How do I cook bacon so it is crisp and flat?

Bacon is a cured product with a lot of fat and, very often, a lot of added water. Both of those decide how it behaves in a pan far more than anything you do to it, so the first useful step is knowing which kind you have bought.

What you'll need

• Bacon rashers
• A heavy frying pan, or a baking tray and oven
• Kitchen scissors
• Kitchen paper

Step by step

1. Know whether it is dry-cured or wet-cured.Dry-cured bacon has been rubbed with salt and rested; it fries cleanly and shrinks less. Wet-cured bacon has been injected or soaked in brine and often carries declared added water. In the pan that water comes out, the pan temperature crashes, and the bacon simmers in white liquid instead of frying. Both are edible; only one crisps easily.
2. Start in a cold pan, not a hot one.Lay the rashers in a cold or barely warm dry pan and bring the heat up to medium. The fat renders out gradually and the bacon then fries in it. Dropped into a hot pan, the meat proteins set and contract before the fat has melted, which is what makes rashers buckle.
3. Snip the fat edge to stop the curl.Fat and meat shrink at different rates and the strip of fat along a back rasher shrinks more, pulling the rasher into a bow. Two or three snips through the fat edge with scissors before cooking releases the tension and the rasher stays flat.
4. Deal with the white liquid if it appears.If the pan floods, tip the liquid out into a bowl — carefully, it is hot — and put the pan back on the heat. Once the water has gone the bacon will start to fry properly. Do not turn the heat up to boil it off faster; you will scorch the rashers that are already touching the pan.
5. Turn it once, when the underside has coloured.Bacon does not need constant fiddling. Give each side long enough to brown properly. For genuinely flat rashers, press them down with a fish slice or set a smaller pan on top for the first minute or two.
6. Use the oven for more than about four rashers.Lay the rashers flat on a lined baking tray, or on a rack over one if you want the fat to drip away, and cook at 200°C for 12–18 minutes. No turning, no curling, no splashing, and it all finishes at the same moment. This is the right method for a bacon sandwich for several people.
7. Drain on a rack rather than kitchen paper if you want it to stay crisp.Kitchen paper works but traps steam underneath. A wire rack keeps the underside dry. Bacon also crisps further in the thirty seconds after it leaves the heat, so pull it just before it looks finished.

Tips

• Streaky bacon crisps more easily than back bacon because it is a higher proportion of fat. If crisp is the goal, buy streaky.
• Keep the rendered bacon fat. It is excellent for frying eggs, starting a soffritto or roasting potatoes.
• Grilling bacon under a hot grill is fast but uneven and the fat can smoke. The oven does the same job better.
• Microwaving between two sheets of kitchen paper produces surprisingly good crisp streaky bacon in a couple of minutes, though it will not brown in the same way.

Common mistakes

• Adding oil to the pan — Bacon renders more fat than it needs. Extra oil raises the fat level so the rashers part-fry rather than crisp in contact with the pan, and it spits.
• Cooking bacon on a high heat from the start — The lean sets and curls, the fat has not melted, and the edges burn while the middle is still soft. Medium and patient is faster in practice.
• Overlapping rashers in the pan — Where they touch they steam, and you get pale soft bands across otherwise crisp bacon.

If it doesn't work

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