Bacon! What a delightful piece of meat. Yet, it's frequently so difficult to cook well! I simply cannot abide soggy bacon. But sometimes in the quest for delightfully crispy bacon you end up with cracker like meat with no flavor. But I have made a break through. I have done an experiment and discovered the best way to cook bacon in order to achieve edibility of the whole piece (not just the actual meat part) and maximum bacon-y flavor. No one should be surprised at my findings, the name of the food itself implies the proper way for it to be prepared. It is, after all, bac-on. Bake it!
Now, this is how the story goes. I bought some bacon a while back because it looked like it had a high meat to fat ratio and promised some good hickory flavoring or something like that. Moving forward to a few days ago I had the grand idea to make up a few slices and crumble them into some soup or a salad for dinner. So I pull out the package and open it up to begin making the bacon. I think I had planned on microwaving it, since it's quick and makes for crispy fat. But something on the package caught my eye. It read "Baking instructions". Baking bacon? The thought had never occured to me. What an idea! So I decided to try it. I lined the tray for my toaster oven with some tin foil and fit 4 pieces of bacon on it. "Bake at 350 degrees till crispy", easy enough. Then in true Turner fashion I decided to go ahead and just try them all and compare them to find the best way to make bacon.
I placed 3 slices in paper towels for microwaving and 3 slices in a pan to fry. The package said to do 1 minute per slice in the microwave. I only did 2 minutes and they were quite crispy. I put them in for another 30 seconds just to be safe and then ate them all up, leaving only a strip of meat a couple inches long for comparison later.
The pan frying was still warming up really, so the bacon was just sitting there, starting to cook a bit. The oven was up to temp and I could smell the bacon sizzling up nicely in there. There wasn't really much to do while i waited. After a bit the bacon in the pan started sizzling and I decided also to flip over the bacon in the oven. After a few more minutes the bacon in the pan was frying up well, but the fat was just not getting cooked. It kept curling so I'd have to flip it over and squish it down so it could cook. But the baked ones were done, so I pulled them out and enjoyed eating all but a sliver that I saved for later comparison. I then finished frying the remaining 3 pieces and consumed them in a similar manner to the other 2 batches.
The results are as follows:
The microwave piece was a bit leathery though without much taste in the meat part itself. The fat was all cooked crunchy though and so there was almost no gicky pieces I didn't want to eat. (I'm really picky about bacon fat. Gicky bacon fat is just inedible for me...) But it wasn't greasy at all, and clean up was a snap because of the paper towels it was surrounded by. Pro: crispy, non greasy, easy clean up, really fast cooking. Con: low taste, bit leathery
The baked bacon had a nice meaty texture, kinda reminiscent of thick jerky. It tasted great because it was still cooked in the drippings, unlike the microwaved slices. It also had very well done fat and I consumed all but a few small pieces of fat that were a bit too fat like for my tastes. Pro: Tastes good, easy clean up (just let the drippings cool in the tin foil then roll it up and toss it. Done! No gross looking can of nastiness) wonderful smell! Con: takes a while, bit greasy
Pan frying took the longest, or at least seemed like it. (The baking might have taken longer, but just finished first since I started it first... who knows) It created a very tasty, crunchy meat- but had the most gicky fat pieces. And I had to wash the pan when I was done. Pro: tasty! Con: most clean up, needs constant supervision, clean up, under crisped fat.
Well, guess which one was the best... oh wait, I already told you. Bake that bacon. You will not regret it! As a funny side, I actually ended up not making anything else for dinner that evening (lazy me) and so I got to tell everyone how I had 10 slices of bacon cooked 3 different ways for dinner.
I made the rest of the package today and had the most wonderful BLT ever with it. And it was so nice. I popped it in the oven then went about my business. I checked back on it after a while and flipped the slices once, then a bit later it was all done and we consumed every speck of the bacon. Yummy!
