Pom Pom Mushroom Faux Crab Cakes

Yesterday I went to a mushroom talk and cooking demo to highlight pom pom mushrooms, aka lions mane and other strange names like monkey’s head. The studies showing health benefits are many and varied, but what I found most interesting was studies showing that pompoms helped with MS, Parkinson’s disease, reducing cholesterol, improving liver function, ailments of the stomach and digestive tract, and inhibiting cancers and tumors. That’s a lot of health benefits from one little mushroom!

What I like is they taste good and are quite different from most other mushrooms in texture and flavor. The cooking demo showed us how well pom poms work in a faux crab cake. If you slice them about one inch thick and then just pull the slices apart into one inch clumps they resemble crab bits. Then you saute the pompom bits on high until browned a bit and cool. Use them like you would crab in your favorite crab cake recipe and you have a yummy meatless faux crab cake with many health benefits.

a typical pom pom

I had already planned a crab cake dinner for last night so I thought I’d just try this faux crab cake thing alongside the real thing, but when I started to prep for dinner I found that the crab I had bought the day before had somehow ended up in the freezer so I was lucky to have the pom poms to use instead. I cooked them up the way Alan Kaufman had shown us to use them at the Phillip’s demo and mixed them into the Old Bay Seasoning crab cake recipe. I won’t say that it would fool many people into thinking it was real crab, but it was delicious and quite similar. Pom poms can also be used in place of veal and lobster in many recipes with good results. I hope you can find these golf ball sized wonders of the mushroom world and give them a try.

Pom Pom faux crab cakes with quinoa and veggies