Cooking Bacon

Years ago I read a book by John Steinbeck in which someone was cooking bacon over a campfire. The secret, he said, was to cook it slowly over low heat and turn it often. I've been cooking bacon that way ever since. Essentially, the object is to render out the fat, which makes the fatty part like cracklings -- crisp -- but doesn't overcook the lean parts. The cook has to stay focused on cooking bacon -- no wandering off to take a peek at the Weather Channel.

 

When the bacon is crisp, I lay it on a paper towel to soak up the surface fat.

If I'm cooking a lot of bacon, I bake it instead of frying. This entails laying the bacon strips on a rack set in a flat baking pan and putting it in a 350-degree oven for 15 minutes or so, depending on the thickness of the slices. This method has the advantage of freeing the cook to prepare other food or set the table while the bacon cooks. Its disadvantage is that scrubbing the rack is much harder than washing a skillet.

I'm sorry I don't know which book I got this from. I used to read a lot of Steinbeck, and concluded that he must have loved bacon because bacon appears in scenes in most of his books. He even named a character Mr. Bacon.