This week, we made vegan pizza bagels with Yves Veggie Pepperoni. Here's what we thought of this vegan pepperoni.
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Yves Veggie Pepperoni Review
This vegan pepperoni was the reason we made the bagel pizzas (details on that below). They were part of the big GTFO It's Vegan order that Dave placed for my birthday. We are really making that box of food last!
You can eat Yves Veggie Pepperoni uncooked, so we each tried a piece like that, just to see how it tasted. Uncooked, it tasted like bologna to me. To Dave, it tasted like Yves Veggie Ham.
On the pizza, the slices firmed up a bit, but they didn't get that crispiness you'd expect from pepperoni. They also didn't super have a pepperoni flavor.
I suspect that Yves was trying to make a healthy pepperoni, and in the process they backed off on the salt. Their pepperoni has half the salt of animal-based pepperoni. It also has much less fat.
That's definitely healthier, but I think that backing off that much on the salt and fat is a big part of why these didn't give me or Dave a pepperoni experience. The taste and mouthfeel just weren't there.
I think that if you fried this pepperoni up in oil with a generous pinch of salt before using it, it would be a lot closer to the animal-based pepperoni experience. That's my technique when I cook vegan bacon, and it works great!
For me, it still scratched the pepperoni itch, but Dave considered this one a total miss. He stressed that he loved the pizza, but the pepperoni just wasn't his jam.
Vegan Bagel Pizzas
Here's where we will tell you about how we made the vegan pepperoni pizzas, which were a big hit for all three of us, despite the pepperoni being a bit of a letdown. It's still a pizza bagel, after all!
We used plain bagels as the base for these.
Think of them as gigantic bagel bites. I wanted the pizzas to have more surface area, though, so we used a rolling pin to flatten the bagel halves.
The flattening also gave the bagels a more pizza crust-like width and mouthfeel and made the hole smaller, which meant less sauce dripping through. I definitely recommend doing this!
After rolling out the bagels, we spread a tablespoon or two of jarred pizza sauce to each bagel half.
Then, we topped it with vegan mozzarella shreds and the pepperoni and baked them at 350° F for 25 minutes. I'd recommend 20 minutes as the baking time next time, though, because the bottoms of the bagels did scorch a bit.
That's the long story. Here's the short version:
- Split 3 bagels in half, and use a rolling pin to flatten them.
- Spread 1-2 tablespoons of vegan pizza sauce on to each bagel half.
- Sprinkle vegan mozzarella onto each half.
- Top with vegan pepperoni (or your toppings of choice), and bake at 350° F for 20 minutes.
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Cadry
I haven't listened to this episode yet, but I'm excited to see Yves pepperoni. We used to buy it all the time, and then it just disappeared. If you have it again, I highly recommend frying it in a little oil in a skillet first, and then adding it to the pizza. It adds the extra fat & crispiness you're looking for in a pepperoni.
Becky Striepe
We definitely need to try that! It wasn't quite right, texture-wise, when we just slapped it on there before baking.