A low-carber’s all-time favorites combine in this spicy, satisfying and quick-to-make keto dish: it includes bacon, egg, cauliflower, and avocado, all bound together with a splash of piquant hot sauce. This scrumptious recipe creates fireworks of flavors and different textures, from soft and creamy to crispy and crunchy, yet it’s so simple and easy to make!
Tips for making the Spicy Stir-Fried Cauli Rice with Bacon and Avocado
This recipe makes a complete meal for one hungry person, or two smaller servings. It’s very satisfying, so a little goes a long way! You can add some raw veggies or a small green salad with vinegar dressing on the side, if you like.
There are no gimmicks or tricky maneuvers needed to prepare this beginner-friendly dish. The most important thing is to work fast and not cook the ingredients (well, except the bacon…) for too long. The cauliflower rice doesn’t really need cooking at all: frying it for just a single minute in the skillet with the egg will ensure that it retains a crisp texture.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at how to make this low-carber’s dream:
First, take 8 slices of bacon and cook them until crispy. Reserve the bacon fat in the skillet; you’ll need it in the next step.
Crumble the bacon, and set aside.
Take the cauli rice and add it to the bacon fat.
Stir well, keeping the heat at medium-low.
Whisk the egg a couple of times…
…then immediately add it to the cauli rice and egg mixture.
Fry, mixing all the time, until the egg is scrambled. This takes about 1 minute.
Add the crumbled bacon…
…hot sauce…
…and the cubed avocado.
Mix gently but well.
Like this.
Remove from the heat and serve immediately.
My Spicy Stir-Fried Cauli Rice experiments
Actually, this recipe is a long-time favorite. I conducted the first experiments for it a few years ago, and I think I even posted the recipe on my Facebook page after I perfected it.
In spring 2016, I started craving stir-fried rice. Because I had been following the keto diet for years, I obviously couldn’t use regular rice. No problem: cauliflower rice would be a perfect low-carb option to replace the high-starch, high-carb regular rice.
Naturally I needed egg for my stir-fried cauli rice as well. Maybe I could add some crunchy, crumbled bacon, too, to add some texture and flavor?
Of course, I also needed some herbs and/or spices. I decided to use chopped chives. Regular onion would have been too bland, but I still thought the dish would benefit from some kind of oniony flavor, so chives made perfect sense: they would deliver the oniony flavor plus a nice green hue.
Speaking of the color green, I’m not sure how I ended up using cubed avocado in this recipe. I bet it wasn’t the first thing that occurred to me: it was kind of weird to think of adding cubed avocado to a warm, “fried” dish! For a warm pureed soup — like this one — avocado is great, but adding cubed avocado to a dish with fried cauliflower, bacon and egg just sounded odd.
Still, I couldn’t help myself: I had to try out this strange combination. After all, the ingredients themselves — cauliflower, egg, bacon, and avocado — were staple ingredients in a typical low-carber’s lifestyle.
For my first experiment, I used 6 slices bacon, 2 cups (470 ml) riced cauliflower, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons chopped chives, and 1 cubed Hass avocado. Otherwise great, yup: but the taste was far too bland. The chives didn’t lend the sharp, oniony flavor I had hoped they would.
It was almost one month before I conducted my next experiment. I was musing over which seasonings I could add to improve the taste. How could I give it more flavor? Maybe I could add lemon juice, to cut the greasiness and to brighten the dish with some citrusy tang? No, wait: a hot sauce like sriracha might be even better!
For my next experiment, I increased the amount of bacon and used 8 slices (that was exactly one package, so there were no leftover slices of bacon like there were in my previous experiment with 6 slices). I also used 2 cups (470 ml) cauliflower “rice” again, plus 1 egg, 2 tablespoons sriracha, and 1 cubed Hass avocado. (By the way, there was no need to add salt or pepper, because the bacon was salty enough to season the whole dish, and the hot sauce lent it all the sharp, piquant flavor it needed.)
It tasted great! But wait a minute: maybe the avocado wasn’t the right choice? What if I were to omit it? There was either something wrong with the dish or something missing from it. It was really good, but it wasn’t perfect.
Another month passed before I started work on the next experiment. I decided to keep the avocado but reduce the amount of cauliflower rice from 2 cups (470 ml) to 1 cup (240 ml). I also used 1 tablespoon Louisiana hot sauce instead of 2 tablespoons sriracha. No bad thing: Louisiana hot sauce doesn’t have any added sugar (or any preservatives) like sriracha does.
Now the dish was just perfect! It was definitely flavorful enough, and the different textures complemented each other beautifully. In the end, I was extremely—positively!—surprised by how well the dish turned out.
Last week, I found the notes on my stir-fried cauli rice experiments that I had made in 2016 and decided to see how I liked the dish a few years later. It was just as delicious as I remembered, so I thought it was worth posting here on my blog. I bet you will love it, too!
Spicy Stir-Fried Cauli Rice with Bacon and Avocado
Ingredients
- 8 slices bacon
- 1 cup = 240 ml cauliflower "rice"
- 1 organic free-range egg
- 1 tablespoon sugar-free hot sauce (like Louisiana Hot Sauce)
- 1 Hass avocado, peeled, pitted and cubed
Instructions
- Fry the bacon until crispy. Crumble and set aside. Reserve the bacon fat: you'll need it in the next step.
- Add the cauliflower rice to the skillet with the bacon fat. Mix well. Keep the heat at medium-low.
- Whisk the egg a couple of times and pour over the cauliflower rice.
- Cook the egg and cauliflower rice mixture for 1 minute, stirring all the time.
- Add the crumbled bacon, hot sauce and the avocado and mix gently but well. Don't cook!
- Serve immediately.
| Nutrition Information | In total | Per serving if 2 servings in total |
| Protein | 31.9 g | 16.0 g |
| Fat | 69.2 g | 34.6 g |
| Net carbs | 3.4 g | 1.7 g |
| kcal | 780 kcal | 390 kcal |
Tips for variation
I’m not sure how this occurred to me, but somehow I got the idea of pouring sugar-free maple syrup over this dish. There are commercial ones available, and my Low Sugar, So Simple book also includes an easy recipe for homemade sugar-free maple syrup. I think the idea came from from a TV program where a Swedish chef, Niklas Ekstedt, visited Canada and the restaurant Sugar Shack, run by Martin Picard. The restaurant was a very special place: it included maple syrup in each and every dish! Sure, that restaurant is an absolute no-no for low-carbers, but luckily you can get that same sweet-and-scrumptious maple syrup flavor by using homemade sugar-free maple syrup, or a commercial one.
Another great addition to this dish would be adding crushed garlic. Not too much, though: maybe just one clove, so that the garlic doesn’t overpower the other flavors.
Finely chopped fresh herbs like parsley, cilantro, or oregano would be great additions, too. Just add them at the very end, or sprinkle them on top of the finished dish to prevent them from getting wilted.
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