Geek, Garden and Cook

Bacon is one of those fickle things, we know we all love crispy bacon but for most of us it seems to be hit an miss. Is it something to do with the heat of the pan, the  type of bacon, when you put it in or how much oil you use? It seems however that the trick, and stop reading here if you get crispy bacon all the time, is the way it’s cooked.

Forget the pan or the microwave – did you really think the microwave would work? The trick is to bake it. Now before you think that’s too hard it’s really not. Pre-heat the oven to about 180C, throw down some baking paper to reduce the clean up mess, save your oil and just bake the bacon for about 2omin. In just 20min I had the perfect bacon for me. The rind was nicely crispy, the meat was still a little tender and the fat all but drained off after a single turn.

Back by popular demand is another time-series photoshoot of the bacon cooking. Give it a shot, it’s really quite simple. And the best bit is it free’s the fry-pan up for the eggs so you get both cooked perfect and served hot with minimal fuss.

Bake your bacon for the perfect crispiness!

We all love a roast chicken. The smell as it’s cooking, the tasty skin and the juicy stuffing all come together to provide something truly amazing. However, the cost vs effort of picking up a roast chicken from a shop means we rarely roast one up at home! Which is a shame because there’s so many different ways to roast a chicken with different stuffings. Also when you cook you own to can select your chicken and make sure it’s really a free-range grass fed   organic chicken.

So this experiment was inspired by a colleague at work who told me how he’ll put a frozen chicken in his slow cooker in the morning and come home to nicely roasted chook! It sounded both simple and novel so I had to give it a shot. Admittedly I was a little dubious mainly because I thought the slow cookers needed liquid up around the element to work effectively….

The recipie was quite simple.

1. Get one whole frozen chicken
2. Put some aluminium foil or upside down tray at the botom of the slow cooker to let the juices run away
3. Turn it on low for 8-10hrs or high for 4hrs (I chose the low option).

Below are the results over the 9hrs it was cooking for.

9hrs from frozen solid to nicely roasted.

One concern was will the slow cooker be able to heat up the internal temperature of the chicken to a safe level. According to the US Food Safety site the min safe temp for a chicken is 165 F (75C). To track this I kept an eye on the air temp inside the slow cooker then the internal temp of the chicken after about 8 hours. After the first 3 hrs the chicken must have thawed because the air temp moved up from about 75C to 100C and stayed there. After 8 hrs the internal temp of the chicken reached 86c and therefore fine.

Checking the internal temp of the slow cooked roast chicken.

You can see from the above that the color really didn’t kick in till the last 2 hours or so. Up until that point the chicken thawed, sweated, started to crisp up around less meaty sections and then finally browned up.

The main downside to using a frozen chicken is that you can’t stuff it. I love my stuffing so I’ve got 2 choices – go without, or stuff it before freezing. The later though obviously introduces some contamination risk so you’d need to be careful.

Roast Chicken plated up.

All up the chicken was super easy to to roast up and tasted pretty good. Another technique for the slow cooker.