Bacon Nation: 125 Irresistible Recipes (2 page)

Cooking Bacon

You don’t need the skills of an
Iron Chef
contestant to cook bacon properly, but it does take some care. Hot spots on your skillet can produce bacon that is gristly and fatty on the ends and overcooked in the middle. Too hot and the bacon burns. Not hot enough and it is limp and oily. Thick-cut bacon needs to cook at a slightly lower temperature than thin-cut bacon. Here are some guidelines to getting the most flavor and best texture from your bacon. We say guidelines instead of rules because everybody’s pan and stove are a little different, and bacon, just like any other ingredient, always varies.

You’ll need to adjust the heat according to the type and heaviness of your pan or pot. A heavy cast-iron skillet works very well for sautéing bacon slices or cut-up pieces of bacon on the stovetop. A Dutch oven is our choice for stovetop-to-oven cooking. In our recipes, we use only an estimate of the time it takes to brown the bacon; your browning time will depend on the type of pan you are using, the intensity of the heat, the amount of bacon in the pan, the thickness and brand of the bacon, and other variables. But it’s not hard to figure all this out after you’ve cooked some bacon once or twice. As a general guideline, bacon slices of a regular thickness will take from 6 to 10 minutes to cook starting in an unheated skillet, while bacon slices cut into small (¼- to ½-inch) pieces will brown and crisp in 5 to 8 minutes. Of course, thick-cut bacon will take a little longer—from 7 to 12 minutes or more, depending on the thickness. So, our best advice is to monitor the cooking of bacon carefully, adjusting the heat and using your eyes to determine when it’s done to your liking.

How Done Do You Like Your Bacon?

How fully cooked and browned you like your bacon slices is up to you. Some folks tell us they like the taste and texture that comes with moderate cooking so they fry the slices only until the fat is still soft and chewable. Others find that result dreadful. They prefer cooking the bacon until most of the fat is rendered and the bacon is crisp with a firm bite. Then there are those—and we are not among them—who like their bacon slightly to fully burnt without a trace of fat remaining so that it just about shatters when you bite into it.

We’re not going to tell you how much to cook your bacon when you serve it alongside eggs or waffles, but we urge you to follow our directions when our recipes call for cooking cut-up pieces of bacon. Usually, the browned bacon pieces will go from the pan or skillet into the oven where they will cook longer. A lighter skillet browning ensures that some of the bacon fat, a main catalyst of flavor, will be released into the completed dish.

Panfrying Bacon Slices

Many people are impatient and cook bacon too quickly. We get the best results by cooking our bacon over medium heat so that it gently sizzles. Frying slices of bacon in a skillet requires some monitoring, so don’t walk away until the slices are done the way you like them. No doubt you will need to adjust the heat to keep the right sizzle. We usually turn the bacon and move it around in the skillet at least once before the slices are fully cooked. Use metal tongs to turn the bacon and to transfer the slices to a paper towel-lined plate to absorb the excess grease.

Panfrying Diced Bacon

Most of the recipes in our book call for you to brown ¼- to ½-inch pieces of bacon in a skillet or saucepan, rather than browning individual slices. The reason is a simple one: The bacon cooks more evenly. When bacon slices are first cut into small pieces or diced, we’ve found that it is easier to brown them uniformly and render the bacon fat without burning the meat.

Begin by setting the skillet, pot, saucepan, or Dutch oven over medium heat; add the cut-up pieces of bacon and adjust the heat up or down as necessary, stirring occasionally as the bacon cooks. As with full slices, you want enough heat to produce a gentle sizzling sound. Thicker-cut bacon requires a medium to medium-low heat to render the fat thoroughly without overbrowning the meat.

To prevent any splattering grease from hitting you when you stir the bacon pieces, use a long-handled utensil, such as a long-handled spoon or a Chinese bamboo skimmer. You might consider purchasing an inexpensive splatter guard to cover the skillet and cut down on bacon splattering your stovetop, your clothes, and you.

Baking Bacon

If you are cooking breakfast for a crowd or you need more slices than you can fit in a large skillet, oven baking is just fine. Baking bacon produces evenly browned slices. To bake bacon, position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 400˚F. Line a large broiler pan with aluminum foil, shiny side down. Set the broiler rack in the pan and arrange the slices of bacon on the rack without touching each other. Cook the bacon until golden brown, 11 to 15 minutes. The cooking time will depend on the thickness of the bacon slices. To ensure even browning, about halfway through the cooking time rotate the pan 180 degrees. When done, using metal tongs, transfer the bacon to paper towels to drain.

Microwaving Bacon

Before we tried cooking bacon in the microwave, we thought it was a horrible idea. Taking a lovely preindustrial food and nuking it seemed like sacrilege. Wrong: When you microwave bacon there’s no greasy skillet or stovetop splatter to clean up and the bacon turns out fine. To microwave bacon, place five raw bacon slices in a single layer between pieces of paper towel on a microwave-safe plate. Microwave on high power for 45 seconds to 1 minute per slice, or about 5 minutes total. The bacon should be slightly crisp with the fat almost fully rendered. If you want the bacon to be more cooked, microwave it for 30 seconds to 1 minute longer. Cooking times will vary according to the power of your appliance, so check for doneness after about 4 minutes. Wear an oven mitt to remove the plate from the microwave; it will be very hot. Then use metal tongs to transfer the bacon to a serving dish. Don’t use this method for cooking bacon if the recipe calls for saving the bacon drippings; you won’t have any.

