The secret behind Mushaboom. Ask us why it tastes the way it does, and the honest answer is: fungi. Here’s the story of the ingredient doing most of the work.
Mushaboom is fully plant-based, and it’s one of the pieces people come back for specifically — not as the vegetarian option, but because it’s genuinely one of the best things on the menu. Fungi-fermented vegetables, sunchoke purée, pickled fennel, parsley, on our toasted rye. Firm bite, deep savoury flavour, the kind of umami you’d expect from something that’s been slow-cooked with meat, not from vegetables.
That flavour doesn’t come from a trick. It comes from a company in Denmark that’s spent years figuring out how to get fungi to do the heavy lifting.
MATR Foods
MATR calls itself a new generation of natural plant food, and the description fits. They use fermentation not as a way to preserve ingredients, but as a way to transform them — unlocking flavour that isn’t there to begin with, while keeping waste to a minimum. The result is a base with a genuinely juicy texture and a firm bite, built from a blend of Nordic ingredients: oats, split peas, lupins, beetroot, and potatoes. No additives. No heavy processing. No strange ingredients hiding in the list. Just five things and fungi doing what fungi do best. matrfoods.com
Why fermentation?
“Plant-based” gets used as a catch-all, and a lot of what it covers is genuinely underwhelming — texture that falls apart, flavour that needs to be masked rather than built. Fermentation is a different approach entirely. It’s a slow process that breaks ingredients down and builds them back up into something with more depth than they started with, not less.
That’s the part we find most interesting about what MATR does. They’re not trying to imitate meat. They’re using a genuinely old technique — fermentation is one of the oldest food technologies there is — to get somewhere new. The umami in Mushaboom isn’t borrowed from anything. It’s grown.
“We didn’t set out to make a ‘vegan dish.’ We set out to make the best dish on the counter. It just happens to be plant-based.”
