Bacon That Isn’t Bacon, Made Three Ways

Avoiding grease or meat? Try fake bacon! We prefer “facon,” and tried to make it with three different ingredients. Spoilers: only one worked.

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I’ve never quite understood the hype around bacon. I like bacon; it’s delicious! But I can’t eat piles of it, or get behind the strange Facebook culture that treats bacon as the end-all be-all of foodstuffs. I’m sorry! I’m sure your passion for bacon is well-placed. But my indifference toward bacon enables me to appreciate culinary attempts at fake bacon without being utterly scandalized. So when I got a black bean burger from a food truck weeks ago, I was able to appreciate the beauty of the accompanying coconut bacon. It was…good.

On a sandwich, fried by a competent chef who does this every darn day, the coconut bacon passed inspection with flying colors. It crunched well. The flavor matched. It supported the barbecue sauce admirably. Could this, then, be the perfect bacon substitute? Had I stumbled upon the Holy Grail of bacon: healthy and delicious?

Our culture’s love for bacon produces a significant hurdle to vegetarian eating. How can one give up a few thick slices of bacon with French toast on Sunday morning? I set out to determine that very thing, using three different, somewhat common bacon substitute foods with one recipe. Apparently, bacon flavor is easy to replicate, as just about every recipe online had the same basic three things:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 tbsp liquid smoke

2 1/2 tbsp soy sauce (hint: this recipe is vegetarian! if you want it to be vegan, use tamari instead of name brand soy sauce)

2 1/2 tbsp maple syrup

1 1/2 tbsp coconut oil (or other type of cooking oil as desired)

Plus either: Large coconut flakes, an eggplant, or several mushrooms (ideally King Oyster mushrooms).

Instructions:

1. Slice your “bacon” into strips. Remove the skin from the eggplant using a potato peeler, then use the peeler to strip off bacon-sized slices. Slice mushrooms to the desired length and thickness. If using whole coconuts, use a potato peeler or small knife to remove strips from the inside of the coconut.
2. Combine liquid smoke, soy sauce, and maple syrup in a small bowl and stir until well-mixed.
3. Heat coconut oil in a large skillet. Dip each strip of bacon in the marinade, or brush marinade on as desired. Lay each strip flat in the skillet.
4. Fry the bacon at medium heat until the desired level of crunchiness is achieved. Remove bacon and place on a paper towel-covered plate to cool.

You can adjust the three marinade ingredients slightly to taste. Each ingredient brings an important aspect to the recipe–the maple syrup, when cooked properly, caramelizes over the bacon and gives it a satisfying, sweet crunch. The soy sauce gives it the necessary salt factor. The liquid smoke provides something distinctly “bacony” that I can’t quite explain, but don’t overdo it. Too much liquid smoke leaves the whole thing tasting like a firecracker.

Then there’s the bacon itself. I tried three different foods: coconut, eggplant, and mushroom. Don’t raise your eyebrows at the mushroom, the Internet said it was a good idea (it was not, as you will soon see).

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The coconut required the most work. Most online recipes recommend purchasing pre-sliced coconut flakes. Not the skinny junk you get for baking, but large flakes. My store was bereft of such delights, so I had to buy two coconuts on sale, stick corkscrews in the three dots on the side, drain the milk into a bowl, then tap with a hammer around the fat edge until they broke in half. The downside? Way too much work for bacon. The upside, I learned how to properly break a coconut.

And don’t think I was done once the coconut was halved. Now I had to figure out how to shave flakes out properly with a potato peeler. Oh sure, it worked eventually, but my wrist hurt afterward and I ended up wasting coconut. Moral: buy large coconut flakes if you’re making facon.

The eggplant and the mushrooms were considerably easier. The eggplant required peeling, but once done, a potato peeler shaved off nicely-sized, thick slices that seemed ideal for baconization. The mushrooms required nothing more than slicing into large, slender pieces…though admittedly they didn’t resemble bacon in any way.

Most recipes recommended brushing on the flavor mixture of liquid smoke, maple syrup, and soy sauce. This was not enough flavor for me. I soaked the suckers in juice. I have no regrets.

From there, lay them out in the pan at medium heat and frying until they are the desired level of crisp. I used non-stick pans, but I still recommend a bit of oil (coconut oil, in this case, but anything works). Especially on the eggplant, the oil helps ensure the bacon doesn’t dry out and get rubbery.

Of the three attempts, mushrooms lost badly, but that may have been my own fault. I used shiitake mushrooms, though King Oyster are recommended (King Oyster are more difficult to find and more expensive). The shiitake ended up just tasting…well, just like heavily-seasoned mushrooms. The bacon flavor existed, but it was overwhelmed by the mushroomy texture, which liberal frying did nothing for. I can assume King Oysters will cook differently, but I still don’t think they can overcome the impossible hurdle of simply being mushrooms.

Eggplant was next best. Eggplant’s problem is its rubbery texture, somewhat offset by the oil, but never quite defeated. I have seen elsewhere recommendations to oven-bake eggplant bacon rather than fry it, and perhaps this would solve eggplant’s primary problem.

But let’s talk about coconut and how it is the goddess of bacon substitutes. Coconut is crunchy to begin with, and doesn’t lose that trait in frying, so it ends up with a perfect balance of crisp and pliability, just as bacon should. Coconut’s slight sweetness compliments the syrupy flavor well, without overwhelming it, and the syrup tends to glaze over the coconut bacon to give it a little bit of the sticky texture we expect from good bacon. Because it’s a fruit, it absorbs the salty sauce flavor admirably as well.

When plated alongside a stack of French toast with melted butter and maple syrup, the coconut bacon was by far the most pleasing and most bacon-like of the three. I would eat coconut bacon with my breakfast! There wasn’t a piece left once I served it to my friends and taste-testers.

Next: King Arthur Flour’s New Bakealong Starts with Pane Bianco

Experiment if you like with eggplant and other foods. But if you’re against meaty bacon for whatever reason, coconut facon is by far the (surprisingly!) superior bacon substitute.