Vegan Shawarma Is Everywhere, Which Rules
The proliferation of plant-based shawarma is a thrill, and we’re sharing D.C. chef Doron Petersan’s cauliflower version you can make at home
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Just the word shawarma sounds so comforting, conjuring perfectly the truth of a spiced meat getting swaddled into a pita, surrounded by vegetables and draped in tahini. But usually, yes, the Middle Eastern street food shawarma involves meat being sliced off a spit. That’s why the new wave of plant versions are such a thrill: All that comfort and satisfaction, with vegetables like mushrooms and cauliflower standing in for the traditional flesh.
And it’s widely available, whether going out to eat or cooking at home. One of New York’s favorite falafel spots, Taïm, has a cauliflower shawarma on the menu, served with hummus, salad, pickled cabbage, tahina, amba (a mango condiment), and parsley. British grocer Waitrose sells a soy protein version. The Hummus & Pita Co. chain just released their take, and Minimalist Baker has a recipe for a chickpea version. There’s no shortage of vegan takes with different vegetables or proteins.
At D.C.’s fast-casual Shouk, chef and co-owner Dennis Friedman chose oyster mushrooms as the base for theirs. They had considered trying to make a vegan shawarma that would be cut off a spit like the meat version, but it proved challenging because of the constraints they put on their recipes. “We are 100%, not processed,” Friedman tells me. “There’s nothing processed in our restaurant, there’s no soy products; we just take vegetables and put them together in a really thoughtful way.”
“What we do is we get the oyster mushrooms in whole,” he explains, “and then we peel them by hand. It doesn’t have to be perfect. So, you have some thicker strands and some thinner strands, and that works to our benefit because then that helps with re-creating that traditional experience. When you bite into a bigger piece, you really do taste a texture like you’re biting into a piece of meat. We don’t try to imitate anything, but it just happens that this is a byproduct of what happens with the oyster mushroom.”
At Fare Well, also in D.C. from the team behind beloved bakery Sticky Fingers, chef and co-owner Doron Petersan…
