Fairhope’s Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon is music to your mouth
“My goal was to make a bacon where you could really taste the pork,” Bill Stitt says. “That’s not as easy as it sounds.” (Jennifer Kornegay/Alabama NewsCenter)
The harmonious balance of pure pork flavor, moderate salt and modest smoke in a bite of Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon will make your taste buds dance. And that makes sense; music is a key note in its composition since, as William “Bill” Ernest Stitt, founder and head bacon-maker at Bill-E’s, often says, his bacon is “serenaded by singers and songwriters.”
This is just one of several branding lines Stitt calls “Bill E-isms,” and it’s true. The tiny cure room, smokehouse and packaging center where Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon is created in Fairhope is directly behind the stage of Stitt’s other venture, his roadhouse-style restaurant, Old 27 Grill, where live music is playing again now that the COVID-19 shutdown has lifted. (While the restaurant is back open, full table service has been suspended in favor of counter service, and social distancing is practiced by staff and encouraged for patrons.)
Stitt said the “serenading” claim is more than a clever marketing slogan. “I believe the music really does have an impact,” he said. “My bacon team is back there working when the bands are going, and it motivates them.” Any genre will do, but some are more inspirational than others. “Eighties stuff works well, and R.E.M. is great,” Stitt said.
The blend of tunes and Stitt’s exacting technique have resulted in a product so popular, Stitt currently can’t make it fast enough. “We’re behind on orders about two to three weeks right now,” he said. “We make our bacon in small batches, so it takes the time it takes.” Part of the delay is due to demand; Bill-E’s sells 3,000 to 5,000 pounds each week (sending orders to every U.S. state and locales as far-flung as Japan), which proves the operation may be “small batch” but is not small potatoes.
Another factor in the slowdown is that “small batch” designation – referring to Bill-E’s small staff, small facility and that every aspect is done by hand. There’s no automation in the process that starts with fresh pork bellies, “fresh” being key. “We get them delivered twice each week, typically within 48 hours of slaughter,” Stitt said.
Bill-E’s Bacon aims to lock in the meaty flavor and smoke the competition from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
Once at Bill-E’s facility, the meat is rubbed with a mix of heavy kosher salt, a little pink curing salt and dark brown sugar. The bellies dry cure in this blend for eight days and are then moved just feet away to the smoke room and placed in one of five small, custom-made metal boxes, where they’re caressed with ribbons of thick hickory smoke. The duration of this smoke massage is not divulged; it’s the one secret Stitt keeps.
All facets of Bill-E’s show the same thoughtful effort, a painstaking passion that’s been developing for decades, despite Bill-E’s officially being in business only since 2011. With Bill-E’s, Stitt simply perfected a process he’s been fiddling with since he was studying hospitality management in the late 1980s at the University of Mississippi. “I’ve always been into food and always loved bacon, and at Ole Miss, I learned about curing and smoking meats,” he said.
The Yazoo City, Mississippi, native took a job after college working for the Ruby Tuesday corporate office, helping the restaurant chain design catering and to-go menus. The job eventually brought him and his wife to Fairhope, where they’ve been for 23 years. In 2011, he built and opened Old 27 Grill and realized he had just enough space behind the music stage to build his own smokehouse.
“I started smoking all kinds of things, and experimenting with different methods for bacon,” he said. He landed on his simple recipe that harks back to yesteryear. “I’m making bacon the old-school way, when people were curing meat more for preservation than for flavor,” he said. “I’ve had so many customers tell me that Bill-E’s tastes like what they had at their grandparents’ house. It’s so cool to hear that.”
As Stitt explains his devotion to detail and the precision of every step, it’s clear that he takes his bacon seriously. And yet, he’s often dropping jokes and one-liners, including corny Bill-E-isms, all evidence that’s he’s having a darn good time. More proof? Each smoker box has a name and bears a plaque honoring its namesake and their nicknames – all from Stitt’s childhood friends or college buddies.
Like much of Bill-E’s operation, the smokers may be little but they’re mighty, enveloping the space in such a heavy haze of smoke scent, it supersedes all other senses. Knowing this, it’s surprising to find that smoke is not the dominant flavor of the bacon. Unlike products of other famous Southern small-batch bacon-makers that boast an intense smoke taste, in Bill-E’s bacon, smoke is merely a backup singer, and this, like everything Stitt does at Bill-E’s, is by careful design. “My goal was to make a bacon where you could really taste the pork,” he said. “That’s not as easy as it sounds.”
It may take work, but it’s work Stitt relishes; he gained a crystal-clear view of his own feelings during the COVID-19 shutdown. “That was and has been rough, but it just reinforces how much I love what I do,” he said. And he’s now gearing up to grow the business. “Within the next 12 months, I hope to have a new, much bigger facility ready,” he said, “one that should allow us to make 15,000 pounds of bacon a week.”
Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon can be ordered direct at billesbacon.com and is sold at specialty shops throughout the South.