Draining Bacon

Unless we tell you otherwise, get rid of the excess grease from cooked bacon by transferring it from the skillet or pan to a plate lined with paper towels. If the slices look exceptionally greasy blot them with more paper towels. We like using long-handled tongs to remove whole slices of bacon from the pan, while a slotted spoon works well for cut-up cooked pieces.

Ain’t Nothin’ Good Without the Grease

Bacon fat is rich in flavor and we never hesitate to recommend using it when we can if the recipe calls for fat in which to brown or sauté other foods. Many of us grew up in households where our moms or grandmothers kept a coffee can of bacon fat at the back of the kitchen stove. The fat was used and replenished almost daily for making dishes like fried eggs, boiled green beans, or skillet corn bread. Since then the discovery that animal fats contain high levels of cholesterol has—we would say misguidedly—altered our cooking and eating habits. Fat has calories, to be sure, but whether or not it affects cholesterol very much is a far from settled question. Fat is a vital component in a healthy diet, just not loads of it all the time. A healthier lifestyle doesn’t mean we need to exclude moderate amounts of wonderfully flavored animal fats like bacon drippings, duck fat, chicken fat, or butter from our diets. If you choose to shy away from using bacon drippings, you can usually substitute an equal amount of vegetable oil for the fat called for in the recipe. Though we don’t believe the dish will taste as good. We have intentionally created recipes that rely totally or partially on bacon fat for flavor, but at the same time we have worked carefully to strike a balance and appeal to health-minded cooks by ensuring that no recipe is overloaded with excessive fat.

Because the fat content of bacon varies from one producer to the next, you may fry up some pieces of bacon for a specific recipe in our book and find that the bacon has rendered too little fat. Not to worry; simply add a little olive or vegetable oil to make up the amount called for in the recipe. Likewise if your bacon renders too much fat, pour it off and either discard the amount you don’t need or save the excess for another dish. And if it makes you feel nutritionally moral, you can always trim off and discard excess fat from the ends of the bacon slices before you cook them.

A quick perusal of Internet food websites shows us that cooking with bacon grease is still very much alive today. Here are some of the most popular uses we found for bacon drippings to enrich our own everyday cooking. We have just scratched the surface here. Experiment on your own whenever you need to cook with fat.

• Pop popcorn in bacon fat.
  
• Make Caesar salad dressing with bacon drippings in place of the olive oil.
  
• Fry chicken using four parts peanut oil and one part bacon fat.
  
• Add about 1 tablespoon of bacon fat per pound to raw hamburger, ground turkey, or venison meat before frying or grilling the patties.
  
• Fry liver and onions in bacon fat.
  
• Use bacon fat to make gravies and roux.
  
• Sauté onions, carrots, and/or garlic in bacon fat for vegetable soups.
  
• Use bacon fat to cook refried beans and sunny-side-up eggs.
  
• Stir 1 to 2 tablespoons of bacon fat into pots of boiling white beans, polenta, grits, or rice.
  
• Sauté sliced brussels sprouts in bacon fat.
  
• Add bacon fat when boiling water to cook or blanch green beans.
  
• When baking russet potatoes, coat the skin with bacon fat before putting the potatoes in the oven.
  
• Cook hash browns in bacon fat.
  
• Sauté chopped Swiss chard and other hearty winter greens in bacon fat.
  
• Fry sliced tomatoes in bacon drippings (great on sandwiches).
  
• Use bacon fat when making skillet corn bread; you’ll get a crunchier crust.
  
• Substitute a tablespoon of bacon fat for other fats in single-crust pies.
  

Straining the Drippings

Many of our recipes call for bacon drippings. It’s hard to be accurate when you try to pour, say, 2 tablespoons of bacon fat from a hot and heavy skillet. It’s equally difficult to avoid pouring off the bitter, burnt brown bits that are left behind after you cook bacon. The way to get clear drippings that are easily measured is to transfer the drippings into a heatproof one-cup bowl (a coffee mug also works). Then, pour off the required amount of fat. The brown bits will have sunk to the bottom of the bowl or cup. Or, strain the drippings through a layer of cheesecloth set over a small bowl. (Some of our friends tell us they like the flavor of those browned bacon bits in the bottom of the skillet. In this case, don’t bother to strain the fat.)

Thick or Thin?

Most bacon is sold presliced. It varies in thickness from thin (twenty-eight to thirty-two slices per pound) to regular (sixteen to twenty slices in a pound) to thick (ten to fourteen slices per pound). Slab bacon is sold in one piece and still has its rind, a thick, light-brown layer of pig skin that covers the top of the slab of bacon. The rind is usually removed before cooking. You can cut slab bacon into whatever size strips or pieces you desire. We especially like it for making lardons—thick strips that are perfect for stews and soups—because lardons release the bacon fat and flavor more gradually than thin strips or smaller pieces of bacon.

Most of our recipes use bacon of regular thickness. If you find that yours is thinly sliced and the recipe calls for using five regular slices, you will want to increase the number of slices you use to six or even seven. Or, if the bacon is relatively thick, use one slice less. However, as lovers of bacon we find it’s always best to err on the side of too much rather than too little bacon: In fact, to our way of thinking it’s really not erring at all.