Most vegan shepherd’s pie recipes have anchovy in them. Not on purpose — through Worcestershire sauce, which is the standard shortcut for savoury depth in this dish, and which in its usual form contains fermented anchovy. If you’re cooking for someone vegan, check the bottle in your cupboard right now. Vegan versions exist and say so on the label, but the default one doesn’t.
That’s the first thing to get right. The second is the base, because a vegan filling has to earn its richness from somewhere, and the three usual candidates behave very differently. I’ve made all three more times than I’d like to admit, mostly because my sister went vegan in the middle of a winter when I cooked this every other week.
If you want the meat version, and the reasons pies go watery, that’s covered in our classic shepherd’s pie. This one only looks at the plant-based problems.
Lentils, soy mince, or mushrooms and walnuts
Green or brown lentils hold their shape, take about 25 minutes from dry, and give you a filling with actual bite. Red lentils collapse into paste, so don’t. Soy mince (dried or frozen) mimics the crumb of meat almost exactly and absorbs whatever you flavour it with, but it contributes nothing of its own. Chopped mushrooms with walnuts is the flavour winner by a distance — mushrooms bring glutamates, walnuts bring fat and a soft chew — and it’s also the most expensive and the fiddliest.
| Base | Texture | Own flavour | Cost for 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green lentils | Firm, slightly grainy | Earthy, mild | Lowest |
| Soy mince | Closest to meat | Almost none | Middle |
| Mushroom + walnut | Soft, meaty chew | Strongest | Highest |
Which do I actually cook? Lentils with about 200 g of chopped mushrooms stirred in. That’s a dodge and I know it, but it’s honest: lentils give structure and cost almost nothing, mushrooms give the savoury weight the lentils lack. Pure mushroom-and-walnut is better eating and I make it when people are coming over. Soy mince I’d skip unless you’re feeding someone who specifically wants the meat texture — teenagers, usually, and it does work for that.
One thing on lentils: cook them slightly under, around 20 minutes, because they carry on softening for 30 minutes in the oven. Same principle as any time you cook dried pulses from scratch and then keep cooking them in a dish.
Where the savoury depth actually comes from
Four things, and you want at least three of them.
Yeast extract is the big one. A teaspoon, stirred into the hot filling until it dissolves, does more than any other single ingredient here. Two teaspoons and it starts tasting of yeast extract, which is a different and less welcome thing. Start with one.
Soy sauce brings salt plus fermented depth — a tablespoon and a half. Tomato purée brings sweetness and body, but only if you cook it out: two tablespoons into the hot vegetables, stirred for two full minutes until the colour shifts from bright red to brick and the raw metallic smell goes. Skip that step and the pie tastes faintly of tinned tomato all the way through.
Dried mushrooms are the sleeper. A small handful, maybe 15 g, soaked in 200 ml of just-boiled water for 20 minutes. Chop them into the filling and pour the soaking liquid in too, leaving the last spoonful behind because grit settles there. That liquid is the most savoury thing in the whole dish, and it’s the same trick that carries a good mushroom soup.
Ingredients
- 250 g dried green lentils, rinsed
- 200 g chestnut mushrooms, finely chopped
- 15 g dried mushrooms, soaked in 200 ml boiling water
- 2 onions, 3 carrots, 2 celery sticks, all finely diced
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- 2 tbsp tomato purée
- 1 tsp yeast extract
- 1½ tbsp soy sauce
- 2 bay leaves, 2 tsp dried thyme
- 500 ml vegetable stock
- 1 tbsp cornflour, slaked in cold water
- 3 tbsp olive oil, plus more for the mash
- 1.2 kg floury potatoes (Maris Piper or similar)
- 300 g celeriac, peeled and cubed (optional, see below)
- Salt and black pepper
Instructions
- Soak the dried mushrooms in 200 ml boiling water for 20 minutes.
- Simmer the lentils in unsalted water for 20 minutes, until just short of tender. Drain.
