In this installment
Bacon bits
About Broadbent’s
What makes one bacon better than another?
Devils on Horseback Recipe
Bacon bits
Maker: Ronny & Beth Drennan in Kuttawa, Kentucky
Cure: Dry cured for one week in a mixture of salt and sugar
Smoke: Hickory, 72-96 hours
Taste: Intense. Very smoky and rich.
About Broadbent’s
The Broadbent Company and the recipe for its bacon dates back to 1909. That’s when Anna and Smith Broadbent started selling smoked country ham, bacon and sausage from their farm. The Broadbent family still lives at the end of Broadbent Road, behind the business, where the family’s farm is. It’s also where the ham house is located.
Ronny and Beth Drennan bought the business from Smith Broadbent III back in 1999. Ronny worked with them for a few years to transfer the family’s knowledge and recipes. When I first met Ronny and Beth they were still curing their hams and bacon in the same town, Cadiz (though it’s spelled the same way as the town in southern Spain, folks in Kentucky call it “katy’s”) down in the southwestern corner of the Bluegrass state. In 2008 they’ve moved into a new plant about twenty-five miles up the road in Kuttawa (draw the syllables out as much as you can to get the true southwest Kentucky pronunciation) at the intersection of I-24 & the West Kentucky Parkway.
This isn’t one of those city kids fall in love with the country and moves to Cadiz to cure bacon stories. Ronny and Beth are both from the area. Ronny’s dad cured country ham and bacon. “I grew up in a small town, on a dairy farm. Fredonia is the town,” he told me. “It’s near Princeton. There used to be a lot of small dairy farms here. Used to be dozens of little ones. Now there’s maybe one or two. My dad had 163 acres. Put six kids in college . . . four of ‘em finished, but I’m not one of ‘em,” he added chuckling. “We had cattle, hogs, tobacco, a little bit of everything. We killed our own hogs, but we never really got to eat the ham that was made from ‘em.” Why not, I asked? The answer was it had become an important part of the family’s income.
They are two of the nicest folks I’ve met in the food business. Ronny is a gentleman, blue eyes, hair combed sort of over his forehead. About 5’9”, he’s got big meaty arms like Popeye, but he’s a pretty soft-spoken guy. His accent is intense—even by Kentucky standards. Beth is shorter still and super nice. When I visited she was right there in the back room, boning and slicing ham into packages. They’re Kentuckians through and through and they make a darned good bacon.
This bacon undergoes a dry cure process.
The previous bacon you received (Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Bacon) is a wet cure. Wet cured bacons are processed in a brine solution; dry-cured bacons are covered with salt, sugar and spices. There’s no water involved at all. The dry curing process removes moisture from the slabs of bacon, making the flavor deeper, more intense.
What the Drennans are doing at Broadbent’s is probably anything but efficient by industrial standards. “We hand rub each belly with salt, sugar and a bit of nitrite,” Ronny explained. “Then we stack ‘em on the shelves about seven or eight slabs high. We leave ‘em for one week, then we wash all the salt off and hang ‘em up on the bacon hooks. Then we let ‘em sit overnight and a day to set. Then we smoke ‘em for three or four days. Depends on the weather— sometimes it’ll smoke quicker and sometimes a bit longer.”
The dry cure results in big, bold flavors.
I used the Broadbent bacon at a class I did a few years ago for the International Association of Culinary Professionals in Dallas. It was the surprise hit of the session. It’s the one that pushed me to the realization that long, dry cured bacons like Broadbent, Edwards and Benton are akin to the big red wines at the end of your wine list, or a seven-year old cheddar. They’re not for everyone. If you were only going to pick one bacon to sell, then this wouldn’t be the one. The people in the class who were most excited about this bacon were the food professionals in the group—writers and chefs like Bruce Aidells and Molly Stevens—folks who are interested in big flavors and who hadn’t tasted anything like the flavor you get from a dry cured bacon like this.
