Remove Bacon From Its Package Like This For Easy Cooking

From Sunday brunch to a weeknight breakfast-for-dinner, bacon is a classic staple when it comes to a hearty morning meal. It's also a favorite way to pack protein and flavor into a sandwich (BLT, anyone?) or even on a pizza. In other words, there never seems to be a bad time to enjoy it. There are, however, some common mistakes people make when they cook bacon. Believe it or not, some of these mistakes can be traced back to the very first step of makin' bacon: removing it from the packaging.

Especially in the U.S., plenty of folks can relate to the struggle of taking raw bacon strips out of a typical plastic package. Unlike breakfast sausages or thicker Canadian bacon, sliced bacon strips are a more fragile meat when handled raw. On top of that, the packaging they're usually found in isn't resealable and doesn't make removal the easiest feat. When you pull raw bacon strips out of the pouch, it's common for them to stretch out or even tear into pieces. This makes for a mess when you're trying to cook them neatly and evenly in a skillet, because stretched out slices either won't fit or have the potential to burn because they're thinner.

If you want to avoid this cooking catastrophe, you can try gently rolling the bacon strips off of each other to separate them, instead of pulling them apart. This can minimize stretching and prevent accidental breakage as you go.

Whether you're making an early morning spread on the weekend or whipping up an elevated BLT sandwich in between Zoom calls, employing this rolling technique can make your prep work a breeze when it comes to cooking bacon. If you have the time and patience, you can obviously try the individual method of rolling each slice of bacon off the rest as you cook. Alternatively, some TikTok food creators have offered up a genius hack for making this process even quicker; instead of rolling after you've opened up the bacon, roll up the unopened package itself and then flatten it back out before you cut into it. This can loosen up all the slices at once, so it's much less risky and time-consuming to pull each one from the others.

If you're feeding a crowd or you really want to savor the process, cooking your bacon in the oven can yield great results (and optimal crispiness) if you follow our oven-baked bacon recipe. Of course, using a skillet is also an option — just keep these safety tips in mind before you do. Luckily, bacon is an incredibly versatile food, so you can take the flavor from spicy to sweet to salty with any number of seasonings or techniques. Our maple-cinnamon candied bacon recipe, for example, beautifully combines the sweet, crispy, and savory features of bacon strips in one satisfying treat. If you want to enjoy it over a longer period of time, you can even opt for making bacon jerky at home — whatever way you prefer to "roll" with it.