The Bacon Trick That Makes Breakfast Sandwiches So Much Better

A sandwich can be a beautiful thing — but also a troublesome one. Take the classic bacon, egg, and cheese, for example — its noble pleasures become a little tricky to enjoy if half its contents are leaking out the sides. That's why, when plotting your next breakfast sandwich, you should consider a bacon weave – a simple but effective trick that will render your sandwich more manageable to eat, structurally secure, and aesthetically pleasing.

A bacon weave is exactly what it sounds like — several slices of bacon (ideally thinner cuts, as the bacon will cook and the fat will render more quickly, avoiding the risk of a tough, chewy texture), folded into a lattice pattern before cooking. The method will be familiar to anyone who's put together a pastry lattice topping for pie. First, lay out your bacon — five or six strips should be sufficient for a regular-sized sandwich — on plastic wrap or parchment paper. Fold every other slice of bacon over on itself at the halfway point, leaving the ones in between, then lay a further piece across the slices you've skipped. Lay the folded bacon back down over this layer. Repeat this process with the bacon you did not fold the first time, and you will soon see the pattern of the weave emerge. As always, when handling raw bacon, practice good kitchen safety and beware of cross-contamination.

Once complete, bake your weave to your preferred level of crispiness, and the result will be a neat square of perfectly cooked bacon that appears almost fused together into a uniform whole. Not only will this fit perfectly on a standard slice of bread, but it will also guarantee consistent bacon-y goodness in every mouthful.

A breakfast sandwich is just one of the myriad applications for a bacon weave, which has been firing up culinary imaginations since it exploded into public awareness in the 2000s. This was arguably thanks in large part to the technique being popularized by cult YouTube cooking show "Epic Meal Time," which frequently employed bacon weaves in their elaborate, outrageous, and invariably bacon-heavy creations, and the viral fame/notoriety of dishes like the Bacon Explosion, a hefty behemoth of stuffed Italian sausage-meat wrapped in a weave of BBQ sauce-slathered bacon, which by 2009 had become one of the most popular recipes on the internet.

If your tastes don't run to such extremes, a bacon weave is nevertheless worth trying as a variation on the 19th century technique of barding, in which large pieces of meat are wrapped in bacon, prosciutto, or some other kind of fatty sliced meat before being roasted, thereby not only enhancing the flavor but also providing a delicious additional accompaniment. As their interlacing pattern helps the bacon stay in place without sliding off, weaves have also become an increasingly popular way to garland roast chickens or Thanksgiving turkeys.