Bacon tastes sooooooo good. It’s great with eggs in the morning of course, and crumbled in salads it adds a nice contrasting layer to the greens. Cooked bacon adds flavors to quiches, stews, and soups. (I just made a potato soup and the added bacon took it to a new level.) 
But standing over the stove with those pork slices spitting up at me, feeling guilty about pouring the bacon fat down the drain, and scraping all those bits off the pan and soaking it and washing it had me thinking about the soy alternative again.
And then, that wacky pork lover himself, Alton Brown, showed me the light. Well, actually, he showed me the oven and the joys of bakin’ bacon.
In AltonBrownSpeak, here’s the hardware:
A sheet pan.
A wire rack for the sheet pan.
There is no number three.
Then:
Place the wire rack in the sheet pan.
Lay your bacon slices across the rack.
Put the sheet pan in a cold oven. (Just like frying bacon, starting out cold keeps the bacon from curling. And that’s a good thing.)
Turn your oven on to 400 degrees.
When your oven reaches temperature set your timer to 8 minutes.
After the timer goes off, check the bacon every one or two minutes until it’s as crisp as you want it.
Done.
Drain the bacon on paper towels. Then, and here’s the best part, (besides the eating part) remove the wire rack, wipe out the sheet pan with paper towels and throw the towels away. No more down-the-drain-guilt! The rest of the clean up is easy.
Need to cook more than one sheet pan of bacon? Use multiple sheet pans on multiple racks in your oven.
Shopping list
Alton Brown (his books, not him)
Sheet pans
Wire racks
Niman Ranch Bacon, try their Applewood Smoked Bacon
You don’t have a timer? I’ve got four in my kitchen and sometimes I’m using them all at the same time. The trick is to know when a particular beep beeps, is it for the beans, the bread or the bacon. Buy some timers.
What’s your favorite use of bacon? Tell us.
– J. Michael Wheeler
