These 14 Mistakes Are Ruining Your Bacon
NEWS
By SARAH NOWICKI NICHOLSON
Thin Cuts
Bacon is 50% fat, so a thinner cut will melt away in your pan, leaving you with very little once cooked. Hence, it’s best to choose a thick cut instead of a flimsy one.
A great option is uncured slab bacon, which is uncut bacon made without nitrates. You can also opt for thick-cut streaky bacon, a common American variety made from pork belly.
Prolonged Refrigeration
Bacon will last in the refrigerator unopened until its use or best-by date. If there’s no date, you can safely store the unopened bacon for about two weeks.
Conversely, an open pack of uncooked bacon can be stored in the fridge (at about 40 F) for no more than one week. However, you can leave it in the ice box for about four months.
Excessively Hot Pan
Since bacon has a lot of fat, adding it to an already-hot pan will cook that fat too quickly, but its interior and the fat within won’t cook or render as fast.
Start your bacon off in a room-temperature pan, and gradually get it up to heat. Doing so will allow the fat to render slowly, and altogether the bacon will cook more consistently.
Cold Bacon
Bacon is half meat and half fat. The fat retains its chill longer than the meat, so cooking cold bacon leads to undercooked fatty portions and overcooked meat portions.
For evenly cooked bacon, you should remove it from the fridge and let it sit at room temperature for about 15 to 20 minutes before introducing it to your room-temperature pan.
Extremely High Heat
If you start the pan cold and turn the heat up too high, the bacon’s fat will burn, and its exterior will cook too fast, leaving you with unevenly cooked bacon.
Instead, use medium-low or medium heat and let the bacon cook slowly and evenly. When using the oven, cook your bacon at 325 to 350 F for 10 to 20 minutes for a well-cooked strip.