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Bacon can be cooked and incorporated into numerous dishes, such as creamy scrambled eggs, on top of burgers, within a delicious quiche, chopped up and sprinkled on a crispy jacket potato or even served on pancakes for the sweet and savoury combination. Regarding how bacon is cooked, however, there are essentially two camps - one for those who prefer an evenly crispy, well-rendered strip of bacon and another for those who favour it being slightly chewier.

I happen to fit in the evenly crispy, well-rendered strip of bacon camp, but how I achieve that perfectly cooked bacon is remarkably inconsistent. Most of the time, my preferred method is to use the air fryer, but occasionally, I do cook bacon in the pan. To determine which delivers the best results, I've cooked bacon in the frying pan, in the oven and in the air fryer. The method that performed the best didn't require any cleaning afterwards, but there was a drawback to it.

This is the most popular way of cooking bacon, as it simply requires cooking slices of bacon in a preheated pan. For this method, I heated the pan over medium heat, then arranged the bacon strips in a single layer. You can likely only fit four slices comfortably.

I cooked the bacon until crispy; approximately eight to 10 minutes was sufficient. Halfway through, I made sure to flip the bacon regularly and adjust the temperature as needed to prevent burning. If you favour your bacon being more chewy than crispy, then this is the technique for you. While there was a slight crisp to it, the crispiness was very minimal.

With this approach, I had to use some oil to prevent the bacon sticking to the pan, and the bacon ended up far too greasy. Additionally, this way of cooking bacon created a lot of mess on the hob.

Using an air fryer to cook bacon offers the advantage of hands-free cooking, but it comes with some compromises. I began by preheating my air fryer to 180°C, then I arranged three bacon slices vertically on the bottom of the air fryer basket - that was as many slices as I could fit.

I cooked the bacon for roughly seven minutes, flipping halfway through. This is a technique for anyone who prefers bacon with contrasting textures. Some parts of the bacon will be pleasantly chewy while others will be thoroughly rendered and crispy.

While this is a solid option, it was not my favourite out of all three of the cooking methods.

Annoyingly, I only had three slices of bacon left to test out this technique, but it's perfect for those cooking a lot of rashers at the same time.

For this approach, I started by preheating the oven to 180°C fan and placed the bacon on a lined baking tray. Bake until crispy, about 20 minutes, turning the bacon over halfway through cooking.

The ultimate method to cook evenly crispy and consistent bacon, particularly in large quantities, is in the oven. This was my preferred technique, as it ticked all the crucial boxes: hands-off cooking, perfectly crispy bacon and no mess.

This is also one of the most straightforward methods, which just goes to show that sometimes the simplest, hassle-free techniques yield the best outcomes.

The only downside to this method was that it takes twice as long to cook bacon in the oven compared to other methods.