What Is Bacon and How Can I Use It?

Bacon rewards a little know-how: how to choose it, cook it, store it, and substitute in a pinch. Browse 1,237 recipes to cook with it.

What is bacon?

Bacon is cured pork belly, almost always smoked, sliced thin and sold in a vacuum pack. The cure is salt and a little sodium nitrite, which fixes the pink color and the savory tang you taste before the smoke even registers.

That belly cut is why supermarket bacon comes in long strips of alternating fat and meat. Outside the United States this fatty version is called streaky bacon, to set it apart from the leaner back bacon most of the world eats.

What ties all of them together is the same thing: salted, usually smoked pork that needs cooking before you eat it.

The fat is the whole point. Render it slowly and it turns into a liquid you can cook in, and the meat crisps as the fat leaves it.

Cooking Bacon

Low and slow beats fast and hot. Start the strips in a cold pan over medium heat, not a screaming hot one.

Give the fat time to render before the meat scorches and you get even, flat strips instead of curled, half-burnt ones. Lay the slices so they are not touching, because crowded bacon steams in its own moisture and stays flabby.

The oven is the move for a whole pack at once. Lay the strips on a rimmed sheet pan, slide it into a cold oven, and set it to 400°F (200°C).

Pull it after 15 to 20 minutes when it is the color you want. No flipping, and no splatter on the stovetop.

The microwave works in a pinch. Put three or four strips between paper towels on a plate and run it about one minute per slice. It will never taste as good as the oven, but it is fast and the grease blots away clean.

Crisp versus chewy is a real fork in the road, not a mistake. Pull it early and floppy if you are chopping it into Chicken Carbonara, where rubbery is fine. Take it darker and brittle for a BLT or to crumble over a Bacon Potato Pie.

What Bacon Does in a Dish

Bacon is a flavor base as much as a breakfast meat. A few strips rendered down at the start of a braise or stew lay a smoky, salty foundation the rest of the dish builds on.

That is the job it does in Coq Au Vin à la Slow Cooker and in Traditional Hopping John, where the rendered fat carries through every bite.

Pair it with sweet and with sharp. A drizzle of maple syrup or a sprinkle of brown sugar leans into its salt, while vinegar and mustard cut through the fat. It also loves eggs, potatoes, and almost anything in the cabbage family.

The common mistake is forgetting how much salt it brings. Salt the rest of the dish lightly and taste at the end, because bacon and its drippings season as they go. A pot of beans finished with crumbled bacon often needs no added salt at all.

Watch the heat once it nears done. Bacon goes from amber to burnt and bitter in well under a minute, and the sugars in candied bacon take it there even faster.

How It Differs from Canadian Bacon and Pancetta

Streaky bacon is not interchangeable with Canadian bacon or pancetta, and swapping blind will change a dish. Regular bacon is fatty belly that crisps. Canadian bacon is lean, round back loin that looks and eats more like ham. It renders almost no fat.

Pancetta is Italian belly cured with salt and spice but not smoked, so it brings the salt and silk without the campfire note. For raw weight, half a pound of sliced bacon is roughly 8 standard strips.

Turkey bacon stands in when you want the smoke with far less fat, though it is drier and gives you no drippings to cook with.

If a recipe wants rendered fat and crisp bits, reach for streaky bacon or pancetta. If it wants neat ham-like rounds on a pizza or in Eggs Benedict, that is a Canadian bacon job, and the two do not trade places well.

Slab, Sliced, Thick, and Thin

Sliced bacon is the default, sold thin or thick cut. Thin crisps fast and shatters, which is what you want crumbled into a salad. Thick cut stays meaty and chewy in the center, better for a sandwich or for dicing into chunky lardons.

Slab bacon is the uncut side, rind sometimes still on. Buying a slab lets you cut your own thickness, from paper-thin to fat batons, and it tends to cost less per pound than pre-sliced. A bacon side is that same uncut piece on a larger scale.

Look for streaks of firm white fat and rosy meat, not a slab that is nearly all fat.

Sealed bacon keeps about a week past its date in the fridge, and once opened it is best used within a week even wrapped tight. It freezes well for a few months; roll the strips loosely first so you can peel off a few at a time.

Do not pour the rendered fat down the drain. Strain it into a jar and keep your bacon drippings for frying eggs or roasting potatoes; it is one of the best free flavor sources in the kitchen.

Types of bacon

Specific kinds of bacon and the recipes that use them.

Bacon drippings

Bacon drippings are the rendered fat left in the pan after you cook bacon. It is liquid and golden while hot, then sets into a soft, opaque solid as it cools, somewhere between butter and lard in feel.

That fat carries the smoke and salt of the bacon it came from, which is the whole reason cooks save it. A spoonful turns plain food smoky without adding a single strip of meat.

Strain it warm and you have a free cooking fat.

Bacon bits

Bacon bits are small pieces of cooked bacon, crumbled or chopped fine, scattered over a dish for crunch and salty, smoky punch. They are a topping, not a cooking ingredient, added at the end so they stay crisp.

There are two very different things sold under the name. Real bacon bits are exactly what they sound like: actual bacon, fried hard and broken up. Imitation bacon bits are textured soy protein dyed and flavored to taste bacon-ish, with no pork in them at all.

The two are not the same, and which one you grab changes the dish more than people expect.

Bacon, canadian style

Canadian style bacon is cured pork loin from the back of the pig, not the fatty belly that makes regular bacon. The loin is lean, so this bacon comes in round, meaty slices that look and eat more like ham than like crisp breakfast strips.

The name causes endless confusion, because two different things wear it. In Canada and Britain, back bacon means brined and smoked loin sold raw, to be cooked like any bacon.

In much of the United States, "Canadian bacon" means a round, fully cooked, ham-style product you can eat straight from the pack.

Either way, the through line is lean loin instead of belly. There is almost no fat to render, so it behaves nothing like streaky bacon in the pan.

Round slices of Canadian style bacon

Bacon side

A bacon side is a whole uncut slab of cured pork belly, the full piece that sliced bacon is cut from. It comes in one rectangular block, often with the rind still on, rather than in a pack of ready-cut strips.

Buying the side means you slice your own. That is the point of it: you control the thickness, from paper-thin strips to thick lardons, instead of taking whatever the factory cut.

A slab also tends to cost less per pound than pre-sliced bacon, and it keeps longer because less surface is exposed.