For years I cooked bacon on the stove because that’s the way my mom and grandma always did it. When I went to college my roommate, Heidi, showed me how to cook it a better way. Technically, it’s baking your bacon. If you only make a couple of slices at a time, cooking bacon in a frying pan makes sense. If you use half a package or more, making bacon in your oven is the easiest and fastest way to do it. No splattering grease all over your stovetop; no flipping bacon halfway through; no cooking six pieces at a time because that’s all the room you have in your frying pan. Once you start making bacon in your oven you’ll never go back.
All you’ll need is bacon, a baking sheet with sides, and tin foil (I guess it’s technically aluminum but tin is a lot quicker to say).
First you’ll want to preheat your oven to 400°. The get out your baking sheet. Here’s mine. It’s pretty grody. I’ve made bacon in this thing probably 500 times. Maybe even a thousand. I’ve had this pan for almost two decades and we eat bacon at least once a week; you do the math. You don’t have to line the pan with tin foil but using it means you don’t have to scrub the pan when you’re done. Why clean things when you don’t have to?
Open your pack of bacon and lay the strips out. I happen to know that with my size of pan and a pack of Kirkland bacon from Costco (YUM!), I have to overlap the pieces a smidge to get them all to fit.
Once your oven has reached 400°, place the bacon on the bottom shelf for 15-20 minutes.
I like my bacon really crispy and that takes 18 minutes in my oven (I told you I make it a lot!). Your oven might be different or you might be one of those odd people who likes floppy bacon. Check the bacon after 15 minutes and go from there. (Oh man, I’m completely salivating and about to lick my monitor!)
While the bacon’s cooking get a plate out and line it with a couple of sheets of paper towels. When the bacon comes out of the oven, you’ll remove the slices with tongs and put them on the plate to drain. I do a second layer of paper towels on top of the first and finish laying out the bacon. I use a couple more paper towels on top of that and let it drain for a few minutes.
After the bacon has been eaten (usually within 30 seconds), I put all the greasy paper towels on top of the tin foil, then roll the whole thing up and throw it in the garbage. No need to find a can to drain the bacon grease into.
Now you know the easy way to make bacon. So what are you waiting for?
Nice tutorial, but I would like to respectfully add a couple of improvements:
1. Don’t bother preheating the oven. Just shove them in the cold oven and check them in about 20 minutes. (Your oven may vary, so you might want to check after 15, but then you’ll learn what works for your oven.) Unlike baking cookies, you needn’t worry about having a consistent heat throughout the whole cooking time. So save yourself the time and stick them in a cold oven.
2. You don’t save the rendered bacon grease?! At our house, we have a dedicated jar in the fridge, labeled “Bacon Love” for keeping the grease. Which is then used, well, pretty much any time I want to grease up a pan to stop something from cooking. Chicken breasts? Check. Pancakes? Check. Last-minute croutons to go on a spinach salad? Oh, oh yes. Just imagine giving everything a bacon kiss when cooking it: that’s what bacon love does for you.
It’s true that finding something to pour hot bacon grease into, just so you can let it harden up and throw it out, is a hassle. So save yourself the hassle by appointing one jar to be your dedicated bacon love receptacle. Throwing away bacon love is like throwing away the fond on the bottom of a pot where you’ve just seared a steak: nearly criminal.
My SIL showed us how to do this and we’ve done this way ever since. The bacon comes out perfect every time, the house doesn’t hold on to that stale bacon flavor, and best of all, I don’t have to stand there, splattered with grease and getting grumpy. I have a terrific BLT salad recipe if you’d like.
You are all making me DROOL!
We’re on the same page with this one! And here I was all excited that you had perhaps found an even easier way to cook it…
I make my bacon on a large cCorrell dinner plate in my microwave. It is much less greasy than on foil, because the fat is absorbed as fast as it mel s out during cooking. Probably the same price as foil is the dinner plate with double layer (square) of paper towels. You must cut the bacon strips in half and then flare them out in short strips because the microwave only really cooks around the edges. You can prepare and cook bacon this way in the quantity you need perhaps faster than in heating up a big oven. My oven in my new stove is so large it could hold a BIG turkey, and it is costly to heat the whole oven up. Also we only eat bacon about twice a month because it is full of Nitrite to preserve it, so it is carcinogenic. Both of us have had cancer in some forms so we are always careful, and never eat ham, regardless of the Relief Society dinners considering a spiral cut ham as the mark of Good Mormons. But I truly drooled over bacon in my childhood 80+ years ago, and still love it! People used to save bacon grease for making bakingpowder bisquits. Yikes, what a terrible amouont of fat that goes straight to your arteries to make PLAQUE :Atherosclerotic lesions. which result in strokes, etc.
We were not eating beef except at many banquets a year, where we can often, now, get salmon, thank goodness. Regular beef has its pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics; but our daughter in Provo here found a way to get grass- fed beef from moountain meadows and it is so fat free you have to put canola oil in the pan to fry home hambergers (the only place we ever eat hamburgers) on nice whole wheat buns. We are trying to be healthy enough to get our work on the earth done and my husband is a healthy 87 editing long days on the Joseph Smith Papers, and I at 831/2 am enlarging my writings to finish them for world publication.
Parchment paper baby! Other than that we do it the same way.