How Long Does Benton’s Bacon Last? A Close Look at Its Shelf Life and Storage

Al Benton cures his meats in a tiny smokehouse in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The Benton business was started in 1947 in the town of Madisonville and was taken over by Al in 1973. It is widely seen as an American treasure and makes the tastiest cured meats in the country. “Don’t call me Mr. Benton,” he chides, “I’m Al. ” His smile is half Robert Redford and half Jimmy Carter, equal parts star power and earnest American.

It’s really that easy to make bacon the Benton way: salt, brown sugar, time, patience, and a good hickory smoke that lasts for three days! Al learned how to cure bacon as a child. His family butchered their own pigs and made their own sausage and bacon. Al will tell you that everything he does now is the same thing he did in his backyard as a child.

Al also uses our heritage hams to make delicious prosciutto-style ham. His smoked hams are aged for over a year and a half, and the only things he uses are salt, sage, black pepper, and red pepper. He says he doesn’t use anything he can’t pronounce! Benton is a legend in the South, but he is still busy with all the steps of the curing process. He is another well-known traditionalist who is supporting the American charcuterie renaissance by raising heritage breed pigs.

On the way from Nashville to Madisonville, Tennessee, it poured down rain. The kind of rain that hides the green Smoky Mountains of Tennessee behind sheets of steam and fog and makes the roof of a rented car sound like war drums. Anyone could have thought we were driving through Skull Island, where King Kong lives, or that we had taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Heart of Darkness, a scene from Apocalypse Now. The truth was much more comforting, though: our goal was to see Al Benton and Nancy Newsom, who are known as the “King and Queen of Country Ham.”

One of the best things about Heritage Foods USA has always been the personal visits they make to farms, chefs, and suppliers. Anyone who has been on one of these trips with tour leader Patrick Martins knows that they are truly magical meat tours, whirlwinds of gastronomic bliss and historical culinary discovery, epicurean epics written in regional cuisine. And, a hell of a lot of fun.

Our first stop on this journey to the southern ham cathedrals was Benton’s Country Hams. The owner greeted us in his small storefront on the side of the road.

Al Benton speaks with an unerring southern twang that is like catnip to New Yawkers. He jokes that he’s a hillbilly, but he can’t hide his business sense or good looks from the old school. His smile is equal parts Robert Redford and Jimmy Carter, star power and honest American It’s a powerful lesson in pride, good taste, modesty, respect for history, and the providence of good timing to talk to him about his business. Both he and his Kentucky counterpart, Nancy Newsom, were lucky to catch the rising tide of foodies and enlightened chefs who realized the soaring quality of their country hams just as cosmopolitan foodie culture was exploding.

A steady stream of people came in to buy bacon, ham parts, sliced country hams, and more bacon while we talked to Al. There were young men wearing camo pants and trucker hats, soccer moms with their kids, and a middle-aged man wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Ham doesn’t care who you are. Al states, “The Southern Food Alliance is based on the idea that if you sit down at the table, we are all the same.” It doesn’t matter where you come from or what your ethnic background is. ” Indeed, ham is the great equalizer.

Tommy is Al’s plant manager and right-hand man. “Sometimes he’s up to his elbows in bacon grease, and other times he’s on the phone to solve problems,” Tommy said. — takes us on a tour of Al’s facility, which from the street looks like a small storefront but is actually a maze of rooms filled with hams hanging to dry or curing in salt—a real porky bunker The smell of hickory smoke kisses you on the face at every turn.

Al talks about how he ran into a smokehouse that was on fire to save his bacon, yelling at the firefighters, “DO NOT USE YOUR HOSES! THERE IS BACON IN THERE!” He also thinks about his favorite places to eat: “I love Charleston and New Orleans, but New York City is where you can get everything. If I had to choose one, it would be one of David Chang’s restaurants.” Chang’s Momofuku empire has been a big supporter of Benton, and why not? In fact, our list comes after the one made by Momofuku executive chef and main mover Matt Rudofker just a week ago.

It’s that easy to make ham the Benton way: “Just salt, sage, black pepper, and red pepper. We don’t use anything you can’t pronounce.” Some of these factory-made hams have so many ingredients that you can’t even read them. Some of them are things you’ve never heard of. ”.

