you guys may all already know about this, but I'd never heard of it until Alton Brown of the Food Network mentioned it.

I took very thick bacon slices, put them on a jelly roll/cookie sheet in a 375 degree (F) oven, and it took 20 minutes for them to be brown, crisp, and (!) perfectly straight. I put mine up on a little rack, elevated by a couple wads of aluminum foil.

The drippings were quite clear and easy to save, though it struck me that with them already sitting there in the pan, I could probably toss my chicken breasts on that pan immediately and bake them up.

There is no splatter at all with this method, which is why it appeals to me. Also, you don't have to turn them or watch them or fool with them all the time--just set the timer and forget!

does this not splatter the inside of the oven? that's what has made me reluctant to cook the bacon this way. even though dave's the one that cleans the oven, i don't like it to get dirty!

debbie, no splatter that I could see (or smell, when I reheated the oven later on in the day). Maybe if a person cooked it higher--like 450--that would be a problem, but at 375 it just baked quietly.

I experimented and found out this works, but with an important caveat. My first attempt was using the broiler pan, as it has all these holes in the top I figured grease could drip down.

Several millennia later when I finished scrubbing the stuck bacon off the broiler pan....

I have these two little wire racks like you cool cakes on? They're cheap, and have very small little raised areas to elevate them. I use a typical rectangle cake pan, I put one rack over it, then I lay about 1/4 a package of bacon closely together across it (it hangs off the edges about 1"). Then I put the other rack on top of that with the slats in the other direction, which is elevated just slightly from the first one, and I put another 1/4 package of bacon across that one. Everything drips into the baking pan. The bacon comes out perfectly flat. They shrink of course! About 15 minutes before it's done, I take it out, and pick up the wire racks and reverse them -- so the one that was on the bottom is on the top. This helps the parts that were real close together get better crispy. This makes fantasic bacon.

My dream is to have something with a number of racks, a bit further apart, so I could lower the oven rack and cook a whole package at once. I find if I do this, let it cool, it's easy to get off the wire racks and they're pretty easy to clean, I can pour the juices out the corner of the pan into a cup, then I have this little food scale (it's a postage scale actually!), and I weigh out 1oz portions of the cooked bacon and put it in little ziplocs. Then when I'm having a salad, or eggs, or just about anything else, I can grab a bag, crumble it over my pan or bowl, and it's instant-flavor and I already know the carb/protein count.

Regards,
PJ