Proper British Bacon opens its doors in Auburn

Published 6:35 pm Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Life can lead you in a funny direction.

Just ask Robin Halbert and his wife, Calli, owners of Proper British Bacon and Meats in Auburn.

A year ago the Halberts were hard at work at their Enumclaw poultry farm – the Twisted S Ranch – trying to find ways to deal with a downturn in the economy that led to plummeting demand for their eggs and laying hens.

“It’s been a major hit,” Halbert said of the reduced orders – down from a peak of 400 dozen a week just a year before.

While searching for ways to make up for lost revenue – including plying their wares at local farmers markets – the Halberts were tossed a curveball, courtesy of the offhand comment of a friend.

“A friend of mine from Scotland – Ceri – said, ‘This is a beautiful country, we love the people, we love the area, but the bacon is just horrible,’” Halbert said. “So I tried not to take offense at that and asked her what she meant. And talking it over with her at this Christmas party, I told her I had been butchering for about 10 years, and I’ve got some of the best bacon in Enumclaw, let me give it a shot.”

After his friend explained the intricacies of British bacon, Halbert —  who had never been to the British Isles —  gave it a go, producing a first batch that was more Canadian Bacon than British before nailing the recipe on his second try.

“She said, ‘This is spot on. Don’t change a thing.’” Halbert said. “That was April 16 of last year.”

Halbert said his Scottish friend then asked if it was OK to spread the word about his new product.

“I figured 50, 100 bucks a month doing some bacon for people, that would be great,” Halbert said. “She works for Microsoft, and she told 1,000 people on the Microsoft intranet site.”

The next morning Halbert woke up to a whopping 1,200 pounds worth of meat orders, courtesy of the Microsoft intranet site.

“We said, ‘Stop, this is not a hobby anymore,’” he said. “Doing it under the guise of just for friends of family was not appropriate anymore. We needed a shop, we needed licensing and insurance.”

After trying to get a shop going in Enumclaw, Halbert said he stumbled onto an opportunity to open up in the shop’s location at 625 Auburn Way S., a spot that has housed a butcher shop for more than 50 years.

“I’ve had most of the older owners come in to see what was going on,” he said. “And I’ve been able to talk to them and ask them what happened in the past and what made them successful and what I should do, and that’s been really helpful.”

Although the shop sells other things, including a large array of salami, ham, jerky, pork chops, sausage and even American-style bacon, the real star is the British bacon.

Halbert said he uses free-range natural pigs raised on a farm in Moses Lake.

“They do as good a job as I would want to do if I was raising the pigs,” he said.

The pigs are then slaughtered at an organic USDA processing plant in Basin City.

The difference between American and British bacon lies in where the meat is cut from on the pig, rather than in the preparation.

“American bacon is belly bacon,” he said. “You can see how much fat is on it. It’s nice stuff. It gets nice and crispy and has been an American mainstay for hundreds of years. It’s easy to cure, it cures quickly, and it lasts a really long time once it’s cured and smoked, which is important after a month on the chuck wagon.

“And then you’ve got British bacon, which is a back cut,” he said. “The problem is the cut is not commercially available. The way we process pigs in America, it’s either a part of other cuts, or pieces of it get eliminated.”

Currently the shop is going through the USDA licensing process for organic certification, and the couple plan to start carrying cheeses soon.

For now though, it’s all about the proper British Bacon.

“It’s been such an unusual chain of events that has led us to this,” he said. “You could never predict such an odd bunch of circumstances to lead us to this.”

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Proper British Bacon and Meat is located at 625 Auburn Way S. and is open from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday through Friday, and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday. They can be contacted at 253-709-8294 or on the Web at www.properbritishbacon.com.

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A healthier alternative?

After a heart condition at age 37 put a scare in Robin Halbert, the longtime lover of pork products said he was looking at a dim future for his palate.

“I found that my cholesterol was 475 and my triglycerides were 2,300,” he said. “I was in trouble. What followed after that was three months of a pretty serious depression.”

“I like prime rib,” he continued. “I like all the fat. I’ve been butchering my own pigs forever, with an inch of fat on the outside of my pork chops. That’s where all the flavor is, the fat is the good stuff.”

Because of the low fat, low cholesterol restrictions of his new diet, Halbert said he had resigned himself to cutting bacon.

Then he discovered British bacon.

“It’s a lean cut of meat with a little strip of fat on the outside,” Halbert said. “If you trim that off with a fork, according to the USDA Web site, you can have a product that is half the fat of a skinless chicken thigh, ounce for ounce. It’s got all the great smoky flavor of American bacon, and it’s not greasy. It will never get crispy, crispy, though. For the people that like their bacon where it cracks if you bend it, this will never do that.”

Halbert continued:

“All of sudden with this, it’s almost better to eat bacon than chicken,” he said. “If I’m going to eat a skin on chicken thigh, I might as well eat twice as much bacon for the same amount of saturated fat.”