There’s nothing better than the smell of sizzling bacon when you wake up in the morning. Whether you’re enjoying it in a sandwich, with eggs or as part of a full English breakfast, the crispy exterior and salty taste is hard to beat.
Although bacon is pretty straightforward to make, there are a few things that can go wrong. One slip-up and you’re left with fatty, soggy bacon, which is simply not as good as when it’s crispy. According to one surprising chef – rapper Snoop Dogg – you can make your bacon taste so much better if you do one simple thing before putting it in the pan.
The US rapper is just at home in the kitchen as he is on stage, with collaborations with Martha Stewart and his own recipe book, From Crook to Cook, under his belt.
The cooking pros at Simply Recipes recently highlighted one of his unconventional yet genius kitchen hacks, and it’s all to do with how you cook bacon.
Instead of peeling the bacon apart into individual slices and frying in a pan like most people would do, he recommends dumping all of it in to fry in one solid piece.
How to cook bacon perfectly
This might sound bizarre, but according to the experts, this results in perfectly crispy, salty bacon that goes well in any recipe.
And it’s so easy to do. Simply place a cold pan over a medium high heat, and dump the slab of bacon in there, resisting the temptation to pull it apart with tongs or a spoon.
Instead, cover the pan and leave the bacon alone for a few minutes. Doing this will help to create steam and renders the bacon fat, making the strips easy to eventually pull apart.
Once a few minutes have passed, give the bacon a stir a couple of times, until they are nice and crispy – this should take around 15 minutes.
According to the experts, they will come out ‘beautifully curly’ with so much more texture than you’d get if you cooked them in flat strips.
This method is perfect if you’re making a fry-up, but if you want those perfect strips for a BLT, take your bacon from the pan when it’s not quite solid and pop the slices on a plate lined with a paper towel.
When the bacon cools down, it will firm up into crisp strips.