What Is Imitation Bacon?

Imitation Bacon is any meat that has been ground and seasoned with Imitation Bacon Seasoning, then formed into a loaf and cooked or smoked. You can use Beef, Wild Game, Poultry or even just leaner cuts of pork. Today we are going to be showing you how to make three different types out of Turkey, Leaner Pork and Beef. Rather than a whole muscle product, our imitation bacon will be a ground and formed product. We are going to be making this out of three different types of meat.

Meat Block

2 lb of Ground Beef
2 lb of Ground Pork
4 lb of Ground Turkey
If you are using low fat wild game make sure you have at least 20% beef or pork fat

Additives

1 Bag Imitation Bacon #2 Seasoning
1 package of Carrot Fiber

Process

Our process is going to be very similar for all of these other than the amount of fat that we are going to be adding, or not adding. If you are making this out of whole muscle you need to grind your lean product twice through a 1/8" plate and your fat once through a 3/16" plate. We have some 80/20 ground beef here and some fatty ground pork as well so we are starting out with an already ground product on these. For the Turkey we just stopped by the store and picked up some 85/15 lean to fat ratio pre-ground turkey to make turkey bacon. We’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating, whether you are making Bratwursts or Snack Sticks or whatever, there is nothing wrong with picking up a previously ground product at the store and starting from there if you don’t have a grinder. You won’t have as much control over the entire process but you can still get a great tasty product by doing this.

We have measured all of this out for 2 lb batches, so we have .075 lb (1.2 oz) of the seasoning (which already includes our cure), 4.8 oz of water and .16 oz of smoked meat stabilizer. We are adding smoked meat stabilizer because we don’t want to wait overnight for the cure to work in the meat, basically we are hungry and we want to cook it immediately!

Meat Mixing

So we are going to mix all of this until we have protein extraction and the meat is nice and sticky. With a mixer, this would take about 5 minutes, but since we are doing such small batches we need to do this by hand, so it will just take as long as it takes.

Note

Once you have it all mixed you can put it in 2 lb foil pans or form a loaf on a cooking sheet. We used the foil pans just because it was a little easier

Thermal Processing & Smoking

Stage 1 - 120° for 1 hour
Stage 2 - 140° for 1 hour
Stage 3 - 175° until internal temperature is 160°

Cooling

Once it is done cooking you can either cut it with a knife and eat right away or you can allow it to cool down and then use a slicer to get a more traditional bacon look. Either way is fine, we’ve just been cooking this all day and don’t want to wait any longer. For the best results, slice the imitation bacon, and pan fry just like normal bacon. It will crisp up great and have a taste very similar to traditional bacon!

Wrap up

While all of these are ready to eat at this point the best way to get a true bacon taste is to cook them in a pan or oven to the point where they are crisp before serving or using them in a recipe.

Additional Tips

• If you want to get real fancy with your imitation bacon, and start with whole muscle meat and grind it yourself, you can keep the lean meat separated from the fat to layer the lean and fat meat and truly create a more bacon looking product. We will be simply combining it all together, so we won’t get that separate and visible distinction between the lean and fat particles, so it won’t look as close to normal bacon.

Watch WaltonsTV: How to Make Imitation Bacon

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