It’s a warm summer evening, and you’re on a back porch with a group of friends, drinking a beer and getting ready for dinner. Someone passes you a paper plate, a seeded bun, and-wait, you don’t eat meat? Oh. Well, here’s a tomato and some lettuce.

If you steer clear of beef, you’ve probably experienced a similar scenario. If you’re lucky, you maybe even found a frozen soy patty masquerading as a burger that, when grilled, sort of tasted like nothing, and drenched it in mustard.

I know: Vegetarians need to stop whining about missing out at barbecues because we choose to ax delicious, juicy hamburgers from our diets. But even if you’re just trying to cut back on meat, or trying to impress a vegetarian, the alternatives usually offered are lackluster at best, and unhealthy and environmentally questionable at worst. As my colleague Kiera Butler reveals, it can take just as much energy to produce a veggie burger as a beef burger, and many soy-based fake meats are processed with hexane, a neurotoxin.

Luckily, there are savory alternatives to this dilemma, made from ingredients you probably have at home. I reached out to a few vegetable-oriented chefs and cookbook authors for their […]