How to make vegan bacon: 5 tasty and healthy recipes

Bacon is one of the most desired and addictive foods in the world, but not exactly one of the healthiest, and certainly not an option on vegan or vegetarian diets. However, we have Vegetable alternatives to bacon and we can even make vegan bacon at home if we want to enjoy similar flavors and textures in our recipes.

To do this, let’s first see what gives bacon its characteristic aroma, because that will be essential for understand how to make vegan bacon and get closer to a result that reminds us of the aroma of bacon.

The bacon has a intense salty taste with a sweet touch and a texture that are ideal to complement many dishes such as salads, vegetable purees, pasta dishes, sandwiches and hamburgers, stews, tofu scrambled eggs or to eat as is as an appetizer.

One of the factors that makes bacon so successful is its umami taste. Umami is how the “fifth taste” is known. The word comes from Japanese and means “the delicious taste”. When we eat a food that tastes umami, the brain releases neurochemicals that make us want to keep eating it.

Using vegetable ingredients as a base and certain condiments and spices we can achieve reproduce the texture and aroma of bacon. Below you will find some tips to achieve it and up to five different ones vegan bacon recipes to make at home.

Homemade vegan bacon: the best tricks

Vegan bacon can be found on the market, but it is not always as natural as we would like. The good news is that it is not very difficult to prepare vegetable bacon at home. with natural, healthy and quality ingredients.

The most important thing when making vegan bacon is the aroma and flavor, and for this you have to prepare a macerate and macerate the ingredients that we will use for the base of our bacon recipe. For the base we can choose between different types of vegetable proteins such as tempeh, tofu, seitan or make healthier bacon with vegetables such as carrot, eggplant, zucchini or all kinds of mushrooms.The important is cut ingredients into very thin slices so that they absorb the flavor well and have a nice texture. We can also use ingredients such as a variety of fruits and nutssuch as coconut flakes, almonds, cashews, legumes such as cooked chickpeas… marinate them in the vegan bacon marinade and use them for toppings of salads and vegetable purees.

Macerated to achieve the aroma of bacon

As we have seen, we have the ingredients, we have to macerate them and for this it is important use strong flavored seasoningsthose who provide this addictive salty flavor.

When preparing the macerada, the following are usually used as main ingredients:

soy sauce smoked paprika garlic a dash of sweetener such as coconut sugar or maple syrup

We can add liquid smoke, which is bought in specialized stores and which provides the smoked flavor, but it is not necessary. Then, depending on our tastes, we can add other seasonings such as tomato concentrate, cumin, dehydrated onion, nutritional yeast, black pepper, cayenne, Worchester sauce, vinegar….

If we leave the food in the marinade for longer, the flavor will be even more intense.

How to get the texture

Well seasoned ingredients we can cook baked, in a skillet or even in the dehydrator until they start to brown.

If we cook them in the pan, they tend to be more greasy. Instead, if we do in the oven, they are drier and crunchy; Of course, you have to watch them so they don’t burn, especially at the end, since each oven is different.

5 vegan or “no bacon” bacon recipes

In these bacon recipes we use vegetable ingredients as a base such as tofu, mushrooms, coconut, carrot or zucchini. The mash is very similar in each case, but there are small variations.