4 Easy Steps to Get Your Bacon Perfectly Crispy In the Oven

Bacon lovers tend to fall into one of two opposing camps. They either like their bacon chewy with the fat slightly crispy on just the edges or they prefer their bacon crispy and crumbly. For those that like it crispy, oven bacon is the way to go.

I’m a crispy and crumbly kind of gal. I also love thick-cut bacon which can make it more difficult to get perfectly crispy.

I can get crispy bacon in a frying pan but it’s a long, complicated process that involves cooking several different batches. You have to drain the hot bacon grease halfway through cooking in order to get the bacon crispy.

This method also creates a huge mess on the stove from the grease splattering everywhere.

Enter Oven Bacon!!!

Perfectly Crispy Thick-Cut Oven Bacon

Once you’ve made oven bacon, you’ll never go back. It makes less mess, gets the bacon crispier, and is much easier.

There are only 4 steps to perfect oven bacon.

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Gather Your Supplies

• Thick Cut Bacon – Remove from refrigerator an hour before baking
• Jelly Roll Pan
• Aluminum Foil
• Tongs

Preheat and Prepare

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cover the entire upper surfaces of your jelly roll pan with a flat sheet of tinfoil. I buy the 18″ wide foil because it covers my entire pan in 1 sheet.

Crinkle the second sheet of foil and smooth it out slightly in the bottom of the pan. See my setup below.

The bottom smooth layer is to protect the pan, and the top crinkled layer is to allow the grease to drain away from the strips of bacon.

If you don’t want to bother with the foil, you can get a special bacon pan like the ones below.

Arrange For Cooking

Lay the bacon as flat as possible across the top of the foil. Try not to overlap the edges too much. A slight overlap is okay and will adjust itself as the bacon starts to cook and shrink, but too much overlap will cause it all to stick together.

Get Baking

Place the bacon in the preheated oven and bake for twenty minutes, then remove it and flip the pieces onto the opposite side.

Continue baking for another seven to fifteen minutes depending on your desired crispiness.

Caution: The bacon will continue to cook for a couple minutes after being removed from the oven.

While this cooking method still creates a mess in the oven, it keeps it better contained and you can always shut the door and clean the oven later.

Related Article: How To Deep Clean Your Oven – The Easy Way

What To Do With Leftover Bacon

If you’re wondering who has ‘leftover bacon’, let me tell you why I have leftovers.

I buy my bacon in a 3 lb package at my local grocery store because it helps me save money on groceries. I cook the entire package of bacon in one session.

Once it cools, I stack it in layers with paper towel divider, then put it in freezer bags with the date on them.

Related Article: Meal Planning

Now I have crispy cooked bacon handy at a moment’s notice to make BLT’s, crumble over Instant Pot ‘Baked’ Potatoes, or crumble over a salad.

Are you in the chewy or crispy camp, and why? Tell us all about it in the comments below.