• Recipes
• Second course
• Pasta and macaroni
• Smoky, spicy vegetarian pasta with eggs and mushrooms

Of all the pork dishes I imagine my vegetarian self eating in some alternative universe, I dream not of porchetta or ragu, carnitas or banh mi—but of spaghetti carbonara, where the meat is more like the punctuation marks of a sentence than the letters themselves. <br /> <br />A salty, yolk-rich sauce clinging to long noodles, hiding crispy bits of something savory and smoky? Surely I could approximate that without the guanciale. <br /> <br />In this vegetarian recipe, the smokiness comes not from cured meat but from finely grated smoked mozzarella that gets whisked with the egg yolks, then softened with hot pasta water. The mozzarella won’t melt completely, which means you’ll get some strands of cheese in your final bowl of pasta. As long as those clumps aren’t pieces of scrambled egg, all is well (at least in my book). <br /> <br />As for the crispy bits (the "guanciale"), you'll sauté mushrooms with garlic and chile flakes in a separate pan as the pasta boils. When I first made this recipe, I used somewhat-elusive black trumpet mushrooms, which are particularly smoky, but any type of wild mushroom (or even white button mushrooms) will do the trick. You'll add the mushrooms—and the spicy oil they've cooked them in—to the pasta once it's been coated in the eggy, cheesy sauce.

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