I bumped into a friend/reader yesterday who asked me, completely sincerely, why I don’t try turkey bacon in place of the real thing.

There is so much truth to be told on this subject, but underneath it all, I truly never thought of it because I don’t think of turkey bacon as food, despite the fact that it can be kosher and might technically fill the role of “bacon.”

People who have never tasted bacon might not have much use for the turkey substitute, so for those out of the loop I will summarize turkey bacon: it’s a health food, the particle board of cured, sliced meats, processed and pressed together with way less fat and absolutely none of the natural muscular/fatty structure of the real pork bacon or even its distant relative, beef bacon. (I’ve had beef bacon, but it tastes suspiciously like corned beef.)

So yes, the short answer is, I never even remotely came close to considering it as a bacon solution because even when I am not trying to match recipes, I am not inclined to eat it.

The longer answer has a lot of parts. First, I suspect that turkey bacon, designed as most packaged turkey bacon products will tell you to have less fat and be way more “heart-healthy”, doesn’t have enough natural salt or fat to infuse a recipe with the kind of flavor that pork fat provides.

Second, that stuff never gets crispy.  OK, well only if you microwave it within an inch of its life between two wads of paper towel.  But then you’ve lost the fat to the paper towels, and so far none of the recipes I’ve witnessed call for totally crispy bacon.  So it’s a lot of work for not a lot of return in the areas for which bacon might typically be used.

Third… well, this is disingenuous but whatever.  I’m tired of talking about this.  I’ll just refer you back to the short answers, in which I’m not motivated by or attracted to turkey bacon as an ingredient.

However, I feel sufficiently guilty dismissing it that I will probably seek to include it in experiments in the not too distant future.