A few years ago, a vegan customer asked for a BLT with no B. That is a sad sandwich, and it bothered the kitchen enough that somebody went looking for a vegan bacon worth serving. The packaged ones were thin, salty, and tasted like the smoke flavoring they were painted with. So we started making our own, and it turned out to be one of the more important decisions the menu ever made.
What seitan is
Seitan (say "SAY-tan") is wheat gluten: the protein left behind when you wash the starch out of wheat dough. Cooks in East Asia have been making it for centuries, often as a meat substitute in Buddhist cooking, and it is very good at the job because it has something most plant proteins lack: chew. Tofu is soft. Beans are soft. Seitan has a bite and a grain, and it takes on seasoning the way meat does.
That makes it the obvious base for a bacon. Bacon is not really about pork flavor; it is about salt, smoke, fat, a little sweetness, and the contrast between a crisp edge and a chewy middle. Seitan can do the chewy middle. The rest is up to the cook.
How ours is built
We are not going to print the recipe, but the shape of it is this. The seitan is mixed and seasoned with smoke, salt, a little maple for the sweetness that real bacon gets from its cure, and a few things that push it toward savory. It is cooked, cooled, and sliced into strips. Then, when you order, the strips go onto the same flat-top as everything else and get seared until the edges crisp and the middle stays chewy.
The griddle is the important part. Packaged vegan bacon is usually pre-cooked and just warmed. Ours cooks, which is the same reason we serve peameal instead of Canadian bacon on the other side of the menu. Things that cook on the griddle taste like the griddle.
Where it goes
- The VLT. Seitan bacon, lettuce, tomato, and hemp ranch on toasted white, rye, or wheat. The sandwich that started it.
- The Veggs Benedict. With tofu scramble, grilled tomato, spinach, and cashew hollandaise on a baguette. This one got on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
- The Veggie Quiche (vegetarian, not vegan; there is cheddar in it). Vegan bacon, peppers, onions, and mushrooms.
- Any breakfast. Wherever the menu says "add bacon," it also says "add vegan bacon," at the same price.
- On a fried egg sandwich or a grilled cheese, for the vegetarians who eat eggs and dairy but not pork. There are more of you than the menu categories suggest.
- As a side. Seitan bacon, on a plate, next to pancakes. People do this.
Bacon isn't about pork. It's salt, smoke, sweet, and a crisp edge on a chewy middle.
Who orders it
Vegans, obviously. Vegetarians who want a BLT. Students from up the street who eat plant-based on weekdays. And, more and more, people who eat pork bacon and simply like this one too. It has become a regular's item, not a special-request item, and that was the goal.
After three o'clock
Our sister restaurant across the parking lot took the same view of plant-based cooking at dinner. The Steer's vegan menu is thirteen dishes deep, built around a lentil meatloaf, and served in a room where the person next to you is having a dry-aged, wood-fired steak. We wrote up the full plant-based day on this block, morning to night.
Ours starts at seven, at the diner, with a VLT and a coffee. The bacon will be on the griddle.