No More Grease Splatters: The Best Way To Cook Crispy Mess-Free Bacon Isn't On The Stove

We'd like to officially petition for bacon to be regarded as its own food group — it's that good, and these simple strips bring so much additional flavor to any dish. Even the fat from bacon is a wonder in the kitchen, transforming your caramelized onions and making your morning toast completely crave-worthy. However, there is a drawback: Cooking it on the stove typically leaves that surface absolutely covered in grease splatter. If the thought of clean-up has been keeping you from enjoying bacon as often as you'd like, we'd like to put you onto what is actually the best way to cook it: in your oven.

There are a few reasons why this is, in fact, the superior bacon-cooking method. First and foremost, there is zero splatter to clean up — all the grease pools in the pan and stays there. Secondly, you can make more bacon at once, even using multiple baking sheets, which is great if you're feeding a crowd. Also, baking it renders crispy, evenly cooked strips every time, and you don't have to babysit it the way you do when pan-frying — you're free to attend to anything else you need to get done in the kitchen while it crisps up.

We have a few suggestions to help make the process of baking your bacon even easier, starting with the cook temperature. You don't want it to be too high and burn it right away, but nor do you want it to end up taking an hour. About 400 degrees Fahrenheit is the best temperature for baking bacon, and you can adjust the time based on how hot your oven runs, how much bacon you're cooking, and how thick the bacon is — usually about 10 to 20 minutes.

And to make that clean-up a snap, always line your pans with something, be it parchment paper or, our preference, aluminum foil (you can actually bunch up your aluminum foil a little bit to create an uneven surface, so the fat drips below the pieces). Make sure you cover the entire pan so that grease doesn't leak through; then, when the bacon is done cooking, you can just bunch up the liner and toss it in the garbage -– easy peasy. You might also lay down a wire rack if you have one, so that the bacon sits further up from the pan, but you don't need one (they're such a pain to clean, anyway); your bacon will get plenty crispy even if you don't use one.