Back in mid-October I took my family on a little road trip. We traveled around the southeastern portions of Tennessee to see the sights. It was one of those trips you take when you don’t have a definite destination. Originally, we had planned to go to Gatlinburg, but news of heavy traffic scared me away.
Instead, we drove down to the Ocoee River and The Cherokee National Forest. On the way back, we took Highway 411 east toward Knoxville. The fall colors were outstanding making the drive even more enjoyable.
On our way, I was looking at a map and plotting our route, when I realized that we were fairly close to Madisonville, Tennessee. Probably no one but me would recognize the importance of this, but I knew that Benton’s Bacon was in Madisonville, so I looked up their address on my iPhone and headed that way.
I immediately detected some subtle objections from my wife and daughters, who could not understand why anybody would want to go to a bacon store while on vacation. They obviously did not share my appreciation or knowledge of Benton’s Bacon. I had eaten it before, thanks to my brother Jack Napier, who gave me a package for Christmas a couple years ago. I also knew of their reputation from nationally-acclaimed cooks like Bobby Flay and Paula Deen and stories I had read about them in Southern Living Magazine.
I was pretty excited and was looking forward to seeing their operation. My father was a butcher and I always considered myself to be an educated man when it came to meat. I love country ham and decided right then I would buy one once we arrived at Benton’s. I bake a country ham for Christmas each year for our Napier family gathering in Celina.
It took a while, but we finally found it. The sign said “Benton’s Smoky Mountain Hams.” It was in a run-down cinderblock building that looked like anything but the home of the best bacon in the world. Inside, the decor was indescribable. An old meat case had some samples in it, that looked like they had been thrown in. There was sides of bacon hanging on a rack, and more importantly, a line of people, waiting to make their purchase.
The smell of smoke was so heavy I am sure you could smell it on my clothes the next day. To me, it was a good thing. To my wife, it would be a negative. They had a hand-written menu on a board and a man in a white butcher apron standing behind an aged wooden counter. He was writing orders on brown paper sacks. He then put the order into the same sack.
You could see a half-dozen employees in the room behind the counter, cutting meat, some on a saw, others with a knife. I listened as the people in front of me ordered. “Six pounds of bacon please.” I looked around and saw that the bacon was $6 a pound. They also had country hams, (smoked or not smoked), and sausage in cloth bags with draw-string closure.
Their country hams were aged up to 18 months and smoked. The 17 pound ham I took, cost $65. I got mine sliced with the bone in. You could also get it boned, trimmed and sliced, but I prefer the bone in my ham. That’s where all the flavor is. This turned out to be the best country ham I ever had. I would consider myself to be an expert when it comes to cooking and eating country ham.
Benton’s hams are slow-cured using salt, brown sugar and sodium nitrite. They are typically aged 9-12 months but you can get them older. This time-honored practice dates back to when the preparation and preservation of meat was a way of life and sustenance. Their business was started in 1947 by the late Albert Hicks, a dairy farmer who began curing and selling country hams. Allan Benton purchased the business in 1973 and has honed the dry-curing of hams and bacon into a culinary art, taking the products from a simple breakfast mainstay into a world of gourmet cooking, where they have been praised by world-famous chefs for their characteristic flavor.
Benton says his Hickory smoking is performed in a smallsmokehouse located behind the business. He uses hickory and applewood smoke and it comes from a “wood stove he bought from his cousin 30 years ago for $50. ”
It is this “smoke” which imparts a distinct flavor that many customers prefer. “We try to start out with the very best, fresh product we can get our hands on. Our hogs are grown on pasture, not antibiotics. Most hams you see today are made in 80 days. That’s not our game. I have hams in my building now that are 28 months old. We set a goal for ourselves many years ago, that we wanted to make a world-class product, that would complete with the Europeans. I sure won’t pretend that we reached that goal, but I can tell you we strive to meet it everyday in our business.”
“My bacon is very intense, very pronounced smoke flavor, you smell it all over your house when you fry it. And people either love it or they don’t,” Benton said.
What really put Benton’s on the map, was when chefs started using his hams and bacon in their restaurants. According to Benton, the very first chef to use his products was Bob Carter, who was at Blackberry Farms. Later, John Fleer became the chef. Up until then, Benton’s customer base was just pretty much a few greasy spoon restaurants scattered throughout the Smokies and the local hillbillies that just walked in his front door.
Young celebrity chef David Chang, proprietor of New York hot spots such as Momofuku Noodle Bar and Momofuku Ko, orders 150 pounds of Benton’s goods weekly.
“Your stuff is the ultimate old-school product. We can smell the work you put into it,” Chang once told Benton, as recounted in a story in Gourmet. “Sometimes when you ship us a ham, we can see handprints on the box. We know that the person who packed our box trimmed our ham.”
“John Fleer singlehandedly started sharing my products with all these incredible chefs, everybody from Thomas Keller on the West Coast to Tom Colicchio in New York to John Besh in New Orleans. They had all these fabulous chefs across the country come to Blackberry Farms as guest chefs and he invariably shared my products with them,” Benton said.
Food magazines, from Gourmet to Saveur have run feature stories on Benton’s. Newspapers, like the New York Times, have featured stories about restaurants in Atlanta and elsewhere who use his bacon in their main dishes. Benton gives these talented chefs the credit for his rise to fame. “It’s the creativity of these very talented chefs that’s made my product. I think what I make is a decent product, it’s not a fabulous product, but they take it and elevate it,” Benton said.
“I’ve been blessed to make a living doing something that I really enjoy,” Benton said. “I honestly count my blessings everyday that I’m still doing this, because I get to meet this incredible cross-section of humanity. I’m dealing with farmers in their bibbed overalls, five star chefs and all kinds of people in-between. I’m old enough to draw social security, but I have zero plans of retiring. I hope that if I’m alive and able, that I’ll be making bacon when I’m 85! You’re not going to get rich in the meat business, but if someone offered me ten times as much doing something else, I’m not sure I’d want to do that.”
A note on their website (bentonscountryhams2.com) says there is currently a four week wait as they struggle to keep up with orders.
