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Vegan Hungarian Bread Dumplings with creamy root veggie sauce and tahini roasted mushrooms.
Here comes another veganized version of a Hungarian classic: Vadas aka hunter style sauce with traditional bread dumplings, plus tahini and balsamic vinegar roasted mushrooms instead of beef or game. This recipe is full of autumn goodies, though it makes a good meal any time of the year. Try it, if you don’t believe me!
Vadas is a meal, that I used to absolutely hate when I was a child, even if my mom made it meat free. I don’t know why, I guess I just didn’t like the concept of a sauce named after game meat (vad means game in Hungarian). Plus it was a regular dish in elementary school canteens, which instantly turned me off.
However in the past few years I started to really miss this sauce with dumplings, so I made it quite a few times. Especially since my aunt sent me her superb Vadas sauce recipe. Sometimes with store-bought faux meats, sometimes without any meat substitute, and other times with some sort of roasted vegetable. One of my favorite versions is this tahini roasted mushroom one, so I thought I’ll share it with you.
This recipe is not a 15-minute one, but don’t worry, it’s still very simple to make, and most steps don’t need any supervision (meaning you just let the things cook by themself).
For the Vadas sauce you just cook some vegetables, then puree them all into a nice, thick, and creamy sauce. I personally love to use potatoes, carrots, parsnip and onion, but you can try it with sweet potatoes, celery root, rutabaga or even sunchokes. The sauce can be prepared a day or two earlier, then just re-heated right before serving.
For the Zsemlegombóc, aka bread dumplings you whisk together some milk and chickpea flour, this mixture will act like an egg mix here. You add some stale bread cubes, seasonings, and let it all sit for about 30 minutes. Then shape the mixture into balls and cook in boiling water. Super simple!
If you want an extra delicious version, fry cooked balls in vegan butter until the outside gets crispy. I usually skip this step, but actually I shouldn’t, because this makes the balls so much more better!
I like my bread dumplings to be a bit more rustic, so I used whole wheat bread cubes to make them. However if you prefer them smoother (or just generally in a more traditional way), make sure you use white bread. You can of course use any gluten-free bread as well, if needed.
The smoky tahini roasted mushrooms are not a must for this recipe, but I personally think that those earthy and smoky flavors work really well with this dish, especially when using a lovely mix of different types of mushrooms.
Serve it all nice and warm together, I promise you’ll love this recipe!
If you try this recipe, let me know! I would highly appreciate if you could leave a comment and rate it. Also don’t forget to take a picture and tag it on Instagram (use the hashtag #greenevi) or post it on Facebook! I love seeing what you come up with! ♥︎
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Hungarian Bread Dumplings w/ Root Vegetable Sauce & Roasted Mushrooms
- Total Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
- Yield: 4 1x
Ingredients
For the sauce:
1 onion
1 parsnip
4 carrots
1 medium potato
4 cloves of garlic
3 bay leaves
1 tbsp mustard
1/2 tsp maple syrup
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
handful of fresh parsley and lovage
salt, pepper
For the Bread Dumplings:
2 shallots, chopped
1 cup of chickpea flour
1 cup of unsweetened plant milk
3.5 cups of cubed, stale bread – I used whole wheat (but use GF if needed)
1 tbsp of chopped parsley
salt, pepper
For the Tahini Roasted Mushrooms:
400 g/14 oz assorted mushrooms, cut into bite sized pieces
1 tbsp tahini
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1/2 tsp liquid smoke
salt, pepper
Instructions
For the sauce:
- Chop roughly onion, parsnip, carrots, potato, and garlic, and add to a large pot with bay leaves, and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat, and cook until veggies are soft, about 20-30 minutes.
- Discard bay leaves, and add mustard, maple syrup, vinegar, and fresh herbs, then using an immersion blender blend sauce until completely smooth. Season with salt and pepper.
For the Bread Dumplings:
- Start by sautéing onions until translucent, adding a tablespoon of water at a time to prevent burning (or use vegetable oil, if you prefer).
- Meanwhile whisk together chickpea flour and milk in a large bowl. Add bread cubes, sautéed onions, parsley, salt and pepper, and mix everything well together. Let stand for 30 minutes.
- Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Using your hands or an ice cream scoop form mixture into 12 balls. Slip dumplings into the boiling water, and cook for 8-10 minutes, or until dumplings are fully cooked through. Drain and set aside.
- As an extra step you can also fry the balls in vegan butter for 3-5 minutes, or until the outside gets crispy.
For the Tahini Roasted Mushrooms:
- In a bowl whisk together tahini, vinegar, liquid smoke, salt and pepper. Add mushrooms, and toss to coat evenly.
- Spread mushrooms in a single layer on a baking sheet, and bake at 200°C/400ºF for 30-35 minutes.
Assembly:
- Serve dumplings warm with Vadas sauce poured on it. Top with roasted mushrooms and chopped parsley. Enjoy!
- Prep Time: 20 mins
- Cook Time: 1 hour 15 mins
They look so inviting! I love esp. that root veggie sauce, Evi.
Thank you, Angie!
This looks amazing! The sauce and the dumplings sound really nice and with the mushrooms, the dish must be delicious.
Thanks, Anca 🙂
Loving the sound of tahini roasted mushrooms. And totally in love with this meal. So good!
Thank you 🙂
Hi! Thank for sharing this recipe! I gave a question. Can I use only white mushrooms?
Hi Joshua,
Yes, of course, white mushrooms will also work 😉
Hi Evi, this recipe looks delicious! Question: does it make a difference if the bread for the dumplings is not stale?
Hi Tish,
Yes, it makes a difference, since stale bread is more ‘dry’ and soaks up more liquid. If you don’t have any old bread, you could also just slightly toast some fresh bread. Or if you can’t do that either, maybe just use a little bit less of the milk in this recipe. 🙂
I really wanted to like this recipe, but unfortunately almost every step did not work out for me. The sauce was very onion-y so I might recommend cutting down the amount of onions and garlic to half. I also found that it needed more seasoning and flavor, perhaps boiling the veggies in a veggie stock would have helped infuse them with flavor more? I added smoked paprika, black pepper and thyme as well and found that helped. When it came to the dumplings I ended up giving up. I followed the recipe but when trying to boil them, they just fell apart. Perhaps baking them may have worked better. This looked very delicious in the pictures, and maybe I did something wrong along the way, but unfortunately this recipe just wasn’t it for me in terms of both flavor and difficulty.
Sorry to hear the recipe didn’t work for you 🙁