Every Way to Cook Bacon (50 Methods) | Bon Appétit

Hi

every

one, I'm the editor-at-large of food tonics at Bon Appetit and these are all the ways to

cook

bacon

. The word

bacon

can mean many different things. We normally think of it as coming from a pig, but it can also refer to. The meat that comes from a turkey or a cow can come from different parts of the animal such as the loin or the jowl it can be smoked it can be unsmoked it can be smoked twice but today we are working with something good old fashioned Classic American Bacon It is made from pork belly cured with salt and sugar and then lightly smoked, so it needs to be

cook

ed again before eating and we will cook it in all the ways we can imagine for homemade bacon.

Here we have a piece of pork. belly, you can see that it still has some of the skin with a lot of beautiful fat and these veins of meat that run along the first step are the curing, so we're going to combine a little bit of brown sugar, a little bit of salt and then a little bit of pink curing salt, which is a combination of good sodium chloride, also known as salt, and sodium nitrate, which will help preserve the pink color of the bacon. We will rub the cure all over the pork and wrap it tightly with plastic wrap, place it on a baking sheet and let it rest in the refrigerator. for about a week, once our bacon is cured we will take it outside to smoke it.

Well, here we have our cured pork belly. Now it's time to put it in the smoker and finish it off so our bacon has been smoking for about an hour. and a half, let's take a look, smoke, now it looks like bacon, as you can see, the color of the pork belly has really changed, the meat has gone from a limp pinkish gray to this darker red and the fat has turned a color little more yellow we're going to remove the skin because it's a little difficult for us to eat it. I'm just going to cut a few nice slices of this so what we have here is our homemade bacon it's still raw we need to cook it again so we can eat it and since we have our smoker ready to go we're going to go ahead and smoke some of these bacon pieces a second time so that they are completely edible.

Double smoked bacon. About one smoked bacon. to turn it into twice smoked bacon, we'll check it out in about half an hour, that should do it, so here we have our homemade twice smoked bacon, as you can see it didn't give up too much at such a low heat and the meat is even pinker than before hmm Wow, it's almost hard to taste anything else because it's so smoky you have a good amount of meat because we cut these slices quite thick and the flavor is exceptional - delicious, let's get back to Go to the kitchen and get to work.

Cool bacon. We have some bacon. We have a cast iron skillet that is cold right now. We're going to place these bacon strips in the cast iron skillet. We put the heat on medium and leave. that goes until they are crispy mmm crispy so we have a nice even browning on both sides, a good amount of fat rendered to make it nice and crispy, it just breaks apart mmm, excellent caramelization and crunch, very meaty, not too greasy , this is a really easy and foolproof way. To make bacon on the stove with a minimum of mess and fuss, bacon to begin with, we're going to place our bacon in a preheated pan now and you can see that it immediately starts to sizzle, it's getting a little smoky, okay, that's because do, so one thing you'll notice is that the fat didn't render as evenly as our cold start version did and that's because we didn't have any of that low heat time.

It's definitely less crunchy but doesn't look bad. Hmm, it's definitely chewier. and a fattier taste for sure, I'm not mad about that, the really bad thing was how smoky and spicy this method is, so I think starting from cold is definitely the way to reduce the bacon over low heat. This time we're going to put our bacon in a cold cast iron again, well we're going to turn the heat down to really low and really take our time, maybe I'll have time for a quick nap. Oops, I almost forgot to turn it over, there we go, so right away we can see that. there are some pieces that give up and crisp up a little less evenly, it's a little loose here, crispy ER there hmm, it's still tasty, but going even lower and slower didn't make the piece of bacon cook more evenly , since the cold medium is definitely the sweet spot of bacon lardons, the large ones are basically pieces of Frenchified bacon.

We have three thick strips of bacon, we're going to cut them into sticks about a quarter of an inch thick and then we're going to cook them over medium to medium-low heat. until nicely browned but not too rendered, we chew a little there, the wallah lardons brown instead of crispy it's kind of here and the fat is not aggressively rendered hmm, great caramelization, tons of the flavors from my garden, but not too crispy with a lot of meat each ooh bacon toaster it's a toaster but only for bacon what world we live in we just have to open this thing put our strips in there ooh sizzle I close the doors to the capsule compartment and press the button okay, let's look at this Wow that is really something that looks terrible we took it out because the edges are starting to burn and the rest is not even close to being done it's all over the place yeah obviously I'm mad at this how could I something made explicitly for cooking bacon?

