Oven-Baked Bacon Recipe (VIDEO) (2024)

FAQs

Is it better to bake bacon at 350 or 400? ›

Bacon should be cooked at 400°F.

Medium-thick bacon slices will need 18 to 20 minutes to reach the perfect level of crispiness. But check the bacon at 10 minutes, and adjust your cooking time to your preferred degree of doneness.

Heat the oven to 450 degrees. Arrange the bacon in a single layer on 2 aluminum foil-lined rimmed baking sheets, or, for extracrispy bacon, arrange on 2 wire racks set over 2 foil-lined rimmed baking sheets. Bake until the bacon is browned and starts to ripple, or to desired doneness, 10 to 20 minutes.

Regular, thin-cut bacon will typically bake in 12 minutes at 400 degrees F. If you want it extra crispy, you can let it bake a little longer, but keep a close eye on it. For Thick-Cut Bacon. Thicker bacon will take 14 to 20 minutes, depending upon your thickness and how crisp you would like it to be.

Step away for a minute to slice a tomato for a BLT and your bacon could throw a toddler-level tantrum. But oven-cooked bacon allows you to live your life for 18 minutes or so while the pork does its thing. You don't have to flip it, press it, or shield your kitchen from grease.

Bacon is done when golden brown and has rendered its fat. The shrinkage at this point is about 40%. It may or may not be crispy. Crumbly bacon is overcooked and that may be fine for how you are using the bacon.

Cooking bacon in the oven doesn't take any longer than in a pan. Oven bacon gets just as crispy, if not crispier, and there's very little mess to clean up after. Making a batch of bacon in the oven also means you can do other things while it's cooking.

The bacon won't splatter all over your countertop, clothes, or you! It does not pop, sizzle, or splatter in the oven. Perfect, evenly cooked bacon, every time. The bacon cooks evenly for beautiful, golden brown, perfectly crisp bacon.

Using Heat That's Too High

Bacon cooks best low and slow. Whether on the stove or in the oven, don't cook it at a temperature that's too high or you risk uneven cooking, or worse, burned bacon.

Prevent oven splatters.

This from Cindy Capps Lepp: Lay a layer of foil over the bacon; this will keep grease from spitting all over the oven. Remove the foil for the last few minutes of cooking for "final crisping."

Make Perfect, Crispy Bacon Every Time

You can use a glass baking pan, a steel or aluminum baking sheet, or even a cast iron pan. Check out the list of tools we like. Put the pan into a cold, unheated oven.

What is the best cooking method for bacon? ›

Always cook bacon on foil or parchment paper at 400°F. Cook regular sliced bacon for 14 minutes; thick-cut bacon for 18 minutes. If you cook less than a full sheet of bacon, check after 12 minutes. For extra-crispy bacon, bake it on top of a metal cooling rack set over the baking sheet.

In my experience, using the convection baking setting bakes the bacon faster than the standard baking setting. Either one is fine and will give you perfectly crisp bacon but you just may need to continue to bake the bacon longer after coming to temperature if using the standard baking setting.

Baked Bacon Is Less Greasy

Cooking bacon produces a lot of grease, which, when you use a typical recipe, stays on the bacon and gets eaten.

Why Should I Cook Bacon in the Oven? Because once you do you'll never go back. Bacon made in the oven is less messy, less painful (if you're prone to burning yourself with splattering bacon grease) and just less hassle all-around than bacon made on the stovetop.