Healthy Vegan Pasta with Mushroom Carrot Sauce
The Inspiration of the Mushroom Carrot Pasta
To make this mushroom pasta with a wild and flavorful sauce only takes 25 minutes. This recipe is inspired by a traditional Cantonese dish called Buddha’s Delight, which my family has every Lunar New Year. The traditional Buddha’s Delight is a Chinese Buddhist vegetarian dish that uses dried mushrooms, tofu, carrots, bamboo shoots, and other vegetables. It is usually cooked with soy sauce along with a stir fry cooking method. Buddha’s Delight traditionally is cooked with 18 different vegetables, but in this recipe, I modified and simplified it into two major ones – mushroom and carrots. Stir-fried with soy sauce, the mushroom and carrots make a rich and savory sauce for this vegan pasta dish.
So How to Make This Healthy Vegan Mushroom Pasta?
Let’s start with the ingredients
The two most important ingredients are mushrooms and carrots. I chose to keep these two ingredients from the Buddha’s Delight because they bring the earthy and umami taste. Mushrooms are savory and have a meat-like flavor which is a good meat substitute in a vegan or vegetarian meal. Carrots are rich in Vitamin A and the sweetness of carrots can add another layer of flavor to the sauce.
In this recipe, I only used white mushrooms which were convenient for me to find, but you could use various kinds of mushrooms to cook. I would recommend using white mushrooms which have more of a woodsy and portabella mushrooms, which have a meaty-texture.
Another worth mentioning ingredients in the recipe is the vegan beef broth. I bought these vegan beef bouillon cubes to dissolve in water.
Cooking Tips for The Mushroom-carrot Sauce
- sauté the onion and cumin powder before the mushrooms. The onion and cumin powder can give some toasty and spicy flavor to the mushrooms.
- Be generous with your oil. Both mushrooms and carrots soak in a lot of oil in cooking.
- Be patient – when you sauté the mushrooms, give it some time for the mushrooms to turn brown. Take it slow when simmering down the sauce but turn off the heat before it dries up.
- Use a teaspoon of flour to thicken the sauce so that it has a nice saucy texture.
Mix the rich and flavorful sauce with the rotini pasta well before you enjoy it. The sauce embraces the pasta with an earthy, savory soy-sauce taste and at the same time, the mild sweetness from the carrots is subtly lingering. Enjoy different layers of the flavors dancing in your mouth along with the rotini pasta!
Recipe
Vegan Pasta with Mushroom Carrot Sauce
Equipment
- Frying pan
- Pot
Ingredients
- 2 cup mushroom slices
- 1 cup carrot coins
- 2 cloves garlic minced
- 2 slices ginger
- 4 oz rotini pasta
- 2 tbsp peanut oil or other cooking oil
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- 1/4 cup vegan beef stock
- 1 tsp onion powder
- 1 tsp cumin powder
- 1 tsp flour
- chopped cilantrol
- salt to taste
Instructions
- Dissolve ¼ of the stock cube in hot water
- In a saute pan, heat up the pan over high heat
- When the pan is hot, add two tbsp of peanut oil to the pan over medium heat
- Saute the garlic and ginger
- When you can smell the aroma of the garlic and ginger, add onion powder and cumin powder
- Saute the mushrooms until browned
- Put the carrots in and stir fry with the mushrooms for about 4 minutes
- In the meanwhile, boil hot water and cook the rotini pasta until it’s done. It takes about 9 minutes
- When the carrots start to be softened, pour in the stock and slowly simmer over medium heat
- Add soy sauce to the pan
- Mix the flour with the sauce well to thicken it
- Salt to taste, and remove the pan from heat
- Drain the pasta when it’s done and serve in pasta bowls
- Plate the Mushroom and carrot sauce on the side, and garnish with cilantro
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