I just performed an experiment while frying up a pound of bacon. My normal geekishness took over, and I decided to weigh the bacon after it was fried. Not blackened, but nicely crisp. It turned out that the original 16 ounces of bacon now weighed only 4.2 ounces. This is almost exactly one fourth of the original. So if your bacon costs $3.75 a pound in the store, it actually costs $15.00 a pound for the useable part.
I had done this about a year ago with a 12 ounce package, and found it was 3.1 ounces after frying. This is in almost perfect agreement with today’s experiment, so like the Mythbusters, I’m going to call this one “confirmed”.
Of course, if you save the grease and use it as one of the main ingredients in wilted lettuce, then I guess it’s not wasted.
I’m going to bet most of that weight loss is down to it being injected with brine to speed up the curing process. If you can get a nice dry cured bacon, you’ll probably find that although it’s more expensive in the store it ends up working out cheaper for the usable part - I’ve done similar experiments and had only around 50% weight loss. Some of the disparity may be down to my not liking my bacon very crisp except for the fat, but not all.
You can use the fat, too. So you should weigh the bacon after cooking, and the fat that comes from it, and any remaining unaccounted for weight is the actual waste (probably water).
Thank you for doing this experiment. I’ve been wanting to compare the price of fully cooked bacon to raw bacon. I now know it’s about 30% more expensive than raw.