Local hickory is burned in a wood stove in the smoke room. “The wood comes in when it does,” they say. People come to me when they need to sell wood and are out of beer and milk. That’s always the way it’s been. ” The hams spend three days in the smoke room to get that intense flavor. For five weeks, bacon cures in brown sugar and salt, then moves to cooler rooms and finally a heated room. Hams can age for up to two years. “The hams need to be aged. It’s like cheese: it tastes mild at first but gets stronger as it ages.” ”.

Benton’s began in 1947, when dairy farmer Al Hicks cured hams for local farmers. According to Al Benton, ham was food that hillbillies ate. This is what made ham famous in the first place.

In 1973, Al was having a hard time making ends meet as a high school guidance counselor. He decided to do what he knew would work best. “After I quit my job, it hit me hard: it wouldn’t be easy to make a living curing hams…” I wanted to hear everyone’s ideas, so I wrote to college professors, cooks, and anyone else I could think of. I also studied everything I could, but the recipe from the old smoke house behind the house where I was born was the best. People liked it a lot. At the beginning I was thinking about curing quickly, maybe one hour for a twelve-lb. ham: I thought I had to work very quickly and quick-cure if I wanted to make it in this business. But my daddy told me ‘If you play the other guy’s game, you are always going to lose. Make it the best you can. Quality is what is going to sustain you.

“Blackberry Farms changed things, this was in about 1991. We had just two employees then. John Fleer was the chef at Blackberry. He was already a star because he had been Mary Tyler Moore’s personal chef. John is such a nice guy—I never heard him raise his voice, which is unusual for chefs—and he cared so much about finding the best ingredients. On day, he called. He had bought something from us, and I thought he was going to complain. Instead, he wanted to know if it was okay to put our name on his Blackberry menu. I thought there had to be a reason why not, but I couldn’t think of one. Then his phone started ringing, and so many great chefs, like Tom Colicchio and Thomas Keller, were coming to see him. I guess that’s when I saw the Promised Land. There was a market for fine dining with the aged country hams and bacon. ”.

Later that night, at dinner, people talked about moonshine, music, and professional wrestling. They said that Tennessee and Memphis were the best places to watch the great sport, led by its King, Jerry Lawler. Lawler’s biggest rival was a Jewish comedian from New York named Andy Kaufman. But mostly we talked about food, and mostly about ham. Al had a lot of praise for his coworkers Sam Edwards and Nancy Newsom. He believes it was their idea to bring traditional Southern ham to the North.

“People are becoming very interested in where their food comes from. For example, McDonald’s knows what it means when it talks about cage-free eggs. It gives me pride that small folks have been able to make such a ripple in food culture. ”.

When Heritage Foods started in 2001 we set out to sell heritage Thanksgiving turkeys. For three years, our turkey project grew. However, turkey is a seasonal food, and two of the three farmers we worked with to raise the birds were looking for a more stable way to make money if they wanted to keep working with us. So we promised to sell pork, which can be raised all year as long as the breeds come from old genetic lines, just like the turkeys. Twenty years later, Heritage Foods still works with those two original farms and a few others. These farms brought the term “heritage pork” to menus across the country by sending center-of-the-plate pork dishes to thousands of homes through Heritage Foods’ mail-order service and hundreds of America’s best restaurants from coast to coast.

Doug Metzger was truly at the ground zero of our business and the heritage food movement. He was the magician who put us in touch with our processor, Paradise Locker Meats, with whom we have worked and grown ever since. From about 2002 to 2013, he raised heritage turkeys with Frank Reese.

Doug is 83 years old and lives with his wife Betty on a 1,500-acre farm in Seneca, Kansas. They raise purebred, certified Berkshire and Tamworth pigs.

In an era of specialization Doug is an anomaly. Doug is famous for adapting to any moment. In 2001, he picked up the phone and agreed to raise heritage turkeys for us with Frank. He did this because he thought that the growing food movement would enjoy the taste of the birds that his grandfather raised. Doug began raising heritage pigs when the demand for high-quality meat grew. He turned his commodity farm into a pastured farm where the rare Tamworth breed could thrive.

Doug has been farming since 1951. As a kid he raised chickens but gave them up when he got into turkeys. As he got older, he broke into the milk cattle game. Then he tried sheep, but he says he couldn’t get them to breed right. He also raised Aylesbury ducks — a rare heritage breed. His huge farm has been used to grow wheat, corn, oats, barley, sorghum, alfalfa, and rye over the years. He even grew flax one year because he heard it would help the cows’ immune systems, which he thought it did. “It certainly made their coats look wonderful,” Doug says.

