17 Vegetarian Thanksgiving Recipes

Gravy is the thing a vegetarian Thanksgiving most often gets wrong. Every technique that makes gravy good depends on drippings from a roast, so this one has to build the same depth out of hard-browned mushrooms and soy instead. Expect the color of milky coffee with darker flecks through it rather than the deep mahogany on a packet, and taste it for acid before you decide it is finished.

Watch for: The mushrooms have to be dry and properly browned before the flour goes in. Move on to the onion while the pan is still wet and all that mushroom water ends up in the gravy, which is why it stays thin however long you simmer it.

A squash soup that reads sweet and then simply stops is missing acid rather than salt, and that is most of why a restaurant bowl beats a home one made from nearly the same recipe. Serve it in small cups before the table sits down, since a full bowl competes with the plate that follows.

Watch for: Give the squash room on the sheet. Crowded cubes release steam faster than it can escape and boil in place, and a soup made from pale steamed squash never tastes roasted however long it simmers.

A starter that survives a full oven, running entirely on the stovetop on a day when the oven is booked from morning onward. It also takes frozen corn without apology in November, though if you do find fresh, the cobs are worth more than the kernels: scraped with the back of a knife they give up a thick cloudy liquid that thickens the pot on its own.

Watch for: Blend the corn, never the potatoes. A blade tears open the swollen starch granules in cooked potato and frees the starch, which sets into something closer to wallpaper paste than to chowder.

The version people mean when they say sweet potato casserole, and leaving it out would be pretending Thanksgiving is something it is not. It is a dessert that has agreed to sit next to the gravy, and the recipe pulls it back where it can: roasting the potatoes rather than boiling them sweetens them enough that the sugar could come down.

Watch for: The marshmallows go on for the last five to eight minutes, not for the whole bake, which is what most versions of this recipe get wrong. Vegan ones will not melt at all: gelatin is what makes a marshmallow slump and spread, so the agar sort holds its shape and simply toasts on top.

The same dish for the half of the table that thinks marshmallows belong in a bag and not on a vegetable. The streusel does what the marshmallows do, which is give a soft casserole something to crunch against, without the sugar landing as hard. Worth knowing before you choose between them: roasting makes sweet potatoes considerably sweeter than boiling does, so this is not automatically the restrained option.

Watch for: The streusel wants butter softened, not melted and not straight from the fridge. Melted butter makes a paste that bakes into a single sheet of candy, and cold butter never rubs in at all, so it pours off the casserole as loose sand.

Sprouts are the dish most likely to change someone’s mind at the table, and the one green thing that does not wilt into sadness while everything else finishes. Halved and laid cut side down on a sheet that went into the oven empty is the whole technique. The loose leaves that fall off and go dark are not a mistake, they are the best thing the pan produces.

Watch for: A crowded pan steams them instead of roasting them, which is how sprouts got their reputation in the first place. Use two sheets rather than piling one, and leave visible metal between them.

The thing to make when the potatoes are already spoken for, or when someone at the table is not eating them, and it takes gravy exactly as well as mash does, which is the only test that matters on the day. A food processor is safe here in a way it never is with potato, because there is no starch to rupture, so this is the one mash on the table that goes smooth in thirty seconds.

Watch for: Boiled cauliflower carries water into the mash and turns it to soup. Steam it instead, and let the florets sit in the colander a few minutes so the condensate runs off before they go in the processor.

The color on a table that is otherwise brown, orange and beige, which is worth more than it sounds when a dozen dishes are competing for attention. They roast at the same temperature as almost everything else here, so they cost no extra oven planning. Scrub them rather than peel them: on the purple ones the color sits in the outer few millimeters and a peeler takes most of it away.

Watch for: Add the honey near the end, whatever most recipes tell you. Fructose starts caramelizing around 230°F and carries straight on to burnt, so a glaze brushed on at the start of 25 minutes at 425°F is bitter by the time the carrots are done.

