Sticky soy- and honey-roasted mushrooms go on salads, sandwiches, potatoes

In the woods, mushrooms are everywhere — even if you don’t see them. They hide under leaves, peek out from the soil, blend into the bark on fallen logs. In that way they’re the stereograms of the forest: You have to stare at the scene for a long while, refocusing and unfocusing your eyes until a hidden image takes shape, and once you see it, you wonder how it was able to escape your notice at all. At that point, it all seems so obvious.

Mushrooms are all over one of my favorite new cookbooks, too, but they don’t always jump out at you. In Michal Korkosz’s “Polish’d,” he tosses them in bigos (a sauerkraut stew), stuffs them into beet green rolls, tosses them with kopytka (the Polish version of gnocchi), and purées them with walnuts into a paté. They’re essential, but not always the star. And then you focus in a little harder, and the spotlight starts to shine.

As a fellow vegetarian, I have cooked mushrooms every which way you can imagine: under a “brick” in a skillet, in quesadillas and fried rice, skewered into kebabs, “pulled” a la barbecued pork, stewed with lentils for a take on Bolognese, in risotto, wrapped in puff pastry, and on and on. There’s truly no end to their versatility.

This recipe from Korkosz is something else entirely: a mushroom treatment that seems almost too simple to be a recipe but that results in something you’ll want to do over and over again.

He boldly calls them Roasted Mushrooms to Die For, and they’re worth a bit of hyperbole because, as he writes, after making them, “You won’t believe how good mushrooms can taste.”

What’s the secret? You marinate oyster mushrooms in a mixture of soy, oil, honey, smoked paprika, bay leaves and garlic for at least an hour, then roast them for almost a half-hour, during which time their marinade bubbles up and glazes them and their edges get a little crisp. All the ingredients offer a contribution, but I give most of the credit to the combination of soy and honey for a sweet-salty depth. Their flavor is so deep, in fact, that they remind me of one of my other favorite fungi treatments, from Chris Bianco, in which you roast portobello mushroom caps in beer.

Here, the results are not exactly a complete dish on their own, but instead offer the makings of so many others. Put them on salads, in sandwiches and tacos, on baked potatoes, sweet and white. I haven’t been able to stop eating them as part of grain bowls or, let’s be honest, snacking on them right out of the fridge.