I like bacon alot and uhhhhh 4

1 or 2. Bacon shouldn't snap if you bend it.

I'm a fan of 4 or 5

for anyone else who likes it crispy-but-not-burnt, the best trick that I've found is to cook it relatively low and slow to start off with, to boil away most of the moisture, and then turning the heat up to get it to the level of golden-brown you want.

there's two variables to play around with. one is the temperature reached by the cooking grease, especially how long it spends in the 140-160 C sweet spot for the Maillard reaction. the other is the final water content once it's done cooking. the former controls level of brownness, the latter is chewy vs. crispy.

in theory, you could get #2 but crispy with an extended low & slow cook, or #5 but still chewy if you preheated leftover grease and then fried it quickly in that.

Correct. 4 is perfect. Baked in the oven or pan fried?

PAN
I've always microwaved mine.
- Does that cause any issues? I can’t imagine the microwave cleanup to be a walk in the park.
Air fryer at 350 for 10-12 minutes does a pretty good job at crispy bacon, more if it's thick bacon. It gives you time to work on the rest of breakfast without needing to think about it.
- Good point. I just have a toaster oven but same theory.
I would def do the pan because then you can deglaze the sucs with a little vinegar or something and make a quick pan sauce while your bacon cools, and you can drizzle that over an English muffin, or use it to saute some pre-diced vegetables, beet greens...then you get a clean pan AND a sauce AND you can dig right into the bacon when it all comes together. If you're fast enough you could even chop your veggies while the bacon is cooking. Then the whole process is like 15 minutes
- Tasty!! I doubt for me it would take 15 minutes, but it sounds like a good use of the bacon crunchies and fat

I don't eat it anymore but when i did I thought 3 was ideal.

One thing about watching food prep videos on little red note that never ceases to give me a little culture shock is that the preference over in China would be more like a 0 or -1 on this scale. They start using it in eggs and wraps when i would consider it still raw! When they see our 1+ on this scale the XHS users would call it dry or burned.

I used to prefer 5 as a kid. Now I prefer 2-3. Only one I wouldn't eat is 6.

Only one I won't eat is 1

Why is bacon that would be considered burnt if it was any other meat considered the norm? I'm genuinely asking because I don't get it.

Probably because of the high fat content. The fat needs to render properly, which means cooking it more than the meat would otherwise need. If you've ever had a rare steak with a large piece of fat in it, you'll know what that unrendered fat is like.
In addition, the high fat content keeps the meat from being dry, so "overcooking" it doesn't have the same effect as less fatty cuts (this is also why you can slow cook ribs and some other cuts all day, while leaner cuts tend to dry out in a slow cooker).
Because its thin

2-3, anything more just tastes like dry crackly dust

🐖

yes

Somewhere in the 3 - 4 range. Crispy but not burnt

when i was in culinary school the best bacon was the burnt pieces at the bottom of the serving pan :3

6, although I prefer mine to be cooked a bit more than that. You people all spoil your tastebuds. The masses that walk this earth have all forgotten the ways of carbon. My stomach is full of ash and soot and as a result I’ve lost tons of weight. It’s an incredible diet. If you don’t have bacon, you can follow along by adding 20 or so minutes to any recipe. More if possible. You can also use your smoke detectors as a make-shift kitchen timer, too. “When you hear the beepin’, it’s time to get eatin’” my mother would always tell me. It was hard to find a carbon-friendly doctor, especially. Every time we would visit, they would have something rude to say. “Nutritional imbalance” this, “this is why you have digestion issues” that, etcetera etcetera. Luckily, after asking our doctor’s office for a new doctor enough times, we were connected with a lovely young man who seems completely apathetic to our diets. One of these days, blackened food will make a comeback, and I’ll be sending “I-told-you-so”s to all of you. You’ll see.

Pure carbon is tasty

No. 4

I’ll take two dozen of those, please. Thank you.

I'd rather back bacon than this and I'll take a 0 on this chart.

You have all the Ukrainians on your side

give me 6 or get outta my face!

There’s a restaurant in Montreal that have this chart on their place mat (?)

For steaks, yes. A few restaurants.
We got tired of clients asking and naming a specific cooking while not knowing what they were ordering.
Looking at you, self-proclaimed "important food critic" who loudly and tear-eyed-ly threatened me to demolish my steakhouse on your little blog back in 2011 after insisting to get a "mii-diumm" after being served a perfect textbook medium filet mignon.
- It's not a proper steakhouse if they can't nail medium-plus on the first try. I got spoiled by Ruth's Chris for birthdays as a teen.

am not a huge fan of bacon but when i do eat it for by itself 2-3 is good. when using in burgers, baguettes etc 4 is optimal but 4±1 is acceptable range in those applications.

I will take a pound of all of the above please

I would like a sampler of 1-5, three each. That is ideal

How can you eat 1?
- Chew on it, allow rendered fat to burst forth repeatedly with every bite, coating all 10,000 taste buds, savor it as though it were a piece of gum, suck additional flavor periodically until the piece is sufficiently broken apart, swallow.
  😳

I'll need a hundred of each for sampling

4 or 5.

As a young adult, in fact I 'OD'd' on bacon and Rocky Road when I first had the financial means, given that my family didn't consume each of those things very often as I grew up. Plus, because they tickled my taste buds at the time, specifically.

So, yeah, every once in a while I'll have some of that ice cream, because... well, it's delicious ice cream, plus it features chocolate!

But the pork-belly stuff? Oh man, I get nauseous now just smelling it, in which it takes me right back to eating all those many pounds of fried, greasy pig-flesh strips when I was ~19yo. Haha, in a way it was like the 50's dad trope of catching his kid smoking behind the garage, then forcing them to chain-smoke on the spot until the kid puked.

BONUS: "Seared strips of swine-flesh? I will enjoy it!"
https://skipcut.com/watch/2rCTuXAbyTI

3-5 are good. Ngl, I’ve still eaten 6 before. I hate remaking bacon. It’s so messy.

2,3 or 4 would be my limit. 2 preferable if I'm putting it into a sandwich. 3 or 4 if I'm cooking it up for breakfast or just to eat it like a snack.