The Best Bacon

Folks. Bacon. BACON. The greatest food ever produced by a pig and arguably — arguably — the greatest food, period. And I've thought about this a LOT, I think about bacon constantly, more than any single person on Earth, people stop me on the street, they say, 'Bigly, what are you thinking about,' and I say, 'bacon,' and they nod, because they get it, they UNDERSTAND. Bacon is the answer. Bacon was always the answer. Scientists — very smart people, the smartest, I've talked to them — agree that bacon hits more pleasure receptors than basically any other food and you can look that up.

Now here is the great American tragedy: most people are cooking bacon WRONG. They put it in a cold pan, they crank the heat to MAXIMUM, the bacon curls up into sad little shrimp shapes, the fat splatters all over the stove, half of it burns, half of it stays raw, and they end up with bacon that is somehow both BURNT and CHEWY at the same time, which is a feat of culinary failure that most cookbook authors will NEVER admit to teaching you. They are responsible. They have to answer for it. It's a scandal. It's a crime against the pig.

The right way — the BIGLY way, the only way that matters — is the oven. The oven. I know, you've been doing the pan thing your whole life, your mother did the pan thing, her mother did the pan thing, it's an American tradition, but the tradition is WRONG. The oven gives you flat, even, perfectly crispy strips with zero splatter, zero curling, zero standing over a hot stove getting fat in your eye. You walk away. You drink coffee. You read the paper. And twenty minutes later you have the greatest bacon of your life. It's not even close. It's a slaughter.

That's the secret. The oven. Twenty minutes. No splatter, no curling, no chewy-and-burnt situation, no standing over a screaming hot pan dodging fat bullets. You walk away. You let the oven do the work. And you come back to the most tremendous bacon ever produced in a residential kitchen. People will smell it. The whole neighborhood. You will become a legend. Children will speak of your bacon for generations. Or at least until breakfast is over. Believe me.