Traditional Polish Wild Mushroom Soup (Zupa Grzybowa)

Wild mushroom soup, zupa grzybowa, is one my family has made for as long as I can remember. It is the Christmas Eve soup after barszcz, and it earned that place as fast-day food: no meat anywhere near it, but a broth with as much depth as one.

Mine is made with fresh mushrooms rather than dried, and in Polish cooking that decides the seasoning. A dried-mushroom soup is soured with vinegar and a fresh-mushroom one never is, so there is none here, just the mushrooms, stock and a little cream at the end. Porcini or chanterelle if you can get them, and chestnut mushrooms from a supermarket make a perfectly good soup if you cannot.

There is penne through it, which is my stand-in for the kluski that were cooked in the soup itself. It is in my Must-Try Polish Christmas Dishes roundup, and my guide to Polish food sets out the whole Wigilia table.

“As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”

PPin it

Mushroom Picking Season: Choose Only the Mushrooms You Know

Autumn is the season, when the ground is damp and the nights have turned cool, and in Poland going out for mushrooms is something families do together rather than a hobby a few people have. I grew up picking them with mine and I still go now.

One rule, and it does not bend: pick only what you can name with certainty. Wild mushrooms are the one ingredient in this recipe where being nearly right is not good enough, and a field guide read the night before is not the same thing as knowing. Go with somebody experienced the first few times, or buy your porcini and chanterelles from a good greengrocer and enjoy the soup just as much.

Types of Mushrooms to Use for This Recipe

• Porcini Mushrooms (Boletus)
  • The king of wild mushrooms in Polish cuisine, porcini mushrooms add a rich, earthy flavour to the soup. Their meaty texture holds up well during cooking, making them the ideal choice for this recipe.
• Chanterelle Mushrooms
  • Known for their golden colour and delicate, slightly peppery flavour, chanterelles are another great option for this soup. They are prized for their unique taste and pair beautifully with the creamy broth and vegetables.
• Chestnut Mushrooms
  • If you can’t find wild mushrooms, chestnut mushrooms from your local supermarket are an excellent substitute. They offer a deeper flavour than white button mushrooms and will still complement the rich broth.
• Cremini (Baby Bella) Mushrooms
  • Another supermarket alternative, cremini mushrooms are similar to chestnut mushrooms but offer an even more intense, earthy flavour. Their texture and taste make them a versatile option for this recipe.
• Oyster Mushrooms
  • Oyster mushrooms have a mild, nutty flavour that blends well with the other ingredients in the soup. Their soft texture contrasts nicely with the bite of the pasta and vegetables.
• Shiitake Mushrooms
  • While not traditional in Polish cuisine, shiitake mushrooms can bring a deep, umami-rich flavour to the soup. They are especially good if you prefer a heartier, more intense mushroom taste.
• Dried Wild Mushrooms
  • If fresh wild mushrooms are hard to come by, dried porcini or dried mixed wild mushrooms can be an excellent alternative. Simply rehydrate them in warm water before adding them to the soup. Don’t forget to use the soaking liquid for extra flavour!
• Bay Bolete Mushrooms (Podgrzybek)
  • These mushrooms are often used in Poland and have a slightly milder flavour compared to porcini. If you can get them fresh or dried, they will add a distinctly Polish touch to your soup

Why This Soup Belongs on the Wigilia Table

Christmas Eve in Poland is a meat-free meal, and zupa grzybowa is there because it solves that. Mushrooms came out of the forest and cost nothing but the walk, so for centuries they went into the pot wherever meat would otherwise have gone. A cook writing in Warsaw in 1860 puts it plainly: this soup stands in for a meat broth, and it is made on fast days.

It is still the second soup of that table. Ask Polish households what they eat on Christmas Eve and barszcz comes first, named by around four in five, with grzybowa behind it at roughly one in three. It turns up on Wigilia tables from Kaszuby and Kujawy down to Podhale and Silesia, sometimes soured with cabbage brine, sometimes served with poppy-seed noodles alongside.

