Photos show the different ways bacon turns out depending on how you cook it

Insider

• I made bacon eight different ways to see which method yielded the best breakfast side.
• I compared methods by looking at how they affected the cook time, consistency, and texture of the meat.
• Starting the bacon in a cold, dry skillet made for consistently cooked strips while starting in a preheated skillet made for half-rubbery, half-burnt strips.
• I was surprised by how well the batch I made in the microwave turned out.

After spending weeks finding the best ways to cook scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and pancakes, I thought it was only right that I try making the perfect breakfast side next: bacon.

Some people prefer their bacon chewy while others opt for crunchy. There's also greasy versus dry, and ribboned versus flat. Knowing that the possibilities are nearly endless, I scoured the internet to come up with a list of eight different ways to cook the popular breakfast meat.

Using the same brand of uncured, center-cut, smokehouse bacon, I changed up variables like my heat source and cooking surface to see how they affected each batch. I made two strips per batch so that I could pay attention to consistency as well.