How to Cook Bacon in the Oven (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.

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.

You can cook the bacon directly on aluminum foil-lined baking sheets or on a wire rack set on top of the baking sheets. The latter method will give you extra crispy bacon, but you'll have to wash that greasy rack. Your choice!

You can easily pull it off with a wire baking rack, aluminum foil, and a rimmed baking sheet — simply set the rack within a foil-lined baking sheet, place the bacon strips on top of the rack, ensuring none of them are dangling over the edge, and let the oven do its magic.

Oven bacon is a true set-it-and-forget-it affair, and if you line a baking tray with foil or parchment paper, you'll have nothing to clean after.

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.

Bacon injected with lots of water for curing will lose a lot of water when cooking due to evaporation. Rinsing your bacon with cold water just gives you wetter bacon. Think about it. Where was your bacon before you got it ready to cook?

Crowding the Pan

Crowding creates steam and prevents the bacon from cooking evenly, giving you limp bacon instead of crispy strips. Cook in batches if needed.

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.

How do you keep bacon from sticking to the pan in the oven? ›

Line the pan with aluminum foil or Silpat for easier cleanup. Don't use a baking rack to "keep the bacon out of the grease." Instead, put the crispy bacon onto a paper towel-lined plate when it's done.

A baking sheet or parchment paper? The best way to cook bacon in the oven is on parchment paper because it allows for an easy cleanup. Once you're done and it's cooled down, simply roll all that grease up into the center of the parchment paper and throw it away!

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.

Diner and restaurant chefs usually position the strips on a rack atop a baking sheet and place it in the oven to effectively drain the excess fat. Unlike cooking bacon in a pan where the fat accumulates and leads to soggy, uneven-cooked strips, this method ensures the most desirable results.

Oven bacon is a true set-it-and-forget-it affair, and if you line a baking tray with foil or parchment paper, you'll have nothing to clean after.