Algorithm to remove a character from a word such that the reduced word is still a word in dictionary

Here is the scenario, Given a word remove a single character from a word in every step such that the reduced word is still a word in dictionary. Continue till no characters are left.

Here is the catch: You need to remove the right character, for eg. in a word there may be two possible characters which could be removed and both may cause the reduced word to be a valid word, but at a later stage one may get reduced to the end i.e. no characters left while the other may hang up.

Example:

• planet
• plant
• pant
• pan
• an
• a

OR

• planet
• plane
• lane
• not possible further, suppose lan is not a word. hope you got the idea.

Please see my code, im using recursion, but would like to know if there are better efficient solutions to do the same.

public class isMashable
{

  static void initiate(String s)
  {
    mash("", s);
  }

  static void mash(String prefix, String s)
  {
    int N = s.length();
    String subs = "";

    if (!((s.trim()).equals("")))
      System.out.println(s);

    for (int i = 0 ; i < N ; i++)
    {
      subs = s.substring(0, i) + s.substring(i+1, N);
      if (subs.equals("abc")||subs.equals("bc")||subs.equals("c")||subs.equals("a")) // check in dictionary here
        mash("" + s.charAt(i), subs);
    }
  }

  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    String s = "abc";
    initiate(s);
  }
}