Cook Perfectly Crispy Bacon Every Single Time - Baked Bacon Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Is it better to bake bacon at 350 or 400? ›

Bacon should be cooked at 400°F.

Medium-thick bacon slices will need 18 to 20 minutes to reach the perfect level of crispiness. But check the bacon at 10 minutes, and adjust your cooking time to your preferred degree of doneness.

Kenji López-Alt recommends 425 degrees, which he says takes 20 minutes for crispy bacon, but he doesn't recommend going much higher than that. “Cooking at 475 left me with bacon that was threatening to burn in spots and still undercooked in others after just 15 minutes,” López-Alt wrote.

Whether you prefer to microwave, pan-fry, or bake your bacon, the oven will allow you to keep your bacon crispy for up to a few hours. Set the temperature to 200ºF and center a baking rack. Lay your cooked strips out on a baking sheet and place them in the oven until it's time to enjoy.

I top one or two rimmed baking sheet pans with sheets of parchment and a row of bacon slices, then bake them at 400°F for 15 minutes. It's just as simple and efficient as it was at the hotel.

But oven-cooked bacon allows you to live your life for 18 minutes or so while the pork does its thing. You don't have to flip it, press it, or shield your kitchen from grease. And if you play your cards right, cleanup will take two minutes, flat.

Side bacon has much more fat on it. Uncooked or undercooked fat is not well-appreciated by Americans. As a result, they tend to cook it longer, to render much of the fat out. This leaves the bacon crispy.

They cook it the best way possible, on a sheet pan in the oven. The bonus is while it takes longer to make this way, you can make more at once, the pieces are more or less flat and they come out crispy. Or they throw it in the deep fryer once it's done.

As with other meats, allow some room between strips, about an inch, when placing bacon in the pan. Crowding creates steam and prevents the bacon from cooking evenly, giving you limp bacon instead of crispy strips. Cook in batches if needed.

Oven bacon gets just as crispy, if not crispier, and there's very little mess to clean up after. Making a batch of bacon in the oven also means you can do other things while it's cooking.

Is bacon crispier in oven or on stove? ›

Cooking bacon in the oven gives you perfectly crispy slices without any flipping or fussing, and the cleanup is superspeedy. It's also the best way to make bacon for a crowd. You can cook the bacon directly on aluminum foil-lined baking sheets or on a wire rack set on top of the baking sheets.

Even if you're in a hurry, we really don't recommend this method. Stovetop (medium-low heat): We started with a cold pan, put the bacon in, and turned the heat to medium-low. It took 18 minutes to cook and the result was bacon with a great bite, good color, and rich flavor.

What Temperature to Bake Bacon in the Oven. We recommend baking bacon at 400 degrees F. For most recipes, you'd wait for the oven to preheat before you start baking. When baking bacon, however, we suggest sliding the sheet pan into the cold oven so the bacon sits inside as the oven comes to temperature.

Bacon cooks best low and slow. Whether on the stove or in the oven, don't cook it at a temperature that's too high or you risk uneven cooking, or worse, burned bacon. It's not worth rushing, so plan accordingly.

Cook on medium-low heat—you want to render a lot of the fat out of the bacon and this takes time. Don't rush it. Turn bacon occasionally with tongs so bacon cooks evenly. Since most pans don't heat evenly, you should move the bacon to a different part of the pan when flipping it.