Omnivore - Get in Ma Mouth: Buckboard Bacon Edition
When interstate billboards for sausage companies lead to good things
Driving south on I-75 towards Florida, a couple hours south of town, you start seeing billboards for Carroll’s Sausage somewhere around Cordele. They’re noteworthy mainly for the fact that you don’t often see billboards for sausage companies. At least not in Atlanta. And who can deny the urge to visit a sausage company once you’ve seen their billboard (OK, their DOZENS of billboards) along the interstate?
Just like those billboards, Carroll’s Sausage and Country Store sits right by I-75, in Ashburn, Georgia. If you see the giant Georgia peanut by the side of the road, you’ve just passed Carroll’s, so turn around. Once you exit your vehicle, legs sore from the drive, just follow your nose in through the door, where whiffs of smoke and pork and Southern pride scent the air.
Inside, you’re greeted by beef jerky bins and displays of scuppernong wine and row after row of molasses and sorghum and every-type-of-jarred-stuff-you-might-hope-to-find in a Southern roadside market. Imagine the love child of a Cracker Barrel and a butcher shop, and you’ll be pretty close to picturing Carroll’s Sausage and Country Store.
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- Carroll’s Sausage & Country Store
The meat counter here is the main event, stretching ten yards or so across the back of the store. I surveyed the sausage section first - roughly four dozen types spanning smoked, fresh, link, pan, and patty (oh, patty) - but found myself drawn in to the small section of bacon nearby. Slab bacon, country cured bacon, peppered bacon, rib bacon, and… buckboard bacon? I wasn’t really familiar with what “buckboard” actually meant, or what it had to do with bacon, but the patient woman behind the counter at least explained that it was cut from the shoulder, cured with a dry rub, then smoked before slicing. You could see that it was heavily coated with black pepper, with much less fat than typical bacon. I ordered up a pound, and got some of their regular bacon and country cured bacon for good measure.
Once we made it to Florida, we cooked up the different bacons from Carroll’s on successive mornings - a different salty, porky treat to greet each day. They were all good, but the buckboard stole the show. Cut extra thick, this bacon feels like a closer relative to New York pastrami than bacon proper - well marbled, thick and juicy, and intensely peppered. Hot dang. I imagine it would be great in a pot to flavor some greens or beans, or on white bread with some crisp lettuce and summer tomato.
- Carroll’s Sausage & Country Store
In fact, I couldn’t stop thinking about that buckboard bacon, and decided to do a bit more research. First, I called up Carroll’s, where Johnny Walker, their manager for business development, absolutely gushed with pride over the fact that Carroll’s is keeping the buckboard bacon tradition alive. He said most people weren’t familiar with it, so the stores like to offer samples, and “once people taste it, they love it.” Carroll’s sells roughly 200 to 250 pounds of it each week across their four stores. Taking my research online, I discovered some fine buckboard bacon do-it-yourself tips from Backwoods Home Magazine (“practical ideas for self-reliant living”), some nice photos of the curing process on the Smoking Meat Forums, and a semi-scholarly discourse from one “Wild Ed” Thomas in Backwoods Man Magazine (no relation to Backwoods Home Magazine, as far as I can tell). This is clearly the stuff of rugged survivalists and nostaligic individualists, not to mention people who just plain love smoked meat.
I debated trying to make some buckboard bacon myself, drawn in by the hard to resist allure of buying a pack of Hi Mountain Western Legends Authentic Wyoming Recipe Buckboard Bacon Cure (seasons 25 pounds of meat!) from Bass Pro Shops. But I figured I’d never be able to match the bacon prowess of billboard-famous Carroll’s Sausage and Country Store. Especially since you can just order up some of their buckboard bacon online and skip the long drive down I-75. They sell it for ten bucks a pound, plus shipping, which seems like a pretty good deal to avoid that drive to south Georgia.
I also checked around here in Atlanta once I got home. Rusty Bowers of Pine Street Market told me that they’re actually working on a buckboard recipe right now (maybe he saw the billboards, too?), and will have it available in their retail shop next week. He described buckboard bacon as “an old Southern way of using more than just the pork belly to make bacon (since a 200 pound pig only produces an average of 20 pounds of belly),” adding that it “can be made from the butt/shoulder or the loin, and is more aggressively cured, like country ham, with a rustic flavor of black pepper and usually mustard.” Meanwhile, Kevin Ouzts at the Spotted Trotter said that they sometimes offer a savory and honey-brushed version of buckboard bacon, and offered to work up a batch with advance notice.
I don’t know. As much as I like the Spotted Trotter and Pine Street Market, I feel like buckboard bacon just makes more sense when purchased by the side of the interstate, in rural south Georgia, next to a giant sculpture of a peanut. Now maybe if Rusty or Kevin bought up a few billboards around town they might be on to something...