The Secret to Great Bacon Is the Cold Skillet.
Crispy bacon and its byproduct, bacon fat, are very good, and when cooking strips of fatty pork, you need to make sure you reach your maximum potential. The best way to cook the bacon is in a cold skillet.
Part of the Skillet The Grown-Up Kitchen series , designed to answer your most basic cooking questions and fill in any gaps that may be missing from your home chef education.
While I usually bake bacon , sometimes I just need to fry a few strips and preheating the oven to 375 ℉ is a waste of time and energy. It may take a hot skillet to get a good crust on a chop or steak, but this is the enemy of crispy bacon. Typically, when you toss striped bacon in a very hot environment, it grabs, curls and cooks before the fat has time to come out. This means sticky, not crispy bacon.
Give this pork treasure a little time to get its best by placing it in a cold skillet, switching the heat to medium or low, and letting the fat drain slowly, giving the bacon plenty of time and a lot of fat that’s crispy. (Bonus: This results in the most leftover bacon fat, excellent cooking oil if there ever was.) Aside from bacon, this applies to any extra fatty meats you want to fry, like pancetta. It might take a little longer, but how long will it take to get very good, very crispy bacon?