Fake meat is famed the world over

A Thanksgiving savior for any vegetarian, Tofurky is no joke

By Liz Crain

The Portland Tribune, Nov 21, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

Ted Schnieman of Portland brings Tofurky in from the cold in Moscow’s Red Square.

COURTESY OF TURTLE ISLAND FOODS

Portland prides itself on its wide array of vegetarian and vegan-friendly markets and restaurants, but even here Thanksgiving is and most likely always will be, at its core, carnivorous.

Sure, there are the standard sides sans meat — candied yams, green-bean casseroles, baked apples, etc. — but the real deal is usually the big bird smack dab in the center of the table.

Seth Tibbott, founder of Turtle Island Foods, holds this truth to be self-evident, but he has been working to carve out a holiday food niche for the herbivorously inclined ever since he introduced Tofurky to the market in 1995.

Tibbott founded Turtle Island Foods in 1980. His business goal: to make tempeh (fermented soybean cake) and elevate it to the stature of the veggie standards yogurt and granola.

Working out of an abandoned school in Husum, Wash., north of Hood River, Tibbott and a couple of friends supplied tempeh mainly to small co-ops and markets in the Portland and Seattle areas. In 1992, they moved to their current location in Hood River.

Tibbott had been delivering tempeh to Hans and Rhonda Wrobel of the Higher Taste, gourmet vegetarian food manufacturers, in Portland for nearly a decade when he discovered their holiday tofu loaf.

The three-pound mashed tofu and spice loaf, formed in a cheesecloth-lined colander, baked until golden brown and served with nutritional-yeast gravy, was a holiday hit. Even though the loaf was spendy, about $40 a pop, plenty of Portland folks came by every holiday to reserve a loaf.

Tibbott says: “I had always wanted to do something for Thanksgiving — that was my big thing. We had tried stuffed squash, pumpkin, gluten roast that you couldn’t cut with a saw. It was just one disaster after the next — nothing stuck. So I was pretty excited by this.”

Tibbott and the Wrobels joined forces and used the holiday loaf recipe for their original commercial Tofurky in 1995 and 1996. At that point, the Wrobels backed out, and in 1997 Tibbott and a team of collaborators crafted the current Tofurky recipe.

One major problem with the original Tofurky recipe, according to Tibbott, was that it couldn’t be frozen.

“So what we did was take seitan (wheat gluten), basically, and then we combined that with tofu because the seitan by itself has kind of a chewy gluten edge to it, and the tofu lightened that up,” he says. “The seitan gave freezability and structure to it. That’s the whole marriage of Tofurky right there.”

Another change that bolstered Tofurky’s popularity was slimming down the faux-bird to a pound and a half.

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