Mac and cheese is a Thanksgiving staple on a great many American tables, particularly Southern and Black American ones, rather than a modern addition to the day. This version gets there without dairy, which quietly solves one of the harder plates to build. If you add one thing to it, make it a teaspoon of white miso, which reaches a savoriness nutritional yeast alone does not.

Watch for: Cashew sauces tighten as they sit, and this one will be stiff by the time it reaches the table. Keep a mug of the starchy pasta water back and loosen it just before serving, since plain water dilutes without putting any starch back.

The only thing on the table that is better made three days early, which is the whole argument for cooking it rather than opening a can. It is also the acid the rest of the plate needs, sitting between the gravy and the casserole and stopping the whole table reading as sweet and heavy. Keep half the zest back for the end: the compounds that make citrus smell like citrus are volatile, and ten minutes at a simmer sends most of them into the kitchen.

Watch for: Do not judge it in the pan. It is loose while hot and sets only as it cools, when the pectin from the burst berries links up, so a sauce simmered until it looks thick will be closer to jam in the bowl.

For the household doing Thanksgiving for four rather than fourteen, where a whole roast makes no sense and something still has to be the center of the table. It carries a crust, which is most of what a centerpiece has to do. Half a pound of mushrooms looks like too many and is not: they lose better than half their weight in the pan and they are where the savory backbone comes from.

Watch for: The filling has to cool before the pastry goes on. Steam coming off a hot filling softens the fat in the crust and wets it from underneath, so it slumps instead of puffing and comes out golden on top and pale and soft beneath.

The other centerpiece, and the more useful one if the table includes people who want something that eats like a roast dinner. Lentils and mushrooms do the work the beef does in the original, so chop the mushrooms to about pea size and leave them alone long enough to sear rather than stirring the moment they hit the pan. It holds in a low oven while everything else catches up.

Watch for: Mash spread onto a hot, loose filling sinks straight into it. Let the filling settle off the heat and check it has really reduced, then spread from the edges inward so the topping has a rim to grip.

The pie the day is actually about, and the hardest one to get right without eggs. A pumpkin custard normally sets on egg protein, so a vegan one has to rebuild that set out of starch, and the ratio is tight enough that this is a filling to weigh rather than scoop.

Watch for: It has to leave the oven still wobbling in the middle. A cornstarch custard finishes setting as it cools, so a filling already firm in the oven is one that cracks across the middle on the way down.

The dessert you can hand to someone standing up. Thanksgiving dessert is rarely a sit-down course by the time it arrives, and a tray of bars survives that better than a pie needing plates and forks. Bake the base to properly golden and pour the filling on while it is still hot, or the crust drinks the filling and goes soft underneath.

Watch for: Cut them cold, not warm. Two hours on the rack is a minimum rather than a target, and an hour in the fridge after that is the difference between a smeared knife and clean edges.

For the table that has one person who does not really like pumpkin, which is most tables. It is pecan pie with the sweetness pulled back by chocolate, so it reads as a different dessert rather than a second version of the one beside it. The shell has to be blind baked, because it sits under an inch of wet filling for well over an hour and never otherwise meets dry heat.

Watch for: Pull it while the center still shifts as one piece. Egg protein sets around 180°F and squeezes its water back out past that, which is what cracks the top and leaves a wet layer underneath.

The alternative to pumpkin that nobody argues about, and the one dessert here that can be assembled the night before and baked while the table is being cleared. A pie coming out of the oven is doing work that a pie sitting on the counter is not.

Watch for: Give the apples their full hour in the sugar, then cook the juice they give up down and stir it back in. Skip it and the fruit shrinks in the oven and pulls away from a lid that has already set, and no amount of crimping closes that gap.

The dish here most people have never met. It is a Southern dessert that treats sweet potato the way a cobbler treats peaches, rounds candied in a spiced brown sugar syrup rather than mashed into a custard, and on a day when two sweet potato dishes are already on the table it is the one that surprises people.

Watch for: The slices have to leave the pot underdone, with a knife still meeting resistance in the middle. They get another 45 to 50 minutes in the oven after that, so anything cooked through on the stovetop first arrives as mush.