The Microwave Is Your Best Friend When It Comes To Cooking Bacon

Microwaves are amazing kitchen appliances, perfect for reheating last night's lasagna leftovers or nuking a hot dog in an acceptable fashion in just minutes. But have you ever considered cooking your bacon in the microwave? It sounds like a recipe for soggy, undercooked strips, but you can give your pans and tongs a break and try this miracle microwaving method.

First, tear off two full-size paper towel sheets (if your paper towels come in tearable halves, you'll want four connected pieces) and fold them along the perforated line so that you have a double-thickness paper towel. Place this on a microwavable plate — the size of the plate will depend on how many pieces you plan on making — and drape the bacon slices onto the paper towels, settling them side-by-side but not touching. Then you need to add two more full-size paper towels, folded in half, over the bacon.

Pop the paper-towel-sandwiched bacon on the plate in the microwave on high for about a minute per slice. Once done, move the bacon to a new set of paper towels and let it rest before digging in.

There are some definite pros to the microwave method for cooking bacon: First and foremost on the list is hardly any clean-up. With pan frying you end up with bacon grease splatter all over your stove, as well as having to safely dispose of all that bacon grease after (since it absolutely cannot go down your drain). With the microwave, the grease is soaked up by the paper towels, so all you have to do is let them cool, bunch them up, and toss them out.

There's also the fact that it can take much less time to blast pieces of bacon in the microwave than it would to wait for a pan to heat up from cold, flip the bacon on each side, and let it crisp up on the stove. Plus, you don't have to go through all that if you just want one or two slices.

There are a few downsides to this method of cooking bacon (though they have nothing to do with the final taste or texture). It's not great if you need to make bacon for a crowd, as you can only fit so many non-touching pieces in your microwave. It also compels you to use a lot of paper towels, so it's not great for the planet. And finally, all that luscious bacon grease gets absorbed by the paper towels, so you can't save it for cooking with later.

If you don't want to pan-fry your bacon, but you don't have access to a microwave, there are a few more relatively hands-free, low-mess methods for cooking up bacon using other kitchen appliances. For example, you could bake your bacon in the oven, placing the strips on a wire rack inside a foil-lined pan. This is a great method for cooking bacon for a crowd, and you can bake multiple trays at once. It also preserves all the leftover bacon grease for a variety of uses.

Or, if you don't want to heat up your kitchen, you can also air fry your bacon by placing it in the basket in a single layer, laying down a bit of parchment paper inside the outer basket, and cooking it at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Ten minutes will likely get your bacon pretty crispy, so if you like it less so, subtract a few minutes from the cooking time.