Spaghetti with Shimeji Mushroom

Spaghetti with Shimeji Mushroom is a simple Japanese-style pasta dish made with flavorful Shimeji mushrooms, bacon, and Japanese seasonings. It’s a popular home-cooked dish in Japan and can also be found on the menus of many pasta restaurants. With its savory, familiar flavors, this is the kind of pasta Japanese people love to enjoy as an everyday meal. It’s also easy to eat with chopsticks, making it feel a little more like a comforting Japanese home-style dish than traditional Italian pasta.

What’s Spaghetti with Shimeji Mushroom?

There are a lot of Italian restaurants in Japan, and you can find all kinds of Italian pasta dishes there. There are also many “pasta restaurants” that are different from traditional Italian restaurants. They serve typical Italian pasta dishes, such as tomato sauce and cream sauce pasta, but they also offer Japanese-flavored pasta and their own original creations. Japanese-style pasta is just as popular as its authentic Italian counterpart.

For Japanese-flavored pasta dishes, people like to use ingredients with strong flavors and saltiness, such as salted cod roe, pickled plums, and other pickled vegetables. Because these dishes let each ingredient’s own flavor shine, the sauce doesn’t need to be heavy or complicated. Instead, it is often simply seasoned with soy sauce, sake, salt, or citrus juice. Japanese-flavored pasta is pretty easy to make at home, too. There is very little cooking skill involved—if you can boil spaghetti, you’re already halfway there! All you need are fresh ingredients.

Shimeji mushrooms are one of the most common mushrooms used in Japanese cooking. They have a mild, slightly nutty flavor and a pleasant, firm texture that holds up well when cooked. Shimeji are often used in stir-fries, soups, hot pots, rice dishes, and pasta. They are especially good in Japanese-style pasta because their natural savory flavor adds depth to the dish without making the sauce heavy. If you can’t find Shimeji mushrooms, you can substitute Enoki mushrooms or regular white button mushrooms. In Spaghetti with Shimeji Mushroom, bacon may seem like an unexpected ingredient, but it adds a wonderful smoky flavor and saltiness that pairs very well with Shimeji mushrooms and works beautifully in the sauce.

Top the pasta with thinly sliced Oba leaves and roasted seaweed. The Oba leaves add a refreshing aroma and aftertaste that pairs especially well with the savory pasta. If you don’t have Oba leaves, you can simply leave them out. However, try not to skip the roasted seaweed—it adds a wonderful savory flavor and brings all the flavors of the dish together.

Tips and substitutions for Spaghetti with Shimeji Mushroom

• Regular spaghetti is used in this recipe, but you can use any type of pasta you like. If you prefer thinner pasta, angel hair works well, while linguine is a good choice if you like thicker, heartier, and chewier noodles. Choose whatever you like best!
• Bacon can be replaced with other proteins, such as ham or sausage, which will still add a little smoky flavor to the dish. Feel free to use whatever you have on hand or whatever suits your taste.

• When cooking the bacon, it may brown a little too much and leave brown specks in the dish. If you want to avoid this, you can wipe out or change the pan before cooking the rest of the ingredients. However, those browned bits left in the pan add wonderful flavor to the dish, so you may want to keep them!
• The toppings for this dish are Nori roasted seaweed and Oba leaves, but you can choose other toppings depending on your preference and what you have available. If you have some leftover Furikake, that works wonderfully, too.

More recipes like Spaghetti with Shimeji Mushroom

• Mentaiko Spaghetti
• Salmon and Shimeji Spaghetti
• Creamy Uni Pasta
• Japanese-Style Garlic and Chili Pasta
• Spaghetti Neapolitan

Print Pin

No ratings yet

Spagghetti with Shimeji mushroom

Prep Time 20 minutes minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes minutes

Total Time 30 minutes minutes

Servings 2 servings

Japanese flavored spaghetti with Shimeji mushrooms and smokey bacon

Video

Ingredients

• 1/2 lb spaghetti
• 3 slices bacon (cut to 1/2″ width)
• 1 clove garlic (minced)
• 1 bunch Shimeji mushrooms (cut the bottom, separated into pieces by hand)
• 1/2 onion (thinly sliced)
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp Mirin
• 1 Tbsp Sake
• 1 Tbsp butter
• 3 green onions (thinly cut)
• 4-5 Oba leaves (thinly cut)
• thinly cut roasted seaweed

US Customary – Metric

Instructions 

• Boil about 12 cups or 3 littler of water in a big pot and add about 3 Tbsp salt (not in the ingredients). Cook spaghetti according to the instructions on the package.
• Heat a frying pan at medium heat. Add bacon pieces and cook until browned and somewhat crispy. Add minced garlic and stir. Add Shimeji mushrooms and sliced onion and cook until tender. Add into the pan a quarter cup of boiling water from the pasta, the soy sauce, Mirin, and Sake, and stir well. Add butter in the sauce. Put the cooked spaghetti into the sauce, then add green onions. Stir for a couple of minutes to coat the spaghetti with the sauce.
• Serve on a plate, and top with thinly cut Oba leaves and seaweed.

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: Japanese

Keyword: mushroom, pasta, shimeji, spaghetti