Be so bad at cooking bacon, it's not faster, more convenient, or better, shame on you, bacon curler for the record. I don't have my hair or makeup done for this show, but the bacon does, oh, it's sizzling, you know, it's actually quite disturbing to me. this is hard working people cooking their hair, if this was a hair i would say they did a pretty good job, we have a nice tight curl here, but other than a few strands here and there, it doesn't look that cooked after actually, it's a little nervous eating it mm-hmm, yes it's bacon, but it hasn't been cooked in any particularly appealing way.

I'm going to overlook this bacon curling iron, well the curling iron was a bust, but we're going to try our luck with a curling iron, it really fits this thing in one go, so we'll have to do it just a few inches at a time. time. Well, I guess it's already done, so it's definitely almost cooked and we have some. of browning here hmm it's not particularly crispy or well cooked, but if you're going to cook bacon in the living room, this may be your best option, you know, it's starting to smell like burnt plastic in here, let's take a breather outside of the bacon in the living room. campfire three ways we're We're going to take these two strips and we're going to put them here over the coals, then we're going to have an envelope of aluminum foil with some bacon in it, then we're going to put it here and then we're going to hang these three strips over the flames and we're going to take them. all off now they're ready oh yeah that's on fire okay let's get those out that foil packet should be ready by now and let's try to get these guys out okay all set cold cooked bacon so obviously Bacon and direct open flame don't really mix. there's so much fat and it really caught fire in there so it was burnt and D on one side and barely cooked on the other hmm Oh yuck, it's really sour, saudi and unpleasant, you can barely taste the Crows bacon. bacon packed in foil, you know, all things considered, this doesn't look too bad, it browned a little, didn't yield much either, steamed a little there and didn't brown at all where the pieces overlapped hmm yeah no It's terrible, but there's nothing to write home about about the clothesline bacon, so this is a disaster.

I'm not sure why we thought this would work. This part here is just study, but quite raw and this part is just burned out and I'm not there. Sure, if it's really cooked, this doesn't seem too safe. I mean, this is pretty much the only piece I can't, I'm not going to do it, sorry, let's go back inside, it's getting weird out here, bacon baking, oven time. I have some bacon on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper and we're going to bake it at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes. It looks good. This baked bacon is very consistent.

It looks well cooked without being dry and to me it is nice and crispy. This is the Platonic Ideal of crispy bacon still a little Gib, just the right amount of fat rendered. I mean, if you ask me, this is the most convenient way to cook a large amount of bacon in one go and the parchment makes cleanup a breeze. a rack baked bacon is fine, same thing, but this time on a wire rack at 400 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes looks good, so one thing you'll notice here is that it feels like it's a little more even, which probably has to do with the way air was able to circulate around the slices, yes, very crispy, very well made, practically perfect, it's a real trade-off between this and the parchment version, but the latter is definitely easier to clean the roasted bacon, okay, same thing, but under the broiler. time, ooh, we have to take this out, it's starting to smoke roasted bacon, y'all know, I don't like what I'm seeing, we've got this burning on the edges, that's why we had to take it out, but other than that, it definitely seems a little less cooked than we want and it's not particularly crispy, yes there is some bitterness on the charred edges and it's not caramelized or crispy, yes rotisserie is a no-no bacon, doesn't like restaurant style bacon with high direct heat, now we're going to take a page out of the short order cooking manual, here we have six slices of bacon that we've dipped and a little bit of neutral oil in this baking dish and we're going to put it under the broiler for a few minutes. until it is fully cooked now we will take our fully cooked slices and place them on this last iron griddle and then we will weigh them with this hot press, these should be ready in no time, order the pieces really shrunk and they took in a really attractive color, very dark and consistent, great crunch, just a minimal amount of chew, this is exactly what I want in a BLT, this is a great method if you're making a ton of bacon to order, but it probably won't do all of that. a lot of sense at home bacon oven gadget okay we have this metal thing that looks like a dishwasher rack and we are going to cook bacon with it in the oven okay let's take a look at the slices they actually look pretty good excellent shape.

I have that kind of iconic wavy thing and the color is pretty perfect, well there's definitely some flexibility there mm-hmm I mean, I don't think it's better than our parchment baked version and I really don't want to have to clean that thing, but it definitely works. First we will take one of these strips and cut it. We're going to place it on this mold that's made specifically for making bacon bowls. Now we'll bake it until the bacon is fused together and crispy, that's something, okay, I mean, it didn't work, it's a bowl, okay, hmm, yeah, I mean, it tastes like cooked bacon, it's definitely a trick, but a great bacon straw, we made a bowl.

