How to Cook Air Fryer Bacon Without Smoking up the Whole House

Is there any flavor more perfect than bacon? The combo of rich fat, smoky flavor, and salt is just about as purely delicious as it gets. No wonder we love it wrapped around almost anything, baked into bread, or even in ice cream.

Bacon is traditionally made on the stove of course, though it tends to splatter, and cleanup can be a big pain. If you're making it for a crowd, it's easiest to just cook it in the oven. But if you're looking to just make a small amount of bacon, and don't want to deal with splatter, then your top-rated air fryer is the way to go.

There's a caveat, though. Many recipes out there encourage you to cook bacon the way you'd cook most anything else in an air fryer: hot and fast, to get it crispy. With bacon, that's a bad idea. Because bacon is so fatty, cooking it at high temps in your air fryer will typically cause all the fat to drip off, shrinking the strips down to just the lean parts, and also potentially causing all that dripping hot fat to fill your kitchen with smoke.

Instead, we recommend cooking your bacon at a much lower temperature: just 300°F, and letting it cook for around 20 minutes. We've found this cuts down on fat loss, keeps the bacon flatter since the fat and lean parts both have time to fully cook, and results in a sublime, crispy ribbon of smokey goodness. Don't want your bacon too crispy? Just start checking on it after about 15 minutes, and remove when it's reached your desired level of doneness.