How to Freeze Bacon Slices for Recipes, Convenience & Storage

A quick cooking tip for how to freeze bacon slices raw for long-term storage and the convenience of being able to use the individual pieces for recipes.

I cooked for many years without realizing I could freeze bacon. Well, I knew you could throw a pound of bacon in the freezer, but you couldn’t use it until thawing, putting me right back where I started. Can you relate?

There are so many recipes (most?) that do not need an entire pound of bacon like Mediterranean Scramble, Bacon-Corn Tart, Bacon Caesar Slaw, and Curried Lentils with Bacon & Cabbage. If you’re like me, getting the bacon required for the recipe often goes something like this:

• wrestle a few slices off the slab
• wrap it back up
• then try to plan a bunch of meals in the next week to use it up before it turns too brown and unappealing.
• clean up the raw bacon juice that often leaks in the fridge – yuck.

When I read a number of years ago that you could partially cook and freeze bacon slices on a cookie sheet before packaging them up, I was all over that. The convenience of being able to pull just a few slices from the freezer for recipes was wonderful.

But it wasn’t perfect – there were all those steps and dirty pans. But mostly partially cooking the bacon meant you wouldn’t get much bacon fat from each piece after freezing. And often when a recipe calls for 2-3 pieces of bacon, it also calls for the 1 or so tablespoons of rendered fat to sauté onion and other vegetables.

Then one time I didn’t have time for all the partial baking, so after separating the slices, I just laid them on the baking sheet raw and froze them. I have no idea if this is a technique known to everyone and I’m just late to the party, but I found that it was:

• easier to freeze them raw
• they stored just as nicely
• all the bacon fat was preserved for recipes

Since I don’t think there are many actual new things under the sun, I don’t really think I invented this technique as much as just stumbled on it. And one thing I’ve found since starting this blog is that there are others out there like me, so I decided to share my little bacon cooking tip with you all.

It really is the BEST way to store bacon and then use it easily in recipes – I think you’ll love the convenience if you haven’t done this before!

Instructional Video

How to Freeze Bacon Slices

You’ll love how easy it is to freeze individual bacon slices, too.

1. Separate a pound of bacon slices and lay the individual pieces on the largest baking sheet you have. Even then they may not fit perfectly, like mine above, so I just make more room by bending the slices to fit. It doesn’t matter that if the frozen slices are wavy or flat, they cook just the same – and may fit better in your skillet, anyway.

2. Place the pan in a freezer until frozen, usually a few hours (you don’t have to cover it). Honestly, it’s usually the next day for me, but I try not to go more than 24 hours, since they are uncovered.

3. Remove the pan from the freezer and use a spatula to help remove the slices, one at a time from the pan.

4. Place slices in a gallon sized freezer baggie or other container with an air tight seal.

5. Seal the baggie/container and label the baggie with the date frozen, just for reference. Store in a freezer you can easily access – meaning your kitchen fridge/freezer – since you’ll want to be able to grab a couple slices whenever you need them.

Brian and I even made a video for this how to freeze bacon tip for those who are more visually inclined:

 

That’s all there is to it! Tell me, do you freeze bacon?