Try a straw, we'll take our bacon and wrap it around this slippery stainless steel straw. Now we're going to take our bacon straws and we're going to put them in the oven until they're cooked and crispy now that our bacon straws have cooled down. we can take them off these guys very impressive stainless steel, good caramelization and they held their shape pretty well also a little worried about how flexible they are although yeah I mean I know that taste from nowhere no surprises here but oh well, They only work as a straw. way to find out they hold water people, the perfect non-plastic straw exists Prince Harry's bacon so apparently Prince Harry went to Disney World as a child he loved the bacon he was served there and insisted that the royal chef From now on, in a specific way, it is first placed under the broiler and now that it is partially cooked but still quite soft and oily, it is cooked again in a very unrolled way.

It has a little more give than I would expect, you know, it's good, but it's actually a little tough, it's not as crispy as some of our other

methods

and it takes more work. I'm the one officially questioning Royal tastes like microwaved bacon, okay let's get out the oven. of the equation we're going to take our bacon, layer it between a few pieces of paper towel, and pop it in the old science box for three minutes. Easy, okay? Just so fans of the show know that I have very little love for the microwave. but this actually looks pretty perfect hmm damn it's a nice piece of bacon, it could be a crispy ER but it took three minutes and there was practically no cleanup so what's not to like?

Wow, bacon, now we're going to use this device called Wow. bacon that looks a bit like a Brita filter but apparently cooks bacon, put it in the microwave and leave it for three minutes. Wow, that's somethingIt looks like a dorm shower and a horror movie. It's all a little misty and misty and then there. Are these pieces of meat hanging? Yeah, not bad, but also why a plastic tray of bacon? Another microwave device. We are going to place our strips and cook them for two minutes and 45 seconds. Oh well, more cooked bacon in the trash, it looks really trashed.

I don't know what happened here. It looks strangely burnt but it's not crispy and it also smells like melted plastic. Something is very wrong here. It looks like it is steam fried and also tastes like chemicals. Bacon wave, but wait, there's more. This instruction manual is a bit disconcerting. We're going to weave our strips into the bacon wave and secure them with these plastic pegs that I assume will keep the bacon from falling out. Well, inside the box, she says. Wow, so it looks like these pieces came off the peg and shrank. so much to keep its shape strong smell of melted plastic almost burnt bacon it's okay, it's quite crunchy the strange plastic aftertaste is seriously disqualifying the microwave works why do you have to make it more complicated?

Bacon Butter We've cooked a lot of bacon so far, which means we've produced a lot of bacon fat that we've been saving because there are so many great things you can do with it First let's make some bacon butter , we'll take some hot bacon fat, strain it to get the bits out, and then refrigerate it until it hardens, now it's more solid. We'll put it in this plastic wrap, fold it and squeeze it into a nice little loop, Shawn, there, clearly bacon butter is just a nice way of saying bacon grease, but it's not the worst rebranding of The story is very soft, softer than butter. uniform and has this pale milky color, yes that's pork fat, okay, you get a little bit of smoke, salt and sugar, but it's not overpowering, obviously, it's not much on its own, but I would gladly use it as butter, for example, in a grilled cheese.

YUM bacon mayonnaise we have an egg yolk a little Dijon mustard a little lemon juice it is very difficult to make a mayonnaise with all the bacon fats we will start with vegetable oil adding little by little until the emulsion forms and then finally add our bacon grease and add a lot of salt and there's our bacon grease mayonnaise okay let's open this jar it's a little bit darker than standard mayonnaise and it's got a nice gelatinous consistency mmm you know lemon mustard. and the salt really increased the flavor of the bacon. I'm really trying it.

This would be the best bacon candy BLT ever. We're going to put a little bit of bacon fat in this little pot with a little bit of cream and heat it underneath to combine a little bit of corn syrup. Pour the sugar and salt into this pan and cook until

every

thing dissolves and turns a nice amber color. We're going to whip up our bacon cream mixture and then place a candy thermometer until it reaches 230 degrees. Transfer it to a greased loaf pan lined with parchment paper, hit it with a little flake salt and then we'll let these sweet turkey bonbons look so pretty and feel nice and pliable they smell a little like bacon, you know, honestly , it doesn't taste as strong of bacon it's like a really good salted caramel with a bit of a smoky pork aftertaste which is probably good.

Bacon bourbon, hold on to your hats, folks, first we're going to make bacon-infused bourbon, pour some of this in first. 2 o'clock sometime, so we're going to pour in our bacon fat, go to the last drop, put the lid on and shake it really well, then we're going to let this sit for a few days and we'll get back to it, okay? We refrigerated it for a few hours just now so that the fat solidifies and rises to the surface. Now we'll pour it through a coffee filter to clarify it. It looks good from the bottom up to look like regular bourbon, there's nothing floating in it.

