- So last week, Molly sent me a TikTok
of this guy Rj THE Magician
who kind of was laying in bed one day
and concocted this idea of making vegan bacon out of bread
like a literal piece of bread and it looks really good
and literally,
I feel like the next day it was all over the internet
so I had to try it for myself.
The marinade itself looks pretty similar
to what we do with our rice paper bacon
which you guys know all about and love.
It's very much the same ingredients.
So it's soy sauce, maple syrup, there's oil,
he adds MSG to his, nooch, paprika and garlic powder
and then his secret ingredient apparently
is this Tabasco chipotle which I already happened to have
which is great.
So I'm gonna mix together all of these ingredients
and then we're going to tackle the bread.
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MSG, nutritional yeast, garlic powder and paprika.
So we've got our spices in there.
I'm sure if you don't have MSG, you can just use salt.
Maple syrup.
And I'm sure you could probably do this
with whatever your favorite like bacon marinade is.
Soy sauce, oil and then apparently this is for color
as well as flavor.
Add quite a bit of that
and then I'm just gonna mix that all together
and transfer it to a plate
which will be nice and easy for marinating the bread.
All right, so our base of the bacon is a piece of bread.
I just got normal white bread
'cause I figured it was the most neutral.
I did see a followup video like right before we shot this
that he thought potato bread worked really well
which I will have to try next time
but I don't have that today
but you wanna use a rolling pin and flatten it out.
If you don't have a rolling pin,
I mean, you can use like a bottle of wine or something
but I do think the key to this
is using something like a rolling pin
to really flatten it out.
So I'm gonna flatten out the piece of bread,
cut off the crusts and then cut it into bacon like strips.
I mean, essentially what you end up with
is a piece of gluten
which is what we make a lot of vegan bacon out of already,
right, seitan?
Same thing but different
and then I'm going to flatten each one of these.
You don't really see any of that crumb.
It's just one uniform flat piece of bread.
All right, that's exactly what we want.
So in his video, he had set up a couple forks
to lay the bacon on top of.
I'm going to do the same thing.
I've also put my marinade in a plate.
I have a plate with a lip so it kind of contains it all
and that will just allow me to really quickly
put the marinade on the bread without soaking it too much.
My oil here, I have one half of avocado oil.
The other half, plant-based butter
just to make sure that nothing burns.
I find that that's the best combination.
That's a great combination for making pancakes
if you need one
if you find that you're burning your pan all the time
or the oil is burning.
All right, so I'm going to dip the strips into the marinade,
throw it into the pan
and he says that we wanna cook this over a low heat
turning constantly.
All right, so very quickly putting the bread
into the marinade, tossing it into the oil
and then he says to turn it a lot.
I mean, it's not very dark
so I'm gonna try basting it with more of the sauce
and I don't wanna add too much
'cause I don't want it just to burn.
I think if I were to do this again,
I know I haven't even tried it yet
but I feel like the bread is having issues
clinging onto the oil that's in the marinade
and we fry it in so much oil so maybe we don't need oil
so I would definitely cut down on the oil I think.
I'm gonna do a couple different lengths of time.
So these ones put them on to forks.
They're really sticky.
These ones I'm not gonna baste at all.
The maple syrup is definitely caramelizing quite a bit
which is making things pretty sticky.
It is also a lot of maple syrup.
I turned down the heat a little bit
so maybe we'll get more of like a toastiness.
Why are they so difficult to pick up?
There we go.
Yeah, these ones are getting more
of like a toasted look to them.
Ah, hot.
Don't touch your hot food with hot oil on it.
All right, so we have three different lengths of time
and thicknesses and all of that.
So these two were basted a lot
and cooked for a longer amount of time.
The second two, they were just cooked,
they were cooked a little bit shorter, basted a little bit
and then the last ones are not basted at all
and they're cooked for a shorter amount of time.
So I'm gonna take a little piece of each one
and give it a little test.
So the first one's very rich in flavor.
I'm getting a lot of smokiness, a little bit of char
and the second one is richer in flavor
like you can taste more, has less of the char
and then the third one,
I actually like the texture on the third one the most.
That's the shorter amount of time but it's missing,
actually, is it?
Let me try that again.
Doing a combination of cooking it
for a shorter amount of time
and basting it only a little bit
I think gives you the outcome that you want.
It's a really good bacon substitute.
I could totally see this to add like some crunch
and some salt and some sweetness in a BLT.
It kinda tastes like barbecue chips.
That's what it reminds me of.
I think I still like rice paper bacon more
but it's such an innovative recipe
but I don't know that I would just like sit here
and eat just this on its own as a snack
whereas I definitely would rice paper bacon.
Definitely worth the try, see if you like it.
All right, so we are back to a Gordon Ramsay recipe.
This one actually looks promising.
