• If you long for tasty bacon, but aren’t quite in love with grease splatters and burns, fear not.
  • Switch to baking your bacon in the oven, and you can enjoy the porcine goodness without the lengthy cleanup session.
  • Here’s how to bake bacon and the tools you need to do it, including a baking sheet, a cooling rack, and tongs.
  • Read more: The best baking sheets

Bacon. So salty, so crispy, so fragrant, so delectable. But when cooked on the stovetop in a skillet, so messy.

I love the tantalizing aroma that fills our apartment when my husband cooks a big batch of scrambled eggs and crispy bacon on Sunday mornings. But neither of us look forward to the mess that follows: splattered oil all over the stovetop, a greasy cast-iron skillet requiring its own specialized cleanup, and our corgi licking the floor in front of the stove where inevitable grease splashes landed.

But once I learned how to bake bacon in the oven rather than frying it in a skillet, everything changed.

Not only does this method cut down on the mess, but it also makes perfectly crisped bacon without those little pockets of raw fat that stovetop frying doesn't get because the bacon has curled.

You still get the wonderful, distinctive aroma of bacon when it's in the oven, but the enjoyment is heightened by the knowledge that you won't need to break out the mop afterward, nurse a burned spot on your arm, or pre-treat grease marks on your shirt before tossing it into the wash.

Plus, it's an easy technique that doesn't even require you to flip the bacon while it cooks, and it works with both traditional pork bacon or slightly healthier turkey bacon.

How to bake bacon in the oven:

  1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. If necessary, let your bacon thaw before cooking.
  2. Line your baking sheet with aluminum foil. If you don't have a baking sheet, we recommend the Nordic Ware Aluminum Baker's Half-Sheet.
  3. Spread your bacon in a single layer across the baking sheet. Don't pile strips on top of each other, or they won't cook evenly.
  4. Pop tray into the oven.
  5. Begin checking the bacon at the 12-minute mark, but be prepared for it to take up to 20 minutes for the meat to reach your preferred level of crispiness. I'd say 15 minutes is average.
  6. Remove the sheet pan from the oven, and use tongs to transfer the bacon strips onto a plate topped with a paper towel, or onto a cooling rack like this one from Bellemain that we ranked as the top pick in our buying guide. If you don't have a set of tongs already, we recommend the Starpack Basics Silicone Kitchen Tongs.
  7. Use another paper towel to soak up any excess grease.
  8. Once your baking sheet cools down, discard the aluminum foil, balling it carefully so as not to spill grease, and wash the pan.