That's good, it definitely smells like there's something a little smoky, a little oily, the flavor is not very strong, but it has a rich, round quality and definitely a little bit of smoke, you know, let's take this. go one step further and get our handy bacon straw which worked better than I thought and definitely tastes like bacon that way although I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not yeah water method bacon let's put these in slices in this cold cast iron skillet and then we're going to add enough water to cover the bacon, now we're going to turn up the heat and we'll come back when the water is completely boiling, okay, now that most of the liquid is evaporated we're going to turn the heat down and Finish it off, give it a spin and that's it, I'm seeing some little bits at the ends of the strips that didn't take on any color and while the pieces look pretty crispy there are more than a few specks on them, totally fine, it could be very crunchy here .

I just don't think pre-cooking and water added anything to the equation. Well, we have to do it right, we have a saucepan of boiling water here we are. Let's put our strips in there, oh boy, oh boy, yeah, and there we have our poached bacon, as you can see, it's totally soft, the fat seems to be what changed the most texture-wise, it looks pretty stringy, hmm, You know, although I'm not. getting any of the crispy, golden brown flavors that I associate with bacon, it's definitely quite interesting, it's chewy but not in a bad way and it lost some flavor in the water.

I think, trying to keep an open mind, steamed bacon, let's open this up. bad boy, put our pieces in there, close the lid and come back when it's done. I guess it looks very similar to our poached bacon, no color, although some of these pieces have a slightly brighter pink color, but yeah, floppy town, USA hmm Again, not what most people think when you think of bacon for breakfast, but it has more flavor than poached bacon. Car engine bacon, okay, we've got some bacon, we've got a hot car engine, we're going to wrap this bacon in aluminum foil and slide it in.

Stick it right into this little crack here and hopefully the bacon will cook nicely. 45 minutes have passed. We will call him. You know, it's a little hard to tell if it's cooked or not. There was definitely some liquid and some grease coming out. a little warm and has changed shape a little. I feel really nervous about whether this is going to poison me or not, but I'm going to try it anyway, yeah, I probably shouldn't have, this bacon is barely cooked, that wasn't wise, let's take this party back into bacon jam. , we're going to chop our bacon good and cook it well in this non-stick pan until it's golden brown and a little brown, pour in a little bit of that fat, add a little bit of chopped onion and once it's browned a little bit. sugar, a pinch of vinegar and let it cook for half an hour until it's nice and tangy, transfer it to our jar and we have our bacon jam, yeah, open this bad boy, this looks really cool, we basically flip our mix of bacon and onion. kind of caramel it's a little sticky a little oily mmm it's so good the dark caramel flavors really go well with the fat and smoke great umami energy this would be a great addition to a burger or a cheese plate or something candied like that bacon, this one is pretty easy, we're going to rub our strips with brown sugar, give them a little black pepper, do the same on the other side and then pop this in the oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes, shiny, you've got some burning on the edges from all that added sugar, but these pieces look really pretty mmm delicious.

I mean, I generally think bacon desserts are a little gimmicky, but the whole sugar, fat, salt, and smoke thing always hits home with bacon ice cream. Well, you can't make bacon ice. cream without making a bacon crème anglaise, we will add cream, milk, butter and bacon fat to this saucepan, we will bring it to a simmer over medium heat while it works, we have a little egg yolks, sugar and a pinch of salt and we will whisk them until light and fluffy. Now that there's hot dairy, we're going to add it little by little to our eggs to temper them and then we're going to beat it all together until it's smooth and then we're going to transfer this over.

Back in our saucepan, cook it until thick and then strain it to make sure it's smooth. We will let it cool in the refrigerator until it is cold and thick. Okay, now that our ice cream base is cold, let's pour. Pop it into this ice cream maker and let it rip now that it's almost done, add some baking bits you know for texture and let it finish freezing. Now we'll scrape it into this loaf pan, cover it with more bacon pieces and cover it with plastic. and then let it freeze overnight, well our bacon ice cream is ready to go and while we could make our ice cream in a regular bowl, why not in a bacon tada bowl for the pork ice cream?

Never been sure how I feel about cold bacon, but Here goes nothing Wow, very bacony, very salty, good chew to the bacon bits, you know, it's actually a lot better than I thought, but I don't think I can eat it more than a small spoonful, personally, let's get some fresh air. Do we grill bacon two ways? This side of the grill is nice and hot and this one here is very low, first we will oil the grill grates, then place the slices, carefully close the lid and flip again, we will simply remove them as the sprouts are ready High heat grilled bacon are always a problem with something that is greasy so it got a little charred plus a few spots that definitely could have been cooked a little more hmm definitely on the chewier side with the grilled flavor.

