I have to cook bacon for 300, how far in advance can I make the bacon? How will it hold up if say I start cooking it 2 days before the breakfast?
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2 Answers
I actually have some experience with exactly this. I needed to do a breakfast party for a bunch of bikers, at 5am, by myself, in the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere in Alaska has a special meaning that would elude most readers of this. It's a special kind of middle-of-nowhere. So, I promise, I took it seriously, and this actually works:
You can cook the bacon two days in advance. Here's the thing, you've got to do it the oven, slowly enough that you can control curling. Bake it on a sheetpan at no more than 375F (190C), flip the bacon half-way through and turn the pan front to back. Figure 18 minutes total, but don't let it get crisp. Stop just shy of crisp. You can use foil or parchment paper to facilitate clean-up. Put the not-quite-crisp bacon in Ziplocs in the fridge.
The very final crisp can be done at most a couple of hours in advance, it will get chewy if you try to add the final crisp sooner than that. You can use any method that works for the final crisp, even the microwave. Of course a griddle is ideal.
answered Nov 18, 2014 at 5:38
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1You can stop the bacon curling by placing another, foil-wrapped sheetpan on top. Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 9:35
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2@ElendilTheTall if your bacon is thick enough, you can get away with that. If your bacon is thin, and you're feeding 300 hungry bikers in the Alaska wilderness...by yourself...no backup...you might want to listen to me.:)– Jolenealaska ♦Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 11:41
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1I think it goes without saying that you should keep all of those delicious drippings for yourself and not share with any of the bikers. A few hundred bacon strips' worth should last you a while. Commented Nov 20, 2014 at 16:55
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1@logophobe Those drippings were part of the reason I took the gig! :)– Jolenealaska ♦Commented Nov 20, 2014 at 18:14
If by "hold up" you also mean "still taste good", I'm not sure anything but vacuum packing could give you that assurance. Fortunately, Oscar Mayer has packages of precooked bacon on the market which take only about 5 seconds in the microwave to rejuvenate, and honestly taste as good as can be. Also, I see that they can be purchased online in bulk at 12 boxes for half a bill. That's about 33 cents a slice.
