July 1, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| What's up Jesse? | ||
| How are you man? | ||
| Doing really well. | ||
| You are one of the many people that are cool as fuck that I've met because of Steve Rinella. | ||
| I need to give that guy like a gift just for introducing me to cool people. | ||
| I've met at least a dozen really cool people because of Steve Rinella. | ||
| Yeah, I can believe that. | ||
| He's a powerful person and I'm honored to be included in that group. | ||
| I really am. | ||
| He's done a lot for us. | ||
| His ability to get out there and support people and his knowledge of his reach and Just wanting to get out there and promote people. | ||
| It's very, very kind. | ||
| He's a very generous person. | ||
| He is. | ||
| And he's so smart and he's so important to that world, the world of wild foods. | ||
| I heard you on the podcast on his podcast a few years back when uh you were talking uh you guys were talking about uh cooking and and daidue your restaurant here in austin and you could tell right away that what you're doing is very much a like a passion project like you're you're a guy like when you talk about food and you talk about cooking when you talk about like the ingredients that you use and it's like I fucking love when someone's really into what they do. | ||
| When I hear you talk about Dai Due, when I hear you talk about cooking in general, and of course you got a new book out. | ||
| It's out right now, the Hog Book. | ||
| Go get it. | ||
| Chef's Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Pigs. | ||
| But it's very inspiring. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, I love food. | ||
| And most of my life revolves around gathering it in some way or another. | ||
| I mean, I like to go pick blackberries a lot. | ||
| And that translates to a lot of other things. | ||
| I mean, I obviously like to kill pigs. | ||
| I also like to buy carrots, things like that. | ||
| I like to serve food. | ||
| And it's honest work. | ||
| And I'm glad that you appreciate that. | ||
| Yeah, it's, you know, I learned from Anthony Bourdain that what food really is. | ||
| It's like it's an art form that's temporary. | ||
| You know, I used to think of food as just being delicious. | ||
| And then I watched that No Reservation show, and I'm like, oh, these are artists. | ||
| Oh, it was like a shift in my head. | ||
| I had to like rethink what it meant to be a chef. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Sometimes I might disagree a little bit with the artist label and more that, you know, sometimes I'll tell our staff is like we're plumbers. | ||
| Like we're more craftsmen than artists. | ||
| Now there's some chefs that are artists that are out there that Way smarter than me. | ||
| And they can make a foam or they can compose a dish with things that just like will blow your mind. | ||
| You're like, I don't think that's going to be good. | ||
| And then they put it together and it is really good. | ||
| I think of being a chef got really hip. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, Bourdain had a lot to do with that, too. | ||
| But I like to tell our staff particularly just to kind of keep everybody's egos within limit that we're more craftsmen. | ||
| We're like plumbers. | ||
| We do something that's needed on a daily basis because you eat a really good meal and you're hungry the next day. | ||
| And so I think that some chefs are certainly artists, and I really admire them. | ||
| I, however, am not one of those. | ||
| You're being humble. | ||
| I get it, though. | ||
| And I like what you're saying about keeping the other people in check. | ||
| Good move. | ||
| Very smart. | ||
| Tell them they're plumbers. | ||
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Right, right. | |
| No offense to plumbers either. | ||
| I mean, they make a hell of a lot more money than cooks do. | ||
| Well, yeah, and when your sink's broken or your toilet's backed up, you need them. | ||
| The thing about it is, though, there is an art to cooking food correctly. | ||
| There's also an art to being a carpenter, right? | ||
| There's a lot of craftsmen. | ||
| For sure, a Finnish carpenter, that's an artist. | ||
| But there's something about food that, for whatever reason, I think until Bourdain came along, people didn't really look at it like an art. | ||
| Now I think they do. | ||
| I think a lot of folks do. | ||
| When he would go and travel to France in some strange restaurant that was in the middle of some farm, and they have farm-to-table, these incredible chefs are all running around cooking these little things. | ||
| You're like, wow, this is a... | ||
| There's strange little projects that these people are doing, and they're composing these foods, these dishes, based on local ingredients and everything. | ||
| It just gets you excited about what you're eating. | ||
| It's a different way of looking at food. | ||
| At least it was for me. | ||
| And it changes every day, especially if that's how you're sourcing your food. | ||
| Everything is a little bit different. | ||
| The tomatoes are blowing up because there's been too much rain or there's no tomatoes because it's too hot or something like that. | ||
| You're dealing with things like that every day and you can deal with that in a positive or a negative. | ||
| You can look at that as an advantage. | ||
| And so I'll concede that yes, there is a bit of an art to dealing with food like that too. | ||
| How long have you owned Dai Due for? | ||
