Since the dawn of food time, man (and woman) has been struggling to find an alternative to bacon. Turns out the answer was right under our sea all the time

I remember going veggie many years ago, my girlfriend was veggie and while she didn’t mind my eating meat she disapproved of it, so I went veggie too.

It was okay actually, but we ate an awful lot of fried food for flavour and put on a lot of weight. So it wasn’t entirely successful.

Meat was not on my menu but like so many people trying to go veggie there was one temptation almost irresistible – the bacon sandwich. It was easy to avoid making one at home, but I was doing a lot of work on TV commercials at the time and on every film set at around 7am, studio or location, the bacon butties would appear. And I could not resist.

And I stopped being a veggie.

So when I’m told seaweed can give me a bacon hit with none of the guilt, I am sceptical. There have been bacon alternatives before but not even Linda McCartney pretended they were any good.

This Seamore Foods  I Sea Bacon doesn’t look to hopeful in the pack. It just looks like dried seaweed, which of cours it is. The blurb says you can eat it from the pack, like jerky.

I tried that and it was even worse than kale, hard to chew, fishy flavoured, and it got into every tooth crevice almost immovably. A fail. Then I tried frying it in oil, as instructed on the pack as method two. Twenty seconds a side, no more. What a revelation.

It became super-crispy and tasted very much like bacon. Very much indeed, quite supernaturally so in fact. It has no thickness, so you’d need a lot to make a sandwich, but it can be used for a lot of other bacon dishes.

Fried and crumbled into salad it was great; a salty, tasty, crunchy kick as good as lardons.

You can also soak it before eating or warm it through, but we found frying was tastiest. Seamore is a Dutch company and their 100% wild and organic seaweed, dulse,  is harvested by local fishermen in France and Ireland.

They cut just a small proportion of the seaweed and only in a four month period, so the enterprise is very sustainable and green.

So pig out, it really is delicious

You can find it at Planet Organic and Whole Foods.