— Toni Crawford

So, um, what, what I would suggest is trying to not replicate the meat dish as much in that same way, because a lot of times those are heavily processed ingredients or gluten. So ham is always kind of a difficult one to do, especially if you're looking like ham, like sliceable ham, um, that would typically be a gluten dish as well. Otherwise you could do it in the tofu thing, like I said before. But if you're like, often I will recreate a bacon esque kind of flavor by, um, doing like, uh, like by smoking it basically, you can either use a liquid smoke, you can use, uh, you know, the briquettes on, uh, grill, which I often do. I'll make a smoked salsa. Um, I've been doing a lot lately, which you basically take wood chips like hickory wood chips and soak 'em for about an hour and then put them, uh, in a container on the grill, and then you put your other ingredients in the grill and the smoke flavor basically kind of goes through everything. Um, and you can do that with Tempe. Um, you can do it with, uh, all kinds of different things as far as recreating bacon ish kind of flavors. Um, I'll also use smoked salt sometimes in that same way. Um, if I don't want to whole grill everything, but I'll do shiitake bacon, I'll do, uh, you know, the Tempe bacon, you could do tofu, bacon, um, all those kinds of styles as far as the ham recipe goes. So that's a little different. And I've never personally tried to recreate like a sliced ham, um, using a vegan recipe at all. So it's not quite, uh, my expertise in that. But, uh, what I would also suggest is to be able to kind of steer off of some of the replacers for the actual meat and instead try to look for things that would incorporate, um, other textures and flavors into things.