Friday Afternoon Bacon Blogging — You’re Doing It All Wrong Edition
Cooking your bacon, that is, according to this video from Chowhound (there is a quick commercial at the beginning):
But there’s lots of ways to cook bacon and lots of partisans for those methods too. I’ve cooked LOTS of bacon for events in the oven — you get uniformly flat and crispy bacon (think of the bacon in the warming pans at a buffet) with little work. But my favorite way is via a cast iron pan on top of the stove. And no pouring off the bacon fat in between batches, either. Sprinkling a few grains of brown sugar on the bacon just before it is done seems to really help make the flavor of certain bacon really bloom.
So what is your favorite way to cook bacon? And for extra bonus points, what is your favorite bacon?
Tags: Bacon!
Let’s see…favorite bacon…I’m going to go with Sir Francis. OK, actually I think there was some kind of maple bacon my wife gets that’s pretty good. I can’t see the video. Is it saying that it should be baked in the oven? We have done that, and it is good. I’ll have to remember the brown sugar idea. Sounds yummy.
oh my god.. it’s friday already?
The video cooks the bacon on top of the stove and in a cast iron pan. He says to take 20 minutes to cook it (on very low heat), flip it alot, size the pan in accordance with the length and amount of bacon you will be cooking and No Crowding the Bacon!
Bacon in the oven is a possible option I brought up and has lots of discussion in the comments thread of that video. Which I forgot to post and will fix now.
Interesting. Thanks, Cassandra. I would have thought it would be better to cook it quickly on a higher heat. But maybe that’s why the only thing my wife let’s me cook is the books (Note to bibliophiles and the IRS: no books are actually cooked in the Scott P household).
20 minutes seems a little long to me. Plus I don’t like bacon totally crispy.
On another note, I had a great sandwich at an Irish pub in Louisville this week — an RLT. Rashers, Lettuce, Tomato and they put smoked salmon on it. That sandwich would have been all kinds of perfect if the tomato was a real, local summer tomato. But the bacon/smoked salmon combo was fantastic.
please share your high volume oven method.
Take a baking sheet — you size it to fit your oven and the size of the bacon — and line it with parchment ( lots of people prefer foil). Lay out the bacon piece by piece, side by side. You can put another piece of parchment on top of the bacon if you want to reduce the splattering.
Turn on the oven to 400 (no preheating), put the pan with the bacon in the oven and cook for about 15-20 minutes. Some people like to turn it once, but mostly I just leave it. Start watching it around the 15 min mark to make sure it doesn’t get overdone. You pull the sheet out when the bacon is done the way you like it. Transfer the bacon to a platter with paper towels to drain.
Repeat the process until you’ve cooked all of your bacon. In a normal oven you can cook about 2 lbs of bacon on two sheets, and stage them in so you don’t have two sheets finishing at once.
About 30 years ago, I worked for a catering company and we cooked bacon wrapped artichoke hearts…..Great stuff. We cooked it at 400 for about 15 minutes (if I remember right). It was tough to keep the trays full as I loved them 🙂
I like cooking it in the microwave, the fat drains away easily and it’s fast.
I think I had microwaved bacon once, and thought the texture of it was off. Maybe it was bad bacon.
Bacon Bomb!:
Best bacon: http://www.nueskes.com/smoked-slab-bacon.aspx
http://www.nueskes.com/assets/item/large/702.jpg
Nueskes is really good — I had some of their gift baskets sent to some friends for Christmas and had a number of phone calls from Christmas breakfast tables from people who just loved that bacon.
But for folks in northern NCC, you can actually BUY Nueskes bacon by making a quick run across the border to the Fresh Market in Concordville, PA. It is in the Shoppes at Brinton Lake center. The veggies there are awesome too.
Thanx for sharing