The Bacon Doneness Scale: A Definitive Ranking of Breakfast Loyalty
Every family has The Bacon Argument. Someone likes it practically raw, someone else wants it fossilized, and everyone else is stuck awkwardly in the middle wondering how a strip of pork became a personality trait. Let’s break down the scale.
1 — Soft & Chewy
Barely cooked, still jiggly, glistening with fat that hasn’t rendered out. This is bacon in its rawest legal form — technically cooked, spiritually still in the fridge. The people who eat this are usually the same people who order steak “blue” and think everyone else is overcooking their food out of fear.
2 — Lightly Cooked
A step up, but still pink and soft in the middle. This is the “I panicked and pulled it off the pan too early” result. Not committed to crispy, not committed to chewy — just kind of drifting.
3 — Nice & Crispy
The people’s champion. Edges have color, the middle still has a little give, the fat has rendered enough to actually taste like bacon and not just warm pork belly. If you asked a hundred people to point at “normal bacon,” most fingers land here.
4 — Crispy
Deep mahogany color, audible crunch, slightly curled edges. This is what restaurants serve you when they want to look like they know what they’re doing. Correct, confident, no notes.
5 — Very Crispy
Verging on brittle. Snaps instead of bends. This is the bacon of people who’ve made peace with the fact that it will shatter into pieces the second they bite it, and they’ve decided that’s a feature, not a bug.
6 — Call the Fire Brigade
Charcoal. A memory of bacon. This person didn’t want breakfast, they wanted a smoke detector demonstration. And yet — somewhere, right now, someone is nodding at this option, dead serious, saying “yep, that’s how my grandma made it and it’s perfect.”
So who’s “right”?
Nobody, and everybody. It genuinely comes down to:
- Fat rendering — the crispier you go, the more fat melts out, so 5s and 6s are technically “leaner” bites, just at the cost of, well, being burnt.
- Texture preference — chewy bacon lovers want that fatty mouthfeel; crispy lovers want crunch and are willing to sacrifice moisture for it.
- Cancer-scare debates — there’s an ongoing (and honestly overblown) internet worry that well-done bacon has more of certain compounds from high-heat cooking, which the crispy-bacon crowd will loudly dismiss and the chewy-bacon crowd will loudly cite, neither side backing down.
The real answer is there isn’t one — bacon doneness is one of the few kitchen debates where “it’s subjective” is actually true and not just a cop-out. But if the comments under this post don’t turn into a full civil war between Team 3 and Team 6, it’s not a real bacon post. 🥓🔥
