Charles
Gatton Jr.
FATHER’S COUNTRY HAMS
Gatton Farms
P.O. Box 99
Bremen, KY 42325
Toll-free: (877) 525-4267
www.fatherscountryhams.com
So after my father died in the year 2000, we wanted to turn the business into more of a a year-round food business instead of just ham, bacon, and sausage that we were for 50 years. So that's why we added all the different [flavors of] bacons. – Charles Gatton, Jr.
Charles Gatton, Junior, is known to some as the mad scientist of bacon. Growing up on Gatton Farms, Charles learned the business of curing hams and bacon from his father, Charles Gatton, Senior, who founded Father’s Country Hams in 1950. When his father passed away in 2000, Charles Junior decided to take bacon-making to another level. His epiphany occurred at a food show, when chocolate purveyors asked if he could create a chocolate-flavored bacon. Charles Junior returned home and began toying with different products, eventually getting his hands on some flavorings that he could use in his dry-cure process. Today, Gatton Farms makes ten flavors of bacon, including apple cinnamon and vanilla bourbon, but no chocolate--yet. And, yes, they still offer the traditional hickory and pepper bacons.
Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Charles Gatton, Jr. talking about the process of curing bacon. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.] What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
SUBJECT: Charles Gatton, Jr.
INTERVIEWER: Amy Evans
DATE: August 23, 2005
LOCATION: Gatton Farms-Bremen, KY
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Tuesday, August 23, 2005 and I'm in Bremen, Kentucky at Father's Country Hams with Charles Gatton, Jr. And Mr. Gatton would you mind saying your name and your birthday for the record if you don't mind.
Charles Gatton: Okay, sure; my name is Charles Gatton, Jr., and my birthday is July 8, 1952.
And can you tell us a little bit about--a little history of Gatton Farms and the ham business?
Sure, I'd love to. Actually--actually our farm has been
in our family since 1840 and back in the 1800s my great-great grandmother,
Susie, used to serve meat out of the family smokehouse and tea and that's
what actually started our business. In the 1950s, my dad taught vocational
agriculture and he decided that one of the classes that they would cure
some country hams and the-the weather didn't cooperate with
them and I think a flood came and they lost most of the hams they cured
and it was several years later before he actually started Father's Country
Hams. And he named the business after his father; that's why it's called
Father's. But today we do a full line of gourmet food products. We actually
have 10 different flavors of gourmet bacon. We make dry rubs here also
for cooking and through the ability of making dry rubs we can make the
flavored bacons. But all the bacon we do are dry cured. It's all--everything
we do is done the old-fashioned way. It's all done by hand. I oversee
every batch of cure that's made personally myself.
I recently had surgery and they couldn't cure bacon until I was able to come over and watch it being weighed to make sure it was right. But originally we only had hickory bacon for probably about 30-some years and bacon is one of the number one consumed products of the world. So we decided that we would add the pepper bacon and a cinnamon flavored bacon, and we were being featured in national magazines such as GQ, Esquire, Food & Wine, Cooks Illustrated--about our bacons. So we decided that we would have three flavors. And I do a television show; started actually in year 2002 on Home Shopping Network and we've sold several thousands of pounds of dry-cured bacon on Home Shopping that we actually take a slab of bacon when we do the show and people don't know what a slab of bacon--you know they've never seen one before--before we introduced them to what bacon looks like before it's sliced.
But from that one of the buyers told us that we needed some more flavors and I guess she's responsible for us now doing 10 different flavors of gourmet bacon. And they're all dry-cured and it's all done by hand.
What do you think about all these different flavors of bacon and--and all these boutique bacons they call them?
Well I know it's--when my dad was living, we cured about 4,000 pounds of bacon a year and last year we did somewhere around 100,000 pounds of dry cured bacon and that's a lot of hand--hands-on operations because it's all done by hand and nothing automated about it at all. But I think you know--our biggest problem has been educating the public and whenever I do a television show, I buy one of the nation's top brands of regular bacon that has water-cured in it and we cook it on there and we show the difference in a dry-cured product like what you've seen today versus one that's got water injected into it, and there's about almost half the difference in size. I mean when ours is cooked, it's almost the same size it starts out at.
And one reason for that is [coughs] excuse me--we hand-trim
the sides of the bacon when it comes in so you're really just getting
the center portion of it. And then another reason for that is we have
about a 16 to 12 percent shrinkage in our bacon and that's meat--water
lost out of the meat where the other people can pump enough water in that
they have really no shrinkage. And then--and it's on the label; I mean
they're very honest. Their--their label will 
say
cured with water and salt where ours is going to say cured with salt and
sugars. So we use no water in our production at all. And we're real proud
of that; we're proud of being able to still do things the old-fashioned
way. We're one of the--you know there's still not a lot of us out here
that--that still does it the old-fashioned way you know.
Can you walk through briefly the steps that it takes to cure bacon and talk about those custom smokers that you use?
