Stop fighting a losing battle with a grease-spattered stovetop. If you’re buying high-end bacon, you want a perfect crunch without the 20-minute cleanup. The real problem with a frying pan isn’t the taste, though. It’s all that popping and the errant grease spots that mark your skin and kitchen walls.
In an effort to find the best, cleanest way to make bacon for a Sunday brunch or BLT, I tried several methods, including the stovetop, oven and air fryer.
It turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong.
A frying pan
- Cooking time: 10 minutes
- Hassle: 8/10
- How much bacon: 7-8 strips
I can feel the splatter bombs just looking at this photo.
Another drawback of cooking bacon in the frying pan is its limited capacity. A 10-inch frying pan can hold only about 7 average-sized strips of bacon at a time, although you can add more as they shrink during cooking.
Then there’s the matter of cleaning said pan after use. It’s not recommended to put most cookware in the dishwasher, so you’ll have to manage that grease-soaked surface yourself.
The oven
- Cooking time: 18 minutes
- Hassle: 6/10
- How much bacon: 10-12 strips
Thanks to its quick cooking time and hassle-free execution, the air fryer is my new go-to for making bacon.
There’s almost nothing I won’t try to make in the air fryer but, astoundingly, this is my first attempt at bacon. I anticipated a quick cook, because air fryers sizzle most food about 25% faster than a standard oven.
The air fryer proved to be my favorite way to make bacon, with one big caveat (more on that later). My favorite glass-bowl air fryer cooked those strips in about 7 minutes at 375°F — faster than the oven and the frying pan. Because air fryers include a crisping rack, grease naturally drips into the vessel below, so there was no need to nestle it in a paper-towel lasagna.
Air fryer bacon is really crispy, y’all.
The big caveat: Capacity
I use a modest 4-quart air fryer so I can only fit about six strips in at a time. That’s plenty for my partner and me but if I were making bacon for a group, I would have had to cook in batches or invest in a larger model.
That said…
Not having to keep watch over a sizzling, splattering pan or negotiate a grease-filled baking tray pulled from the oven is worth running it back another time to feed a group. There’s also no preheating needed, unlike with an oven, and the sheer speed and cleanliness gave the air frier the edge over the other methods I’ve tried.