So he did a BLT on I think it was TikTok
or Instagram video reel or something, I don't know,
and he took rice paper
which we know and love and have been doing forever
and filled it with marinated tofu
which I thought was a very interesting idea
so we're gonna try it out.
This recipe seems a lot more promising
than the last one that we did
so I'm very excited about that.
It's pretty much the exact same marinade
that we make with our rice paper bacon
which love to see it just that he added melted vegan butter
which is interesting.
So let's start with the marinade
and then kinda go from there.
All right, so he adds some sriracha
and then two tablespoons of nutritional yeast.
We've got our spices.
So paprika, garlic, cayenne.
So I guess this is gonna be some spicy bacon.
We've got tamari.
It's a very thick marinade.
Maple syrup.
Liquid smoke.
Melted butter.
I like the melted butter addition.
Also adds more salt.
Oh and water.
One, two, three, all right.
Now it'll be less thick.
That makes sense.
And then give that a whisk.
I like how red it is from the sriracha.
It's very pretty.
Set that aside.
And now it seems that we get our tofu.
So place pressed tofu in a bowl.
Using hands, crumble tofu into pea-sized pieces.
Season with remaining nutritional yeast
so that would be a tablespoon
and three tablespoons of marinade.
All right.
(calm music)
Now I'm going to add a tablespoon of nutritional yeast
and then three tablespoons of the marinade.
Mix that together.
I did manage to find these square ones
which makes making bacon so much easier
than the round ones that we've been using for years.
So one thing that he doesn't do in this recipe
that I do in mine
is I put it through warm water first to soften it
and then I put it in the marinade.
He is sticking these right into the marinade
which will definitely help more of the marinade stick
so you'll probably get like a richer, deeper flavor
which is something I would like to try
for my recipe as well.
They're about like an inch and a quarter, inch and a half.
My shallow bacon dish.
Jokes, that's why you're here.
Yes?
Yes.
All right, so our marinade is in here.
All right, so he says take the strip,
put it right into the marinade, both sides,
he says until it becomes pliable.
It's quite thick so I don't know.
So I guess something like this maybe
and then put it onto there.
Crumble with tofu which should represent like that.
It says on the instructions.
Maybe something like that I guess.
Take a second strip and do the same thing again
and then I guess just lay it on top.
Something like that
and then they'll just come together as they bake.
I would probably like this marinade
to be a little bit thinner.
There's not a ton of moisture
that's helping this to become easily pliable.
If it doesn't work then we know to add more water next time.
I mean, rice paper really has become
like the it vegan ingredient these days
for like chicken skin and bacon recipes
and so much you can do with it.
So I was concerned about running out of marinade
so I did add a little bit more water to the marinade here.
So I mean, it'll be interesting to see
how the last three compared to the first four
'cause you're definitely getting more pliability.
Is that a word?
I don't know.
So then we stick it into the oven for 10 to 12 minutes.
It says flipping halfway through.
I'm gonna be curious to see how that turns out
and then that's it.
All right, 10 To 12 minutes.
He says to flip it but it's on this baking grill sheet thing
so I don't know that, this is gonna be really hard to flip.
I'm worried about ruining the integrity of it
so I'm just gonna not flip it
and just kind of let it do its,
it's just not, it's really flimsy.
How does he flip it in the video?
Like how do you flip this?
Maybe when there's like a couple minutes left, I'll flip it.
All right.
Keep going.
So I was struggling to figure out
how I was going to flip this
and then I watched his video and he doesn't,
he doesn't actually cook it on the rack
that he says to cook it on in the written version
of the recipe.
So I'm just not gonna flip it.
Because it's cooking on a rack,
it is getting air circulation on both sides
so I'm just not gonna flip it.
It's also really, really wet
because the marinade is so thick
so I'm going to cook it for like five extra minutes
and kind of see how that works out
but yeah, what he's making in the video
and what's written in his physical recipe is different.
So just FYI if you try this.
All right, so I let it sit for about five minutes
to try and crisp up and it crisped up a little bit.
Something that I will say
is definitely water down the marinade a little bit more
and then do wipe off that excess
or else it'll take longer to crisp up
but I mean, it's pretty good.
It's pretty good.
I think next time I would do what I just said
but also add less tofu
so that there's less moisture in the middle
and it crisps up a bit more and it's also really spicy.
I don't know bacon to be spicy
so I'd probably remove the cayenne.
Yeah and less on the sriracha 'cause it's pretty spicy.
I mean, it's like elevated rice paper bacon.
I would love to try this with my own marinade and not his
and see how it goes but yeah, it's pretty tasty.
All right, so there you have two more bacon recipes
that you can try out at home
and see if you have found your perfect vegan bacon yet.
I'm definitely going to work with this recipe
a little bit more and see if I can come up with something
that makes me super, super, super happy
and thank you again to Herbaland
for sponsoring today's video.
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the US and the Canadian one
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you want me to test out,
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Okay, bye.
(calm music)