Bacon Recipe Round-Up (2024)

FAQs

How to cook the perfect bacon? ›

In a cold skillet, arrange bacon in a single layer (don't let it overlap too much). Turn the skillet to medium heat and cook, flipping the pieces often to promote even browning, until they reach your desired doneness (8 to 15 minutes).

Curing your own bacon, at least once, is a great experience for any meat enthusiast. Although it's a fairly lengthy process (at least, compared to running to the store and just buying some), it is a wholly satisfying one, and in addition to the sense of achievement it also yields some tasty rewards.

Even though it doesn't necessarily come with a mild flavor, bacon is a total blank canvas. With the help of some extra ingredients and spices for your bacon, you can take its original savory, salty, and smoky flavor and enhance it with things like chili powder and coffee, Sriracha, maple syrup, brown sugar, or honey.

Tried and true, this is the way I learned to cook bacon: Lay the strips in a cold skillet, place over medium-low to medium heat, flip and fry until you reach your desired doneness and then transfer to a plate lined with paper towels to drain.

Bacon should be cooked at 400°F.

Medium-thick bacon slices will need 18 to 20 minutes to reach the perfect level of crispiness. But check the bacon at 10 minutes, and adjust your cooking time to your preferred degree of doneness.

The main concern about bacon is its high levels of saturated fat and sodium, says Kristen Smith, RD, also a spokesperson for the AND. A diet high in saturated fat and sodium is linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and obesity, per the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Cooking bacon in the oven doesn't take any longer than in a pan. Oven bacon gets just as crispy, if not crispier, and there's very little mess to clean up after. Making a batch of bacon in the oven also means you can do other things while it's cooking.

1. **Cooking temperature**: Cooking bacon at too low of a temperature can result in chewy rather than crispy bacon. Make sure you're cooking the bacon over medium-high heat to allow it to crisp up properly.

The secret is pre-cooking your bacon

Regardless of the perfect meat-to-fat ratio and peak freshness, the real secret to diner-worthy bacon is the cooking method. According to Epicurious, par-cooking it in the oven is the preferred method of many restaurant owners.

The flour definitely helped to give the bacon a crispier texture and nicer color than the other methods I tried. Plus, it seems like the flour prevented the bacon from curling too much. The starch soaks up the grease from the bacon, helping it to stay rigid and maintain its shape.

Can bacon grease go bad? ›

In the fridge, bacon grease can last anywhere from three to six months, but after the three-month mark, you should check to make sure it hasn't gone bad. If you want your grease to last longer, you should filter it so there are no small pieces of meat left in it. Doing so reduces the risk of spoilage.

The trick is something you'd expect to find in a French restaurant: He confits it. Yes, Koutsouris covers four pounds bacon with oil (yes, oil), and then broils it for about 20 minutes, until it's halfway cooked. The end result is a limp, jiggly heap of bacon that you can fry to crispness in just 2 minutes flat.

Bake the bacon in a 400°F oven until well-browned and crisp, this should take between 15 and 18 minutes depending on the thickness of your bacon. To follow Martha's method to a T, you'll need to rotate the sheet pan halfway through.

Starting with a Hot Pan

I won't keep you waiting: always start with a cold pan. Whether you like your bacon shatteringly crisp or chewy, the goal is strips that are evenly cooked, without burnt bits of meat or rubbery pockets of fat.

If you want all the joys of bacon without the river of oil, try making bacon in the oven. Cooking bacon in the oven doesn't take any longer than in a pan. Oven bacon gets just as crispy, if not crispier, and there's very little mess to clean up after.

Lay a sheet of parchment paper in the pan and turn up or fold up the sides of the paper to keep the grease in. Place the bacon in the pan then the pan in the oven and cook at 350F. Keep watching the bacon and flipping it until it's done how you like.