Layered Meat Alternative - Mushroom Shish

Hey guys!

Adding to my meat alternatives for this wonderful Veganuary, I was thinking about really yummy things that I haven’t seen many people share in the vegan world, and one was a skewer. Now I have done halloumi alternative skewers before, but I was thinking… I really want to come up with some Tex/Mex ish style skewers with chilli and bbq sauce, that’s not just buying something ready prepared. That’s where I got the idea to use button mushrooms and create these roasted delicious skewers.

So the whole idea behind this is finding something that can hold on to it’s shape whilst cooking, has a melt in the mouth texture, can be flavoured with something spicy without it disintegrating and of course button mushrooms were the go to. I prepped them by taking off the top layer and using my grater to slice them up, if you have some fancy knife I suggest you do that but I have no such knife. I started to assemble the mushrooms and popped them slowly onto a soaked skewer. If they’re too old they may fall apart but if you have fresh mushrooms they’ll maintain their shape.

On the baking trey, I added thyme, pepper, white sugar, garlic powder, some coconut oil and salt, the concept I had was if I roasted them first with foil over, they’ll sort of smoke? So I popped them into the oven for 25 minutes on 200c and it did what I had hoped. I didn’t want the spices I added to coat the mushrooms as much as burn in the cooking process and flavour them.

Then I mixed up a BBQ sauce, I have a sauce recipe here which uses chocolate which is amazing. I wanted the sauce to be like when you add a syrup at the last bit of like a pudding recipe, because I thought if it would coat the mushrooms and then boil during cooking they’ll soften and disintegrate and won’t give the meaty texture I was after. So I did the sauce work in a pan, and added way more chilli and way more tomato flavours than the chocolate one.

Then after the 25 minutes I covered the whole skewer with the sauce, made sure it was coating both sides, and roasted them for a further 10 minutes. I didn’t think that there was enough crisp to them so I finished with 3 minutes under the grill. But what a treat! I had some yummy herby corn on the cob, some crispy potato skins and it went down insanely.

If you would like the full recipe and ingredient list in more detail, let me know and I can pop up the full meal.