Oven bacon is perfect bacon.
I have a short attention span. My mind wanders while I’m cooking. I often burn things. I know. It surprises people. Someone like me who develops recipes, writes about food, and cooks all the time. Well, much of it is overcooked. Burnt. This is a lifelong pattern.
As a young teenager, I’d yell upstairs to my sister…”Hey Marge, want to try a piece of this banana bread (insert any recipe here) that I just made?” She’d yell back down to me, “Did you burn it?” Happened all the time. R.B. usually cooks the bacon for this very reason. I turn up the heat on the skillet way too much and have no patience for slow cooking. (Cheater BBQ makes perfect sense, now doesn’t it.) With all his low and slow barbecue experience, he’s got no problem hanging over a couple of skillets on the stove delicately turning the gently spattering bacon slices every so often until perfectly crisp. He loves his splatter screen. Not me. I leave my post. Start on something else like the biscuits. That’s when things get smoky.
Oven bacon is great for impatient folks with a short attention span.
When R. B. is too busy practicing the guitar, and the bacon is up to me, I do it in the oven. Changed my life. A whole pound cooked at once on baking sheets in about 15 minutes. The slices are perfectly even. Almost too perfect looking, like microwave bacon. You can still save the grease, too. Just pour it from the sheet into you drippings jar. Turn up the oven heat to 400 F. Lay the bacon slices out on a rimmed baking sheet. Put it in the oven. Set the timer for 10 or 15 minutes (you’ll have to figure out the exact timing for your bacon depending on the thickness and how crisp you like it). Be sure to set a timer. Get lost in your thoughts and your hands in the biscuit dough. Or make a pile of great BLTs. The bacon is ready to go for a crowd. Freeze it and pull out a few pieces as needed on a busy school morning. You never know when a little cooked and crumbled bacon can make the meal. Heat them back up in the toaster oven or microwave and you’re set to go.
This oven bacon is perfect. Not one burnt piece.
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