Vegan Green Bean Casserole Recipe
The 1955 original had soy sauce in it, which is exactly the ingredient most vegan versions drop and then spend an afternoon trying to replace.
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Why I Stopped Making This The Hard Way
For years I treated this as the one dish on the table that needed rescuing. I soaked cashews overnight, blended them with stock, fried my own shallots in three batches because the pan was never big enough, and lost the best part of an afternoon to a side dish. People ate it. People said it was nice.
The year I stopped doing that is the year it got good. I made the sauce with a flour roux in the same skillet as the mushrooms, used oat milk instead of a cashew cream, and bought the crispy onions. Forty-five minutes of real work, and the result was better on both counts I cared about: the sauce was thicker, and the onions were crisper than mine had ever been.
What changed my mind was reading where the recipe came from. It is a 1955 convenience dish, written specifically so that anyone could build it out of what was already in the cupboard. Making it laborious does not honor it. It just produces a different, slower dish that happens to share a name.
I break with the original in exactly one place, and I would defend it anywhere: fresh beans, blanched, never canned. Four minutes in boiling water and straight into ice. That single step is the whole difference between green beans and the gray, collapsed thing this casserole is unfairly famous for.
The story
Green Bean Casserole Was Designed To Be Easy
The dish has a single, documented author. In 1955 Dorcas Reilly, who ran the test kitchen at the Campbell Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey, was asked for a recipe built from two things almost every American household already had in the cupboard: green beans and a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup. She called it Green Bean Bake. It has outlived nearly everything else Campbell’s ever printed on a label.
The original ran to six ingredients: green beans, the condensed soup, milk, black pepper, French fried onions, and soy sauce. That last one is the detail worth stopping on, because it is the one every from-scratch version drops. Reilly was not reaching for an Asian flavor. She needed salt, glutamate and a little color in a pale, mild, starchy sauce, and in 1955 a bottle of soy sauce was the cheapest way to get all three at once. Seventy years later it is still the fastest way to make a vegan mushroom sauce taste like something, which is why it is in the recipe below.
Campbell’s put the recipe on the soup can and the dish did the rest. It now turns up on more than half of American Thanksgiving tables, and the company says half of its cream of mushroom soup sales fall between November and January. In 2002 it donated Reilly’s handwritten recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, where it is kept in the same collection as Edison’s light bulb. Reilly died in 2018 at 92, and said she had no idea how popular the thing had become until about forty years after she wrote it.
What actually has to change to make it vegan is smaller than the internet suggests. The classic is already meat-free: Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom is built on vegetable oil and wheat flour, not chicken fat, so a green bean casserole made straight from the can is a vegetarian dish. What rules it out for vegans is the cream in the soup and the half cup of milk the recipe adds. And the crispy fried onions, the component everyone assumes is the problem, are onions, palm oil, wheat flour, dextrose and salt. They have been vegan the whole time.
So the entire job is replacing one can of thick, salty, mushroomy sauce, and this is where most vegan versions overshoot. Cashews soaked overnight, a blender to wash, shallots fried in three batches. It works, and it turns a recipe whose whole design brief was convenience into an afternoon of work. It also tends to produce a thinner sauce than the can it replaced, because blended cashew cream is pourable and condensed soup is not. A flour roux does the same job in the skillet the mushrooms just came out of, in about ten minutes, and it sets up thicker.
What to buy
Ingredient Notes
Fresh green beans
Canned is what the original called for, and it is the single biggest reason this dish has a reputation for gray mush. Fresh beans, blanched for four minutes, stay green and keep some snap. Frozen are a genuinely good substitute and need no blanching at all: thaw them and dry them very well. If you do use canned, drain and rinse them, skip the first two steps, and expect a softer casserole.
Cremini mushrooms
White button mushrooms work and cremini have more flavor for the same money. Twelve ounces looks like a lot next to the classic’s single can, and it is deliberate: this is the only place the sauce gets any mushroom taste, and mushrooms lose roughly half their weight in the pan. Give them room in the skillet. Crowded mushrooms steam, and steamed mushrooms taste of water.
Unsweetened oat milk
Oat milk has more body than almond and browns better in a roux, which makes it the closest thing on the shelf to the evaporated milk the dish is really asking for. Check the carton says unsweetened and not vanilla; sweetened oat milk in a savory sauce is unmistakable and there is no fixing it afterwards. Soy milk is the next best choice. Skip rice milk, which is water with opinions.
Soy sauce and white miso
Together these replace the salt and the glutamate that condensed soup brings. The soy sauce is not a vegan substitution, it is in Dorcas Reilly’s 1955 original. The miso is my addition, and it is what makes a six-minute sauce taste like it was reduced for an hour. Use white (shiro) miso; red is too assertive and turns the sauce a muddy brown. Tamari makes both of them gluten-free, though the topping still will not be.
