Preparing Thanksgiving dinner vegetarian style

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As many as 10 percent of all Americans call themselves vegetarians. So, how do you prepare for one of them sitting at your table for Thanksgiving?

Chefs at the One World Café in Salt Lake City are preparing for their first ever "traditional" Thanksgiving meal tonight. They'll have turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and, of course, pumpkin pie made out of tofu. Executive Chef Giovanni Bouderbala explains, "We're going to use tofu as a crust."

Bouderbala says tofu will also be mixed into the filling instead of eggs and cream. That recipe may scare off many people, but Bouderbala says it's not as bad as it may sound. "It's good. It turned out good," he said.

Along with their traditional Thanksgiving food, they'll be serving other dishes for their vegan friends.

"We're going to have mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy," Bouderbala said. When asked if he was going to put butter or cream in the potatoes he said, "No, we're going to use roasted garlic."

Of course, if you really want a vegetarian Thanksgiving, you could always get Tofurkey. Just don't bake it.

"It just doesn't help the texture of it because it doesn't have a lot of texture. It's kind of a soft, pudding consistency," Harmon's Grocery Executive Chef Kyle Lore said.

He has experience making meatless Thanksgiving dinners. His wife is a vegetarian, which makes him "vegetarian by association." Even he understands why some people find turkey-flavored tofu to be unnatural. But his wife loves it.

"She says the name brand Tofurkey is the best one to stick to," he told us. And, yes, there are off-brand tofurkeys. He says if you plan to serve tofu, marinate it in soy, sesame and rice wine, bread it with corn starch then fry it.

If you plan on serving Jell-O salad, vegetarians won't eat that either because gelatin is an animal-based protein. Lore says his father-in-law has a really nice fruit dessert recipe that doesn't use Jell-O. "He would cook cranberries, mandarin oranges and everything, but he would leave the gelatin out and let it set on its own with the natural pectin from the cranberries."

That no gelatin rule means no marshmallows on the yams, either.

E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com