Recipe of the Month: Coconut Mushroom Pizza

During last year's weeklong vegan challenge, I observed that there are three kinds of vegan dishes. Some are naturally plant-based and don't need any modification; some require minor changes, like leaving out the meat or substituting tofu; and some requires out-and-out imitations of animal-based products.

In general, we prefer the first and second kinds. This is mostly because dishes that are inherently vegan, or that require only minor changes to make them so, usually taste better than dishes that are trying to imitate meat or dairy. The latter kind tend to taste like inferior substitutes for the original, something you'd have no reason to eat if you weren't trying to eat vegan.

However, if the alternative is giving up a favorite dish entirely, we'd rather put up with a substitute and just make it the best substitute we can find. That's why we were so happy to discover the homemade vegan mozzarella recipe from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken; it allowed us to continue enjoying dishes like Pasta a la Caprese and pizza, which we assumed would be impossible to make without cheese.

Or so I thought, at least, until It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken served up this recipe: Creamy Vegan Mushroom Coconut Pizza. It's a fully vegan pizza that doesn't call for any kind of cheese substitute: just heaps of sauteed mushrooms and onions and a creamy white sauce made from coconut milk, flavored with lemon and thyme and thickened with flour. It looked like it would at least be interesting to try as a change of pace, and if we liked it, maybe it could become our go-to recipe, reducing the need to mess around with veggie cheesemaking.

So I printed out the recipe for Brian, and this week he gave it a try. And while trying, he noticed two problems right away:

• The volume of mushrooms was huge — far more than we'd normally put on a pizza. That in itself wasn't a problem, since we both love shrooms; the difficulty was cooking them. The recipe says to just throw them all in a large skillet and saute them for "about 5 minutes," but that didn't work at all when Brian tried it. Even in our biggest pan, the volume was simply too large to expose all the mushrooms to the heat at once, and so he couldn't manage to cook all the water out of them. Rather than risk burning some while he tried to cook the others down, he took them off the heat, but he didn't feel at all confident about putting them on the pizza.
• The directions for the coconut sauce had a similar problem. They said to make a roux, then add the coconut milk and seasonings and whisk it for, again, "about five minutes" until it thickens. Brian kept it on the heat quite a bit longer than that, but it still wasn't anywhere close to the thickness he considered appropriate for a pizza sauce. It was more like a soup.

Based on prior experience, he feared that putting these two liquid-heavy ingredients on top of the crust would result in a soggy pizza, and sure enough, it did. There was nothing really wrong with the flavor; it was quite different from an ordinary pizza, but very savory, with the coconut and the faint tang of the lemon making an interesting background to the earthiness of the mushrooms. But the texture was nothing like a pizza. As Brian put it, it was more like a mushroom soup served in a very shallow bread bowl. I actually ate part of my slice by breaking pieces off the crust and dipping up the shrooms with them, and I ended up giving up on the rest.

We hoped that perhaps the sauce would thicken up more if it were left for a day to set, but no such luck. When Brian heated up the leftovers in the toaster oven, the crust crisped up beautifully, but the topping was still as sloppy as ever.

However, despite these shortcomings, Brian doesn't want to give up on this recipe. He really liked the taste, and he thinks the problems with the texture can be fixed. Next time he tries it, he plans to cook the mushrooms in small batches so that they lose all their liquid and also brown a bit, enhancing their flavor. He also intends to reduce the volume of coconut milk in the sauce from a full can (about a cup and a half) to around one cup, limiting the amount of liquid that goes into it — which will also reduce the amount of fat. The resulting pizza won't have as strong a coconut flavor, but personally, I think a heavier balance of mushrooms to coconut would probably be an improvement.

So we will try this pizza at least once more, with these emendations, and see if it comes out with a more pizza-like consistency. If it works, this might become a regular addition to our repertoire — at least as an alternative to, if not a replacement for, more traditional pizza. And if not, we can always try to adapt the filling as a soup.