Today, farmers are encouraged to grow only corn and soybeans—”that’s all they want us to grow,” Doug says. “And farmers haul their crops to town instead of using them on their own farm.” Doug has fond memories of the time when a diverse farm would grow corn and make whiskey from it, or when soybeans were grown to feed milk cows, which is what Doug did on his farm. “Keep your grain,” Doug insists, “and use it to grow a truly sustainable farm. ”.

Doug was never one to use chemicals to grow food. He doesn’t think it’s possible to talk about sustainability if you only grow one crop or use chemicals to do it. “If my friend and I worked all night, we could get rid of 100 acres of weeds in one day. We didn’t need any extra help.” All those chemicals are part of the reason there are so many cancers around, if you ask me. Having grown so many foods naturally, Doug has learned a lot about farming over the years. He often uses lessons from decades ago to solve problems that come up today.

Life Magazine once said that Doug’s 104-year-old father had more living descendants than any other American, and many of them were farmers. Doug comes from a truly great American farming family. This is one of many stories of people who came to the New World and did well by following old traditions, being honest, and working hard.

Doug, who is getting close to his 84th birthday, is as down-to-earth as the farm he still works on. “We’re here today to save these breeds,” he says. “Save the breeds and make a little money. We got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of land. But I can’t keep up with everything. I need more young people! When I was young, we raised turkeys in the spring and sold all of them by Christmas. We milked cattle all year round. I want to keep working — my dad was helping me when he was 84!”.

His conversational style always brings insight and interesting thoughts to bear. Doug and Betty have been part of our team for many years, and we hope they continue to believe in diversified farming. His daughter Marilyn, her husband Stan, and their two kids, Simon and Joel, work on the farm to make it run.

We met Larry and Madonna Sorell in 2002, as growers for Frank Reese and the Heritage Turkey Project. As their turkey flock grew in size, so did the Sorell’s importance to Heritage Foods.

There is a five-state, twelve-farm network started by Larry and Madonna that raises the Red Wattle breed of pork. This breed has a long history and was almost extinct once upon a time. In this story, Larry and Madonna are the heroes. They are the faces of the heritage food movement and true believers who were meant to be the Guardians of the Red Wattle. People believe that “you have to eat them to save them” when it comes to animals that are in danger of going extinct. ”.

The first time Heritage Foods sold pigs, in 2004, it was through a handshake deal with chefs Zach Allen and Mark Ladner, who were working at Lupa Restaurant in New York City at the time. They knew that a Red Wattle pig raised on pasture without antibiotics and using traditional farming methods would produce high-quality meat that didn’t lose its taste. Part of how Heritage Foods got its start was through the deal with Ladner and the partnership with Larry and his Lazy S Farms.

“We went 18,000 miles to get started,” Larry says in a matter-of-fact way about the Heritage Foods Odyssey. The goal was to find rare Red Wattle sows and gather a genetic lineage of this amazing pig that has roots in New Orleans in the 18th century. “We started out with two Red Wattle gilts and a boar. To start a herd, we had to go all over the United States.” “.

“I’ve pretty much stopped raising animals now, but we have a dozen Amish growers working with us. I pay for the hogs and bring them to Paradise Locker, where they are processed.” I have a tractor trailer and pick up 300-pounders and fifty to eighty head of cattle every week. We have farms in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa. that’s a lot of traveling. We may have four or five pick-ups every week. You wear out a truck pretty fast. ”.

Larry, who is now over eighty, doesn’t drive as much, but he still keeps up all of his relationships, which is hard because Amish homes don’t have phones. “I’ll have to quit sometime, but for now it’s going pretty well,” he says. The driving is easy. Getting 50 to 100 pigs from Amish families every week is hard work because you have to make sure everyone is happy and keep an eye on the animals’ sizes to make sure we have enough. And we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now. ”.

The Red Wattle was moved from Critical to Threatened on The Livestock Conservancy’s watch list thanks to Larry and Madonna’s work. This is a huge victory for biodiversity, which is one of the most important issues of our time.

