Snoop Dogg's Tip For Making The Crispiest, Curliest Bacon Possible

Despite bacon's unwavering popularity, it can be a fiddly food to perfect, which is why there's no shortage of tips to be found for achieving perfectly cooked, crispy strips. These culinary hacks can range from covering the bacon in water to dehydrating bacon in an air fryer. However, one of the more unconventional — yet effective — methods comes from rapper-turned-celebrity-chef, Snoop Dogg.

Recipe developer and cookbook author, Jess Damuck, details Snoop Dogg's intriguing bacon trick in her cookbook, "Salad Freak" (via TheKitchn). Damuck described her surprise as the rapper unceremoniously chucked a heap of bacon into his frying pan and used tongs to stir the meat for 15 minutes. The result, she claimed, was "perfectly crispy curly bacon."

The specifics of Snoop's method are extremely straightforward, if not a little unorthodox. Generally, your pan should start off cold when frying bacon, but Snoop preheats his first. Overcrowding bacon is also generally considered a no-no, but Snoop's approach works thanks to one specific technique — continuous stirring.

Normally, we want to leave a reasonable amount of space in the pan for our bacon, making sure the strips don't overlap. Trying to cook too much of the meat at once can trap the steam released from the bacon as it fries, leading to a soggy finished product. If the meat is too crowded, some parts of the bacon may be blocked from receiving the direct heat needed to crisp up properly.

However, Snoop Dogg continually stirs his bacon, which increases the airflow in the frying pan and allows the evaporating water to escape from the meaty mass. Keeping the pan's contents moving also means they don't get too hot, and gives the fat enough time to render fully, even though he starts with a warmer pan. Plus, it ensures the strips remain separated, and every part of the bacon gets exposed to direct heat.

The thing to bear in mind is that Snoop's method results in extra curly bacon, so it may not be suitable if you want to keep your strips as flat as possible. While flat bacon has its place, particularly when adding it to things like sandwiches or burgers, it's hard to beat the crunch and aesthetic of curly bacon.

Bacon typically curls when the fatty sections cook more quickly than the meaty parts, causing it to warp as the fat shrinks; alternatively, it shrinks due to water evaporating out of the meat. Lower-quality bacon usually contains more water due to the curing process, which is faster and more cost-efficient than dry curing. However, if you want curly bacon like Snoop Dogg's without compromising on quality — and if you don't feel like stirring continuously — there is a cooking hack you can try with your oven.

You can force the bacon to curl along its length by creating a mold from kitchen foil. First, tear off a length of foil roughly twice the length of your baking pan. Then, pinch the foil together to create a series of parallel peaks across the width of the pan, leaving roughly one inch of space between each peak — it should look a bit like the side of an accordion. You can now lay the bacon across the foil and press it into the troughs, and it will keep this curly shape as it bakes.

Alternatively, you can scrunch the foil into two or three loose rolls and place them in the pan lengthways, then drape your bacon over them to create curls that hold their shape through cooking. These methods will also keep your baking tray clean, and make it easier to save the leftover grease for future recipes.