Almost one year ago, I learned about PETA’s faux foie gras challenge via the Village Voice, which wrote in my Portobello Mousse as a candidate. Well, hell, if Sarah DiGregorio at the Village Voice thought I should enter I figured I may as well enter and so I sent off the recipe for the vegan version of the Portobello Mousse. And much to my surprise, this week I found out that I won!

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A victory for mushrooms!

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The point of the competition was to find a recipe that can substitute for foie gras without using any animal products, which is something I’m not sure is possible. Ingredients are ingredients, and I’m really not into the whole vegetarian cooking trick of pretending a portobello mushroom is a hunk of steak, or that tofu is fish.

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But I do like deconstructing recipes and finding things that can fool the eye and mouth and yield unexpected results. I used to do something I called the “Seafood Trio” at Heirloom which was cooking three different kinds of mushrooms the way you’d cook three different kinds of fish: deep fried, sauteed and grilled. The point wasn’t to imitate seafood, it was to do the same thing WD-50 does with its eggless egg: to present the eye with one thing, and the mouth with another. Not for health or political reasons, but for fun.

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My Portobello Mousse comes from that same urge. When you cook with meat, fat carries the flavor, but with vegetables you have to find a way around that. I wanted to base a dish around a vegetable but have the same rich, fatty flavor as foie gras for no other reason than to surprise people and have them enjoy what they’re eating. One thing that’s been really cool about this prize is that while the Portobello Mousse has gotten a lot of attention, rarely has the vegan version (which we also offer) and that’s what won this prize, gotten quite as much. I can taste a minor difference between the two, but that’s because I taste them both every day. Most people I know can’t tell which is which, so it’s nice for the vegan mousse to get some respect.

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I’m really hoping this recipe gets used, refined and turned into something different by professional and home cooks around the world. And I want to thank PETA for picking my recipe and for giving me $10,000. Robot waiters, here we come!

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