Crispy fried onions
French’s Original are onions, palm oil, wheat flour, dextrose and salt, which makes them vegan as sold. Store brands are usually the same formula but a few add milk powder, so read the box once. They do contain wheat, so a gluten-free casserole needs either a gluten-free brand or shallots you fry yourself.
Vegan butter
Used only in the roux, where the salt and the small amount of water it carries do more work than they would in baking. Olive oil is a fine swap and gives a sauce that is a shade less rich. Refined coconut oil works too; unrefined will make the whole casserole taste of coconut.
All-purpose flour
A quarter cup of flour to two and a quarter cups of liquid is close to double what a pouring béchamel uses, and that is the point. Condensed soup is concentrated, and a sauce that looks right in the pan is already too thin for a casserole, because the beans give up more water once they are in the oven.
Vegan Green Bean Casserole
A from-scratch vegan green bean casserole: browned cremini mushrooms in a thick soy sauce and miso gravy, blanched beans that keep their bite, and a crispy fried onion top.
Ingredients
Equipment
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Instructions
- 1
Blanch the beans
Heat the oven to 375°F (190°C). Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil, add the green beans and cook for 4 minutes, until they turn bright green and still squeak against your teeth. They get another 25 minutes in the oven, so stop while they are firmer than you want them to end up.
- 2
Shock and dry them
Drain the beans and tip them straight into a bowl of ice water. Once they are cold all the way through, drain again, spread them out on a clean kitchen towel and pat them properly dry. Any water left clinging to the beans ends up in the sauce.
- 3
Brown the mushrooms
Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms in as close to a single layer as the pan allows and leave them alone for 4 to 5 minutes. Stir, then cook for another 4 to 5 minutes, until they have released their liquid, the pan is dry again and the edges have taken color.
- 4
Soften the shallots and garlic
Turn the heat down to medium. Add the shallots and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until they are translucent, then stir in the garlic and the thyme, if you are using it, and cook for 30 seconds more, just until you can smell the garlic.
- 5
Stir in the roux
Melt the vegan butter into the pan, scatter the flour over the top and stir constantly for 1 to 2 minutes. The flour should coat the mushrooms and start to smell toasted rather than raw. It will look dry and clumpy at this stage, which is correct.
- 6
Whisk in the liquid
Pour in about a third of the oat milk and whisk hard until it forms a smooth thick paste, then add the rest of the oat milk and the vegetable broth. Simmer for 5 to 6 minutes, stirring, until the sauce is thick enough to hold the line when you draw a spoon across the bottom of the pan.
- 7
Season it past comfortable
Take the pan off the heat and stir in the soy sauce, the miso and the black pepper. Taste, then add salt. The sauce should taste slightly too savory and slightly too salty on its own, because six cups of unsalted green beans are about to dilute it.
- 8
Fold in the beans and half the onions
Tip the dried beans into a large mixing bowl, scrape in all of the sauce and add 1/2 cup of the crispy fried onions. Fold with a spatula until every bean is coated, then scrape it all into a 9x13 baking dish and level the top.
- 9
Bake until it bubbles
Bake, uncovered, for 20 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling around the edges and the middle is hot through.
- 10
Crown it with the rest of the onions
Scatter the remaining 1 cup of crispy fried onions evenly over the top and bake for another 5 to 8 minutes, until they are deep golden. Let the casserole rest for 10 minutes before serving; straight out of the oven the sauce runs across the plate.
Notes
The sauce should taste slightly too salty before the beans go in. Six cups of unsalted green beans will pull it back.
Frozen green beans skip steps 1 and 2 entirely. Thaw them and dry them very well.
Tamari in place of soy sauce, a gluten-free flour blend and gluten-free crispy onions make the whole dish gluten-free.
Rest it for 10 minutes before serving or the sauce runs on the plate.
Nutrition Facts
8 servings · 230 g per serving
- Calories
- 195 kcal
- Total Fat
- 10.1 g13%
- Saturated Fat
- 3 g15%
- Sodium
- 760 mg33%
- Total Carbohydrate
- 22.9 g8%
- Dietary Fiber
- 3.5 g13%
- Sugars
- 7.9 g—
- Protein
- 4.9 g10%
Recipe from veggierecipes.blog
When it goes wrong
Troubleshooting
It came out soupy
There are two water sources and both are avoidable. The beans have to be dried after the ice bath, not just drained; a colander leaves a surprising amount clinging to them. And the mushrooms need to go past the point where they release their liquid, until the pan is visibly dry again and the edges have browned. If it is already in the oven and looking loose, bake it uncovered for another ten minutes before the topping goes on.
The sauce tastes flat
Almost always under-seasoning rather than a missing ingredient. A can of condensed cream of mushroom carries around 870 mg of sodium, and a from-scratch sauce seasoned like a normal white sauce lands nowhere near it. Taste before the beans go in: it should be slightly unpleasant to eat on its own. Add the salt off the heat and after the miso, which is already salty, or you will overshoot.
