Katherine McPhillips tested four ways to cook bacon—microwave, air fryer, oven, and frying pan—to determine which delivers the tastiest breakfast. The oven emerged as the clear winner, producing consistently crisp rashers with a rich, savoury flavour, despite requiring the longest cooking time of 20 minutes.
Frying Pan: Greasy and Smoky
The frying pan method, the most traditional, involved adding a little oil to a preheated pan and cooking the bacon for about two minutes until golden. While quick and easy, the bacon turned out greasy and slightly soggy, with burnt edges. The lingering smell and scrubbing of burnt marks made this method unappealing.
Microwave: Edible but Messy
Cooking bacon in the microwave proved possible but not recommended. The bacon was edible, but it burnt onto the plate, requiring extra cleaning. Fat splattered inside the microwave, and a smoky odour persisted for hours. “Using a microwave yielded mediocre bacon and generated so much mess afterwards that I would strongly advise choosing an alternative method wherever possible,” McPhillips said.
Air Fryer: Convenient but Uneven
The air fryer method was simple: line the basket with baking paper, set to 200°C for five minutes, and let it cook without monitoring. Some strips were golden-brown and wonderfully crispy, but others were burnt at the edges or chewy. “The air fryer can only handle small batches, which is perfectly fine if you're simply making a sandwich for yourself, but it would undoubtedly become frustrating if you were cooking for the whole family,” noted McPhillips.
Oven: The Clear Winner
For oven bacon, McPhillips lined a baking tray with baking paper, preheated the oven to 200°C, and laid the rashers flat for 20 minutes. “Each rasher was consistently crisp, and the meat appeared to have a richer and more savoury flavour compared to all the other cooking methods,” she wrote. Despite being the longest method, taking twice as long as alternatives, the oven produced the most mouth-watering results with minimal cleanup.
McPhillips concluded that the oven method is worth the extra time and highly recommended it as the only method worth using from now on.
