Bacon is the Duct Tape of the Kitchen
A couple of weeks ago, a fellow bacon-loving friend and I were discussing our favorite porcine ambrosia and she asked if it were possible to cook bacon in an air fryer. My immediate response was an emphatic “no.” I said this based on what I had previously read about numerous air fryer drawbacks, one of which is that foods with high fat content do not do well in an air fryer.
According to various manufacturer's troubleshooting guides, cooking high fat foods can result in white smoke emanating from your appliance. This is because fat splatters around in the enclosed environment and gets on the heating element. I had even heard rumors about air fryers catching fire due to high fat content cooking. And since bacon is definitely a high fat food, I just said no, don't do it.
But then I got to thinking. I've never actually tried it myself, so maybe I was being a bit hasty. I Googled the subject and was rather surprised to find scads of recipes for perfect air fryer bacon. Hmmmm. Could I be missing something?
Now, to be sure, not everybody had a wonderful experience with bacon in the air fryer. One correspondent even entitled her piece, “Why You Should NEVER Cook Bacon in Your Air Fryer.” She went on to detail the nightmare scenario of thick white smoke billowing from her fryer and of pools of piping-hot bacon grease and ultimately ruined bacon.
And hers was not the only negative I found. The folks in Food Network's test kitchen, for instance, weren't sold on the process either for basically the same reasons: lots of grease and lots of smoke.
But still, there were more positive than negative responses, so I thought I'd give it a try.
Following the most common directions, I laid a couple of slices of bacon in the basket of my air fryer, set the temperature to 400 degrees and the timer to ten minutes. And I started it up. I took a peek in the basket at about the halfway mark and everything was going well. Lo and behold, in ten minutes, I had two slices of crispy, moist, tender, perfectly cooked bacon. My mind was officially blown!
I'm a traditionalist, okay? You cook bacon the way I learned to do it at my mother's knee some fifty-eight years ago. We had a griddle plate in the center of our gas stove and that's how you cooked bacon. You slapped it on there and turned on the heat. You stood over it with a turner and flipped it a couple of times, and when it was done, you drained it on paper towels and served it up. If you didn't have a griddle, a skillet would do. Yeah, it was gonna splatter and be a little messy to clean up, but that was the nature of the beast. It's just what you did.
Later, when I started doing volume restaurant-type cooking, I learned about the advantages of cooking big batches of bacon on a tray in the oven. I still prefer pan or griddle frying, but I'm not averse to baking my bacon when necessary.
One method I only use when there is simply no choice – or when I don't especially care about taste or texture – is the microwave. I'm sorry, the only thing rigor mortis bacon is good for is crumbling into bits for salads or baked potatoes or something. It is otherwise generally unfit for consumption.
But when you think about it, an “air fryer” is not really a “fryer” at all; it's a mini convection oven. It works by circulating hot air around the food being cooked. Not a lot different than my big wall-mounted convection oven, except it sits on my counter.
A couple of caveats, though, some things to be aware of. Many of the bad experiences I read about involved people trying to make a lot of bacon at one time. They were basically covering the basket of their fryer with bacon. Bad idea. That will definitely produce a lot of smoky grease. If you're going to use your air fryer for bacon, you aren't going to feed a large family. Two or three slices at a time will work. Anything more will likely lead to the smoky, greasy nightmares I cited earlier.
Time and temperature are also factors. My experiment/experience worked well with ten minutes at four hundred. Your results may vary.
One of the variants involves the bacon itself. I don't buy cheap supermarket bacon. There's lots of fat in that stuff and even more water. Supermarket bacon is brine cured: they inject it with water. So when you start to cook it, all that water has got to go somewhere and that somewhere is into your pan where it mixes with the hot fat rendering from the meat and turns it all into a spattering, smoky mess.
Dry cured bacon, like that produced by bacon-whisperer Allan Benton at his Madisonville, Tennessee smokehouse, is much less likely to spatter and smoke because there's no added water in it to negatively interact with the hot fat during cooking. That's true whether you're cooking it on a griddle, in a pan, in the oven, or in an air fryer.
Unfortunately (sigh) I don't always have Benton's bacon on hand. Sometimes I have to go with the product I get from my local butcher or from my restaurant supply house. It's not Benton's but it is several cuts above the thin, watery, fatty stuff you buy in the grocery store. And I almost always opt for thicker slices. On average, a good thick-sliced bacon (1/8 inch) will yield ten to twelve slices per pound. The higher-end grocery store bacon runs sixteen to eighteen slices per pound and the really cheap, paper thin, “bargain” stuff can contain as many as thirty slices in a pound.
So, obviously, if you cook six slices of cheap bacon in your air fryer at four hundred degrees for ten minutes.........you're not going to like the results. The solution, of course, is to buy higher quality bacon, use less of it, and experiment a bit with the cooking time and temperature. Depending on your machine and your product, you might have to go with three-fifty or three-seventy-five. And maybe it will take twelve minutes. Or if your bacon is thinner, maybe as little as eight. You just have to play with it until you get the results you want. The beauty part is that once you do that, you're set forever. Use the same settings and more or less the same product every time and you'll always get the same perfect results.
Are you gonna get some smoke? Yeah, probably. I did at first. In fact, after a couple of minutes my kitchen smoke detector started squalling at me. “Ooops! Dummy! You forgot to turn on the fan.” Once I flipped the switch on the hood, no more smoke and no more squealing detector.
Cleanup was easy. Because I don't use cheap, fatty bacon, there was very little grease collected in the pan of my air fryer. Maybe a couple of tablespoons. I let it cool and solidify and wiped it out with a paper towel. Same for the bottom of the basket. Then it was a touch of Dawn dish liquid and some hot water in the sink and the whole shebang was clean in about two minutes.
So bottom line: yes, you can cook bacon in your air fryer. Experiment a little to see what settings work best with your machine, don't overcrowd the basket with too much bacon, and always use good bacon to begin with. That much is true no matter how you cook it.
And remember two things, both of which I have inscribed in my kitchen: “bacon is the duct tape of the kitchen” and “either you like bacon or you're wrong.”
