The idea of cooking bacon sous vide initially made me roll my eyes a little. This has got to be one of those "everything looks like a nail when you've got a hammer" situations, I said to myself. You know, one of those times when sous vide was being deployed just for the sake of sous vide, rather than actually improving things. I mean, is it possible to improve on plain old fried bacon? What could possibly be the point of cooking bacon in a water bath?
Still, I decided to give it a spin...Holy cow, was it good!
I mean, really really good. The idea of bacon that is crisp and moist at the same time is appealing, but in practice it ends up being crisp in some areas and rubbery in others, which is why I generally prefer my bacon cooked completely crisp. But overnight sous vide bacon is the first bacon I've ever tasted that delivers on that moist-crisp promise. It's crispy on the exterior as you bite into it, but it quite literally melts in your mouth like the finest confit pork belly as you chew.
J. Kenji López-Alt
J. Kenji López-Alt is the Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats, author of the James Beard Award-nominated column The Food Lab, and a columnist for Cooking Light. He lives in San Francisco. A New York native, Kenji cut his cooking chops the old-fashioned way by working his way up through the ranks of some of Boston's finest restaurants. With an education in science and engineering and as a former Senior Editor at Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen, Kenji is fascinated by the ways in which understanding the science of every day cooking can help improve even simple foods. He earned a James Beard award for his first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, which he released in September 2016. It is available for purchase from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.