Make it crisp, make it delicious with Garfunkels tips. Make a meal superb with us. Check out our handy tips and hints to cooking the best crispy bacon below:
1. START YOUR BACON IN A COLD FRYING PAN
Trust us. When you add cold bacon into a hot frying pan, it will start to brown and crisp before the fat has a chance to render out. That leaves you with two choices: Keep sizzling your bacon until the fat’s cooked through but the bacon burns, or take it off the heat and deal with fatty, flabby bacon. On the other hand, if you add it to a cold pan and then turned on the heat to medium, the fat will have plenty of time to melt away, leaving you with crunchier (and less greasy) slices.
2. A CAST-IRON FRYING PAN COOKS BACON FASTER
Choosing between a cast-iron frying pan and a stainless-steel frying pan, the taste and texture will be the same: nice and crunchy, with a lovely smoky depth of flavor, and some deeper browned and charred spots. But while the stainless-steel frying pan takes up to 11 minutes, the cast-iron frying pan can take only 8.
3. ADD WATER TO THE FRYING PAN IF YOU WANT TO CRUMBLE THE BACON
Adding a bit of cold water to your cold frying pan with your bacon yields better, crispier, bacon. It takes a bit longer, all the water evaporates and then the bacon starts crisping as it normally would. The result was thinner and crisper than the bacon cooked in the frying pan without water: it shattered easily, and is very nice and crunchy. It isn’t as salty, and is a good strategy if you are needing to use the bacon as a crumbled topping for something, such as a salad.
4. FOR MORE THAN 1 OR 2 SERVINGS, USE YOUR OVEN
Even in a 12-inch frying pan, you can only fit 5 to 6 slices of bacon. So if you’re feeding a crowd, you want to heat up your oven instead. Baking your bacon on a wire rack set over a rimmed baking sheet allows the rendered fat to drip away from the bacon, helping it cook up even crunchier than pan-frying. (While bacon should be started in a cold pan if you’re cooking it on the stovetop, you can crank up the heat if you’re baking your bacon in the oven. We found a temp of 230°C gave oven-baked bacon the same smoky depth as the stovetop kind. Just cook it for 20 minutes to get perfectly sizzled slices.) Even better, you can fit 10 to 12 slices on a rack, and it cooks without needing any attention: no flipping, no rotating, and—best of all—no messy splatter all over the stove.
5. COOKING BACON IN THE MICROWAVE IS NOT RECOMMENDED
Cooking bacon in the microwave is possible and it even looks beautiful: crinkly and golden-brown, without any sign of char. But when you taste it, it isn’t crisp enough, and lacks flavour. We recommend you stick to the pan or the oven.
