Bacon, oh delicious bacon, how we love thee…unless you are vegetarian or vegan or simply don’t like bacon.  If you are the last one then I don’t think we can be friends.

Sometimes our meals are centered around bacon.  Yes, we start with bacon and then wonder what else to have with it.  And, confession time, we have, on numerous occasions, made bacon as an appetizer!  Eek!  You see, while my guy no longer cooks on a daily basis for work purposes, he now is in the food consulting business, and from time to time, he gets bacon samples from different vendors—hello, dream job—and it is our duty to try these different samples for his customers sake!  I’m not complaining one bit!

The other day Brian, who is my guy by the way, came home with two, one gallon zip lock bags filled with bacon.  He dropped them on the kitchen island, and before he could say “hello, I’m home” he said, “we are gonna grill one of these packages of bacon.”  Grill?  Yes, we are going to put it right on the grill.  Not on a pan on the grill, it’s going right on the grates.  In his mind, while driving home, all he thought about was putting that bacon right on the grill and he wanted to see how it would come out.

So, off to the grill we went for our bacon experiment and to cook dinner.

Brian’s first thought was low and slow, so he cranked on the grill to high to burn off and clean the grill from the previous meal.  After he cleaned it up, he sprayed the grates heavily with a non-stick cooking spray, turned the burners to low on half of the grill and the other half of the grill he turned it to medium.  See, he’s not one for patience some days.  I would have burnt the bacon to a crisp however we has a great knack and a creepy 6th sense when it comes to food, and he was watching the grill like a hawk.

The bacon that we had on the medium side cooked super fast and did get a little too crispy for our liking due to the high flames.  The bacon that was cooked on low gave a nice extra smoky and a great chargrilled taste that was a wonderful addition to our burgers that evening.

Total cooking time—if you are patient—is about 10 minutes on low or until cooked to your liking.  We flipped them often so that they wouldn’t get too crispy.  Total cooking time—with no patience and if you’re ok with extra crispy pieces—is about 2-4 minutes on medium!

Overall, the bacon that was cooked slow did have a nice grilled taste with a hint of the smokiness from the bacon.  We had some bacon that was pretty crispy so we  gave those pieces to the dog.  She likes bacon of any kind.

This cooking experiment was mainly to add to our burgers that we had that same night.  We will post that blog later about how to build a great burger.  We also used some of the bacon for another meal the next night.

Would we grill bacon again?  Heck yes.  Would we grill bacon every time?  No.  There’s something about cooking bacon in its own fat that’s delicious, however, the grilled bacon was wonderful on the burgers and would be a great addition to baked beans or used for a BLT because of the smoky, grilled flavors.

Go ahead and give it a try.  You might like it. If you do, drop a note and let us know how you liked it.