Bacon will be ‘perfectly crispy’ every time with kitchen staple a chef loves

Chef Will Murray of Fallow restaurant swears by this simple oven method for perfectly crispy streaky bacon

Whether you’re making breakfast or meal prepping for the week, bacon is a versatile favourite that adds a satisfying crunch and rich, salty flavour to almost any dish. While many people cook it in a frying pan, air fryer or even the microwave, the oven is often the most overlooked method.

According to chef Will Murray of Fallow restaurant, baking bacon in the oven is the best way to achieve consistently crisp results. Although thinner slices may cook a little faster than thicker ones, the oven helps the bacon cook evenly, producing crispy strips from edge to edge.

The chef, however, swears by adding one particular ingredient midway through the cooking process — sugar.

For this method, Will recommends opting for streaky bacon, as it carries more fat, and as he puts it, “fat means flavour”.

The chef begins by laying the rashers on a baking tray before placing it into a preheating oven at 180C for five minutes.

There’s no requirement to line the baking tray with foil or greaseproof paper, since the bacon contains sufficient fat to prevent it from sticking.

The appeal of this approach is that not only can you cook large quantities of bacon simultaneously, but you can also manage the outcome with greater precision.

Once the five minutes have elapsed, much of the fat has rendered out of the bacon, and it’s time to turn it over. At this stage, the chef scatters demerara sugar over the rashers.

Advertisement

In addition to crisping the bacon further, the sugar imparts an “awesome sweetness”. However, when incorporating the sugar, it is important not to be too heavy-handed, as an overly candied result can leave the bacon unpleasantly tough.

The following step involves returning the bacon to the oven for an additional five minutes at the same temperature.

Upon removing the bacon from the oven, the chef demonstrated to viewers how the edges had become “really nice and crispy”, asserting that no alternative method can rival it.