Sure; when we get our bacon in, we--we buy from one source only. We buy from Premium Standard Farms. We feel like we get the best quality meat. It's--it's shipped in fresh; we get it the same day. Like if it's trimmed off, it's here the next morning, so it's--and the same way for our hams that we get from them. Then from that we--we make our own cure; we use salts, brown sugar and white sugar in most of our cures and sodium nitrate and we hand rub each slab of bacon when it comes in. It goes in a cooler at 39-degree temperature; it stays in the cooler normally 10--10 days. I mean sometimes we'll get a weekend and we'll stretch that out a little bit but normally we--we keep it in the cooler 10 days, and of course we're USDA inspected so our regulations say seven days but we normally keep it 10 to 12 days depending upon how the--the days fall; so we don't have to--you know we don't have to have a meat inspector here. Then after that it's air-dried for 48 hours and we like natural ventilation. When--when the temperature is where we can we use natural ventilation. When it's hot in the summer time we run it through an equalization room at 55 to 60-degrees and dry it down so it doesn't come out of the 39-degrees straight into 100-degrees temperature.
From that after it's been air-dried, we have probably the most primitive smokers in the world. We're probably the--the only people that do this, but we actually have smokers that I showed you earlier that are built on wheels and we build our fires outside and then when they get to smoking real good we roll them in the smokehouse. And one of those fires will last for 48 hours. So we use two smokers at a time to smoke our bacon and it usually takes two rounds of that. So normally it's 96 hours of smoking to get us the color that we're--we're seeking. I mean we would have the flavor in less time than that if we wanted to do a--a shorter version. You know we could--probably one smoking would give us the smoke flavor but we're after the color and the appearance of--of an old-fashioned quality product and that's one thing that as we've grown in the business, you know we've modernized by buying an automatic slicing machine, but we haven't changed any of the original methods that were done back before the days of refrigeration. I mean we can still say that our bacon has been tested--micro-tested and proven safe to be kept 90 days non-refrigerated. And we had to prove that--we made that statement to Home Shopping and their QA people said prove it and--and we did send it off to private laboratories and had it tested and at 90 days it was as good as it was the day it was packaged.
Can you describe a little bit the color that you try to achieve when smoking?
We're kind of looking for a--sort of a pecan color, kind of a deep--deep golden brown color is--is what we're trying to achieve. It makes it very attractive and it gives you that really smoke-aroma flavor when you cook it you know. And--and we run into all kinds of experiences especially with--with Home Shopping; you know they have 100 percent satisfaction guarantee and we run very low on that. We had no returns out of our own business, but even with their return system we run about a two percent return, which is extremely low for food for them. But you know our biggest thing is educating the people. People that aren't used to country cured products tend to think that country bacon is salty and you know we use a total different cure formulation to do our bacon and our hams to prevent it from being salty. But still if you're not used to salt then country bacon is going to give you that little salty kick that--that it's supposed to you know. But--but ours is not as salty as a lot of bacon.
And you were describing earlier to me about your combination of brown sugar and white sugar and how if you use too much brown sugar the rub won't take.
Well in our experience, you know we've--we've basically
kept our recipe the same forever and we've worked with some new products
for some private label--for some other people and we've tried to--we use
a lot of--of brown sugar and white sugar in our cure and we've upped our
brown sugar before and it--and it gets it so that it just doesn't want
to lay on the--on the bacon the way that I like for it to lay. You know
that's my--my biggest objection to it I guess. So I like to mix the two
together, and that's what makes everybody's products--have its own unique
flavor, you know ours versus somebody else; it's that--it's the atmosphere,
the way it's done, the curing 
process,
actually the climate in different areas is different, so it kind of gives
it a different flavor. You know our ham tastes different from other people's.
Our bacon will taste different from others.
And how did you develop the list of 10 fancy bacons that you have? There's a vanilla bourbon and apple—
There's quite a story behind that one. We were featured in magazines all across the United States and I know GQ magazine had Jennifer Lopez as the cover but our ham house was the centerfold; so we were real honored with that one. But we decided that we needed--Dan Phillips was a big inspiration of mine. Dan wants to take bacon to space sometime and I'm sure he will. But we decided that since bacon was one of the number one consumed products in the nation when you look at all the other meats together that we should offer different flavors of bacon so that people wouldn't have to eat the same thing all the time. So back in the 1800s as I told you earlier, my great-grandmother was really huge on tea and we decided to develop a line of gourmet tea that would be like the best in the world and it took us two years to find the best tea pre-mix and the best flavoring company in the world and we make a line of tea in memory of great-grandmother because she's the one that started the whole thing…But from that I soon learned that I could take the same dry flavors that we make of the teas and turn it into any flavor of bacon that I can want to do by making a dry rub. And we also have 10 dry rubs that we sell to cook with, too that we've developed through our own tastes and--and experimentation here. We have an FDA facility as well as a USDA, so all of our seasonings and--and teas and all are done under FDA and our meat business is done under USDA. So after my father died in year 2000, we wanted to turn the business into more of a gourmet year-round food business