A Review of Making Bacon on a Baking Rack

So, you know bacon, right? Of course you do. Don't even try to tell me that you don't. It's the official food of people who don't care about their arteries, and that's most of the internet. It's moist and salty and delicious. It has this smell that reminds me of Saturday mornings in New Hampshire, a fresh coat of snow and the sun peeking over the mountains as a ski shuttle rumbles up the road.

I have cooked bacon in a bunch of different ways. On the griddle, it is time consuming and messy because you end up with a pan full of sizzling hot grease, but the bacon comes out perfectly if you're paying close attention. In the microwave, it is fast and easy, but the bacon is robbed of several magnitudes of its baconness. Now any baconness is better than no baconness, but I still want a good way to cook bacon without splattering my kitchen and setting off fire alarms.

Enter the oven.

I've done this many times. Put aluminum foil on the baking sheet. Put bacon on the foil. Bacon goes in while the oven is cool. Set the oven to 400°. Twenty minutes or so later, mostly perfectly cooked bacon is there on the cookie sheet, floating in grease, which you fold up in the aluminum foil and throw away. Enjoy the bacon. It is delicious.

Yesterday, I read a tip on the internet about this method. If you want really crispy bacon, then you put the bacon on a cooling rack when you bake them. It keeps the bacon out of the messy grease and lets the bacon cook on both sides. Well, my internet best friend, I couldn't help myself. I LOVE crispy bacon. So I tried it.

And I failed.

What you see above is the residue of the bacon from that experiment. Apparently, I was supposed to do something to keep the bacon from sticking to the cooling rack, but the article didn't say anything about that, and stick it did. I had to crush it through the sheet and onto a plate. We tried to make the best of it and sprinkled it on eggs thinking, "It's still good, right?"

Wrong.

It was unevenly cooked, either burnt or limp. And the mess! The mess was insane!!! Two cookie sheets, two cooling racks, a plate, my hands, my gloves, my counter, all covered in bacon grease and bits. The tip called for 18 minutes and it took nearly 30!

This method of cooking bacon gets a crushed pile of sad bacon and no stars to speak of. It was an utter disaster. Whoever thought this would be a good idea should be ashamed of themselves for finding the one possible way to ruin bacon. For. Shame.