Oven baked bacon

My delicious dinner

Oven temp

I was surprised at the idea of cooking bacon in the oven. Who ever heard of such a thing? But I read that it supposedly preserves the flavor, so I decided to give it a try.

The verdict? Not as much fun as cooking on the stove top, and I don't know that I like it better myself. But it tastes excellent, and my mom kept saying that I'd outdone myself. So I think I'll call it a success. Here's how I did it.

Ingredients

Bacon
Elephant garlic (real garlic would also work)
Mushrooms
Cayenne powder

The ingredients, minus cayenne -- it's lonely that it was forgotten :(

Instructions

Preheat oven to 365°f. Or as close as you can guess. (Really, how many ovens will show you exactly where that is?)

Rinse your bacon in cold (or cool) water and lay it in a pan.

Note: I'm not sure how important this actually is, but I also read that this is supposed to reduce how much bacon will shrink as it cooks. In any case, I was impressed at how little the bacon shrunk, but this is also the first time I'd cooked it in the oven. So, I'll reserve judgment on my opinion of rinsing in cold/cool water until further experimentation.

Next dice your garlic and cut up your mushrooms. I intentionally left the garlic in small chunks rather than chopping it finer because I remembered the joy of biting into garlic chunks at a favorite restaurant.

Sharp pointy things...

Scrape the garlic and mushrooms onto the bacon, and rearrange things so that they're underneath. The idea is for the bacon juices to seep into them.

Sprinkle cayenne powder on top.

Ready to cook

Close up

Cook for 10 minutes, enjoying how amazing it smells.

The finished thing

Close up

Doesn't it look amazing? And to my surprise, there wasn't a lot of grease lying in the pan.

I had the bacon with a baked potato. Hey, people put bacon bits on potatoes, so why not serve bacon on the side? And, it was a delicious dinner.

Delicious dinner