Can You Make Bacon In An Instant Pot?

Bacon fans already know that there are near-endless great ways to cook up a plate of delicious strips of bacon-y goodness. Beyond your standard frying or sauté pan on the stove, you've got the microwave, oven, and air fryer. However, if you've yet to consider making bacon in your Instant Pot, you may be missing out.

The Instant Pot is most well known for its pressure-cooking prowess, turning frozen hunks of meat into succulent, pull-apart strips of pork or beef in a fraction of the time it might normally take. It's also often used in place of a slow cooker or rice cooker. However, the Instant Pot's sauté function also works well for bacon, as Real Simple explains. 

While the sauté function on the Instant Pot isn't all that different from sautéing on your stovetop, the Instant Pot offers one key differentiator that makes all the difference when it comes to bacon: those high, deep sides. The size and shape of the Instant Pot allows you to still cook a similar amount of bacon as you might in a standard frying pan. But the pot's deep sides keep splatter and mess contained, so you're not worried about scrubbing grease stains from your kitchen countertops or the wall behind your stove (or worse, dodging flying grease while you're trying to cook breakfast).

So, how do you cook your bacon in your Instant Pot? Real Simple says to place the bacon in a single layer along the bottom of your pot. Don't crowd the pot; Taste of Home counts crowding your bacon pan as one of the worst mistakes you can make when cooking bacon, as it leads to limp, tangled strips instead of individual, crispy strips of bacon. Then, turn the Instant Pot to its sauté setting and cook the bacon until done. That's it.

Unfortunately, cooking bacon in the Instant Pot does mean that it's frying in what can add up to a lot of fat over the cooking process. The healthiest ways to cook bacon usually rely on soaking up that fat in some way, such as by baking the bacon on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet or by grilling it. If you're looking for the healthiest bacon possible, you might want to opt for the oven method; this method is also a good choice if you're feeding a crowd, as Food Network says, as you can cook larger quantities of bacon, faster.