If you’re adding bacon to your homemade pizza, you might be wondering if the bacon needs to be precooked.
Yes, you need to precook the bacon for your pizza. Bacon is one of many foods that should be precooked before you place them on pizza, and you’re about to learn why.
Why Precook Your Bacon?
Think about the process of making and cooking a pizza . . . you put together some dough, cheese, and various ingredients and stick it in an oven that has a very high temperature. Because the heat is so high, you don’t have to cook the pizza for very long. This means your bacon may not be completely cooked when you take your pizza out of the oven. There is an inconsistency between the cooking time of the bacon and the cooking time of the rest of the pizza.
You could potentially lower the temperature of the oven and cook the pizza for longer, but you can only cook it for so long before the other pizza ingredients either get mushy or start to burn. In general, the cooking time of your pizza is always going to be shorter than the cooking time for the bacon, which makes precooking your bacon the best solution.
Another reason to precook your bacon is that it improves the overall texture of the bacon. Some pizza toppings need to be crispy, while others (such as the cheese) need to be moist. Your goal is to cook the pizza at a temperature and time that accommodate all of your toppings, but when it comes to raw bacon or any type of raw meat, this can be a little difficult. Meat generally takes longer to cook than the other toppings, which is why you’ll want to precook it.
Other Pizza Toppings That Should Be Precooked
Some other pizza toppings should also be precooked, such as:
- Any type of thick meat, such as chicken
- Root veggies, such as butternut squash
- Mushrooms
- Leafy greens
- Broccoli, since it takes a long time to get rid of the crunchiness
- Onions
- Bell peppers
In fact, any meat or vegetable that starts off very hard and that might remain too crunchy after the pizza’s done should be cooked for a little while before you put it on your pizza.