Recipe of the Month: Eggplant bacon

Brian and I are almost entirely off meat and dairy at this point, and for the most part, it hasn't been a struggle. But one thing we occasionally miss is bacon. There are a few recipes, like split-pea soup, potato-avocado salad, and roasted veggies, that really aren't the same without it. 

So whenever I spot a new vegetarian bacon alternative, I print out the recipe, each time hoping that it will take the place of bacon in our hearts. But so far, nothing has been up to snuff. Even my favorite vegan blogger has let me down on this. Her banana peel bacon, which seemed like a fabulous something-for-nothing trick, was more like some sort of weird jerky than bacon, and her mushroom bacon, while reasonably tasty, had neither the flavor nor the crunch of the real thing. 

The other day, something got me on the hunt for a vegan BLT recipe, and I came across one on Minimalist Baker that called for "my Crispy Eggplant Bacon." This piqued my interest, since I already know that (1) I really like the texture of cooked eggplant, and (2) you can get nearly anything to taste sort of like bacon with the right marinade. Could putting those two things together add up to the perfect veggie bacon substitute I'd been craving?

I clicked through to the recipe, and it didn't look too complicated. And I knew we happened to have an eggplant in the fridge (Brian can't resist it, even though he only knows a few ways to prepare it). So I printed it out and presented it to Brian, and he offered to make a batch for this morning's breakfast.

Our version of this dish was not fully vegan. It calls for vegan Worcestershire sauce, which we didn't have and didn't want to buy just for this, so we used regular Worcestershire, which has a tiny bit of anchovy in it. Thus, a tiny fraction of a percent of the total volume is animal-based. But it would be quite easy to make a fully vegan version with the right ingredients.

Texture-wise, this "Crispy Eggplant Bacon" isn't really that crispy. We don't have a mandoline slicer, but Brian was able to cut very, very thin strips from the eggplant using our vegetable peeler, and they still came out like Kinda Floppy Eggplant Bacon. I don't think you could get it really crisp without burning it.

As for the flavor, these limp little strips did indeed taste somewhat like bacon. But they also tasted distinctly like, well, eggplant. Under the smoky, salty, savory marinade, there was a faint hint of eggplant's slightly bitter, plant-like taste. That's not a flavor I object to at all, but it did seem a bit out of place at the breakfast table. Perhaps this eggplant bacon would fit in more naturally in a savory dish, such as the BLT recipe where I initially came across it.

Even with its faults, the eggplant bacon was tasty enough that Brian and I had no problem polishing off the entire batch (about a quarter of an eggplant's worth) between us. And since it was technically a vegetable, we felt no guilt about gobbling down that much of it, as we undoubtedly would have eating five or six rashers of real bacon at a sitting. But we're not sure it's good enough to be worth making on a regular basis.

When I expressed mild disappointment, Brian said he was pretty satisfied with the plant-based bacon alternative he invented himself: thin strips of tofu, marinated in soy sauce and Liquid Smoke, baked on a cookie sheet until they're nearly burnt. This, to his mind, does a very good job of approximating both the flavor and the texture of overcooked bacon — which he happens to like. 

So far, I've only tasted Brian's tofu bacon in the form of crumbled bits in a soup or salad. It's certainly good enough for that purpose, though it doesn't lend its flavor to the dish the way real bacon would. But I've asked him to prepare some larger slices of it sometime so we can see how it serves in the place of real bacon strips. Then we can see if it works better than the eggplant bacon as a breakfast food, or even whether it makes a good vegan BLT.