I also have a video review of Sunfed Boar-Free Bacon, if you’d prefer to watch the review rather than read, click here
Meatless “meats” are a bit of a weird thing, some people love them and some people won’t go near them. Personally, I don’t eat them all the time but I do like them occasionally especially if I’m after an easy meal option.
Sunfed are a New Zealand company who launched a plant based, meat free chicken substitute a few years ago. And they have now just released a boar-free bacon! I’ve tried a few different brands of vegan bacon in the past few years, some not very good at all and some quite good but none which are amazing and actually resemble bacon.
Knowing how chicken-like Sunfed’s plant based chicken is I was pretty excited to try their bacon.
First impressions – the packaging is very synonymous with the Sunfed brand, it’s pretty much exactly the bacon version of their chicken packaging. There’s a boar on the front, which I’m actually not a big fan of. It’s kind of masculine and angry looking rather than the sort of cute,fluffy animals you get on most vegan packaging. I like the colour scheme though – black and white makes it look really modern and clean and gives the impression of no nonsense or things you don’t need. The only colour on the packaging is a sort of pinky red, which I’m guessing is to resemble the colour of a pig or boar.
The name of this product is “Boar-Free Bacon” but other than that you have to look pretty closely to see that it is actually vegan. Very small next to the word bacon it says “Plant based”, then even smaller down the bottom it says “Vegan”. I think the reasoning for this, and probably also not putting a cute pig on the front is because their strategy is to market not only to those who are already vegan,but to meat eaters too. The packaging does a good job of that.
Moving onto ingredients. There are only 9 ingredients listed and I know what they all are, no weird sounding ingredients, no preservatives or colour or anything like that. It’s also soy free, gluten free, GMO free and palm oil free, making it super allergy friendly.
Nutritional information looks good too – per serve there is just 1.9g of carbohydrates, 0.1 of which is sugar, and 15g of protein. It also has a 4 star health rating on the front.
Taking it out of the package it looks a little bit strange, it’s super oily and smells like liquid smoke.
Real bacon is oily too though, so not a big deal. The instructions on the back of the packet say to cook for 2mins until starting to brown and go slightly crispy. Taking the pieces out of the pack they’re quite firm and do resemble bacon. I add some oil the pan and start frying. It starts sizzling pretty quickly which I’m quite excited about and it smells yum too, it actually smells like bacon! This is weird but in a good way. What is actually weird though is when it’s cooking there is a LOT of foam. It forms a strange sort of foam all over the top of the bacon and it did make it a bit hard to see the bacon underneath it which meant I couldn’t see if it was cooked or browning or not.
It doesn’t stick to the pan at all, it’s really easy to move it around in the pan which is awesome.
It is super quick to cook, so quick I accidentally overcook part of it – oops.
Once it’s cooked I take it out of the pan and the foam disappears (good). And whaaat?! It looks so much like actual bacon!
It smells like bacon too, and it’s gone quite crispy. I pick up a piece and break it in half and it snaps in two (well, mostly). Wahoo meat free bacon which actually crisps up and then snaps! It’s really crunchy to eat too (although remember I did overcook it a bit) and it tastes really good. Very similar to real bacon. I’m going out on a whim here – this is the best plant based bacon I’ve had. I’m very happy with it. I’ll definitely be buying it again and I’m excited to eat some in an actual meal or for breakfast rather than just by itself.
Sunfed Boar-Free Bacon
$7.90 NZD
Pros
- Low Carb and low sugar
- Allery friendly
- Preservative Free
- Bacon-Like
Cons
- Strange foam when it cooks
