How to Cook Bacon in the Oven 🥓

One of the many benefits of cooking bacon in the oven is that this method produces a crispy, evenly cooked bacon every time. And what else would you want of your bacon than being crispy? Follow these simple steps to always make nice and crisp bacon in the oven.

How to Cook Bacon in the Oven

First heat up your oven to 375F (190C) and place a wire rack in your baking tray. If you don’t have a large wire rack, continue reading for an aluminum foil hack.

Place your bacon slices on the wire rack and put them in the preheated oven. Set your baking time and you can forget your bacon in the meantime.

Baking time is between 12-15 minutes, you’ll find a more detailed explanation on how long to cook bacon in the oven below.

Take out the baking tray and let the bacon cool for a minute. Simply take your bacon slices off the rack and serve them. You don’t need to worry about them sticking, it’ll be easy to remove crispy baked bacon either from a regular wire rack or the aluminum foil hack.

If you want to preserve the bacon grease, drip it off to a container from the baking tray.

The Aluminum Foil Trick

To cook your bacon perfect and crispy in the oven, you’ll need one special tool: a wire rack. This will help the air circulate throughout your pork and reach that desired crispiness. Also the fact that not the whole strip is touching a hot surface will produce an even, perfectly cooked result.

But what if you don’t have a wire rack to put it in your baking tray?

There is an easy heck that you can apply if you have no wire rack to bake your bacon on.

1. Take a piece of aluminum foil, 4X the length of your baking tray.
2. Fold it in half. This is to give it extra strength.
3. Make an accordion fold, about 1-1.5 cm or 1/2 inch high.
4. Stretch it out carefully and place it on your baking tray so that it extends all the way through. And that’s it, you have a perfect wire rack to bake your bacon slices on.

Tips for Baking Bacon

• Always preheat your oven before baking your bacon.
• Don’t move the slices once they’re on the wire rack.
• Definitely use a wire rack or the aluminum foil hack so that the bacon slices won’t touch the surface over a large area.
• Use oven mitts, your baking tray will be very hot.
• Bake your bacon right before serving them. In other words, serve your baked bacon fresh.

How Long to Cook Bacon in Oven

Cooking time depends on a lot of factors, but mostly on your oven, how crispy you like your bacon and how thick the slices are. But between 12 and 15 minutes the result will be perfect.

In my experience, a regular bacon slice, not too thin or thick, should bake for about 12 minutes at 375 (190 C) for a mostly crispy texture but one that you can still bite into. This is my favorite way of serving bacon, not the cracker-type crispiness but when you can still somewhat feel the original greasy texture. Unpleasant to some, ideal in my opinion.

Yet if you want a really crisp, wafer-like bacon, you should bake it for a couple of minutes longer, about 15 minutes.

Pleas note that if your slices are thicker, you’ll need to bake your bacon a little bit longer. Similarly, very thin slices should be ready a couple of minutes faster.

Everyone’s oven is different, you should test your oven for the exact baking time so that you can always have a perfect result in your own kitchen, according to your taste.

Pros and Cons of Preparing Bacon In The Oven

Although undeniably the most popular method, there are also some cons to cooking bacon in the oven. Let’s see what are the benefits and the disadvantages of baking your bacon.

Benefits

• You can make extra crispy bacon every time.
• It’s a set and forget method. You just put your bacon in the oven and take them out once the baking time is over.
• Oven baked bacon is always more evenly cooked compared to the pan fried version.

Cons

• Baking bacon in the oven requires much more time than cooking them over the stove-top.
• It’s a more costly and less environment-friendly method. This might not concern everyone, but instead of heating a pan for 8 minutes, when cooking bacon in the oven you need to preheat the oven and then keep it hot for 12-15 minutes. Also you are technically wasting a large piece of aluminum foil every time you cook bacon in the oven.
• You have to wash your large baking tray which will hold all the grease that cooks out of the bacon.