- Heat 2 tbsp oil in a wide pan. Cook onion, carrot and celery over medium heat for 10 minutes, then add the fresh mushrooms and cook 6 minutes more, until their liquid has come out and evaporated again.
- Add garlic and tomato purée. Stir for 2 minutes, until the purée darkens to brick red.
- Stir in lentils, chopped soaked mushrooms, thyme, bay, soy sauce, stock and the mushroom soaking liquid (hold back the gritty last spoonful).
- Simmer uncovered 15 minutes. Stir in the yeast extract, then the slaked cornflour, and cook 2 minutes until it thickens. It should mound on a spoon, not run off it.
- Meanwhile boil the potatoes (and celeriac, if using) in well-salted water, 18–20 minutes, until a knife slides in with no resistance. Drain, saving 100 ml of the water.
- Mash, then beat in 4 tbsp olive oil and 60–80 ml of the reserved water until glossy. Season hard.
- Spread the filling in a 2-litre dish, top with mash, rough the surface up with a fork, and brush with a little more oil.
- Bake at 200°C for 30 minutes, until the ridges are browned and the filling bubbles at the edges. Rest 10 minutes before serving.
Potato alone, potato and sweet potato, or celeriac
Plain floury potato is the safe answer and it’s fine. Nothing wrong with it.
Adding sweet potato — say a third of the total weight — gives you colour and a sweetness that fights the savoury filling rather than supporting it. I’ve done it twice and preferred the plain version both times. It also holds more water, so the top goes slightly claggy.
Celeriac is the one worth trying. Swap a quarter of the potato weight for celeriac and the mash picks up a faint peppery, celery-ish note that suits a meatless filling really well. Any more than a quarter and it gets loose, because celeriac has far more water than potato. That’s my pick, and it’s the version I’d put in front of someone I wanted to impress.
Getting the mash creamy with no dairy
Plant milks are the obvious move and mostly the wrong one. Oat milk is sweet, soy milk has a bean note that comes through cold, and almond milk is watery. They all make mash that tastes very slightly of breakfast. Plant milk causes similar trouble in dairy-free mac and cheese, where trying to imitate dairy is the mistake in the first place.
Use olive oil and the potato cooking water instead. Four tablespoons of oil and 60–80 ml of that starchy water, beaten in hard while the potatoes are still steaming, gives a mash that’s glossy and holds a peak. The starch in the water is doing the same job the fat in butter would.
Mash while hot, always. Cooled potato goes gluey when you work it. And season with more salt than feels right — there’s no butter or dairy here carrying flavour, so under-salted vegan mash tastes of literally nothing. Same reason a plain baked potato needs so much on it.
Roux, cornflour, or just boiling it down
A flour roux gives the sturdiest, most gravy-like result, but it dulls the flavours slightly and you need to cook it a good three minutes or the pie tastes of raw flour.
Cornflour is my default. One tablespoon slaked in cold water, stirred into the simmering filling, thickens in about two minutes and leaves the taste alone. It can go slightly slippery if you overdo it, so stop at one tablespoon for this quantity.
Just reducing works too and tastes best of all, but it takes 25 minutes of uncovered simmering and shrinks the filling noticeably. If you’ve got the time, do that. Lentils release starch as they sit, so a lentil filling often thickens on its own more than you expect — the same slow thickening that happens in a pot of lentil soup left on the hob.
Browning the top with no cheese and no butter
Rough the mash up properly. A fork dragged across in lines gives you ridges, and ridges are what brown; a smooth surface just goes pale and slightly leathery.
Brush the top with olive oil before it goes in, then bake at 200°C. If after 30 minutes it’s still pale, five minutes under a hot grill will finish it, but stand there and watch — the gap between golden and scorched is about 90 seconds.
The bit everyone skips
Rest it for 10 minutes out of the oven. Straight from the dish it slides apart on the plate and looks like a mess. Ten minutes and the filling sets enough to hold a wedge shape with a clean edge, which is the difference between a pie that looks cooked and one that looks poured.