Chef Joy Houston earned her certification in the Science of Raw Food Nutrition at the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute after experiencing the power of foods to heal her own fertility problems, skin conditions and mood swings. She doesn’t just eat raw, she is passionate about spreading the raw food word. Passionate about every aspect of food from farm to table, Houston supports local organic farming by hosting a weekly video podcast on iTunes called The Delicious Revolution. In addition, she teaches raw and living food classes and offers private coaching as well as online teaching with her Rocking Body Raw Food course.
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I have come up with an Eggplant BLT sandwich. Or you can just make the eggplant bacon and then crumble it over your salad. And I find that it definitely satiates my cravings for bacon. So, let’s go ahead and I’ll show you how to make it, and you can give it a try for yourself and see what it does. But, if you think about it, what is it that you love about bacon? It’s probably the saltiness, the fat of course. We’re going to replace the not so great for you saturated animal fat with a good for you extra virgin olive oil, an organic extra virgin olive oil. Definitely a majorly amazing switch for your body, if we can go from that kind of fat that’s in bacon to olive oil, a very good move.
And then the other taste that’s predominant in bacon, of course, is the saltiness. And we can replicate the saltiness, we can do it with just some regular salt, as in some Himalayan sea salt and we can ground that in there. As a matter fact I’ll put just a little in there. And then, but it’s really salty, bacon is really salty. So I’m also going to add… This is from an Artisan Salt Company, I don’t know if you’ve tried any of their salts. Their Chardonnay Oak Smoked Salt is one of my all time favorites, but this one called Salish and it has a very strong smoky smell, so I’m going to go ahead and add some of that in there too. We want our mixture to be nice and salty. Now, it’s of course going to be fatty and of course it’s going to be salty even though its olive oil, but it’s still much better for us than bacon.
So, instead of breaking down and having some nasty old bacon, we are going to attempt to make our own mixture here that will satisfy that craving, in a pinch, okay? So, the third thing that I would say would be good to add is some Paprika, now the reason we want to have Paprika… I’m using a smoked Paprika, which has an amazing flavor. It has a rich, bold, hearty flavor to it, so it’s going to give us that meaty kind of edge that bacon kind of has. This is also smoked version, which I think has a better flavor. Well depending on what you’re using it for, but for this, smoked Paprika is the way to go. The smoke brings also a sense that it’s been grill or roasted or you know however you’re going to cook up your bacon. So, that’s going to be the basis of the flavor. Now, of course, we need something to sustain that flavor and we need something that’s going to get crispy, so we are going to use eggplant.
We certainly can’t mimic the cured, delicious amazing bacon’s of Artisan farmers around the world don’t get me wrong, and when we’re traveling to cool places or when we encounter those people and we taste their craft and we enjoy it, that’s awesome. But, for our everyday diet, yeah, we don’t want to be eating bacon everyday. So, if a craving comes along, let’s try this dish out and see if it does the trick. Now, you can see that I’m taking the outside of the eggplant off because we don’t want purple bacon, we want red bacon. Okay, and then we’re going to start peeling and we want to start at the top. I cut the tip off, so it’s easy to get nice, thicker threads.
So, we are going to push in a little bit and you can see that’s giving me a nice fat slice of eggplant. Now, if you have a mandolin, of course feel free just use a mandolin. I like the control that using the vegetable peeler gives me. It also gives me width of eggplant better, well you know about right. Okay, so now we have some nice greasy, salty, smoky pieces of bacon. Now, two ways to do this. You can put it in a toaster oven, just spread it across length ways across the bars of a toaster oven and put in a piece of tin foil underneath, so that if any of the olive oil, as the grease gets hot as the olive oil gets hot, it will sort of drip down, so you want to catch all of that so you don’t have a fire. And that is one way of doing it. But since I have a dehydrator, I am going to go ahead and dehydrate mine to a crispy crunch. So, in order to do that I’m going to dehydrate them until they are dry to the touch. I’m going to flip them and I’m going to dehydrate them until they are crispy.
We have piggy-saved bacon. Look at that, complete with grease on the towel and everything. So, now it’s just time for us to put it together and make a delicious BLT where no pigs have been harmed. It’s time to have a bite of our piggy-saved BLT. Let me see how it is. Mmmmm… Yum.