| As a brick-and-mortar restaurant, seven years. | ||
| Now, it's been in business since 2006 when we started and basically going to farms and setting up outdoor dinners and doing these big dinners outside. | ||
| We called it a supper club. | ||
| And we would serve... | ||
| At our heyday, we're serving 80 people every week, once a week, and just sourcing everything locally. | ||
| A lot of times just from one farm. | ||
| And then, you know, getting fish out of the Gulf or freshwater fish, local olive oil, local dairy, local cheeses, local fruit, everything. | ||
| And whatever was available, that's what we'd do. | ||
| Now, these days, I don't think that's entirely novel. | ||
| But in 2006 to 2010, it was still a little bit novel. | ||
| Not to say that eating like that is a groundbreaking idea because it's probably the second oldest idea known to humans. | ||
| But to kind of do it... | ||
| Well, I would say doing it in Texas was harder. | ||
| And no one had ever really attempted that with ingredients here because it is such a... | ||
| Rough space. | ||
| It can be. | ||
| I mean, the weather's very extreme, and the growing seasons can be great or are terrible. | ||
| We have, you know, weather events, things like that. | ||
| So when you started out in 2006, were you coming right out of culinary school? | ||
| Like, what were you doing before then? | ||
| I had just been working in restaurants. | ||
| I never went to culinary school or any school beyond high school. | ||
| And I just loved cooking. | ||
| And I'd always worked in restaurants. | ||
| But I did start to grow a little bit tired of this disconnection with food that I saw in restaurants. | ||
| I traveled to Mexico and I traveled to Europe. | ||
| And I saw in those two places that their cuisine was based on their local ingredients. | ||
| And to put it in a really extreme way, in northern Mexico, the food was wonderful, but it was very much austere. | ||
| We were looking at onions and chilies and beans, and I'm talking about the high desert. | ||
| Meat. | ||
| I mean, no seafood whatsoever, obviously. | ||
| They're a couple hours from the coast. | ||
| And they were still able to pull off this really beautiful food there. | ||
| And that was just, it was meaningful. | ||
| And then if you go someplace like Europe, where it's like, oh, well, there's a lot more resources there, like in southern France or Italy or someplace like that. | ||
| And you saw what they were doing. | ||
| You know, here we use walnut oil and duck fat as our primary cooking fats. | ||
| And they base a whole cuisine on that region of France off of that. | ||
| And what I saw where I'm from is that we had nothing like that. | ||
| Whenever we wanted asparagus, we would order it. | ||
| Whenever we wanted a beef tenderloin, we ordered it. | ||
| And we'd get in these boxes full of, you know, random nameless animals and out-of-season produce from across the world. | ||
| I just thought that what if we could represent the bounty of this area a little better? | ||
| And I saw what you could do with an austere space like in northern Mexico. | ||
| And I'm like, certainly we can do that in central Texas because we are very uniquely poised between the coasts and north Texas. | ||
| We have prairies. | ||
| We have hill country full of game. | ||
| South Texas full of citrus and mangoes, things like that. | ||
| We have everything we need here. | ||
| I don't know what austere means. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Not bountiful. | ||
| Do you know what it means? | ||
| I was pretending I knew what it meant for a while. | ||
| I was like, I better ask a question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not necessarily poor, but not an enriched environment. | ||
| Severe or strict in manner, attitude, or appearance. | ||
| An austere man, okay, of living conditions or way of life, having no comforts or luxuries, harsh or aesthetic. | ||
| Ascetic? | ||
| Is that a word? | ||
| Ascetic? | ||
| How do you say that? | ||
| Conditions in the prison could hardly be more astore, having an extremely plain and simple style or appearance unadorned. | ||
| The cathedral is impressive in its austere simplicity. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, did you get out of high school and then immediately start working in restaurants? | ||
| I worked in restaurants all through high school. | ||
| Did you always know that you wanted to be a cook? | ||
| No, I mean, I worked in the front of the house. | ||
| I was a waiter and a bartender. | ||
| It was just a good way to make cash. | ||
| And cash, you know, I loved it, you know, as a young man. | ||
| And I, you know, I spent it on... | ||
| I tithed most of it. | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| But I enjoyed being in the front of the house, but I knew that it wasn't a long-term thing for me, so I took the pay cut and went to the kitchen and just started working in kitchens when I was about 20. And then I was born in North Texas and kind of just worked my way south to Austin and got here in 98. Is going to culinary school the normal path when someone becomes a chef? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And I mean, I think it can be great. | ||
| It really depends on the person. | ||
| I've known a lot of people that came out of culinary schools that have done a wonderful job in their career and also a lot of people that, you know, it didn't work and, you know, they're on to massage school next, you know. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, that's like with everything, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's hard for people to, like, stick to a path and just grind it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think the chef world is a lot of grinding, huh? | ||
