Bacon or Ham flavoring for Vegans or Vegetarians - is it possible?!

Bacon or Ham flavoring for Vegans or Vegetarians - is it possible?

I'm making a Navy Bean soup and so far everything is vegan friendly but I was wondering if there was something that would give it a ham or bacon flavor that would be concidered vegan. Thanks, I'm a new vegan and I'm still figuring this stuff out!

17 hours ago
I'm going to put a little liquid smoke flavoring in the soup - I wonder if there is something like that that is bacon flavor.

It's quite possible! There's several options available to you.

For your soup you can use a dollop of Marmite, it's a yeast paste that's available at most health food and some grocery stores (and of course the web<g>). Besides having a flavor quite reminiscent of bacon it also *tastes* quite salty (it's actually fairly low in sodium) so don't add salt, instead add Marmite until your soup tastes salty enough.

The Lightlife 'bacon' will work, but it's flavor is subtle so use more than you'd think you need. Frying it in oil will strengthen the flavoring! Add the frying oil to the soup since it picks up quite a bit of the taste.

Any of the vegan 'ham' products will work like Lightlife 'bacon', fry them until crisp, then add the crumbled product plus the oil to your soup.

Torula yeasts have a smoky, meatish flavor that's outstanding for your use. But they are *very* hard to obtain in non-industrial quantities<sigh>. Torula is almost certainly the flavoring used to impart 'porkiness' to any of the vegan replacement products!

Bragg's Liquid Amino's work much like Marmite in imparting a 'meaty' flavor to recipes. It's not quite as 'porkish' as Marmite but still works well. Marmite and/or Bragg's are my flavoring of choice for refried beans (when I can't get torula<g>).

You can also use a strong Tamari (wheat free soy sauce) like San-J or Eden, not very meatish but they add similar 'dark' flavors.

Lastly; have you ever considered adding some (minced) dried mushrooms to the soup?