Heaven bacon: An expert’s guide to cooking perfect crispy rashers (hint: you won’t even need a frypan)

If your pancake is fluffy, your toast is buttered, your eggs are just as you like them, but your bacon needs help, you may be buying the wrong type.

Bacon nirvana is all about fat-rippled strips of salty, melting, mouth-filling crispness, and you can only achieve that with streaky bacon, taken from the pork belly. With its layers of lean pork interspersed with fat, it cooks quickly, shrinking as it crisps.

Short-cut bacon is the leaner, round “eye” of pork from towards the back of the pig, without the streaky tail. It’s quite meaty, good for chopping into stews.

Middle-cut bacon has both the eye and streaky tail, known as an English rasher; perfect for Mr and Mrs Sprat to divide between them.

One fact is inescapable: good bacon comes from a good, well-cared-for pig. Read labels, ask questions, and pay for quality.

All bacon is cured or brined with salt, sugar and nitrates (unless you seek out nitrate-free), and usually hot-smoked or cold-smoked. Tip: double-smoked is twice the fun.

As for the cooking, bacon doesn’t mind if you cook it low and slow, or high and fast. Fry it in a teaspoon of oil in a hot cast iron pan, or start it in a cold, dry, non-stick pan, allowing it to render its own fat. Find your own path to the promised land – but tell me you know about baking bacon in the oven.

Just lay the bacon on a lined baking tray and bake at 200C for around 15 minutes, and it will stay miraculously flat as it crisps. It’s a great trick up your sleeve if you’re cooking for a crowd, or wrangling frypans of eggs and baked beans as well.

For my patent-pending “party bacon”, mix equal parts maple syrup and tomato sauce (ketchup), and brush over the bacon halfway through the baking. It will glaze and crisp into something deliciously, moreishly, sweet and sour – great for your next egg and bacon roll.

Bacon is also useful for gift-wrapping skinless fish or chicken breast or thighs because it protects them from overcooking while at the same time forming a crisp outer coating.

To dice bacon for adding to other dishes, first place it in the freezer for 30 minutes to firm it up, then cut into matchsticks, or lardons. Stack the matchsticks together and cut across into small dice.

Bacon fat, by the way, is kitchen gold. Drain it off and use it to roast potatoes, fry eggs, or whisk through hearty winter salad vinaigrettes. Not a fat fan? Use a sheet of paper towel to soak it up as the bacon cooks.

Troubleshooting: If your bacon spits water into the pan and simply won’t crisp, it’s probably pumped full of salted water. You need to upgrade.