Sous Vide Is The Best Method For The Crispiest Bacon With Less Frying

The splatter left behind when frying bacon has cooks and influencers of all kinds searching for the least messy method to prepare crisp, flavorful slices. We've seen techniques for microwaves, standard ovens, air fryers, and broilers, each with their own drawbacks in terms of time, amount of bacon that can be cooked, and clean up. If you can plan in advance, sous vide bacon is the easiest and most mess-free way to get crispy bacon on the table in no time. The method works for both thin and thick-cut bacon, resulting in either crunchy-thin or thick and chewy slices.

The slow, low heat of sous vide cooking renders nearly all of the fat from your bacon strips, leaving behind meaty pieces that can be quickly crisped up in just a minute or two in a pan when you are ready to eat. Although sous vide bacon needs to cook 8 to 12 hours and then chill, that's all hands-off time. Several packages of bacon can cook in your sous vide setup (right in the store packaging!) at the same time, and you can refrigerate or even freeze one of them for later. The handy, par-cooked bacon is also great for a quick addition to salads or pasta.

Sous vide bacon has some advantages over other low-spatter methods like oven baking and microwave cooking. Most microwaves can only hold a limited amount of bacon in a single layer on a plate, making it tough to cook bacon in quantity. Plus, the grease gets absorbed by the necessary paper towel covering the bacon. Collecting the bacon fat from sous vide bacon is simple, just cut one corner of the cooking bag open while it's hot and pour the melted fat into your grease jar. Bonus: there won't be any burnt bits to strain out or make your bacon grease taste bitter!

As for oven baking, if you are patient and use low heat and skip the parchment paper, your reward is crisp bacon and a tricky-to-manage sheet pan of pourable bacon grease, but the bacon will be sitting in the fat, and the pan will need some scrubbing to clean. If all that isn't enough to twist your arm, here's one more trick sous vide bacon offers: It's the perfect option for bacon-wrapped appetizers. Because the meat is already cooked and the fat has drained, the still-pliable strips of bacon cook easily on a jalapeño popper or wrapped scallop with no raw spots. A pack of sous vide bacon in the freezer might be the meal prep item you never knew you needed!