Want Straight Bacon Slices? Sprinkle This On Strips Before Tossing Them In The Oven

Bacon is an American staple breakfast item, and there are a few ways to prepare this tasty treat. So if you've been cooking it in a frying pan, you may want to try bacon in the oven, especially when you're cooking for more than just a couple people, because you can cook a whole package at a go. There are some tips for cooking bacon in the oven you might want to follow, but you can add this new viral bacon-cooking technique to the list: If you sprinkle a bit of flour on your bacon before cooking, it will help keep each slice more uniform and stop them from curling up.

On TikTok a user showed how dusting their bacon slices with flour created beautifully straight, flat slices of bacon that were ideal for a BLT sandwich. And on Instagram a user said, "Does sprinkling flour on bacon reduce the curls and enhance the flavor? Yup. Curl-free, and delicious." Both videos showed the bacon coming out of the oven straight, crispy, and uniformly cooked. This hack is both simple and relatively quick. Sure, you'll still need to flip each slice about halfway through the cook, but you don't need to be standing over the stove with grease exploding on your arms as they cook.

For this method, all you need is bacon, flour, and some parchment paper placed on your baking sheet. The parchment paper will keep the bacon from sticking to the pan or the paper, even better than aluminum foil. You'll still end up with a fair amount of rendered fat, but there are some amazing ways to use leftover bacon grease. So to start your cook, preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and line it with a single level of bacon strips, side by side. Add a little dusting of all-purpose flour to each strip. If they're too highly-coated in flour, you can pick them up and shake them off. The flour will imbibe some of the grease, and keep the bacon from curling.

All-purpose, wheat flour works great, but you can use rice flour for more crisp or rye flour for more chew, if you want the non-gluten route. Even a bit of cornstarch will work, but you don't want to use too much because it could get a little claggy in the cook. It's very finely ground and can coat the bacon in a thick paste, rather than simply helping to add a thin cooking barrier. Floured bacon in the oven lends itself to sandwiches, because it will be perfectly flat under the bread and add a crispy, salty bit of fat and protein with a proper crunch you just couldn't get from regular fried bacon.