Best Pan To Cook Bacon In Oven

Best Pan To Cook Bacon In Oven – The best way to cook bacon: Stovetop, oven, grill and under glass There are as many ways to cook bacon as there are varieties of smoked meat, but not all are created equal. Here’s everything we know about cooking on the stove, baking, grilling, grilling, and more.

Daniel joined the culinary team at Serious Eats in 2014 and writes articles on recipes, equipment reviews and cooking techniques. Before that, he was food editor at Food & Wine magazine and a staff writer for the bar and restaurant section of Time Out New York.

Best Pan To Cook Bacon In Oven

Of all the ways to make bacon, cooking it with macon is the worst. Macon was a pig, and he once starred in the old Trey Parker and Matt Stone beat, “Bekin’ Bacon with Macon.” In a dark twist, Macon eats bacon. Yes, they went there, but then the producers of Quan

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There are certainly better ways to make bacon that don’t involve feeding it to unsuspecting pigs. You could, for example, do what Stone and Parker do in the video (albeit badly) and cook it in the kitchen. Or you can cook it in the oven. You can grill it, or even cook it well. There are people who say you can put it in the microwave, but these people should not be trusted with food.

The “best” method depends on how many people you’re cooking for, what your personal bacon preferences are, and what kind of recipe the bacon will be part of. Personally, I’m a firm believer that well-cooked bacon strips should be crisp in the meaty parts and slightly tender in the fat; A little chewing is not harmful as long as it is not hard. Others, whose opinions I’ll pretend to consider “equally valid but just different,” like their bacon cooked until it crinkles all over, or what’s commonly known as “crispy burn.” I’m not here to judge, just to observe.

The following tips combine years of serious food testing of bacon cooking methods, plus many original tests for this article. I’ve even gone ahead and re-examined some of the material we’ve covered before for completeness. In almost every test, I used both thin strips of standard breakfast bacon (you can see our epic supermarket bacon taste test here) as well as thick strips.

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Bacon in the kitchen is bacon with a soul. This is the bacon that you pick up as it cooks, that you turn and turn, watching each piece so that it comes out perfectly. This bacon is cooked in a cast iron pan that, over the years, is covered with polymerized layers.

Cooking bacon can have a great dynamic range. It has the ability to be the crunchiest where it’s crunchy and where it’s greasy and everything in between.

Bacon is also ineffective. The typical length of a strip of bacon barely fits a large 12-inch diameter, making it difficult to place more than four or five pieces in the pan at once. For this reason, cooking bacon for a crowd in the kitchen is a challenge. Of course, you can invest in an electric or stovetop griddle for extra bacon-cooking real estate, or you can move the bacon into the oven, which can make excellent strips with minimal attention from the cook.

The Best Method For Making Bacon

The most important thing when cooking bacon in the kitchen is to control the heat. Low to medium heat is best. Let the pan get too hot and the bacon will burn, the fat will smoke and burn, and everything will taste bitter in your mouth. While I totally respect people who like their bacon extra crispy, the fact is that this bacon always has at least a hint of that ashtray flavor. Judging by the popularity of crispy bacon, I suspect I may be more susceptible to this than many people.

The best pan for bacon is a cast iron pan. Like fried chicken, cast iron has a symbiotic relationship with bacon. Cast iron cooks bacon with little to no sticking and cleanup is easy (at least, if the cast iron is well seasoned). Bacon, in turn, provides a ready supply of fat to help sustain and enhance the cooking process. After a lifetime of cooking bacon with proper basic care, your cast iron will reach cherished heirloom status, destroying your children’s relationships with each other as they fight over who gets to keep it (don’t commit the ‘failed to try. Leave it in your case). Decide; the cardinal rule of parenting is, after all, not to reveal favorites).

Stainless steel can also be used, but less ideal. It cooks the bacon just right, but its stickier surface leads to what you see below: brown bits stuck together that then have to be removed. It’s not worth the cleaning effort when there’s cast iron within reach.

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The third option is non-stick. It works well, and cleaning is the easiest of all the options, but I still stay away. Even with a well-managed flame, the fat in a non-stick pan will get really, really hot, hotter than a non-stick surface, because it’s more prone to heat breakdown. If you have a cast iron skillet, why not use it?

The established wisdom is to start the bacon in a cool, dry pan so it slowly crisps in its own fat. My tests more or less confirmed this, but compared to the hot start the differences weren’t as dramatic.

Controlling the heat during cooking is more important than that: if the pan gets too hot, a cold start can quickly get out of control and leave you with bacon that’s worse than a more carefully managed hot start batch. In general, however, a cold start gives you the most control over the temperature right from the start.

Oven Bacon (in A Cast Iron Skillet!)

Cold starter bacon has one downside, which is that the bacon is more likely to stick to the cold pan. In a well-seasoned cast iron pan, this isn’t as much of a problem, so I don’t think it warrants switching to a hot start, but it’s worth remembering. Make sure you have a thin slotted offset spatula or other thin metal spatula, if the bacon sticks slightly – the spatula will be able to slide under and release it.

Some people suggest starting the bacon in a pan with water, such as schmaltz fat or lard. After the water has boiled, the bacon continues to fry in the prepared fat. I wasn’t entirely happy with the results. The bacon came out well, with an impressive range of textures with chewy chunks, tender fatty chunks and crispy bits all in equal measure. But starting the bacon with water also disperses the juices and proteins from the meat throughout the pan; When the water dries, these proteins and juices form a film on the surface of the pan, making cleaning much more difficult. In the cast iron pan, I also noticed that the bacon tends to stick to the pan more aggressively due to the water starting.

The frequency of flipping has a negligible effect on the resulting bacon. It can help reduce burning and even overcooking, but most bacon is so thin that if you leave it in the pan too long, it will burn no matter how many times you turn it. Again, managing the heat and getting the bacon out at the right time (whatever that might mean to you) is more important than details like turning too much or too little.

Best Frying Pan For Bacon

The oven has a few things to do. First, you can cook too much bacon in the oven at once. Arranged on a rimmed baking sheet, several servings can be made with minimal effort. Pop another baking sheet into the oven and you’re pretty much ready to open it. It’s no coincidence that the oven is often used to cook bacon in restaurants, especially if they don’t have the large griddles used by short-order cooks.

The oven also provides more heat to the bacon, reducing the risk of any one part scorching and burning before the rest is done. Relatedly, the oven method is also relatively free, as long as you keep an eye on the bacon and make sure it doesn’t overcook.

Kenji has written about the oven method before, and my test in this article agrees with his findings. He is a lover of crispy bacon, so he and I differ, and therefore our preferred baking methods. The only time I choose crispy bacon is when I want it crumbled for a sandwich or like a baked potato. In these settings, there are enough other ingredients to cover the burnt taste of the extra crispy bacon than I do

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