Portobello Mushroom Shawarma Flatbreads with Spiked Yogurt Sauce.
A delicious, punchy, saucy vegetarian flatbread perfect for mid-week dinners.
This month on ingredient we’re focusing on yogurt: the creamy, tangy kitchen workhorse that does so much more than just provide you with an easy breakfast, snack or dip.
You can already find the recipe for my Cumin Roast Tomatoes with Lemon Yogurt here, and my favourite method to cook lamb chops will be with you as soon as Pipers Farm1 have delivered them and I’ve had a chance to marinate them! Do upgrade your subscription to unlock every recipe in the ingredient archive, and of course to help funding the free part of what I post here!
Once we’d had all the meetings and decided what exactly my second cookbook - One Pan Pescatarian - was going to look like, it started life as a list I wrote at my kitchen table. The flat the table was sitting in is now gone: our last ever rental in East Dulwich before we bought our little period cottage here in Kent, but I am sitting at the same table writing to you right now.
Obviously a cookbook needs to start with a list, because a cookbook needs recipes.
As I explained when I wrote about my recipe development process (see above!) I have a very long list on my iPad arranged by season and course of recipe ideas I’ve had: because I’ve cooked something I think I could do better, tasted something I wanted to recreate, or just because an idea came to me whilst driving and I somehow managed to remember it when I arrived at my destination and could finally write it down.
I started writing the list of recipes I was going to develop for One Pan there: which recipes already on the list fit our criteria? Aka. could it be cooked in just one pot or just one pan, and was it either vegetarian, vegan or pescatarian?
Then, I took a look at all the recipes I’d already published on my blog, and sometimes elsewhere. Was there anything I either had the right to republish (it was on my site) as is and which simply could not be left out of a one pan cookbook that contained everything except for meat and desserts (it was such a relief to me my editor did not seem to have a problem with my insistence there would not be a sweet section in our very first meeting - I rarely enjoy developing recipes for afters), or was it a recipe I should revisit and update because I’d learnt new methods and techniques since I wrote it?
Then, I spent a lot of time in my usual haunts of places like Pinterest and Instagram, walking around Borough Market and in the greengrocers at the end of our road, getting ideas for things I should try and make to fill in the gaps. Things like the delicious vegan paella on the cover which really ought to appear in a book of such recipes.
The final list was, by necessity, a lot longer than the agreed number of recipes we planned on including in the book. I knew that some recipes would simply not work the way they did in my head and would have to be abandoned, or that once I’d developed too many pasta dishes, I really ought to stop (though I’m still amused that one Amazon reviewer took umbrage that I’d used alphabet spaghetti shapes in two different soups. They’re fun shapes, okay, and I’m really not sorry!)
But, this system meant there are some recipe ideas that I never got around to cooking, and which found their way back onto my iPad list to make someday. At some point I’ll get around to making a Whole Chilli & Lemongrass Barbecue Sea Bass, Roasted Green Chilli Ceviche with Mango & Cucumber, or Green Pea & Tinned Chickpea Veggie Burgers, but today one of those orphaned ideas has found a home.
I’m not one of those people to throw a meat substitute into a dish traditionally made with meat and call it the same thing (I prefer to get more creative with my veggies, and tofu is an ingredient in it’s own right thank you very much) but once you’ve cooked up fat, meaty, juicy slices of portobello mushroom with shawarma spices so they absorb into the flesh and cling around the gills, you’ll be choosing them as a speedy shawarma option on any night of the week.
And shawarma would not be shawarma without a delicious, flavoured yogurt sauce, which is why I thought this recipe would be the perfect vehicle to show off yogurt’s creamy, flavour-carrying suitability in such a role. Here I’ve spiked it with garlic, hot sauce, cumin and lemon juice for something slightly spicy, acidic, creamy and punchy to carry the mushrooms and foil whatever garnishes you pile on top.
Portobello Mushroom Shawarma Flatbreads with Spiked Yogurt Sauce
Serves: 2, Preparation time: 15 minutes, Cooking time: 10 minutes
A busy, saucy, flavour-packed veggie meal which can take as little as 25 minutes to make depending on which direction you want to go with the flatbreads (I acknowledge I always make my flatbreads from scratch because I cook for a living therefore have the time to do so - I know most of you don’t!)
You can make the sauce ahead, and either buy in flatbreads (my mother buys the Waitrose Levantine Table ones which are rather good) or make them from scratch - I serve this shawarma on these ones made without the oregano or the sumac. These can also be done a couple of hours ahead with the plastic bag trick mentioned in the recipe, and Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer, the duo behind Honey & Co. who taught me the method often freeze them too - if you plan to do this, double the recipe.