REALEAT VS. QUORN - VEGETARIAN BACON WARS

Ever since I decided to stop eating meat (ever since haha, you'd think it had been years, it's not actually very long ago) I realised it wasn't really that hard to give it up. UNTIL I smelled the delicious aroma of bacon frying. OH BACON! Sweet bacon! It was my main staple ingredient for EVERYTHING before, so how would I actually live without it??

Admittedly, at one point I was like.... hmmmmm... can't I just be a vegetarian that eats bacon? And then I was like UM NO, NO I CAN'T.

So I looked for some alternatives, and found two in town.

Quorn bacon is made from the same mycoprotein stuff that all Quorn things are made from. This mycoprotein, is a fungal substance of course, and that means it's kind of spongy. This sponginess is really good at imitating chicken, but pork... hmm.. not so much. Especially because the most important thing about bacon is it's crispiness and chewiness. You can fry the hell out of this stuff, but it will NEVER be crispy.

So really the only thing that makes this stuff like bacon at all, is the flavouring, which is reminiscent of the kind of bacon flavour you'd find on smoky bacon crisps.

This may all sound really negative, but the stuff isn't so bad. Just don't make the mistake of trying to eat it on its own. On a sandwich with lots of other stuff, it's actually really, really good. It gives you the flavour that real bacon would have given you otherwise and does make a great replacement.

Now the second one:

This stuff looked really good as it had a sort of imitation rind, which was promising to be crispy. It's made from wheat and soya protein, and when I got it out of the box I was like, whoa, this does not look like the picture. It looks kinda gross actually, really dry and flaky.

It has a slightly stronger flavouring than the Quorn stuff, more smoky and a bit.... weird, but the crispiness totally made up for that.

Once again, don't attempt to eat it on it's own... only on a sandwich or something like that.

So overall, I guess there is no winner really. So next time, I'll combine the two!