Bacon made from starch

OK. Forgive me for the title. But "starch-water" bacon just sounds terrible. :D

I have heard quite often that it is a shame to waste all the starch that comes from washing out flour for seitan.

If you are one of those people worrying about that, I have good news for you.

You can make pretty tasty "bacon" out of starch water. Credit where credit is due, the recipe was inspired by Jessica Infante's video, but I found that, modified, it could possibly taste a little better.

Duration: 1 hour (+ min. 3 hours waiting time)

Difficulty: easy

Makes a lot of bacon

Ingredients:

1850g of starch water

Some oil to fry

White part:

8g of oil

1g garlic powder

1g onion powder

4g salt

1g mustard powder

5g agar agar

Red part:

10g oil

10g salt

7g liquid smoke

6g soy sauce

7g maple syrup

2g onion flour

1g garlic flour

2g mustard flour

3g yeast flakes/nooch

4g paprika powder

15g beetroot powder (for the color, you can also use food coloring)

5g agar agar

Preparation:

You start, of course, by washing out flour for seitan.

You can find more detailed instructions for this in this recipe.

Only use the water from the first wash, it contains the most starch. I kneaded the dough in the water for 4-5 minutes, then the water was quite milky and then poured 1850g of the water into a bowl.

Of course, you can also take more, but even this amount creates bacon, which is sure to last for atleast 3 days.

I then simply left the water in the bowl in the refrigerator overnight so that the starch can sink to the bottom.

The first picture is right after the seitan has been skimmed off, the second one an hour later. The picture on the right was taken this morning after the water stood for one night. In theory, 3-4 hours should be enough for most of the starch to settle.

Then I weighed the bowl, tared it and slowly poured off water, or at the end skimmed it off until 1000g were out of the bowl. I mixed the remaining starch liquid until a smooth, lump-free mass was created again.

The starch liquid was then divided into 2 bowls, a slightly larger portion with 500g and one with 350g.

The 500g became the red part and the smaller part became the white part for the bacon.

To do this, the starch mixture is simply mixed with the remaining ingredients.

Now a well-coated pan is made hot and then the dough is added.

There are two options for this, the first is to put a few "lanes" of white batter in the pan, which is then supplemented with red. The whole thing should be as thin as possible, so spread everything a little with a spoon or, even better, with a spatula.

The whole thing is now theoretically just a spicy, colorful starch pancake. And just like a pancake, it is then turned and baked on the other side. Then simply put the individual bacon pancakes on a plate.

When you have baked out all of the batter, you can either cut the bacon into strips or carefully tear it. In any case, it looks a little more natural when ripped. But in the end it all depends on the taste. The individual strips can then be fried in oil until crispy.

Try a little bit during the roasting time, the bacon should of course not be too soft and wobbly, but the starch also gets very quickly, very crispy. Just experiment a little.

The "raw" bacon pancakes can also be stored airtight in the refrigerator for several days.

Then this variant is already finished.

The second variant of the preparation is to fill the two doughs separately from each other in squeeze bottles and thus "draw" the bacon in the pan like a 3D printer.

This is then simply fried until the desired crispness and can then be used for burgers or other delicacies.

A nice alternative to seitan bacon, even if it convinces me a little more in terms of taste and consistency. But this is definitely a cheaper alternative, especially when you consider that the starch-water mixture is usually simply disposed of anyway. Either way, a cruelty-free alternative to real bacon. ;)

Guten Appetit!

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