A former love-hate relationship

Ever since I learned to eat one of my favorite foods to eat is bacon. The salty savory meat is one of those foods that makes everything taste a little better. Doesn't matter if you eat it by itself. On a sandwich. Crumbled and topping savory or sweet dishes. Bacon is one of those foods that makes my mouth happy.

The consuming of bacon is where the love comes in.

It used to be the cooking of bacon was where the hate came in. The grease. It found every surface of the kitchen to lodge itself for clean up long after the fragrant aroma and crumbly goodness has long evaporated. Cooking bacon sucked. Cooking bacon was a chore. So it eventually became one of those foods that was made rarely because the clean was not worth the flavor. Or bacon was eaten at a cafe. Anywhere that I didn't have to cook and more importantly clean up after the fact.

A few years ago I learned a secret. Since that time I don't cringe when I need to cook bacon.

I know some of you know this secret. But this is for those who don't know the secret.

I haven't cooked bacon on the stovetop in years. When I want bacon, I go to the oven. Yes. The oven.

Take the number of strips you want to cook and place them on a cookie sheet pan. Obviously one  that has sides.

You can also place a rack in the pan and that way the drippings drip away from the bacon. As you can see, I didn't do that with this batch.

If you Google how to oven fry bacon you'll find a lot of different temps and times to use. For this pan I used 350 degrees. Depending on the thickness of the bacon and how crispy you like your bacon the time will range from 10 to fifteen minutes, even up to 20 minutes.

Once finished you'll have not only aromatic, savory bacon but they'll look fabulous. None of that scrunchy twisty bacon you're used to getting from trying to get the slices to fit in a pan on the stovetop.

There. Doesn't that look yummy? And everything is confined to the oven. More importantly, the majority is confined to the pan, so you don't have to clean the oven unless you really want to.

Why am I writing about this now? Because I will share recipes here. Some of those recipes use bacon in them. Not all of them. Probably not a lot of them. But some of them will contain bacon. What good does it do to share a recipe that makes a huge mess, meaning one you won't make because of the mess it makes? It doesn't do any good. So before I share one of those recipes the first step is to share a trick I learned long ago how to prepare bacon in a timely, less messy way.

Last night when I cooked this bacon I used the pan and grease in the pan for a second ingredient. After removing the bacon, I sliced cherry tomatoes that I picked from my garden and placed them on the pan to roast in the oven. Since both the tomatoes and bacon were going on a pizza I wanted the tomatoes to absorb some of the bacon flavor while I roasted them.

If you've never cooked bacon this way, let me know how you like it once you've tried it.