There's been a vegan foie gras recipe from Chefsteps making the rounds lately. I've been casting around for a thing to make for Resshoumania recently and thought whoa cool lemme try this. I also stole a few things from this spinoff recipe that was linked in the comments of the Chefsteps recipe.
The original recipe calls for button mushrooms, but the other recipe uses shiitakes and I had them on hand so I went with those instead. You sweat em in a bit of coconut oil before adding in a generous amount of brandy (the traditional liquor used in foie pate is armagnac, I think), a generous dollop of umami enhancers like miso and tomato paste, and their special spice blend that's VERY anise-forward. I'm not personally the biggest fan of the licorice flavor, but I did wanna mostly stick to the recipe so I went ahead with it.
Ignore the cat hair on the blender, Odin loves rubbing on it. This recipe definitely requires a high powered blender to get the mousse-like consistency and smoothness you would expect from a pate, so into the Vitamix everything went. Tangentially, my previous blender that I had since college was an old black and decker that tried, it really did, but I distinctly remember it seizing up and producing an ominous ozone smell when I tried to use it for blending soaked beans once. Meanwhile the vitamix could probably grind up my glasses into a smoothie if I put em in there.
This is the thickening agent that makes this stuff into a spreadable pate instead of soup. Apparently orders on this are backed up to like Christmas now because this recipe is going viral, but I managed to sneak in before the rush. I don't understand the science but apparently the two kinds of gellan gum thicken this in different ways. It's all greek to me, tbh.
After only like 30 seconds of blending it was looking smooth, and heating up nicely. Once it reached 200 I stopped and moved it into the jars.
The guys in the video say that it sets fast and they were not joking. Literally in under 30 seconds it went from a gloopy pour to "I have to use my spatula to coax it along" to "I have to manually scoop it because it's not budging." After wrestling the pate into the jars (there are hella air pockets despite my best efforts :pensive:) they went into the fridge and they'll come out for Resshoumania I guess.
I took a little bit of the leftovers from the blender pitcher and put it on a mini-bruschette I had lying around and gave it a taste.
The anise smell is pretty strong, but it's nowhere near as pronounced in terms of flavor. I could tell it was there but it wasn't the smack-you-in-the-face-with-twizzlers I'd gotten when I opened up the blender. It's really rich and fatty but (imo) doesn't really coat the palate which is nice. I would not be able to tell it was made from cashews if I didn't know. That said, there is the slight aftertaste of shiitake at the very end and I wonder what it would have been like with the original button mushrooms.
UNFORTUNATELY I haven't had actual foie gras pate often enough to be able to compare this flavor to that off the top of my head. I know a buncha people at the afterparty will be bougie fucks (yall know who you are) who know the taste tho, so we'll put it to the test there!