Even fresh coffee smells wafting through the house fail to wake a body like the spitting aromatic alarm clock of cooking bacon. I've known more than one adamant vegetarian to throw in the towel for a perfectly cooked rasher, and who can blame them? Bacon combines the oh-so-delicious dietary taboos of fat, salt and, if you're really lucky, maple sugar, into one perfectly textured piece of temptation.

Cooking bacon seems like an easy enough thing to do, but if you've ever ended up with a pan full of half burnt/half raw strips or an eyeball full of grease, you'll know that cooking bacon leans more towards art than science.

Due to its unhealthy nature, bacon should be considered a luxury. To that end, it is far better to splurge on a really good pound of bacon than to cheap out on the no-name brands in the supermarket. Get your bacon from a butcher to be sure that the slices are cut uniformly and the product is of a high quality. Cheap bacon in the supermarket is little more than an assembly of salty pork scraps smushed into a plastic pack. Good luck cooking bacon evenly when one end of a strip is 3 times the thickness of the other!

Start by laying bacon strips side by side in a cold frying pan (cast iron produces the best bacon, by far). If all of it doesn't fit, use a second pan or cook it in batches. Nothing ruins good bacon faster than piling it up in the pan layered bacon doesn't cook evenly and rarely crisps.

Place the pan over medium heat and let the bacon cook, resisting the urge to worry it as it fries. In its raw state bacon will stick to the pan, but as it cooks it will release and that's the point at which you can get your spatula or tongs in there and give it a flip. If the bacon is excessively fatty, you may want to drain the grease from the pan. Too much fat will hinder the bacon's ability to crisp properly, not to mention the damage that spattering fat does to the exposed surfaces of kitchens and cooks.

After the bacon has received its first flip, carefully watch for tone. Depending on how evenly your pan heats and the consistency of the rasher cuts, you may need to rearrange the strips in the pan to ensure they cook properly. As soon as the strips are evenly browned, remove them from the heat and place them on paper towel to remove the excess grease. If you're cooking batches, place the cooked bacon in the oven on very low heat to keep it warm until you're ready to serve. It can always be reheated in the microwave, but if you leave it on the counter there's likely to be nothing left to reheat by the time the second batch is done.

Learn more about this author, Sue Earle.
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