One thing worth being straight about, because most English recipes are not. The strict Wigilia soup is a fasting dish, which means no dairy at all, and it is made with dried mushrooms rather than fresh, since nobody is finding a fresh porcini in a Polish forest in late December. Mine has cream in it and fresh mushrooms, so it is the everyday version of the soup rather than the fast-day one. If you want the stricter table, it is two changes: swap the fresh mushrooms for about 40 g of dried ones soaked in warm water, and leave the cream out. Season it a little more firmly to make up for what the cream was doing.

Kluski: the Noodles That Belong in It

I use penne because it is what is in the cupboard, but the traditional soup is served with kluski, small noodles rolled and cut by hand. They are worth making once, and they take about ten minutes.

1. Mix 120 g of plain flour with 1 egg, a good pinch of salt and 2 to 3 tablespoons of water, a little at a time, until it comes together.
2. Knead it until smooth, then let it rest for ten minutes so it stops fighting you.
3. Roll it out thin, then cut it into short strips, a couple of centimetres long. They do not need to match.
4. Cook them until they float, then a moment longer.

Cook them in salted water and the soup stays clear. Cook them in the soup itself, which is the older way, and the starch they give off thickens it a little. Both are right, and it is worth knowing which one you are choosing. A spoonful of soured cream on top is optional and traditional.

How to Make Zupa Grzybowa, Step by Step

1. Brown the mushrooms in a pan of their own. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and soften the diced onion and sliced garlic over a medium heat for about five minutes. Add the sliced mushrooms and the teaspoon of butter, turn the heat up to medium-high, and give them another five minutes. This is the step that makes the soup. A mushroom is very nearly all water behind a thin skin, so tipped straight into a pot of stock it poaches and stays pale; in a hot pan the water comes out, boils away, and only then does the browning start, and the browning is where the flavour is. Do not crowd the pan. If 400 g will not sit in something like a single layer, do it in two goes. Set them aside.
2. Start the soup with the root vegetables. Put the vegetable stock into a large pot with the diced carrot, celery, leek and potato, and drop in the bay leaf. Bring it up, then take it back to a simmer and give it ten minutes. Keep it at a simmer rather than a rolling boil: a hard boil knocks the potato apart and clouds what should be a clean, clear broth. The bay goes in now rather than later because it needs the time to give anything up.
3. Add the penne dry, straight into the soup. Tip the uncooked penne into the pot and give it ten minutes. It goes in dry rather than boiled separately, and that is deliberate: it cooks in the stock and gives up a little starch as it goes, which thickens the soup very slightly. That is the older Polish habit, where the kluski were cooked in the soup itself rather than beside it. The trade is that the pasta carries on drinking after the pot comes off the heat, so this soup thickens as it stands.
4. Return the mushrooms for the last few minutes. Stir the fried mushrooms back in, along with the onion and garlic they cooked with, and give them five minutes. They go in at the end rather than the beginning for the same reason they were fried apart: long enough in the pot to give their flavour to the broth, short enough that they still have some bite and have not gone slack.
5. Check the pasta, then the thickness. Fish out a piece of penne and bite it. It should be cooked through by now, and the mushrooms should still hold their shape. Then look at the soup itself: it wants to coat the back of a spoon lightly rather than sit in a mound. If it has gone too thick, loosen it with a little water rather than more stock, because the stock is already seasoned and topping up with it is how a soup ends up too salty.
6. Temper the cream before it goes anywhere near the pot. Take one ladle of the liquid only, no solids, and stir it into the double cream in a bowl or a mug. Then pour that back into the pot. Cream splits when it meets a lot of heat at once: warming it makes the fat globules take hold of the protein, and below about a quarter fat there are not enough of them to manage it. Double cream at nearly half fat is very forgiving, which is why this recipe uses it. If single cream is all you have, warm it more slowly still and keep the pot off the boil once it is in.
7. Season last, and serve. Taste it and season now rather than earlier, because the stock, the mushrooms and the pasta have all had their say by this point. Crack black pepper over each bowl and scatter the chopped parsley. The teaspoon of yoghurt is optional and it is there for sourness. Stir it into each bowl rather than into the pot, so it cannot split. And note what is not here: a soup made with dried mushrooms is traditionally sharpened with vinegar at the end, and a fresh-mushroom one like this never is. The yoghurt is a gentler version of the same idea.