In 2006, farmer Mark Newman wrote us a letter asking if Heritage Foods would ever think about selling his old school Berkshire pigs that were raised on pasture. We said yes, and a relationship started that is still going strong today. It is now his son David who is keeping the genetic line of the Berkshires alive, which comes from people coming to the United States from England in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Newman Farms is in the heart of the Ozarks in south central Missouri. From the air, it looks more like a pioneer settlement or a summer camp than a pig farm. Wooden huts are scattered across green fields like bungalows, where contented Berkshire pigs live their lives, happily on-pasture. It’s an idyllic , far from the modern machine that is industrial pig farming.

Pigs on Newman Farm are raised 100% on-pasture. The sows raise their piglets in huts that dot the fields of the farm. Before they can jump over the 6-inch wooden board that blocks the door, the babies live inside the huts. Once they make the big jump, they can run out in the field and play with the other piglets from the other huts.

As the pigs get older, they will be moved to new paddocks as part of a program called rotational grazing. This keeps the land healthy and the pigs clean. When the pigs are teenagers, they move into grow barns where a few dozen of them live together in what looks like an outdoor dorm room. They play and roll over each other all day.

David Newman is both a farmer and scientist. “The farmer came first,” he laughs. His degrees are in animal science, and he holds a Ph. D in meat science and muscle biology, focused on meat quality. “When I became a scientist and worked in education, I used what I was learning to figure out how we could do things better.” ”.

Berkshires were the favorite breed of British royalty and were first introduced to the New World in 1823. Since then, the bloodlines of Berkshire pigs have stayed very pure, and they have become a favorite among chefs and diners, known for their bright pork flavor and thick, delicious fat cap. And if anyone were to question their excellence, just ask David. “It’s not a matter of opinion!” he insists, passionately. “It’s a scientific fact, Berkshires are the most marbled hog on the market today. David is a great breeder who works hard to keep his flock’s lines separate. He also works hard to make the Berkshire breed better on his farm.

David teaches animal science at Arkansas State and lives on the farm with his wife Kristin, his mom Rita, and their two kids. He also has a kind of double life that not many teachers do: he is a professor and a farmer at the same time. As he says, “there is nothing better than learning from someone who has some skin in the game. My family and I depend on the farm where I work, and I bring that to my job as a teacher. It is the real American dream, America at its best. ”.

“I got my start through my family. My grandfather was a farmer. My parents were hog farmers, but primarily in the commercial pig business. In the 1980s my parents raised pigs in confinement. Everyone in the production industry had some tough economic times, and we knew we had to change what we were doing.

“In the 1990s my parents decided they wanted to go back to their roots. In order to be successful in business, we would need to be very big, and my dad decided that we should focus on quality. We changed our genetic program and our nutrition program. We became Certified Humane®. We never keep animals in cages; “everybody” has access to pasture. We chose to focus on Berkshire pigs because they are the best. ”.

David is the next big thing in American farming. He is on the National Pork Board and also runs a small pig farm with his family. He is young, energetic and strong. He is a great speaker and knows a lot about pigs and pig farming that most of the bigger pig farmers don’t because they raise their pigs in places that aren’t natural for them, like inside and in small spaces. He speaks at seminars and events all over the world and is in high demand. He always promotes the old way of raising pigs, but he also knows what it takes to be successful in the modern world. David works with a group of farmers who raise his Berkshires for Heritage Foods and the chefs across the country who use his products on their menus.

We met the Goods through a connection at Kansas State University where Craig’s father was a distinguished professor. Craig worked in agriculture all his life. He grew up in the Flint Hills of Kansas, which is some of the best land for farming in the world because animals can roam freely and eat the perennial grasses that grow there naturally.

The Good family started raising pigs seriously in 1981, and they have done so every year for the past 37 years. Their Duroc herd began with a few sows from Craig’s old boss, who started raising Duroc pigs in the 1940s with females bought at Sears and Roebuck. Craig says, “I got a job in 1975 working for a great stockman who raised purebred Duroc pigs here in Kansas.” He was an old and skilled Duroc breeder in the U.S. and his name was Fred Germann. S. Things have changed a lot since then, but the Durocs we raise today have ancestors that were Sears females from around 85 years ago. ”.

Due to their good growth rate, body type, and natural instinct to mother, the Duroc breed was used as the basis for the whole pig industry in the United States. Big farming, on the other hand, kept crossing the Duroc with other pig breeds to get traits that would help them make more money. Soon, the industrial pig was almost impossible to recognize, and it was almost impossible to tell that its genes came from Durocs.