It's really deadly, it can be tricky to grill bacon properly without setting something on fire. We tried some great slow roasted bacon, so our low and slow roasted bacon was definitely cooked more evenly and there was more time for the fat to slowly melt, so the pieces shrank a bit. a little more definitely crispier, actually a little more grilled flavor since it had more time on the fire and the texture is really fresh. I prefer this to spicy and quick bacon, honestly, skewered bacon now that we have a couple of skewers that we've threaded strips of bacon onto. and we're going to grill them over medium low heat, turning them occasionally mmm, that smells so good, I love how crispy and golden around the edges and there's definitely some contrast between the peaks and valleys of these bolts, this wavy texture It's really great, I love the flavor of the grill in the variety of textures.

I would love this even more with a soy sugar glaze of some kind. Really cool Searzall bacon, we have our bacon, we have our Sears, all of which is basically just a modified blowtorch and we're going to cook it all the way through with this, this will take a minute, good enough for who it is, as you've seen before, high heat and direct does weird things with the bacon, these slices are a little charred and all seized, but they don't process well or even brown, very, very chewy and definitely cooked, but not much happens, it's cold out here.

I'm ready to get back inside George Foreman Bacon. Let's place our strips, close it and let it do what it seems done. For me, we have these cooked but still chewy bits here and then these almost burnt bits here, yeah. Walnut bars that are somewhat crunchy and are more cooked but chewy and taste a little like ham. I can't recommend it. Air fryer bacon. Can't. I'm even telling you how sick I am of this fryer. She hit the guests ready. I'm not impressed anymore so the bacon got a decent color but the fan blowing there folded the pieces back on themselves which didn't help, it's not crispy hmm.

Yes, naca ting the crunch. What I'm looking for is for this to be a waffle iron bacon, so we're going to place our strips on a little lattice and call it there, so yeah, pretty uneven hmm, yeah, the crunchy bits are crunchy, the chewy bits are chewy. I just can't think of any real reason to cook bacon this way, to be honest, bacon powder. Okay, we have our dehydrator, we have three strips of fully cooked bacon and we leave it on low temperature overnight, it looks very dry. Now I'm going to break these strips into a few pieces, put them in our spice grinder, close it and shake it, that's baking powder, it definitely feels a little sticky, it doesn't flow as freely as you would like for a powder type application, oh, it has a burnt egg aftertaste not good sautéed bacon is okay we're going to cut them into 1 inch pieces we're going to put a little bit of oil in our hot smoking wok inside goes the bacon we keep things moving just a minute we're sautéing the bacon we're looking at some pieces here which are more cooked than others, but it smells great, it feels completely different from our other

methods

, it's really delicious, there's a lot of that smoky wok flavor that really complements the natural characteristics of the bacon and the chew is reallyattractive in this context.

This would be a great starting point for some stir-fried Chinese broccoli or bacon fried rice or something. YUM, fried bacon, bacon meat, bubbling pot of hot oil. Well, it's definitely working. I think we need to cook it this quickly, but the pieces curled up in a really strange way and I'm not very happy with the uniform color around them. It's very crispy, I love the texture, but the frying oil seems to have dulled the flavor a bit and it's a little greasy, not bad, but it does fry. at home it's a pain bacon bits let's line up our strips and cut them into the smallest pieces possible, gently dip them in a little hot oil and homemade bacon bits crispy bacon bits and confetti I want a baked potato, you definitely have it Here there are a few different pieces of meat and fat mixed in, forget it, I'll just use my hands.

I really feel like I'm trying the frying oil here and kind of just cooked the bacon in a cast iron skillet and cut them up. Then country fried bacon, we have a little bit of all-purpose flour and beaten egg. Here I'm just going to season each one with a little salt and then we're going to dredge the bacon in flour, then in egg, and then in flour again. and then carefully place it in the hot oil, repeat with the rest of our bacon and take them out when they're golden brown and my friends are country fried bacon, so like a country fried steak, it's got this nice crispy, puffy exterior. which looks very good, but the bacon inside is not crispy at all, it smells very good, you know, with the breading it tastes like a bacon donut or something, more country fair novelty than anything else, but it's not at all bad, right? bacon cooked in almost every way we could think of, what did we learn right?

First we learned that lower, less direct forms of heat are the key to maximizing bacon's crispier potential, but also that in some cases a little chew isn't a bad thing. thing and while there are a lot of bacon, devices out there, none of them produced a product that was better than any of our simple methods and they were often much worse. I have a favorite method that you didn't see here today, leave it in the comments.