Love Thy Farmer: Benton's Bacon

This mild manner is the opposite of his carefully crafted cured smoked meats packed with so much flavor they border on being overwhelming. It also belies his intense dedication to his work that began when he traded the schoolhouse for a smokehouse and started Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Madisonville, Tennessee almost fifty years ago.

Benton was raised on the country hams and other cuts his extended family in the mountains of West Virginia would cure and put up each autumn. “I loved the stuff but never dreamed I could make a living off it,” he says. Plan A was to be a teacher, which he did for a few years. In the early 1970s, he was working as a guidance counselor at a school in Madisonville and getting his master’s degree at the same time as a way to increase his small salary. After he earned the degree, the “miniscule” bump it gave his pay prompted a re-evaluation. He quit—and without a Plan B. But a new path found him only a few weeks later when an older man in the community, who’d been curing hams in a little bare-frame house in his backyard, retired. Benton leased his tiny facility and got busy filling his market void.  He had no idea what was coming next. “I really thought I might make it a year, long enough to maybe get into law school and then be done,” he says.

Forty-five years later, he’s still doing it. He’s still working, answering calls in the main office and sometimes missing them because he’s running the meat saw or out stoking the fire in the smokehouse. Benton’s is a one-stop shop. “We make it, we slice it, we package it, and we ship it,” he says. And he’s still doing it basically the same way, using time-tested techniques.

When he started, he relied on what he’d seen growing up, but he took steps to refine those methods too. “I knew what we did at home, but I wanted to do it really right, so I went about learning everything I could,” he says.  He wrote to schools of agriculture all over the Southeast and soaked in all the knowledge he could find. He began with his family’s recipe and then, in a quest for the best, did a little more looking around. “I played with so many recipes to see if there was one better—but there’s not, so I went right back, and I still use the family recipe,” he says.

But he did deviate in one way, adding the dusky billows rising off burning hickory to the equation, something his family never did. “We didn’t smoke our meats, but as soon as I tried it, I knew I needed to do it and that people would like it,” he says. He was right; currently, his smoked products make up 99 percent of his sales.

After just a few months, he realized how much he enjoyed his new occupation and ditched all ideas of being a lawyer. The job he stumbled into became a beloved career that some might dub a calling. Today, he’s a darling of the restaurant world—the preferred purveyor of cured pork for the country’s hottest (and most discerning) chefs and has been crowned the “king of pork” and “a bacon god” by numerous national publications. His products can be found in two hundred restaurants in New York City alone.

But that’s now. In the beginning, the business fed his family, yet it was not an instant success. “The first twenty years were pretty lean,” Benton says. But he stayed with it and credits consistency for his longevity. That, and a few key chefs discovering and forging a deep devotion to his meats. The initial order came from chef John Fleer when he was at Blackberry Farm, a luxury resort in Tennessee renowned for its wining and dining. “His was the first ‘white tablecloth restaurant’ to do business with me,” Benton says. “He and other chefs following him really propelled the business up. I owe all of them such a debt of gratitude.”