Salmon Bacon

Crunchy, smokey, salty, and 100 percent pork free. Use this foodhack to transform smoked salmon into bacon like rashers. It is quick, easy and a real eye opener. Whether you don't eat pork, or simply cutting back on saturated fats, salmon bacon is a great alternative.

The inception of this idea was actually a couple of years ago in a restaurant. I had ordered a fish dish but upon tasting I could have sworn there were bacon bits sprinkled on my cod. Now it had been more than a decade since I tasted the real stuff so I offered some to my fellow diners and they too suspected real bacon. So I asked a waiter if there had been a mistake. He smiled mischievously and told me those bacon bits were actually fried pieces of smoked eel. Eel is an even fattier fish than salmon but it is very much endangered so I never recreated those crispy eel bits. But a week or so ago I had a pizza with smoked salmon and I baked it for a short amount of time on a very high heat. This had caused some bits of salmon to go crunchy and again suspiciously bacon like. Which is why I started experimenting with turning smoked salmon into crunchy rashers, ready to be served with some scrambled eggs, or perhaps a spruced up version of eggs royale.

How To Make It

Ingredient wise you only need some smoked salmon slices and a little bit of neutral vegetable oil. 

Cut the salmon into roughly rasher shaped pieces. Heat up some oil in a non stick pan and add the salmon.

The salmon will rapidly change colour. From the orangy shade of raw salmon to the pinky hue of cooked salmon. There is quite a lot of moisture in the fish that you want to cook out to get it crispy so take your time before turning. You want the edges to gently brown before turning. 

The salmon is quite delicate so be gentle while turning it over. If you want it crispy all the way through you want to make sure to have no big patches of pink showing. Once the oil stops bubbling quite so aggressively the largest amount of water will have evaporated and you can take the rashers out and drain them thoroughly on kitchen paper. 

Now I can only say I find it very tasty, but my carnivorous brother (who was extremely skeptical about this project) assures me it tastes suspiciously like bacon.  It is really salty and flavourfull so a little goes a long way.