Anyone who is sufficiently foodie knows that products like meat often are injected with water to bulk-out the mass which is sold over the counter. This is particularly common with products like supermarket bacon, and I used to complain about it a lot – not to mention the steam and white gunk that would boil away in the pan.

But then I found on TikTok a better way to prepare bacon: “dry” frying in a decent non-stick pan with a thin layer of water. This is essentially a Chinese restaurant technique, and the goal is to cook the meat and render the fat before applying dry heat to crisp the bacon.

The results are superb, and entirely solves the variable cookedness of crispy bacon that is fried any other way.

After which it also becomes fairly silly to complain about the amount of water in the pan; so now we focus on flavour and texture.

Answers to common observations:

• Yes this technique also produces great results with great quality dry cure bacon
• Yes you can use an oven but my experience is the ovens tend to dry-out the bacon