Carnivore Bacon Recipe: Perfect Crispy Bacon Every Time

Bacon is close to the perfect carnivore food: high fat, high protein, zero carbs, and endlessly satisfying. The only real questions are how to cook it crisp every time without scorching it, and what to do with all that beautiful rendered fat.

The answer to both is the oven. It cooks bacon evenly and hands-off, and leaves you with a jar of pure dripping at the end. Here is the method.

Perfect Crispy Carnivore Bacon

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Prep Time 2 minutes mins

Cook Time 20 minutes mins

Servings 2 servings

Ingredients

  

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• 250 g Bacon streaky or back, thick-cut
• 1 pinch Sea Salt optional

Instructions

 

• Heat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Line a baking tray with foil and sit a wire rack on top for even crisping, or lay the bacon straight on the tray to keep more of the rendered fat.
• Arrange the bacon in a single layer with no overlap. No oil needed, it cooks in its own fat.
• Bake for 18 to 22 minutes, until deep golden and crisp. Thicker cuts take a little longer, so check from 18 minutes.
• Rest the bacon for a minute to firm up. Pour the hot fat through a sieve into a jar, that is your dripping, perfect for frying eggs, searing steak and roasting.

Notes

Save every drop of the rendered fat. Beef and bacon dripping was the backbone of the British kitchen for centuries, before seed oils replaced it.

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Do not pour the fat away. The rendered fat from bacon and beef is dripping, the cooking fat that built the traditional British kitchen for centuries before seed oils took over. Use it to fry eggs, sear a steak, or roast.

The Oven Beats The Pan

A frying pan cooks bacon unevenly because the rasher touches the metal in some places and buckles away from it in others. The oven surrounds it with even heat, renders the fat steadily, and needs no attention at all.

Flat on a lined tray, 200C, fifteen to twenty minutes depending on thickness. No turning. It will not look crisp when you take it out and that is expected: bacon firms up as it cools, and pulling it when it already looks done means it will be brittle two minutes later.

Read The Cure Before You Buy

Sugar in the cure is common, unnecessary, and rarely obvious on the front of the packet. It also burns, which is why some bacon blackens at the edges long before the fat has rendered.

Dry cured is generally the better buy, and not for purist reasons: wet cured bacon has been injected with brine, so you are paying for water, and that water has to boil off in the pan before anything browns. That white liquid pooling around supermarket bacon is the cure coming back out.

Where Bacon Sits On A Carnivore Diet

Bacon is pork, and pork is monogastric, which means the animal deposits the fat it was fed rather than building its own. Modern pigs are fed a great deal of linoleic acid. That makes bacon an excellent thing to have and a poor thing to build a diet on.

Eat it, enjoy it, keep ruminant meat as the foundation. The full case is in can you eat pork on carnivore. And save the rendered fat from the tray, because it is worth as much as the bacon.

More carnivore recipes worth a place in the rotation: the cheeseburger casserole, an easy slow-cooked brisket, and the classic carnivore omelette.

The same rules about a dry surface and a pan that is genuinely hot apply to cooking a steak properly.