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Most often, we cook bacon by reaching for the frying pan. It’s a fine technique and, after the bacon is cooked and removed, that bacon fat is there to cook with even more: potatoes, onions, carrots… Still, there is an important option. You can bake the bacon, on a sheet pan lined with aluminum foil. The bacon can be unadorned, or you can flavor and even add sweetness.

We’ve been baking our bacon, at 350˚F for 10-20 minutes, after dotting it with brown sugar. You get a sweet but still very bacon flavor. The range of cooking time depends on the texture and sweetness you prefer in the final bacon product.

Now, we have begun to double down. First, you paint the raw bacon strips with maple syrup. Then dot with the brown sugar and bake away.

What do you do with this bacon? Well, sure, you eat it. Just enjoy it hot and sweet and sticky out of the oven. But it makes for a very different BLT experience. You can chop it up into bits and employ in a salad or to top off a soup. The bacon flavor is not lost, but the sweetness is lovely, say, atop a squash soup, or in a wedge salad where the sweet bacon reverberates with the blue cheese dressing.

Experiment away. Don’t skimp on the syrup or the sugar. It’s all a gooey delight.