In this installment
Bacon bits
About Benton’s
Shrimp & Grits Recipe
Bacon bits
Maker: Allan Benton in Madisonville, Tennessee
Cure: Dry Cured for four weeks in mixture of brown sugar and salt
Smoke: Smoked over Hickory for forty-eight hours
Taste: Intense! Sweet, salty and smoky all at once.
About Benton’s
Traveling down to eastern Tennessee to visit Benton’s is something I’d wanted to do ever since John T. Edge started telling me about how good the bacon was six or seven years earlier. Don’t let the amount of time it took me to turn intent into reality reflect on the quality of the bacon. Getting to Madisonville is certainly a road less traveled in the food world. While Benton’s has become a much talked about and highly praised place, I’ll tell you flat out this isn’t any upscale palace of pork. It’s about as down to earth and down home as you’re gonna get.
Benton’s is all about bacon, not about appearances.
“The pork that I make, it probably isn’t any better than what my parents made. It was done then purely for sustenance. It was a way of life to preserve the meat,” Allan told me. “My mom and dad moved to Madisonville when I was about two years old. We would go back to the hills of Virginia to visit on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Hill people,” he adds, “would slaughter, traditionally, on Thanksgiving Day.” “I guess about the time I got out of high school was when my folks were starting not to fool with the hogs any more. When I went to UT, the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, I probably hadn’t had a hamburger but a dozen times in my life, so I was really excited about getting to eat ‘em. But by the end of the first quarter I had lost my taste for hamburgers. And I would bring a hot plate up to my dorm room and fry some country ham to eat.” He pauses and smiles broadly. “You can attract a lot of attention frying country ham in a dorm room.” After I graduated I heard that this fella, Mr. Hicks, was selling the smokehouse, and I went to him and I said, ‘Would you sell it to me?’ And, in 1973, he did.”
The purchase of the smokehouse put Allan back into the world of pork curing he’d grown up in.
He’d never done it professionally so it took him a while to transfer what he’d learned at home as a kid. “After six or eight weeks I began to figure out that this is not rocket science. I actually ran that business in Mr. Hicks’ back yard for the first four years. I was as guilty as some moonshiner in the hills. I broke the law with every ham I sold.” Like so many of the small cheesemakers of Wisconsin who stuck with things through the terrifically tough times for good food in the 1960s and 1970s, Allan hung with his ham and bacon business long enough to have the food world come back ‘round to where he’d been all along.
Today, Allan’s bacon graces the tables of some of the nation’s finest restaurants and in 2006 John T. Edge wrote in Gourmet that Allan is “behind some of the most flavorful ham and bacon we’ve tasted in years.”
Shrimp & Grits Recipe
When you do it right – with Benton’s bacon, really good grits, and fresh in-the-shell shrimp – this is one of the best things to have for brunch.
For the Grits
4 cups water
1 cup coarse-ground grits
3⁄4 teaspoon coarse sea salt
2 tablespoons butter
For the Shrimp Sauce
4 ounces (about 2–3 slices) bacon, diced
12 fresh shell-on jumbo shrimp
1⁄2 teaspoon coarse sea salt, plus additional to taste
1⁄2 stalk celery, coarsely chopped
1 small sweet onion, coarsely chopped
1 large red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 clove fresh garlic, chopped fine
1 tablespoon flour
2 cups water
2 bay leaves
Red pepper flakes, to taste
Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste
Heat the water in a large pot over high heat. Add the grits before the water begins to boil, stirring well. Continue stirring while the pot comes to a boil, then reduce the heat. Add the salt and butter, stirring for a minute to melt the butter. Hold the pot at a low boil, stirring the grits regularly until they begin to thicken (three to five minutes).
Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, loosely covered, for 30 to 60 minutes, until grits reach desired doneness. The longer you cook ‘em, the better they’ll get. Stir often to avoid clumping and sticking.
While the grits are cooking, start the sauce. Cook the bacon in a 13-inch skillet over medium heat for a few minutes until lightly cooked and the fat is rendered. Remove half the bacon from the pan and reserve, leaving the other half in the skillet with the fat. Add the shrimp to the skillet, sprinkle with salt and sauté briefly so that they’re very lightly cooked—but not cooked through—on each side (probably less than a minute per side). Remove shrimp to a platter and set aside.
In the same skillet, sauté the onion, celery, red bell pepper and garlic until the vegetables are soft and lightly browned, 10 to 12 minutes. Meanwhile, shell and clean the shrimp, reserving the shells and tying them in a cheesecloth bundle.
Sift the flour directly over the vegetables, and give it a good stir until it dissolves. Slowly add in the water, mixing constantly, so that it forms a smooth sauce. Bring the mixture to a high simmer and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring steadily. Add the shrimp shell bundle, the bay leaves, reserved bacon and red pepper flakes. Keep at a low simmer for 15 to 30 minutes or until the grits (which are cooking in the other pot) are almost ready. Add additional water if the sauce gets too thick. It should be the texture of a moderately thick pasta sauce.
Cut the peeled and cleaned shrimp into one-inch pieces. (You can leave them whole, but I like the more effective shrimp distribution you get from smaller pieces.) Return to the sauce and simmer for a few more minutes. Remove and discard the shells. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Ladle the cooked grits on to warm plates. Top with the shrimp sauce, sprinkle on the reserved fried bacon and serve hot.
Serves 3 to 4 as a main course.