Tried It: Bacon Salt: Original and Hickory

Bacon Salt is vegetarian and low-sodium, and I can barely contain how much I love that those things are true. A quarter teaspoon of the stuff has 6% of your daily sodium, however, so "low" is a relative term. I tried the Original Bacon Salt and Hickory Bacon Salt flavors.

Straight-up, it tastes like the crispy meaty part of a strip of bacon was dried and made into a powder. That this is possible makes me optimistic about the seaweed that has been reported to taste like bacon, which may come to supermarket shelves in the next few years.

*editors note: This blog is about trying things. I want to try this seaweed bacon. If you have a hookup, hook me up.*

It has MSG, which is fine. Let's examine that for a second. MSG stands for monosodium glutamate. Sodium you'll recognize from sodium chloride, aka table salt, and it's fine for you in reasonable quantities. The mono part just means there's only one sodium atom for every glutamate (shown). 

Pictured: not your doom

Glutamate is an amino acid, one of the the 20 basic building blocks that nature uses to build proteins. MSG is just table salt, except instead of chloride, they use an amino acid.

The supposed reactions people were having to Chinese food cooked with MSG were probably more caused by eating lots of low-quality fried food smothered in sugary sauces, and MSG is now widely regarded by scientific types as safe. It makes stuff taste meaty because it's an amino acid, which is what you use to build proteins, which is what meat is made of. It's a tight circle.

The other things that give it a meaty (umami) taste are yeast corpses (which taste wonderful when dilute), soy sauce (effectively), and smoke flavor. That last part is maybe a little poisonous, but if you keep your overall consumption of charred and smokey things to reasonable levels, you'll probably be okay (I am not a doctor, don't take any of this as medical advice).

So how is it? I like it. I often eat canned chili for lunch at work, and a little sprinkle of this stuff peps that up nicely. It also goes well on popcorn, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, basically anything starchy. Eaten all by itself, it has the aftertaste that I recognize from that time I accidentally ate straight MSG dissolved in hot water (Hi, Aaron). But you don't eat it by itself, you savage, what's wrong with you?

I'll leave you with the best application I've seen for Bacon Salt: encrusted onto the rim of a bloody Mary. You're welcome.