To Boil Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the bacon
Soak the bacon in cold water for 1 hour before cooking.
Scrape the bacon and wash it thoroughly.
Boil
Cover the bacon with cold water in a pot.
Heat it slowly until it boils.
Remove any scum that forms on the surface.
Boil the bacon until a fork easily penetrates it, about 1 to 1.5 hours for smoked bacon.
Remove the bacon.
Finish
Strip off the skin.
If using bread, dry it slightly in front of the fire or in a gentle oven.
Cover the top with bread crumbs or a toasted hard crust.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Smoked bacon
- Provides the main meat, whose fat softens and flavour develops during long gentle boiling.
- Bread
- Dried and toasted into crumbs or a hard crust that adds a crisp, browned topping.
The step that matters
Heat it slowly until it boils. Bringing the bacon up to the boil gradually helps keep the meat tender and lets scum rise cleanly so it can be skimmed off before it clouds the cooking liquid.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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