For our most recent restaurant project (a breakfast concept), I decided we should make our own bacon. This plan, like so many other things in our kitchens over the past twenty years, was born of the “let’s-take-it-apart-and-see-how-it-works” school of thought. That is exactly how we started making our own Worcestershire sauce, cheese, and vinegars, and growing vegetables, etc. Making bacon didn’t seem like it would be that much harder. I just didn’t realize what it would require, ultimately.

My dear friend and personal porcine hero Allan Benton makes some of the finest bacon and the finest country ham there is. I have visited his smokehouse and storefront in East Tennessee on a number of occasions. What he does is remarkable, and though he must know it, he’ll never admit it. It’s infuriating. And, though the product is singular, the process and the equipment are extraordinarily simple. Other than a cooler to salt-cure the bellies in, a cinder-block smokehouse about twice as wide as an outhouse is all that Allan uses. With that in mind, we set to our bacon-making experiments.

Big Bad Breakfast would be a fifty-seat affair when it was finished, and my first thought was that if we were going to make our own bacon, we could do it at home. We could modify the backyard whole-hog pit for bacon and shuttle it back and forth to the restaurant. The three-month process that was the experimentation phase quickly suggested that the hog pit would not nearly accommodate the volume of bacon we would need, so it seemed a smokehouse was in order.

I immediately began to draw sketches on napkins and scraps of paper, and even did a touch of research, but most of our plan was to be based on memories of Allan’s smokehouse setup. As we began to put up the cinder blocks and I second-guessed my initial thoughts, I called Allan for guidance. I got little more than “Don’t worry about it” and “You’ll be fine,” so we built away, plugged in the wood-burning stove, and the minute we were finished with construction, we began making bacon.

It was then I realized that there had always been a hole in my life. I had somehow lived my entire professional career without the understanding that there was a lack of fulfillment. Suddenly, a light–a smoky light, yes, but a light nonetheless, shone. If that wasn’t quite enough, our smokehouse was yet another toy to play with, the best kind: one that ingests something unfinished and spits it back out complete and divine hours later.

Dear friends, meet the Big Bad Smokehouse…