I've spent a couple of hours testing bacon-cookery and bacon brands, then making a giant bowl of broccoli salad. Puzzling over the Joule will wait for another time.
The contenders were the bacon I bought a couple of days ago, as noted in an earlier post: our standard Wright's Hickory-smoked bacon, and Hempler's Applewood-smoked bacon, purchased at the butcher counter of Fry's grocery store. You can see that the applewood-smoked bacon is considerably more trimmed of fat than the Wright's. It has more of a handcrafted look as a result. It also looks a bit leaner, but that might be an illusion because of the trimming.
I tried both microwave and oven-rack cooking. Here, for comparison, are two slices of each type on the rack before it went into the oven. The Wright's is at the top of the photo. Both brands are sliced to about the same thickness.
I forgot to ask about a proper oven temperature, and assumed 350F. The oven-roasting took somewhere over a half hour, and after a couple of bacon-flips and pan-turns I had this:
The microwave oven cooking, on the other hand, took about 6 minutes, with a paper-towel change partway through, to get this:
That bacon is *crisp*!
I had to run the oven-baked stuff through the microwave for maybe a minute to get a similar crispness, even after that cooking - just as @blue_dolphin had noted. Here's the before and after:
The microwave method had the advantage of being quicker and less messy. The oven method gave beautifully rendered bacon fat: "liquid gold", as kayb put it once. Both were better than my skillet work. I think I've been cooking the bacon over too high heat all these years!
I think the brand of bacon, or at least the cure, may also matter. I liked the flavor and "snap" of the cooked Wright's better than the cooked Hempler's. Even the crispiest Hempler's was tough compared to the Wright's. I like the note of hickory smoke in the Wright's. I couldn't really detect much applewood - or pork, really - with the Hempler's. We can get other hickory-smoked bacon closer to home, and I'll be interested to compare it to Wright's when I can for a better comparison. (I will also keep an eye out for Broadbent's, at the risk of being utterly spoiled for lesser stuff.)
Thanks, everyone! I've learned a lot more about bacon cookery than I knew yesterday, and it's because of your collective help. I'll hoist an extra glass to y'all tonight as we enjoy our broccoli salad and beer brats by the campfire.
