- Whoa!
♪ But she looks like bacon. ♪
(bacon crunching)
Hello, everybody. What's going on?
It's your girl, Merle,
and today we're gonna be making something,
something that has been around for a long time
and is now picking up a little speed
on the various platforms, TikTok, Reel,
et cetera, et cetera.
We're gonna be making bacon out of...
(drum rolls)
rice paper.
I have heard, and by heard, I mean, read online
that this is some of the best vegan bacon you can make.
And the original recipe that I'm using today,
and the woman who's been doing this for a long time
is Edgy Veg.
If you guys don't follow her, check her out.
She has amazing vegan recipes.
And I'm going to be following her recipe
for this rice-paper bacon.
So I'm really excited.
I've been wanting to try this for a while.
And since we all know I love spring rolls,
I got a lot of rice paper kicking around in the old kitchen.
So with that, let's get rice into it.
(crowd booing)
Oh no. Okay, okay, okay.
All right, all right, all right.
Seriously, let's get to bacon.
Now we're gonna take two pieces of rice paper
and we are going to place them over each other
to make our bacon a little thicker.
And we're going to quickly, just for a moment,
put that in some water, just to soften it up a bit.
So it's a little bit softer now.
I'm gonna take some kitchen scissors,
and I'm gonna cut these into some bacon strips.
So now I'm slicing up my rice paper
to look more like strips of bacon.
I can see it taking a bit of time to get enough of these
so that you have a decent haul of bacon,
but hey, less time than raising
and slaughtering a pig, though, right?
All about perspective, you know?
We're gonna start off by making our marinade.
I'm pouring in some tamari, nutritional yeast, olive oil,
which will serve as the fat.
I love a good, fatty bacon in my day.
Some maple syrup for, you guessed it, sweetness.
Garlic power, powder, and power,
some smoked paprika, black pepper, and finally,
liquid smoke.
Pow!
Now, we're just gonna mix that all together.
Ooh, I love a nice, thick marinade.
It smells really good.
So I've tried both methods
when it comes to actually coating our rice-paper bacon.
I did the whole dunking thing,
I did the whole brushing thing, and you know what?
It's just gonna be a little bit of a nightmare either way.
Your fingers are gonna get sticky, sticky, and that's okay.
The bottom line is, you just want both sides
of the vegan bacon to be coated.
I'm going to try this marinade, actually.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Kind of has an aftertaste of bologna.
In a good way.
Bologna. Delicious.
Oh my God.
Now it's time to bake.
So we're gonna take our bacon strips,
and we're gonna put them in the oven
at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's 204 degrees Celsius.
See? You thought I was gonna forget.
I get ya. Okay.
So let's put it in for about seven to eight minutes.
Now, what to do while I wait?
(clock ticking)
Should I write a song about bacon?
All right, let's go, maestro.
♪ Don't go bacon my heart ♪
♪ I couldn't if I tried ♪
♪ Ooh ooh ♪
♪ Nobody knows me ♪
I forgot to set a timer.
I'm having too much fun. (laughs)
Wow.
Okay, I don't know how much time is left.
I'm gonna just go by eyeballing it.
I'm guessing about two minutes left.
And already, it looks really cool.
I've been admittedly skeptical
about not necessarily the taste 'cause I love rice paper.
I love the texture, the chewiness.
I could see how it could crisp up,
but how is it gonna be crispy and chewy like bacon?
That's what I wanna know.
Whoa!
♪ But she looks like bacon, yeah ♪
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
She's crispy, and she's fatty.
Wow. Look at this beautiful, beautiful bacon.
Wow, wow, wow.
I had seen it in other videos,
but it's really something else.
It's breathtaking when you see it in person.
I am so impressed by this.
Honestly, amazing.
You guys know how I roll.
I usually keep the judgment out of the kitchen.
I just want to say a quick thing about pigs.
They're very intelligent creatures.
Some scientists believe that they are even smarter
than three-year-old human children
and more intelligent than dogs.
97% of pigs in the US are factory farmed.
They're horrible living conditions.
So any way that you can reduce the amount of pork
you're putting in your body is a really good thing
for the planet.
I'm not saying you're a bad person if you eat bacon,
real bacon.
All I'm saying is the more we can incorporate alternatives
to pork, the easier we can be on the planet
and on the animals.
Let's try our vegan bacon.
It really does kind of resemble fatty bacon,
which is what I used to always really like,
some of the dark, crunchy bits, but also some fat.
Let's see how she cracks.
(bacon cracks)
Oh, that's a nice sound.
(bacon crunching)
I'm gonna brush mine one more time with the marinade.
(bacon crunching)
Mmm.
Wow. Wow.
This is really cool.
I love that this has a nice crunch to it,
like actual bacon does.
The look of this thing is spot on.
I'm not going to say that the flavor
identically resembles bacon,
because this has less of the chewy, fatty element to it
but I wonder if you could even double the amount
of rice paper that you stacked on top of itself.
It might be thicker and it might be a little chewier
to balance it out.
I think the secret to this whole thing
is making sure you paint it with the marinade again
once you take it out of the oven.
(bacon crunching)
Mmm.
I'm gonna go out there and say,
as far as just crunching and munching on these,
it's less of a bacon experience,
but to have this on a BLT would be exceptional,
and they carry the flavor of the marinade
really, really well.
Most important question.
Did this live up to the hype?
I'm gonna say absolutely, yes, it did.
From one to bacon, I would give this like an eight
because the texture is really good.
The crunch is really nice.
The marinade, spot on.
Ooh. Damn.
This is really good.
Thank you, Edgy Veg.
This is a beautiful, fantastic, easy recipe.
Oh my God.
I'm about to make like a thousand more of these.
Thank you so much for watching, everybody.
Like and subscribe,
and let me know what you'd like me to make next.
(toilet flushing)
(beep)
The things I do for a laugh.
(upbeat music)