| Yeah, it's tough. | ||
| You know, and attitudes are changing these days, but, you know, back, you know, 20 or so years ago, it was still kind of that system where you had to really work your ass off. | ||
| You still do. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| I mean, it's a lot of hard work. | ||
| But working your way through that will really let you know if that's what you want to do for the rest of your life. | ||
| And I knew that it was. | ||
| Something about food just took me. | ||
| So when you first started working, just took the pay cut and went to the kitchen, you knew right away? | ||
| Yes, and I stayed in the kitchen from there on. | ||
| I never left. | ||
| And then when I started traveling, that's when I really got excited about it and just saw Food in its real way. | ||
| You know, I think a formative meal for me would be in Venice. | ||
| I was able to travel there, but I was also able to work in a kitchen. | ||
| It was in the off season. | ||
| Nobody was there because it was between the sunny season and Carnival. | ||
| And so the chef took me literally on a gondola. | ||
| Like, I mean, you can't get more romanticized than that. | ||
| He's like, we have to go to the seafood market. | ||
| Well, how do you get to the seafood market? | ||
| You get on a gondola. | ||
| And the guy takes you across the canal. | ||
| And then we went and bought the most beautiful sole, you know, like a little miniature flounder, these tiny little flatfish. | ||
| And then we go back to his kitchen, and he's got a reach-in cooler, and it's the depths of the off-season, so there's not much going on vegetable-wise. | ||
| And he's got three sizes of arugula. | ||
| He's got small, medium, and large. | ||
| And then he's got some lemons and he's got some olive oil. | ||
| And this guy takes this sole and he cooks it on a flat top. | ||
| And he's like, don't put any salt on it. | ||
| It's still salty from the lagoon. | ||
| And I'm like, you're full of shit, man. | ||
| I'm like, really? | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| And then he cuts a lemon in half because it's winter and so the lemons are in season. | ||
| It's this beautiful lemon and he puts that on the plate. | ||
| And then he picks the small arugula and puts that on the plate because it's delicate. | ||
| And then he takes some olive oil and he puts it on top and he puts it in the window and a waiter comes and takes it. | ||
| And I just remember thinking, like, how is that? | ||
| We could not get away with that in the United States, like serving food like that. | ||
| Here's a chef who's extremely talented. | ||
| He's been working in these hotels all over Europe his whole life. | ||
| And he has the ego, a lack of, to just put a perfectly cooked piece of fish, some raw meat, Greens, some beautiful olive oil and a perfect lemon on a plate and send it out in the dining room. | ||
| So it's to not fuck with it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| To know exactly when this is all you need. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And not think that you don't have to do anything to it. | ||
| And it's up here. | ||
| I mean, I want to do stuff. | ||
| I want to manipulate it all the time, of course. | ||
| When I saw that, I was like, that's food, and that's cooking, and that's hospitality, and that's nourishing right there. | ||
| I thought that was really cool. | ||
| And it was all ingredient-based, and it was all hyper-local. | ||
| And there's got to be something satisfying about being able to respect the simplicity of a dish, to not get your fingerprints all over it, and just to know that as it stands, it's amazing. | ||
| You don't really have to fuck with it. | ||
| At that point, your skill is really sourcing. | ||
| It's relationships that you've made with a fishmonger or a farmer or a rancher or somebody that's pressing olive oil. | ||
| It's things like that that I think are really exciting because once you have those base ingredients, you really don't need to do that much. | ||
| You can. | ||
| You can get there and play with it all you want. | ||
| My style is certainly to not play with it. | ||
| And also, I mean, there's so much wisdom in leaving stuff alone. | ||
| When you see someone do that and you know that that's all it needs, it's exciting. | ||
| There's something exciting about something that really hasn't been fucked with in that way, like as a dish. | ||
| Just if it works out. | ||
| Because there's a wisdom in creating something like that. | ||
| There's a craft in and of itself in just leaving shit alone. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a perfectly cooked piece of meat. | ||
| It's not requiring a lot. | ||
| It's just time and understanding what you're doing with it and salt and meat. | ||
| I mean, it's about as primitive as you get. | ||
| But when it's done right, there's something about food where you can almost feel the effort when you cook something perfectly and then you serve it to someone and they're eating it. | ||
| The effort of the people that have put this dish together comes through as you're eating it. | ||
| And when it's done really well, It's like you're excited about the skill of the person who put this together. | ||