Craig, on the other hand, kept breeding his Durocs to improve their genes with traits that were important to him while staying true to the original breed’s health and heartiness. Before breeding sows with boars, Craig always gave it a lot of thought. He did this to improve the quality and taste of the meat, not to make the animals grow faster. Along with the way they behave, he chose pigs because he treats them like family. Craig bred for strong animals and sought out leaner carcasses (although the Duroc is supremely marbled). Besides that, he bred for bone size. Craig likes a long body for better loin eye size and fat distribution.

There was a time when the Durocs on Good Farm were his own breed, but now they look and act like real old-school Durocs. The Goods keep adding new lines to keep their Duroc from getting too similar, but they work with the lines to make their own version of the Duroc better.

Craig’s dad, Don, was a meat scientist, and a whole area at Kansas State University was named after him. Together they raised purebred Angus cattle and crops on the farm. “I’ve loved raising pigs ever since I did a 4-H project with them in 1965,” says Craig. Craig studied Animal Science at Kansas State University. After getting married in 1976, Amy and I decided to move to the farm near Olsburg, Kansas, that my parents had owned since 1961. The farm is on 1,000 acres of Flint Hills pasture. ”.

We are also proud to have built relationships with local farmers outside of Kansas City, where most of our meats are processed. One of them is Kenneth Johnson, who started with us as a 4-H student and kept his line going after that. He got the line from Craig Good. We also work with Sharon Meyer and the Baker boys, Trent and Troy Baker. They raise some of the biggest and nicest Berkshire pigs in the country on their farm.

Red Wattle is floral and robust, concentrated and bold. Its flavor has been described as a cross between pork and beef.

History: French colonists brought these hogs to New Orleans as a favored meat breed. In the end, the Red Wattle would live in the forests of Texas. There, they were caught and taken to the big slaughterhouses in Chicago. The Red Wattle looks a lot like the New Zealand Kunekune pig, which can be recognized by the wattles that hang from their cheeks.

The history of this pig goes back to the old English pigs that lived in western England. It was first mentioned in the 1780s. The spotted pig forages on fallen orchard fruits and other farm by products. Despite their signature oversized floppy ears which hang over their eyes, this gentle pig is hearty and self-reliant.

Flavor Profile: A premiere bacon producer, Tamworth meat is fruity, earthy, clean, mineral, root, sweet and tender.

History: This is England’s only native red breed, and its roots go back to the wild pigs of the Middle Ages. A slow growing breed, the Tamworth is active and hearty. Tamworth pigs are traditionally raised in the woods, and their long, angular noses make them great foraging animals. They don’t fit the needs of industrial agriculture.

Taste: Berkshire pork is sweet and has a lot of flavor. It is well-balanced and the most loved of all the Heritage breeds.

History: The Royal Family kept a large herd of Berkshire pigs at Windsor Castle for many years. Our Berkshire pigs are descended from these old English pigs. It was because of its great marbling that this breed of Heritage pig became the most popular in the United States. The Japanese loved the Berkshire and brought it back as “Kurobuta” pork. You can tell it apart from other breeds by the six white spots on its feet, nose, and tail.

Flavor Profile: Duroc meat is clean and crisp, and its taste is easy to enjoy. It is known for having a smooth, marbled texture.

The Duroc is an older breed of American domestic pig that has become one of the most popular breeds because it tastes great and has strong genes. However, it is very hard to find a pure Duroc. Durocs are a type of red pig that was created around 1800 in New England. They are thought to have ancestors that were the first red pigs in Africa. Durocs are especially valued by farmers for their hardiness and quick but thorough muscle growth.

The bone-in belly, which is another name for the pork side, is the fattest part of the animal, especially when it comes to heritage breeds. It includes the spare rib (or St. Louis). Our bone-in belly chops combine both sub-primals. Uncured and often boneless, the belly is used for braising and smoking. In cured form, it becomes bacon and pancetta. Belly is also part of our classic porchetta roasts. People mostly eat pork belly to make bacon, which we show you in a variety of ways, depending on the breed and the person who cures it.

Heritage Pork Breeds We are proud to offer 5 heritage pork breeds always raised on pasture by family farms. Heritage breeds are the very foundation of our agricultural history and gastronomic identity.

We want American farms to use balanced, healthy heritage breeds again for the animals’ well-being and the world’s food security in the long term.

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