This Is Ina Garten's Favorite Method For Cooking Bacon
There are few meats that get the kind of love bacon gets. According to Meat + Poultry, bacon sales were up 23 percent in January 2021, with this industry raking in a sizzling $489 million. Cha-ching.
What makes bacon so delightful? Maybe it's the smell that permeates every nook and crevice of your home when you cook it. Maybe it's the greasy, crunchy, savory taste of this meat — which can get anyone's mouth salivating at the mere thought of it — that makes bacon so delicious. We are sure there is some science behind how this siren food tempts us, but honestly, we don't care. We just want to eat bacon on our burgers, our BLTs, in our salads, and alongside our eggs. You can never make too much of it, either. Even Guy Fieri will back us up when it comes to most people's favored pork.
But when it comes to frying up this meat, we are on team Ina Garten. The celebrity cook who says "store bought is fine" is also a fan of cooking hacks that save time, which is one of the reasons we are on board with her favorite way to cook bacon. Not to mention, cooking bacon in this manner is not only practical, but also produces an evenly cooked batch of these strips of goodness. Moreover, the cleanup that follows is just how we like it: nice and simple. How does the Barefoot Contessa cook this favorite breakfast food?
She makes use of a sheet pan
Per Salon.com, Garten is a fan of cooking bacon on a sheet pan in the oven — and there are a lot of pros to using this method. Obviously, you don't have to clean up any grease splatters from your stovetop. Plus, there is no bacon-flipping involved. You just pop it in a 400 degree preheated oven until it gets crispy — which could take anywhere from 20-30 minutes — and you've got perfectly cooked bacon. And you don't even have to clean a frying pan, either.
According to Tech Geeked, cooking bacon in the oven allows you to cook large batches in one fell swoop. If you want to have minimal cleanup, you can line the pan with foil or parchment paper, which will collect the grease and keep your sheet pan nice and neat. Of course, to reduce waste, Salon.com notes that you can use that bacon fat to cook up some veggies or collect and save it for later use. After all, as Andrew Zimmern says, "Fat is flavor."
Garten also uses the oven method when she makes her caramelized bacon, which is its own kind of catnip for humans. So the next time you make bacon, break out the sheet pan, heat up the oven, and enjoy!