| If you have a perfectly cooked steak and you're eating like, oh, and you're excited about how they took care of it, whether they dry aged it, how they cooked it, how they checked the temperature perfectly and served it. | ||
| There's so much going on there. | ||
| I'm excited about the relationship we have with the rancher, too, you know, and the story that they tell. | ||
| You know, it's just like, oh, it's been the rabbi primals are going to look really good for the next month or so because we've had so much rain, the grass is really high, things like that. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And how that, I mean, how it computes the whole system. | ||
| And, you know, I think it's imperative that cooks get out there and see what it's like to grow a carrot or see a cow in the field, catch a fish, kill a deer, things like that. | ||
| I think that all those things are really important lessons that tie you to that whole, the source and then the whole system that it takes to get it to you. | ||
| You use a lot of local ingredients, but you've also been doing this thing where you take people hunting and show them how to butcher an animal and show them how to cook an animal. | ||
| When did you start doing that? | ||
| That was in 2008, so shortly after. | ||
| We started doing classes on butchery of domestic pork, which was kind of my wheelhouse. | ||
| I'd learned that in restaurant work. | ||
| I'd been a prep cook and a butcher in a restaurant. | ||
| And being new to hunting at that point, I had just started hunting a couple years prior and was really excited about it and saw the You know, I knew how to butcher before I knew how to hunt. | ||
| And so I had a little bit of an advantage on the back end of it, but still have and still do have to this day a lot to learn about the front end of it. | ||
| And I wanted to be able to share that with people because I think that hunting is a very key way to show people the importance of food. | ||
| Because if you can I feel sad about taking the life of a deer or a pig or a squirrel, then you can also understand what a case of carrots that is rotting at a grocery store because they haven't been sold or they don't look good enough to sell anymore. | ||
| That's also sad to me. | ||
| And you know a lot of work went into that. | ||
| And so much. | ||
| It's immeasurable. | ||
| And so being able to tie food with a source like that, with hunting or fishing or whatever, I think was really important. | ||
| So we started doing classes where we were taking people out and it's guided hunts. | ||
| And then you learn how to butcher, cook, and then you eat game throughout the weekend too. | ||
| And we still do that to this day. | ||
| And when you do this, how many times a year do you do this? | ||
| You know, well, you know, in season, it's Texas, so it's hot. | ||
| Our season typically runs, if we have a couple dove hunts or something in there, from mid-September till maybe April. | ||
| So just basically the cooler and cool and cold months of the year. | ||
| So about six, seven months. | ||
| And when you do it, would you do it on weekends? | ||
| Like when do you... | ||
| Yeah, they're typically weekend classes. | ||
| We used to do a lot of private events and now I've just gone to, we work with one ranch. | ||
| We do a Friday through Sunday class and in all honesty though, our whole season this year has fairly much been booked up by people that came to previous classes. | ||
| They come back, we have a pretty high return rate on those. | ||
| We're about to release our schedule of those, but there's going to be very, very little seats available to those. | ||
| They fill up. | ||
| We do eight classes a year for four people. | ||
| If you're hunting, too, you're going to need small groups, right? | ||
| You really can't. | ||
| Yeah, and it's got to be very intimate. | ||
| We want everybody to see everything and put their hands on it, so it's really necessary. | ||
| We have a team of guides. | ||
| If you've never been hunting before, you have a guide. | ||
| We walk you through the whole process. | ||
| Series of events, like from sighting in the gun to, you know, it's this constant barrage of, like, learning. | ||
| And it's like, this is how you put your heel down. | ||
| You know, this is the way the wind is blowing. | ||
| This is the way we're going to walk to do this. | ||
| You know, this is what time of day we expect deer to move, when we expect hogs to move, why we're sitting right here. | ||
| We're constantly feeding information, and then once that animal is taken, we're feeding more information about this is how you skin, this is how you gut, this is how you use the liver, this is call fat, this is a shank, this is best for grind, this is best for slow cooking, things like that. | ||
| And then we teach them how to butcher it, break it down. | ||
| And then we really want them to be able to do it on their own. | ||
| And the whole time we feed them game to kind of really keep it in context because a lot of times people have been told, you know, you can't eat that. | ||
| You know, deer liver is no good or venison tastes gamey to me or I'm not going to touch the hog topic yet. | ||
| But, you know, people are very... | ||
| Opinionated about hogs. | ||
| And we try to just kind of dispel those myths and empower and educate people and to be able to do it on their own. | ||
| And whether or not they go and do it in the future, I don't really know. | ||
| But I do think that it gives them some very good connectivity. | ||
| I mean, I know people that came on a trip 12 years ago that still talk about it to me. | ||
