There’s something about waking up on a crisp morning, walking into the kitchen, and smelling…well, it smell good, and then, three minutes later, it doesn’t smell so hot anymore. Sound familiar?
What you’re looking for is that exact piece of bacon that holds up but crumble into tiny bits of crunch as it slides across your tongue. Too often all you get is a hunk of charred dust or some rubbery chew.
How to Cook Perfect Bacon
More often than not, the secret to success, or failure, is all about time and temperature. Magic? No. Physics. This translate into doneness levels matching both rendering time and moisture loss as illustrated on the chart above. The water turns to steam and is lost as solid fat melts and becomes liquid.
And that is what you want. To achieve softer chewy bacon, leave more water in the meat. To go extra crisp, cook until you force a lot more water off and render out the fat. That’s why the weight of the strip vary so much at the end. It is a choice between crunch and juice. Choose your winner.
There are lots of home cooks who turns the dial all the way to “high” right off the bat. The problem? The outside gets brown and crusty as the inside stay uncooked and chewy. The trick is that most folks do it backward (but then again, most folks don’t know what they’re doing). Before you even light the stove, throw your raw strip into a cold skillet. Let the fat slowly begin to melt. As the meat begins to firm up, it will not curl up as it fries.
Overlapping the strips result in steaming the meat rather than frying it. And steamed bacon = soggy bacon. Let each one have room to render well. Why else would it work?
But that’s not all: The thickness also counts. Thin supermarket slice will cook quickly. Look away for a second and they’ll be raw one minute and charred the next. A thicker slice, like you’d get from a good butcher, need to be approached different. It is denser with protein and moister. It takes time to cook through and doesn’t benefit from high heat, or else the outside gets burned by the time inside is ready. Evenness of cooking is key, not necessarily speed.
The oven, says the infographic, is your friend if you’re cooking for a group. Four-hundred-degree baking on an entire sheet pan produce even heating, while also eliminating the splatter that plagues stovetop-cooked bacon. Cleanup is easy if you line the pan with parchment and foil. Flip the bacon after half-time so each side gets to achieve that deep brown color.
“It’s how professionals get consistent results without having to stand in front of a hot stove flipping each strip.”
When your bacon is cooked, don’t let it sit in still-hot grease. Just move it straight to a wire rack. Excess fat will drip off but won’t soak back onto the bacon, keeping the texture crisp instead of greasy.
Whatever you do, though: Don’t dump that still-hot grease down the drain. Strain it into a jar. Later in the week, you can use that liquid gold to fry up potatoes or add some extra flavor to a batch of baked beans.
Bacon mastery isn’t so much about recipes as it should of been an exercise in understanding heat + fat + time. Do you want your bacon to be brittle and dark? Pliable and soft? It doesn’t matter… as long as it’s intentional.
Listen for that sizzle; watch the color change; believe in the process. You’ll thank yourself later when it comes time for breakfast.