NEVER Fry Your Bacon Again — Try This Old LOGGING CAMP Trick

There's a skillet heating on your stove and a pound of bacon next to it, $6.50 the package. In four minutes the strips curl, the ends burn, the middles stay raw and the smoke alarm goes off. The men I ate breakfast with for nineteen years never saw bacon fried in a skillet. One cook, forty men, no time to stand over a pan. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, nineteen of them at the long table of the Cranberry camp. I'm not a cook and never was. I've got the cook's ledger and a scale. The camp way, weighed: Thick cut, a quarter inch, 12 to 14 strips a pound ($6.50). Flat on a rimmed sheet pan, no rack. Cold pan into a cold oven, then 400 F. No flipping, no door. 18 minutes chewy, 22 crisp. 1 lb in: 5.5 oz of bacon out and half a cup of clear fat. Thin sliced, same test: 4 oz, ends burnt. Strips onto brown paper, one layer, two minutes. Potatoes or eggs on the warm pan for six minutes. Plate comes to about $1.40 a man. Fat through a cloth into a metal can. Icebox. Three months. A spoon in the eggs, two in the potatoes, a quarter cup in the cornbread. Honest part: baked is not healthier than fried, it's flatter. If your doctor has you counting sodium or fat, that outranks me. Hot fat goes in a metal can, never hot glass, never the sink. Clean pan at 400 F or it smokes. Two strips for one person, a cold skillet on low is fine. Honest math: this isn't a fortune. Thick cut gives a third more bacon back per pound. The can is where the money is: four ounces of cooking fat a week you were pouring away, about $65 a year, and the potatoes taste like the camp's did. Tell me what you paid for bacon this week, thick or thin, and whether your mother kept a grease can. Next week: the packet of gravy mix, $1.19 for eleven cents of flour, made in the bacon pan in four minutes without a lump. Eat it hot, friend. It keeps you.