In 1995, Tibbott made a fateful tempeh delivery to one of his clients, a vegetarian catering company called the Higher Taste, owned by Hans and Rhonda Wrobel. For a few years, the Wrobels had been making a stuffed tofu roast, grinding and seasoning the soybean curd themselves, molding it in a colander lined with cheesecloth, then glazing it with orange juice and soy. The process was laborious enough that they only sold the roasts to order. Tibbott, meanwhile, had been experimenting with recipes for tempeh burgers. One failed batch, ground with wild rice and cranberries, had strayed so far that it tasted, he thought, like a Thanksgiving dinner. He and the Wrobels devised a partnership: he would stamp his tempeh mixture into faux-turkey “drummettes,” and sell them alongside the couple’s stuffed-tofu roasts as a frozen combo, through Turtle Island’s distributors. To christen the new product, Tibbott, who has a wry and stubborn sense of humor, borrowed a term that had been circulating among vegetarian food purveyors. Over the objections of Hans Wrobel and others, who had agitated for something more dignified, the Thanksgiving Tofurky was born.
The first frozen Tofurky meal, priced at thirty dollars, was a hard sell with retailers and a mad success with the customers who managed to find it. Vegetarians, starved for protein substitutes, were apparently able to overlook a significant flaw in the loaf’s design: freezing tofu changes its structure, turning it into a giant soy-protein sponge. In 1997, this textural glitch was resolved when a failed wheat-gluten manufacturer in Salt Lake City sold Turtle Island its recipe for making gluten—which would help maintain a taut, springy texture when thawed—and then extruding both tofu and stuffing into netting designed for hams. By that year, newspapers across the country were writing bemused tributes to this new Thanksgiving main course. Stores on the West Coast clamored for it. Calls requesting that Tibbott ship the roast East poured in. The name was silly, sure, but who could fail to remember it?