Broadbent’s bacon brings big, bold flavors that are great for putting in stews or into dishes—places where you want some big flavor. It’s very good with eggs and grits. It’s got a big flavor, but it can evoke a bit of nostalgia if you grew up in western Kentucky. “Our bacon tends to remind people so much of what their grandparents did,” Ronny told me. “They’ve moved off the farm and they get to taste this now. So many people say that they remember their grandparents’ bacon but that they haven’t had bacon like this in years.”
What makes one bacon better than another? Part I
The Pigs
There’s really no way around it. Better bacon starts with better hogs. When George Orwell wrote in Ani- mal Farm that “some animals are more equal than others” he wasn’t referring to their culinary contri- butions, but he would have been accurate with bacon. There’s enormous variation in the flavor of the finished pork product depending on the breed of animal, where and how it’s raised and what it eats. In the same way that the flavor of free-range chickens sets commercial birds to shame, the standard com- mercial pork you we’re used to pales in comparison to some of the superb stuff being raised by special- ists around the world.
The Cure
Better bacons are either dry cured (rubbed while dry with salt and sometimes sugar and/or nitrite and nitrate) or wet cured (lightly brined with water and much of the same stuff that goes into the dry cure).
Dry cured bacons, like the one in this shipment, can lose up to 15, 20—even 30 percent of their weight in the curing process. The curing can be anywhere from a couple of days on up to a couple of weeks. It is the oldest, most traditional way to cure bacon, and very few companies still do it. Broadbent is dry- cured.
Wet cures don’t lose weight. They may actually gain some from the water. That may make them sound like a product of post-World War II food science, but they aren’t a totally modern invention. There are many recipes from the 19th and 20th centurie that call for brining the raw belly to cure it before smok- ing.
A finished slab of good wet cured bacon usually weighs about what it did when it arrived at the curer. However, a modern mass market curer’s cost controlling “secret” ingredient is water. Most commercial bacon is what’s known in the trade as “water added.” That means so much water has been pumped into the bacon during production that it may weigh up to 30 percent more when it’s shipped off to market than when it went into the smokehouse. The interest in adding water has increased as the demand for bacon has gone up in recent years, a trend exacerbated by the use of bacon in fast food chains.
Better bacons don’t have phosphates, an ingredient that’s usually added to hold all the above men- tioned water. They don’t have artificial flavors and colors. They do usually have some small amounts of nitrites or nitrates. They’re in there most all the time and have been for many thousands of years. Back in the 1980s, some articles identified health concerns coming from nitrites. I don’t want to dwell on it here but everything I’ve learned says that they’re really no big thing in the quantities in which you and I eat them. In traditional curing the dangerous compounds are almost entirely eliminated.
The nitrite does help to keep the bacon from turning gray in color, and it does provide a level of certainty in the context of food safety. It can come from the mineral salt, spinach juice, or celery. Both of those vegetables have naturally occurring nitrates and nitrites. They are used to cure some bacons. You might find them labeled “nitrate free,” which is what the government allows, but rest assured: nitrates are in the bacon even if it’s not listed as an ingredient on the package.
Part II of “What makes one bacon better than another” is in the next installment of the Bacon Club.
Devils on Horseback Recipe (aka: Bacon Dates)
Bacon dates are a great little appetizer and extremely easy to make. The sweet smokiness of the bacon with the buttery richness of ripe dates gives this finger food a great bit of balance in its flavors.
16 ripe dates, pitted
8 slices Broadbent Bacon, cut in half crosswise
1/3 lb Parmigiano-Reggiano, chunked
Heat the broiler.
Stuff each date with a chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano, then wrap with a half slice of bacon and secure with a toothpick.
Place the bacon-wrapped dates on an ungreased baking sheet. Broil 10 to 15 minutes or until the bacon is crisp, turning once. Keep an eye on them so they don’t burn!
Remove from the oven once the bacon is done, let cool for a couple of minutes and serve while still warm.