Vegetarian-friendly Japanese cooking

Many Japanese vegetable dishes are easy to adapt, but dashi is the ingredient that most often changes the answer.

The first thing to check: dashi

Hondashi and many traditional dashi products contain bonito or other fish. If you want a plant-based dish, use kombu and/or dried shiitake dashi instead.

Good places to start

Rice, tofu, eggplant, sweet potato leaves and many vegetable side dishes are naturally close to vegetarian cooking, but always check bottled sauces, soup bases and seasoning mixes.

Easy swap

For miso soup, replace fish-based dashi with cold-infused kombu dashi.