Should you cook bacon in an air fryer? We test it out

On Sunday, Yahoo published an article that sent bacon sarnie lovers into crisis mode. In it, dietitian Brenda Peralta suggested that an air fryer shouldn’t be used to cook bacon.

Yahoo seems to have removed the original article but plenty of other publications have re-quoted the advice in articles, including the Express and the Daily Record.

We decided to put it to the test.

First off, the dietician’s warning against air fryer bacon cooking was divided into several points:

• Bacon is a fatty food, and fat can cause “smoke or splatter”.
• A bacon strip is a “a small and delicate food, and it can be difficult to flip or remove from the air fryer basket without breaking it”.
• “The air fryer basket may not be large enough to accommodate a large quantity of bacon. This can make the bacon difficult to cook evenly, and it can also produce a lot of smoke and odours.”

We’d take issue with the dietician’s description of bacon as “small and delicate”, which are not words generally associated with one of the lardiest ingredients in a fry-up.

We’d also point out that a set of silicone tongs will help you to remove bacon from an air fryer basket as easily as from a pan. You can buy them from Amazon UK (£6.99) and Amazon US ($13.99).

But we could certainly test whether cooking bacon makes an air fryer smoke, and how air fryer cooking compares to oven cooking or pan frying.

For the bacon-making tests, we cooked both streaky and back bacon, because we pride ourselves on our thoroughness, and because our tester was happy to eat bacon sandwiches all morning.

 Frying bacon in a pan

• Cooking time: 5.30 mins
• Cleanup: Fairly easy
• How bacon-y did the kitchen smell afterwards? Very

I’ll be honest. I’ve never cooked bacon before. But what I discovered is that it’s almost impossible to make a mess of it. As a recipe, it’s the exact opposite of a cheese soufflé. Give most meat-eaters a bacon sandwich, and they’re much more likely to say, “Thank you very much” than, “Which cooking method did you use to prepare this?”

The first test was to fry bacon in a pan. I’d read that bacon contains enough of its own fat that it doesn’t need additional oil when cooking. However, it almost immediately welded itself to the pan, so thanks to whoever circulated that lie.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

I added a little oil and the bacon happily got on with the business of cooking. The only downside was that I had to stand and flip the rashers over a few times.

As the bacon cooked in oil and its own fat, the excess oil needed to be blotted off before serving.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

• Score: 8/10 – Quick, easy and foolproof. I think I could teach this to my cat.

Cooking bacon in an oven

• Cooking time: 30 minutes at 175C/350F
• Cleanup: Very fast but a bit wasteful
• How bacon-y did the kitchen smell afterwards? Slightly

I followed cooking advice from AllRecipes, which I chose as it was one of the first to appear in a search.

It suggested a cooking temperature of 175°C/350°F and what seemed to be an almost absurdly long cooking time of 30 minutes.

In my opinion, if you’re going to eat a bacon sandwich, you want to accomplish the task as quickly as possible, without time for regret or for Googling arterial disease. You don’t want to stand around for half an hour contemplating your mortality.

Given the long oven cooking time, this must also be the most expensive way to cook a few rashers, unless there’s a London restaurant serving them covered in gold flakes for £50.

I placed the bacon strips on a foil-lined baking tray – but you could also use baking parchment – and after 15 minutes, they were still pale, flabby, and only barely acquainted with the oven’s heat. I turned them over at 20 minutes and returned to WebMD.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

The bacon still wasn’t perfectly crispy at 30 minutes so I gave it another 5, then served it up anyway, on the grounds that it was a) cooked enough not to cause death in the short-term, at least and b) bacon, so whatever.

Cleanup was easy but I felt a bit guilty for consigning a length of foil to landfill for such a dismal bit of cooking.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

• Score: 3/10 – Life is too short.

Cooking bacon in an air fryer  

• Cooking time: Streaky bacon 5 minutes, back bacon 8 minutes at 200°C/390°F
• Cleanup: Fairly easy
• How bacon-y did the kitchen smell afterwards? Slightly

I used the first coking instructions I spotted, from BBC Good Food, laid the bacon rashers straight onto the crisper plates and set the air fryer.

One thing that the dietician is spot-on about is the limited cooking space an air fryer will provide for your rashers. Rashers shouldn’t overlap or be placed on top of each other while cooking.

In an average single drawer air fryer, you’ll probably have enough space for three large back bacon rashers, or four smaller slices of streaky bacon. It’s not much less than a frying pan.

And, if you have a dual-drawer air fryer, you can double the amount.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

In the end, I cooked a smaller number of rashers as I didn’t want to kill my food tester, who also doubles as my husband.

I used my trusty Ninja FlexDrawer, which meant I was able to cook two types of bacon at the same time, using different cooking times, and sync them to finish at the same time.

But even in a single-drawer air fryer, it’s so fast that you can cook two batches and clean up in less time than it takes to oven cook.

After reading the dietician’s advice on the dangers of smoking, spitting bacon, I was on high alert and half-expected to see my air fryer burst into flames and start chanting in Latin.

But it was absolutely fine. The oil from the bacon dripped beneath the crisper plate and didn’t get hot enough to smoke.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

If your air fryer smokes, it’s generally a sign that it needs a good clean. If the cooking area seems fine, brush any food debris from the heating coil above with a soft brush or dry sponge (but only once it’s cooled down).

The fact that the fat ran off also meant that the bacon was not as oily when it finished cooking.

In fact, the only issue with using an air fryer is that the circulating hot air can cause bacon rashers to fold over while cooking, but you can use a pair of tongs to flip them back.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Emma Rowley / Foundry

• Score: 9/10 – Even easier than cooking in a pan, as it doesn’t need supervision, and an alarm alerts you when it’s ready.

Tester’s feedback

All of the prepared bacon was delivered, in sandwich format, to a tester. The tester was less happy with the oven-cooked bacon sandwich than the pan and air fryer cooked sandwiches.

But in all honesty, there were no complaints, just a lot of eating noise. Overall, we’d say that oven cooking is the worst option, as it’s slow and expensive. It’s likely only worth it if bacon is just one part of a larger meal. But air frying bacon is absolutely fine, as long as your air fryer is clean, and you don’t crowd the food.

If you’d like air fryer buying advice, you’re in the right place. We’ve got round-ups of the best dual-drawer air fryers, the best Ninja air fryers, the best air fryer ovens, and the best air fryers across all categories.