.6 µg (704 IU) per 100 g of fresh mushrooms, comparable to the levels they cite for fatty fish like Atlantic salmon. The content climbed in a straight line through the first hour, then flattened; two further hours of exposure brought a significant decline. The limit worth knowing: 15 minutes is how long that dose took under that day’s sun. The trial did not test other latitudes or seasons, so an October afternoon may need longer, or may not get there at all. Slice the mushrooms first — that is what the study did, and slices turn far more surface toward the sky than whole caps.
- Whether it reaches your blood is a different question, and two trials answer it differently. Neither is a test of this step: the 2011 mushrooms were irradiated at 1.5 J/cm², about eleven and a half times the sunlight dose above, and the 2014 trial reported its dose as 600 or 4,000 IU of D2 per serving before cooking. Urbain, Singler, Ihorst, Biesalski and Bertz (European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2011) split 26 young adults with serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at or below 50 nmol/L into three groups for five weeks in winter — a soup made from irradiated mushrooms, a D2 supplement, or placebo, about nine people to an arm; their 25OHD rose by 3.9 nmol/L a week (95% CI 2.9–4.8), against 4.7 nmol/L a week (95% CI 3.8–5.7) on a D2 supplement. Mehrotra, Calvo, Beelman, Levy, Siuty, Kalaras and Uribarri, in the same journal in 2014, fed 43 prediabetic, vitamin-D-deficient adults with a BMI above 25 a daily entrée of 100 g of cooked mushrooms for 16 weeks and saw “modest or no increases” in 25OHD; they pointed to unanticipated D2 loss during cooking and probably lower absorption in that group, and no dose or source shifted type 2 diabetes risk factors. Read together: sunlight does something real to the mushroom, and how much of it reaches you depends on the dose, on the cooking and on who is eating. If you are being treated for low vitamin D, talk to your doctor first — this is dinner, not a dose.
- Why silken tofu instead of cashews or coconut milk. Per 100 g, USDA lists silken firm tofu at 6.9 g of protein, 2.7 g of fat and 0.406 g of saturated fat (FDC 172461); canned coconut milk at 2.02 g, 21.33 g and 18.92 g (FDC 170173); raw cashews at 18.22 g, 43.85 g and 7.78 g (FDC 170162). Blended silken tofu carries roughly three and a half times the protein of coconut milk for about an eighth of the fat, which is why the mushrooms still lead the plate instead of the sauce. It is also nut-free, and a cashew cream is not. One honest caveat: USDA has no generic silken tofu record — every silken entry in SR Legacy belongs to a brand (MORI-NU, Vitasoy), and the nutrition here is calculated on MORI-NU silken firm. Another carton will read a little differently.
- The browning is most of the flavor. Six hundred grams of mushrooms hold a lot of water, and for the first five minutes the pan looks like a mistake. Keep the heat at medium-high and wait: once the liquid boils away the mushrooms start to fry rather than stew, and that is where the meaty note comes from. Two things help. Use a pan at least 30 cm (12 inches) wide, or work in two batches, because a crowded pan traps steam. And salt at the end rather than the start, since salt draws more water out just when you are trying to drive it off.
- Sodium hides in the liquids — and in the pasta water. Per USDA: one tablespoon of tamari carries 1,005 mg of sodium (FDC 174278, 5,586 mg per 100 g, 1 tbsp = 18 g), vegetable broth 303 mg per 100 g (FDC 171180), and prepared mustard 1,104 mg per 100 g (FDC 172234). That is why this recipe uses two teaspoons of tamari rather than a tablespoon, and only 1/4 teaspoon of added salt. The pasta water is the other half of the story, and it is easy to miss: USDA puts pasta cooked in salted water at 131 mg of sodium per 100 g against 1 mg cooked unsalted (FDC 169751 and 169737), which is about 196 mg a plate here. To go lower: boil the pasta unsalted, use a low-sodium broth, and add a second squeeze of lemon at the end, which replaces sharpness without replacing salt.
- Gluten-free, and made ahead. For gluten-free, serve the sauce over a gluten-free ribbon pasta or over mashed potato, use a tamari whose bottle says gluten-free, and replace the flour with 1 1/2 teaspoons of cornstarch (cornflour) slaked in a little cold broth and stirred in with the tofu. Ahead of time: the sauce keeps covered in the fridge for 3 days and thickens as it sits. Loosen it with a splash of broth over low heat, hold it at a bare simmer so it stays smooth, and boil the pasta fresh — dressed pappardelle softens fast.
- How the nutrition was calculated: from USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy records — cremini mushrooms 168434, olive oil 171413, salt 173468, onion 170000, garlic 169230, paprika 171329, all-purpose flour 168936, vegetable broth 171180, silken firm tofu 172461, tamari 174278, prepared mustard 172234, lemon juice 167747, black pepper 170931, parsley 170416, and pasta 169751 — adjusted with USDA Release 6 retention factors for the sautéed and simmered parts, then divided by four. The pasta is counted cooked, not dry: boiling in salted water and draining takes minerals out and puts sodium in, and 169751 (pasta, cooked, enriched, with added salt) is the USDA record that measures both. That is where 196 of the 810 mg of sodium on a plate comes from; boil the pasta unsalted and take roughly that much off. The card is calculated on ordinary cremini mushrooms (FDC 168434), not on the UV-exposed record (FDC 168557): the sun step is optional and its result depends on the day, so the number printed here is the one you can count on whatever the weather.