Recipe Card for Polish Wild Mushroom Soup

Check out my other Recipes:

PPin it

Chef’s tip: the mushrooms are everything. Buy fresh ones that are firm and dry to the touch, with no soft patches and no wormholes through the stem. Fry them in a little butter first to brown them and drive off the moisture - that deep, roasted flavour is the secret. And when you add cream, temper it first: stir a ladle of the hot soup into the cream, then pour it all back in, so it never curdles.

FAQ for Zupa Grzybowa

What mushrooms are best for zupa grzybowa?

Fresh porcini is what this soup is built on, and chanterelles are the other one worth going out of your way for. Chestnut mushrooms from a supermarket make a perfectly good soup and are what most of us will actually cook it with. Button mushrooms on their own are too mild to carry it.

Is this the Polish Christmas mushroom soup?

Yes - zupa grzybowa is a traditional Polish Christmas Eve (Wigilia) soup, often served with łazanki pasta or little uszka dumplings.

Can I use dried mushrooms instead?

You can, and plenty of Polish households do, but it makes a different soup rather than a better one. Dried mushrooms are far more concentrated, so reckon on about a tenth of the weight, roughly 40 g in place of the 400 g of fresh here. Soak them in warm water, and pour the soaking liquid into the pot carefully so the grit stays behind in the bowl. One thing to know: a dried-mushroom soup is traditionally soured at the end with a little vinegar, and this fresh version wants none of that.

Can I freeze it?

Not as it stands, and for two separate reasons. The penne has already drunk a good deal of the stock, so it comes out of the freezer as mush, and cream splits when it is frozen and thawed. Freeze the base instead: make it up to the point where the mushrooms go back in, then cool it and freeze it without the pasta and without the cream. On the day, reheat it, cook the penne in it for its ten minutes, and temper the cream in at the end as usual. It keeps about three months that way.

Can I make it vegetarian?

Yes - use a good vegetable stock and it is naturally meat-free, just like the classic Christmas version.

Can I make it ahead?

Yes, and it is better for a night in the fridge. One thing to plan for: the penne is cooked in the soup here, so it carries on drinking as it sits and the whole pot thickens. Loosen it with a little water or stock when you reheat. If you know in advance that you are making it ahead, cook the pasta separately and add it to each bowl instead.

Why does my cream curdle in the soup?

Adding cold cream straight into hot soup makes it split. Temper it first - stir a ladle of the hot soup into the cream to warm it through, then pour that back into the pot and keep the heat gentle. It will stay smooth and silky.

What do you serve mushroom soup with?

It is a happy regional debate - noodles or łazanki, potatoes, kluski, or pot barley (pęczak) are all traditional, and potatoes do not rule out noodles. Homemade egg noodles are the real upgrade.

Can I just use button mushrooms?

Not on their own - they are too mild, and the soup ends up tasting of the stock rather than of mushrooms. Chestnut mushrooms are the easy supermarket answer and are genuinely good here. If button is all you have, brown them hard so they colour properly, and add a small handful of soaked dried porcini with their liquid to give the pot some backbone.

For a fresh, spring alternative to a hearty mushroom soup, see my Spring Vegetable Soup.

A Few Words from the Chef

I was handed a bowl of this the morning after a friend’s wedding, with a hangover I would not wish on anyone, and it brought me back to life. Cream, carrots and mushrooms, and that was all it took. It is the soup that says Christmas Eve to me more than anything except the barszcz, but it is worth making any time of year the mushrooms are good. We still go picking for it in the New Forest, though I will happily admit Poland has far more to offer than we do here. Smacznego!