How to Cook Bacon in the Oven Better: Use This Genius Tip to Prevent Soggy or Greasy Strips

For all the bacon fans out there, here is one of the simple life hacks you can try when cooking your bacon. Recently, people have become almost obsessed with bacon, and there's certainly a culture created around it. It's impossible to go anywhere without seeing or hearing about bacon in one way, or another and people will find any excuse to put it on almost anything. There are so many recipes that involve bacon including your classic bacon and eggs for breakfast or bacon cheeseburgers. There's also even wilder recipes like bacon being used in dessert recipes and bacon wrapped dates which sounds strange, but the mixture of sweet and salty is almost the perfect match. Bacon comes from the pig, and more specifically the side of the pig. The meat is cut off, and then it's smoked or cured which gives it that classic bacon flavor. But it's actually the fat in the bacon that gives it most of its flavor and what's needed to keep it crispy yet juicy. Most of the fat is cooked off of the bacon which can be poured out or reserved and used for other recipes.

Thousands of years ago in China, salted pork belly was a typical dish served in homes. Then in the Roman Empire, people were curing pork even back then, and English peasants used the fat of bacon to cook with. Up until the 16th century, bacon or bacoun was what people generally called any pork meat. The word bacon comes from Germanic and French languages from the French word bako and Germanic bakkon which are all talking about the back even though the bacon meat comes from the side or the belly of the pig. An interesting story about bacon is in the 12th century, a church in Dunmow, England would give a side of bacon to any married man who could swear he hadn't fought with his wife for over a year which is where the term "bring home the bacon" came from and why it was held in high esteem. Hernando de Soto was known as the "father of the American Pork Industry." and he brought 13 pigs to North America in 1539. Apparently, in three years time, he had 700 pigs. In 1653, the pigs almost prevented a wall from being built on Manhattan Island that the settlers of New Amsterdam built to keep out the British and Native Americans This area would then be called Wall Street and hundreds of pigs ran wild in New York City even during the 1800s.

So now that you know a little bit more about this well-loved meat, you'll learn a new way to cook baked bacon. Cooking bacon in the oven prevents the splattering that usually comes with frying bacon in a pan on the stove, it also means that the bacon will be cooked at an even temperature. You can just cook it on aluminum foil to keep the clean up minimal, but the bacon sitting in its own grease can cause it to become really soggy though. So why not take it a step further and make a bacon cooking rack that will help collect the grease even better and provide you with nice, perfectly crispy bacon every time? Just take a sheet of aluminum foil and fold it accordion style making one-inch folds. Then gently unfold the foil enough to have the ridges and place it on your baking sheet. Then, lay the bacon on the ridges and cook according to the directions in the video. Try out this and other simple life hacks from America's Test Kitchen.***