Make Vegan Mushroom Soup

Ive shared a cream of mushroom soup before that relied on mushrooms and shallots sautéed in butter along with some whole milk to produce its rich creamy flavor. Modifying these types of dishes for special diets often involves a trade-off in flavor or simplicity, but this plant-based, gluten-free, oil-free cream of mushroom soup has no such tradeoff and is ridiculously easy to make.

The trick lies in the use of a wide variety of amino-acid rich mushrooms that creates loads of tastebud satisfying umami. These amino acids are abundant in meat and fish and can be usually be coaxed out of vegetables through high-temperature cooking methods such as frying which is why I normally sauté the mushrooms first. To go oil-free, means to forgo Maillard browning, but its possible to make up for this by using a variety of different mushrooms, and steaming them. Also, by making this mostly with mushrooms it not only adds all the flavor we need, it also naturally thickens the soup, giving it a rich decadent texture, without adding any flour.

For this soup I've used 5 varieties of mushrooms, enoki, maitake (hen of the woods), eryngii (king trumpet), shiitake, and shimeji (beech). While you can use any types of mushrooms for the soup, the more variety you have, the deeper the complexity. For the roasted mushroom topping, I like to use mushrooms that present well whole while adding a pleasant texture. For this batch, I've used a combination of shimeji and maitake mushrooms.