The onions on top burnt before the middle was hot
They went on too early. Crispy fried onions have already been fried once; they are there to warm through and darken, not to cook. The casserole bakes for 20 minutes with the topping off and only 5 to 8 minutes with it on. If they are darkening fast even in that window, your oven runs hot, and the fix is to pull the dish early rather than to drop the temperature and leave it in longer.
My beans went gray and limp
Overblanched. Four minutes is enough for beans cut into two-inch lengths, and they should still squeak when you bite one, because another 25 minutes in the oven is coming. The ice bath is not a nicety either: beans left to cool in a colander carry on cooking in their own heat and lose their color while they sit.
The sauce went lumpy when I added the milk
The liquid went in too fast. Flour has to be dispersed before it swells, so the first splash should be small enough that you can beat it into a thick smooth paste, and only then does the rest go in. If it has already gone lumpy, an immersion blender fixes it in about five seconds and nobody at the table will ever know.
It tastes fine, but it does not taste like the one I remember
That will be the soy sauce, and it is the most common thing missing from a from-scratch version. The 1955 recipe has it and most plant-based rewrites quietly drop it, so what you end up with tastes like a mushroom béchamel rather than like green bean casserole. Two tablespoons in two and a quarter cups of sauce is nowhere near enough to read as soy sauce, and it is more than enough to be missed.
Before you serve
Serving & Storage
This is a side dish that wants a crowded table, and it is the easiest thing on a Thanksgiving menu to slot in around everything else, because 375°F is roughly what the rolls, the roast vegetables and most centerpieces want anyway. Mashed potatoes and a good mushroom gravy are its natural neighbors, and it is worth putting something sharp nearby, a cranberry sauce or a vinegary slaw, because the casserole itself is rich, salty and soft all the way through.
Give it the ten minutes of rest. Straight out of the oven the sauce is still loose enough to run across the plate and take the topping with it; after ten minutes it holds a spoon shape.
Making it ahead
The sauce is the part that keeps. Brown the mushrooms, build the sauce through the seasoning step, cool it and refrigerate it for up to three days. It sets very firm in the fridge and comes back with a splash of oat milk over low heat. Blanched beans keep for two days, dried and bagged with a piece of paper towel to catch condensation.
What does not work is assembling the whole casserole the night before. Beans sitting in salted sauce leach water and go dull, and you will be baking something that was soupy before it went into the oven. If you have to assemble ahead, keep it to two hours and keep it cold.
Storing leftovers
Cover and refrigerate for up to four days. The topping is finished the moment it goes in the fridge, so the honest approach is to scrape off what is left of it, reheat the casserole covered at 350°F for about 20 minutes, and scatter fresh crispy onions over for the last five. A single portion in the microwave is fine, and the onions will be soft, and that is the deal.
Do not freeze the assembled dish. A flour-thickened sauce made with plant milk splits on thawing and the beans come out of it in pieces. The sauce on its own freezes well, before the beans are anywhere near it, and whisks back together over low heat, so that is the head start worth taking.
Still wondering
Frequently Asked Questions
Is regular green bean casserole vegetarian?
Usually yes, which surprises people. Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup is thickened with vegetable oil and wheat flour rather than chicken fat, and French’s crispy fried onions contain no dairy. What makes the classic non-vegan is the cream in the soup and the half cup of milk the recipe adds. Store brands do vary, so if you are cooking for a vegetarian rather than a vegan, read the soup label and you may find you do not need this recipe at all.
Can I make this in a 9x9 dish instead of a 9x13?
Yes, at two thirds of everything: 1 lb of beans, 8 oz of mushrooms and about 1 1/2 cups of sauce, which serves five. Keep the baking times as written, because the deeper layer in a smaller footprint takes about the same 20 minutes to come up to a bubble. The direction that does go wrong is scaling up into one enormous roasting pan: the layer gets shallow, the beans dry out and the topping burns. Two 9x13 dishes side by side is the way to double it.
The oven is full. Can I bake this at a different temperature?
Within a range, yes. At 350°F give it 25 minutes before the topping instead of 20. At 425°F the top sets before the middle is hot, so cover it with foil for the first 15 minutes and take the foil off before the onions go on. What it will not survive is sharing an oven set to 300°F or below: the sauce never gets hot enough to bubble and tighten, and you end up serving a warm salad.
Does it work without the crispy onion topping?
Not really, and it is worth being straight about that. The topping is half the reason the dish exists; take it away and you have creamed green beans, which is a perfectly good thing but a different one. Panko tossed with a little oil and salt is the closest substitute and browns in the same five minutes. Crushed potato chips are the other traditional answer, and they work a lot better than they sound.
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