Updated: Perfectly Cooked Bacon

THE secret to perfect bacon is to...

Crispy.

No under or over done spots

(Click the button to read the secret.)
...bake it!

Sell your bacon press to some novice foodie. It isn't going to do for you what it promises to do.

Place the baking on a wire rack like cookie cooling rack. Place a drip pan beneath it. Pop into cold (see update below) oven and bake it at 325 degrees for about a half an hour. The cooler  slower the oven the longer it takes, but the less splatter mess you'll have to clean up later. Increase the oven temperature to 350 or higher and your bacon will get done sooner, but you'll spend 15 minutes cleaning it. Your choice.

As the fat renders and falls through to the drip pan, the bacon will crisp up evenly along the entire surface unlike when done in a pan wear the grease has no where to go.

For something different, pack brown sugar on to the bacon before cooking.

BTW, the New Family Parents prefer Hormel Black Label bacon and Egg Land's Best eggs when they are in the mood for bacon and eggs breakfast (and cannot get out to the farm to get freshly lain eggs).

Making eggs is a topic worthy of its own post. So Dad'll save that for another time. Right now the Twins require attention.

Update: So some subsequent experimentation seems to suggest that cold bacon, not starting in a cold over, produces evenly crisp bacon.

 The oven rack is not large enough to cook an entire package of bacon at one time. Dad noticed that the first batch always turned out better than the subsequent batch. He attributed it to the residual heat in the oven left over from the first batch because he had learned to start bacon in a cold one. However, after a bad first batch, it was burnt crispy in some spots while still limp in others, he reconsidered this notion.

He observed two things. First, the second batch of bacon always sat out on the counter while the first batch baked. Second, one time, the New Family Mom helpfully pulled out an entire package of bacon and left it on the counter for him so it would be ready when he got to it. Her rational was that, similar to grilling steaks, room temperature meat sears better without overcooking the center. Neither batch was good. He observed that he did not get to the kitchen for fully a half hour (perhaps longer) before cooking it. By this time, some of the fat on the pieces on the edge had begun to turn translucent.

Dad'll continue experimenting controlling for different variables and update with results.

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