Notes to self, and a question for others

[magid]

1. Bring hair restraints to the gym. Working out with hair flying everywhere is annoying.
   
2. Put the Boston Organics box out Wednesday morning, and stop having dreams about forgetting it.
   
3. When I next find $very_limited_availability_perfect_gift_for_X, get it immediately; it's much more satisfying than having to figure something else out later.
   
4. It's better to do a load of laundry at least once a week, rather than running out of undergarments all at once. Even though doing laundry is a nuisance.
   
5. Get onions!

Question for bacon-eaters: how salty is bacon? To me it just smells meaty, but the soy bacon stuff I tried this morning is incredibly salty, and I'm trying to figure out how close an approximation it is.

Comments

[jaq.livejournal.com]

mmm, bacon. It varies in degree, but it does tend to be salty, after all the curing process involves either rubbing it with salt or injecting brine into it.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I think I hadn't really paid attention to the process before, or assumed it wasn't so dissimilar from making meat kosher (salting it), or making pastrami. But this stuff was much saltier than I'd eat again. And real bacon smells pretty good to me. Ah, well.

[queue.livejournal.com]

Well, bacon is salted and then smoked before it reaches the store, so, yeah, in general it is pretty salty

[magid.livejournal.com]

I just assumed that it wouldn't be so much more so than the average kosher meat that's been smoked.

Or maybe I haven't had the saltier kosher cold cuts in a long time.

[curly-chick.livejournal.com]

Bacon is salty and smoky. However, immitation bacon often gets it wrong.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Most soy meats aren't 100% on, but it sounds like this might be a greater divergence than most...

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

As noted, bacon is pretty salty, yep. Which veg-bacon did you try? They vary considerably. My personal favorite is the tempeh "Fakin' Bacon" which doesn't even make a show of trying to approximate texture, but has the whole smoky flavor going. I really like the texture of tempeh, too. (It also confused T_W one morning, who smelled the cooking and apparently wondered if we were making actual bacon. :)

I've also had another brand that I don't recall which tried harder for the look-and-feel, and that was interesting, but I'm generally more in the "just make it yummy" camp.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

And for the record, the fakes I've eaten were generally not as salty as the real thing.

Darn, now I want some FB...

[magid.livejournal.com]

I tried "smart bacon", which is a soy-based one, not tempeh. The last time I tried tempeh, I didn't like it, at all, which surprised me, since I like pretty much all soy/gluten/etc fake meats other than it. Maybe I should give the tempeh bacon a try, though. (Not as salty? How do people manage?)

I'm also in the "make it yummy" camp, though sometimes I wonder if what I find yummy isn't exactly what others do... (I remember liking the extremely peculiar fake meats my mom would buy in the late 70s, fr'instance.)

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, iirc, that is much saltier than the FB, and I think was the one that tries more for the look-and-feel. Tempeh (which is soy) can vary greatly, since it's all about how it's flavored, really.

[cellio]

Former bacon-eater here. Salty, but not as salty as the fake stuff. (Wow, the bacon memories haven't faded yet, after several years!)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Huh. Pheromone remembers fake bacon as being less salty than real. I wonder if it's all about regional variation and different soy products...

(My impression from random friends who've gone kosher is that their most fondly remembered food they no longer eat is either bacon or scallops/shrimp/lobster, never anything more exotic.)

[cellio]

There's probably a lot of variation in the fakes. I think I tried Morningstar Farm and Boca before giving up in my tastes-like-bacon quest.

I miss bacon, but the food I most miss from my pre-kosher days is probably the eel from the sushi bar. Grilled with a nice sauce... yummy!

[magid.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried the Morningstar Farm bacon, but I really like their sausages.

Eel, huh? Does it flake like fish, or is it more meat-like?
(It doesn't scream out "sea insect" the way most non-fish seafood does to my brain.)

[cellio]

Eel is more meat-like, though like meat can get to that falling-apart-tender stage if cooked just right.

I've only encountered eel in the one form, and never cooked it myself. I was pretty dubious the first time the sushi chef handed me a piece and said "here, try this", because I had this eel=snake=icky idea, but it was quite tasty.

[geekosaur]

The difference between kashering meat and preserving it in salt is pretty severe; for preservation you want to use granular salt so as much salt gets into the meat as possible, whereas kashering uses coarse salt specifically to minimize the amount of salt that gets into the meat. This makes them less than comparable.

(Bacon is both salted and smoked; some other foods which are preserved in salt without smoking (for example, salted cod and salt pork) are so full of salt that they are literally inedible until they've been soaked thoroughly with frequent changes of water to remove the salt.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

I think I was basing my idea of saltiness on an article or two I'd read about brining poultry, where there was a short aside about how one shouldn't brine kosher poultry, since it's already (effectively) been brined.

I knew about salt cod having to be rehydrated with many changes of water, but never really thought about how it's similar to bacon.

I think I'm learning from this that I I can tolerate less concentrated saltiness than most Americans.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Some bacon is saltier than other, but all bacon is salty.