Prince Harry Has the Secret to Extra-Crispy Bacon
The key to Meghan Markle’s heart might be a perfect roast chicken, but it turns out Prince Harry loves bacon. It can’t be just any bacon, though — former royal chef Darren McGrady says Prince Harry loves his bacon extra-crispy, and even has a very specific way he likes it cooked.
McGrady told Food and Wine that an 8-year-old Prince Harry once surprised him by coming up to him and telling him how he should cook the bacon. Prince Harry told McGrady the bacon would be better if it were broiled, then microwaved for a minute in some paper towels to make it ultra-crispy. He said he learned the trick at Disney World.
At first, McGrady says he was a bit taken aback to have an 8-year-old give him — a Savoy Hotel-trained Buckingham Palace chef — cooking lessons. But then he tried it, and it turns out the kid was right.
“It was after [the royal family] came back from Walt Disney World, and I had cooked bacon for breakfast,” McGrady said. “We serve the same bacon you can get in the States, and I broil it just the same. But Prince Harry said to me, ‘We had it in America at Disney World, and it’s so crispy you can snap it. You have to broil it first, and then you have to put it in some paper towels and place it in the microwave for a minute.’ And I thought, yeah, OK, thank you, you little brat, teaching me how to cook. But as soon as he was gone, I tried it, and I got this amazingly crispy bacon.”
Personally, I’m with Prince Harry. Cooking bacon in the microwave sounds like sacrilege, but it really does make exceptionally crispy bacon.
The prince is really onto something with his bacon technique, too. The biggest drawbacks to cooking bacon in the microwave are that it uses a ton of paper towels and that it wastes all the bacon fat. But Prince Harry said to broil the bacon first and then finish it in the microwave, which would give you the best of both worlds: super-crispy bacon and a big pan of bacon fat leftover for cooking.