How to cook bacon in the oven
1. Stove-top bacon often needs to be cut in half so it fits in your pan.
2. Halved bacon does not taste as good as full bacon.
3. Not only is the bacon cut in half, but it shrivels up in the pan and gets even smaller.
4. It feels like you’re eating far less bacon. Which means you eat MORE bacon because it’s tiny bacon.
5. You have to wait for the grease to cool and then scrape the yucky white fat into the compost bin, ew ew ew.
6. It makes a goddamn mess of your stove-top and the dials. Grease city.
7. You’re going to get burned from splatter at least once.
8. It takes many, many batches to cook a full package of bacon in that one pan.
9. It’s hard to cook all of the pieces consistently.
10. I … just feel like lists should have an even number of items.
Cooking bacon in the oven is FAR superior because …
* You can cook the whole package at once!
* You don’t get splattered with hot grease
* No dirty pan to clean
* Your bacon stays nice and flat (and whole)
* It’s more like “restaurant bacon”
Ready to learn how?
1. Preheat your oven to 400F
2. Cover 1-2 cookie sheets (with edges) with tinfoil.
No need to use nonstick spray because bacon is greasy AF, naturally.
3. Lay your bacon strips on the tinfoil.
Any direction is fine. I like to use two pans that fit side-by-side in the oven, which allows me to cook a whole package without any of the strips touching each other.
4. When your oven is preheated, slide the pans inside and set the timer for 15 minutes.
This is the point when you’ll want to check the bacon, because EVERY package is different — even if it’s the same brand. It depends on how the bacon-cutter has cut the bacon. Some packages have skinny slices (and more of ’em) and other packages have thick slices.
If your bacon looks perfect, take it out.
If it looks like it needs a few more minutes, try flipping it over with a pair of tongs first. Depending on what pan you’re using, this can be just the trick.
5. When your bacon looks just right, lift the pieces onto paper towels.
For me, perfect bacon is “bendy but firm.” If you leave your bacon in the hot pan, even just on top of the stove, it’ll continue to cook and get too crispy.
Once the pans cool, you can ball up that tinfoil and throw it straight into the garbage — and then put the cookie sheets back in the cupboard.
NO! WASHING! DIRTY! BACON! PANS!
The next time you’re cooking up some bacon, try doing it in the oven and let me know how it goes!
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Heather's Handmade Life 