I prefer to cook bacon in the oven vs. on the stove top in a skillet or frying pan. Cooking stove-top always ends up covering my stove in grease spatters (and sometimes the spatters hit my hands — that doesn’t exactly feel good!). I also think it’s tedious and slow. It makes so much less mess to cook bacon in the oven than on the stove top. Depending on the size of baking pan you use you can usually cook the whole package at once instead of just a few pieces at a time. Also, instead of cooking your bacon in a pan full of grease, the grease drips away from the bacon as you cook when you use the method that I’m going to explain here.
This technique was originally published on CRAFT.
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Step #1:
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- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
- Line a baking pan (i.e., cookie sheet) with foil. It's best if you can use one large sheet to cover the entire pan instead of using multiple pieces. This way, the grease won't have a chance to leak through to the pan below.
Step #2:
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- Place a cooling rack on top of the foil-lined baking sheet. The cooling rack will keep the bacon from sitting in the grease as it cooks.
Step #3:
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- Lay the bacon on top of the cooling rack. I prefer to use center-cut bacon as it has less fat that regular.
Step #4:
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- Bake in a 400 degree F preheated oven for 20-30 minutes, depending on whether you like your bacon chewy or crispy.
- After 20 minutes, I typically check it a couple of times (every 5 minutes). For me, it is perfect at 30 minutes. That might seem like a long time to cook bacon, but remember — you are cooking the entire package at once instead of a few pieces at a time.
Step #5:
- After the cooking time, allow the bacon to sit for 2 minutes before removing it from the pan. Bacon usually continues to cook for a couple of minutes after you remove it because of the hot grease that is still bubbling on top of it.
- All you have to do for clean-up is to remove the cooling rack (if you have a dishwasher, just toss it in there) and wash that.
- After the grease has cooled and solidified remove the foil from the pan. Fold it up and toss it in the trash.
- The baking sheet underneath the foil usually never gets dirty. I say usually never because you never know. If the foil gets punctured then the grease can seep through, but that's never happened for me.