instead of just ham, bacon, and sausage that we were for 50 years. So that's why we added all the different bacons. We do a vanilla bourbon, which is like a little bit of Kentucky; you know you've got to have a little bourbon and--and the vanilla just kind of gives it a little special flavor. We do a peach cinnamon bacon for the State of Georgia; it's their number one selling bacon--is peach cinnamon. It's like peaches and cinnamon right off the tree. We do an apple cinnamon; we had a lady that was going to do an apple festival in Georgia and I was walking through the office and they told her we didn't do an apple bacon. And I said sure; I said within an hour we'll have--we'll do her an apple cinnamon flavored bacon and I went over to the lab and we mixed up our apple cinnamon bacon. So we do an apple cinnamon, a peach cinnamon, a blueberry cinnamon flavor for people that raise blueberries and like blueberries, and they're all made with dry rub. So we use no liquids to do our flavoring so when we--actually the--to make our flavored bacons we rub them a second time. After we slice the bacon, we rub the dry rub on the sliced bacon and then we vacuum pack it so it seals into the--to the meat and it--it actually penetrates into the meat so it's like curing it a second time. We do the pepper bacon; we do a Cajun bacon. That was quite an experience for us to do--to do a Cajun bacon. Being from Kentucky, even--I haven't found a Cajun bacon even in Louisiana, but we had to make a completely different dry rub than what we sell to do the Cajun bacon because if you normally would use a Cajun spice the bacon would be so salty you'd have to spit it out. So we had to develop a specific product that we use only for the Cajun bacon. We do a honey-barbecue bacon; it's got a little more smoked flavor, a little sweeter flavored bacon for people that want something just a little more smokey and a little sweeter, very--very outstanding in flavor; but they all start out as--as the base of--of the hickory bacon. Everything we do is a hickory bacon base. The pepper bacon is pepper before it's smoked. The cinnamon sugar bacon is--is coated before it's smoked and everything else is coated after it's smoked…There's a lot of very unique products that we've made here at Father's Country Hams and Gourmet Foods that nobody else in the world does and we're real proud of that.AE: And tell me about your beef bacon that I've read about.CG: Okay; we--we take a--we do a beef bacon. We actually did the beef bacon for health reasons because there's so many people in the world that think that bacon is not healthy and it's one of the things I've done on--on Home Shopping Network. I just recently did a show a week ago--is I've tried to educate the world that bacon is not bad for you because if you cook bacon the proper way and you--and we like--I mean our bacon cooks great in a microwave for instance--even in today's busy lifestyle, you can stick the bacon in the microwave for three minutes, you can finish getting dressed and you walk out the door with a strip of bacon in your hand. You know, that's life. But the--the fat and the calories literally melt out of the bacon when it's cooked; so bacon is really not a bad food for you. I mean it's a very healthy product for you to eat. But we decided to do the beef bacon because there were people that for some reason or another--religion beliefs or doctor's advice could not eat pork. So we take a trimmed off beef brisket and we use the same cure and the same technique but we--as we do with our pepper bacon, the same exact thing and then we--we sell it as--as a sliced beef bacon and it's very, very delicious.
Right off the grill it gives you a steak(y) type flavor; if you let it sit and get a little on the cool side it kind of would remind you of a jerky. So it's kind of in between the two--the two products, but if you're having it for breakfast and you cooked it for breakfast it's just unbelievable if it's hot, but you know if it sits there it's going to give you more of a jerky type flavor from being you know cured and--and dehydrated like it is.
What do you think your father would say about all this?
[Laughs] He would have mixed feelings on some of it I'm
sure, but I think he'd be proud of it. He would think 10--10 flavors of
bacon was a little extreme and I've made a promise to everybody that we're
not--we're not going to do anymore. We've--we've only had one failure
in all the bacons that we've tried and--and I can fix that today, but
we tried to make--as--as a joke we do a food show in Atlanta and all the
candy people are there in Atlanta said they're going to quit coming when
I come out with a chocolate flavored bacon. So I--I attempted to make
a chocolate flavored bacon and my--my dry rub for it--chocolate basically
has a bitter flavor without a lot of sugar, and to put the amount of sugar
I needed to make the chocolate bacon, the bacon was going to burn. But
you could actually take our Splenda version of our chocolate and sprinkle
it on your bacon and you can have the best chocolate bacon in your life.
Your chocolate dreams are--are met because I've done it. But 
I'm--I'm
happy with 10 flavors [Laughs] and--and I don't know what USDA would say
about me making a Splenda version. I don't know if Splenda is approved
for curing bacon. I--I--they would probably let me use it as a dry rub,
but we're not--we're probably not going to go there, but we--you can do
it yourself. I'll give you a package and you can take it home and make
chocolate bacon.
[Did] your father ever cure hams from hogs he raised?
Yes, ma'am; we used to have hog killings here on the farm and we used--raised our own hogs. We had a hog--we had two hog operations where we raised our own hogs. And then when we went federal-inspected we had to buy from federal-inspected plants but we used to kill the hogs and the original smokehouse unfortunately--we tore it down to build my dad a new garage and now I wished it was here. We've got some smokehouses at some of the other tenant houses and there's one that I'm going to preserve because it's one of the original smokehouses that was done back in the 1800s but it's not here at this location. But we used--they used to build their fires and scald the hogs and--and do the whole process here and back in the 1800s. I mean that's what started the whole process, yeah.
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