Category: Product review

Jus Rol Pain Au Chocolat – Vegan Heaven

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There are some things that you just accept as a vegan, and for me one of those things was that I would never spend a rainy morning with the papers dipping a warm Pain Au Chocolat into a coffee ever again. 

I told myself I didn’t mind and it was a small price to pay, but when I heard a rumour that Jus Rol did a range of bake them yourself pastries that were accidentally vegan I just had to investigate. I couldn’t believe it, but my research all came back the same. Vegan. 

Oh praise to the high heaven! 

So when I woke up this morning and it was raining I decided it was perfect Pain Au Chocolat weather and I was going to treat myself. I stopped off at the big sainsburies at the end of my morning run and found them in the chilled section. The range included croissants and cinnamon rolls which are both vegan too (I will be trying these at another date).

I got them home and got straight onto ‘cooking’ them. 


They come in a box and inside the box is a tube and a packet for the chocolate.


Opening the tube is pretty straight forward and then you unroll the pastry, separating the individual pastries by cutting along the perforated edge.


Then you put two pieces of chocolate at each end.


And roll from each end into the middle.


Then you place on a baking tray with the crease at the bottom and if you want a golden glaze (who doesn’t want a golden glaze?) you brush soya milk on the outside.


Pop in the oven at 200c for 12 minutes and go hug your cat.


As you hug your cat enjoy your ordinary house being transformed into a French patisserie as the sweet aroma of baking envelops your home. 

After 12 minutes take them out the oven.


Enjoy warm, with coffee.


The only down side is that they don’t keep well so you need to eat them with at least one other person or you’re in danger of polishing off six on your own. I shared with Andy who agreed they were utterly delicious!  

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Cheatin Bacon – Review

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It’s a cliche for a reason, bacon is  my weakness. Many a spell of being vegan or veggie in the past have ended with me biting into a hot bacon roll, it’s so predictable that it’s sad.

I was brought up veggie so I am familiar with bacon substitutes, the fake bacon of my childhood still makes me gag thinking about it. Thick cut, beany, with a fake smoky plasticy taste, like someone left a bacon flavoured crayon on a radiator. Vile, but that was 20 years ago so you’d hope that the world of bacon substitutes would have moved on somewhat since then.

With most substitutes I find that they work better if you don’t expect them to taste like the original, you need to judge them in the their own right. I think of them as things that can be eaten in place of, rather than things that taste like. So with this in mind I went looking for something I could happily eat hungover and with loads of ketchup.

I bought my Cheatin Bacon from the Honeytree on Heaton Road  


I love this shop, and it’s so handy for me being just down the road. 

In order to test the Cheatin Bacon I decided to a traditional, no frills, bacon sarnie.

 
The bacon was easy to cook, you just fry each side for a minute and a half, I used the pure soya spread as oil because I’m lazy and I already had it out of the fridge. I only used half a teaspoon as I don’t like greasy bacon anyway. 

  
When it was cooked I piled it on some bread that I had smothered in soya spread and tomato sauce, pretty standard sarnie craic.

   

The bacon was very pleasant, not the horror of veggie bacon past. It had a crunch to it and a faint ‘bacony’  taste. Certainly did the trick as a filling in a ketchup sandwich. 

Did it taste like bacon? No, not at all, and I wasn’t really expecting it to but it was nice in its own right.

Would I buy it again? Definitely.

Marks out of ten. 7/10