Cooking Perfect Bacon
This isn’t a recipe blog but some thing are just too good to not share. I’ve tried to be a good vegetarian but bacon is my weakness. Browsing on Pinterest, I came across a picture that said “Running bacon under cold water before cooking will reduce shrinking by up to 50%”. Bacon that doesn’t shrink? Sounds good to me. It also suggested cooking the bacon at 365 for 10 minutes to obtain the best flavor. I decided to give it a try….
1. Preheat oven to 365 degrees.
2. Unwrap bacon and place in colander, separating pieces and rinsing with cold water (I rinsed with warm as well since the cold didn’t seem to do much).
3. Place bacon on cookie sheet, glass pan, or aluminum foil with the edges turned up to stop grease from pouring down.
4. Bake at 365 for 10-20 min. My oven took about 20 to get the bacon browned how I like it.
The end result, amazing bacon that didn’t shrink!
From a strict science point of the view the water thing makes no sense. Bacon shrinks because fat is being cooked off of it.
Here’s another little trick I use since I’m single. I take a strip of bacon, place it on parchment paper, roll it over, place another on top, roll it, repeat until all the bacon has been separated by the folded parchment and you have a nice brick of bacon. Fold the ends, wrap in plastic wrap and then in foil. Stick in freezer. Now when you only need to cook a few pieces of bacon you can take it out and have individually frozen strips that you can cook and put the rest back in the freezer.
From the science point of view, that’s very interesting! Maybe some of the fat is washed off by the water. Or are you talking about the lines of fat in the bacon?
Thanks for the tip. I usually cook bacon by the pound and keep it in between paper towels in a container inside the fridge or freezer. Then take out pieces as they are needed, but bacon disappears quick in this house. 🙂
Does this work for turkey bacon?