Twisting bacon before air frying it is pointless

I’m not an exceptionally busy person. There are people who do far more with their lives than me, a humble internetsman, spending his days writing blogs about air frying. I’m not some ER doctor working overnight shifts. Still, I don’t like wasting my time. Who does?

So that’s why I couldn’t stand a viral TikTok recipe for twisted bacon. It was a monumentally pointless waste of time and effort. I don’t like novelty foods that serve no purpose beyond their novelty. For instance, I wasn’t a fan of these air fryer PB&J roll-ups because it took more time than a normal sandwich without adding much — but at least you could argue the roll-ups might inspire kids to eat their food. I can’t see any such argument for twisted bacon.

Sure twisty bacon tastes good…but so does regular bacon, which doesn’t take 40 minutes to cook. That’s right. Forty minutes. For bacon in a twist shape. No thanks. But first, let’s go over how to make it via the viral TikTok from Jackie Hartlaub, aka @lowcarbstateofmind, a popular food creator whose recipes we’ve written about in the past, with much better reviews.

Ingredients

• Bacon, as many strips as you wish

• Seasoning of your choice, preferably with little-to-no salt, since cured bacon is salty already

Directions

1. Holding the ends of a bacon strip, twirl the strip so it corkscrews into a twisty shape. This is easier to do if you keep one end of the bacon stable while twisting and pulling from the other end.

2. Once twisted, lay the bacon down in your air fryer. Repeat the twisting process for as many strips as you want.

3. Season the bacon.

4. Air fry at 275 degrees for 40 minutes, flipping halfway. Enjoy!

Here’s how Hartlaub’s process looked.

Twisted bacon. What a concept.
Credit: Screenshots: TikTok / @lowcarbstateofmind

The details

First, some housekeeping, while we found this video via Hartlaub, where it racked up nearly 2 million views, she originally found a version of the recipe from @HouseofKeto. So you can also find their version of the recipe here, which is actually made in the oven.

And to be clear, this isn’t an especially difficult recipe. All you do is twist bacon, then air fry it. The twisting does kind of suck, though. I don’t know how often you’ve handled raw bacon in your life, but it has a distinct, slippery quality because its high fat content. That means as you twist the bacon lines your hands will glisten with pork fat. With each passing strip, it will become more difficult to twist because your fingers will be greased.

And that gets at why I don’t like this recipe. It’s needless work! Why are we twisting bacon? Stop and think for one damn second. It adds absolutely nothing the bacon. Zilch. There is no flavor or texture difference. It’s just a different freaking shape.

And it takes longer to cook! For some reason — perhaps because it needs to be cooked at a low heat to hold its twist shape — this bacon takes 40 minutes to cook. Add the five to 10 minutes it’ll take to carefully twist the bacon and you’re looking at nearly an hour of cook time. Here’s what my final result looked like:

Bacon, but make it twisty.
Credit: Mashable

And granted, I ate it and it was good. It was probably a little overcooked, but it’s bacon. It’s truly difficult to mess it up.

But do you know what you could do instead? Just put bacon in the air fryer without twisting it. Most air fryer bacon recipes call for 10 to 15 minutes of cook time. So you could make at least three batches of regular bacon in the time you’d need to make twisty bacon.

There’s just no reason, in my opinion, to take the time to make twisted bacon. Just throw some in the air fryer, sans twisting, and move on with your life.