Mushroom Chopped "Liver"
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 small red onion diced
- 1 10.58 oz box Big Mountain Lion's Mane Mushroom Crumble
- 3 tablespoons finely chopped walnuts
- salt
- freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- Heat the oil in a small skillet. Add the onions and cook until the onions are starting to look a bit black around the edges and are very soft and translucent everywhere else. Add the Lion's Mane Mushroom Crumble and the walnuts. Cook over high heat, until the mushroom crumbles start to caramelize.
- Remove from heat and allow to cool to close to room temperature. Scrape everything from the pan onto a cutting board. Chop the mixture until into fine crumbs that start to stick together. Stir in salt and pepper to taste.
- Refrigerate 1 hour prior to serving for best flavor.
You know I can’t resist a recipe contest! I was excited about this one because one of the products was Big Mountain’s Lion’s Mane Mushroom Crumble. It’s a precrumbled mix of Lion’s Mane, Portobello, and Shiitake mushrooms and can be used as an alternative to beef. When I had gone to the Natural Foods Expo in the before times I tried a lot of mushroom inhansed foods and was impressed with how meaty it could taste. I already have made burgers and things with a mix of both beef and mushrooms so it wasn’t a big leap to think you could just use a mushroom blend (these crumbles also have pea protein and carrots to bulk it up a bit) instead of meat altogether. I love mushrooms!
The theme was “holiday” and I got to thinking about the food we pretty much only make at the holidays. Stay with me because I know this isn’t trendy but one food we normally make is chopped liver. It’s something my husband has fond memories of growing up in a Jewish family in New York City and it’s easy to make with not only chicken livers but the liver that comes in your holiday turkey’s giblet bag. We got in the habit of making it every Thanksgiving with the turkey liver in addition to the traditional Jewish holidays. It is very intensely savory. Obviously, we are okay with eating liver but we have so many vegetarian and vegan family members and friends and even meat-eaters who are just grossed out by liver that I always wished there was an alternative.
Cut to me opening the box of mushroom crumbles and thinking that it looked just like—chopped liver! I had to go for it! I added some walnut to give it a more accurate mouthfeel but, much like chopped liver, its flavor comes from the “meaty” mushrooms and the blackened onions. I’ve always thought that chopped liver’s dominated flavor was onion anyway so it shouldn’t have been a surprise this was such a successful dupe! The texture was very close—we like a chunkier spread vs. a puree–and it was just as intensively savory as the original but was vegan! I can’t wait to make this again at Passover. It was so easy and delicious, I might have eaten it all in one day. It is so much lighter than the original you can do that!