| I think it was important. | ||
| And I mean, that's really important to me and very meaningful that It's a formative experience, even if they never do it again, you know, but it teaches them to really value a resource. | ||
| That time they killed a deer, because it's really hard, like, for me, once you've killed that deer, if you open up a bag of beef or something, I can't help but think, like, all those animals in a field, you know, They all had lives, they all had deaths, everything. | ||
| I think it teaches you to appreciate resources and once you start to appreciate that resource, Maybe you'll start to appreciate all resources, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You'll appreciate the vegetables, everything else. | ||
| You might appreciate where your clothes are made. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Or do we need a leaf blower? | ||
| You know, things like that. | ||
| Yeah, we are really disconnected from so many things that are critical for life. | ||
| I mean, there's very few people that have ever sourced any of their food. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They've never grown it. | ||
| They've never hunted it. | ||
| They never fished it. | ||
| They just go buy food, and they think of food as something that you need to sustain yourself. | ||
| Whenever I talk to someone, they go, oh, I don't give a shit about food. | ||
| I just need to eat. | ||
| I always get so sad. | ||
| You're missing out on it. | ||
| It's real fun. | ||
| It's like people saying they don't like music. | ||
| Oh, I don't like music. | ||
| Like how? | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you not like music? | ||
| How do you not appreciate really good food? | ||
| The pig thing, I'm glad you brought that up because that is one thing that I keep hearing out here from folks that there's an attitude about pigs that they're disgusting. | ||
| They're just dirty creatures, and they kind of just want them dead. | ||
| And I've talked to people that go helicopter hunting, and I go, well, what do you do with all the pigs? | ||
| And they're like, you leave them there. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| I'm like, that doesn't seem... | ||
| That seems not just wasteful, but, well... | ||
| I mean, there's a lot to that. | ||
| You have to, right? | ||
| Because you have to eradicate a certain amount of those pigs. | ||
| But isn't there a lot of food that you're just letting rot? | ||
| There is. | ||
| So, I mean, this is the Pandora's Box topic for me. | ||
| I'm very vested in it. | ||
| I just wrote a book about feral hogs. | ||
| Steve Vernella, to come full circle on that, he called me the hog apologist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's true. | ||
| But to your point, I think that, you know, we'll start there with a feral hog. | ||
| Let's explain the numbers, too, because people need to know how fucking crazy it is here in Texas. | ||
| And, of course, these numbers are not going to be clearly defined. | ||
| You know, it's hard to get a census on hogs. | ||
| So the estimate in the United States is around six million. | ||
| The estimate here in Texas is between two and four million. | ||
| So probably somewhere in the middle of that, maybe 2.6. | ||
| That's a number that you'll see a lot, maybe around 3 million, but whatever. | ||
| So literally more than the entire population of Austin. | ||
| In hogs. | ||
| In hogs. | ||
| Spread out around the state. | ||
| And in the time we've been talking about them, you know, how many have been born. | ||
| So they have no breeding season. | ||
| They can breed at a very young age. | ||
| You know, let's say five or six months is very conceivable. | ||
| And then they have a gestation period of three months, three weeks, three days. | ||
| And then they can drop a litter of, you know. | ||
| Always three days? | ||
| So you can just plan it out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty precise like that. | ||
| I bet women are very jealous. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I'll be giving birth on Wednesday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got it timed in. | ||
| And after that, I mean, they're able to go back into estrus pretty quickly after that. | ||
| And their litter size can be anywhere from, you know, 2 to 12. But, you know, let's just say it's, you know, even 6 is a lot. | ||
| So you've got a 10-month-old animal dropping 6 babies. | ||
| And they can do it 3 times a year. | ||
| Well, twice. | ||
| You know, the way that works out, you know, you've got, I think it's 20, I want to say 26 days that they can go back into estrus, something like that. | ||
| It might be 23 days. | ||
| I can't remember the number right now. | ||
| After they give birth. | ||
| And they're back in estrus. | ||
| And if they're living in an area that's got a high population of boars, they're probably going to get bred pretty quick. | ||
| And so that's when you see this explosion that has happened. | ||
| And so... | ||
| They're not indigenous to this country, so they came here in the mid-1500s. | ||
| Columbus brought some to, I mean, just the Caribbean islands. | ||
| But the mainland is usually attributed to Hernando de Soto, who dropped off a bunch of pigs on his way before he died in Arkansas. | ||
| And then there was some other explorers that also brought in pigs, Spanish explorers that brought in, you know, domestic, semi-domestic hogs and dropped them off. | ||
| And so what we saw was this real slow build in pig populations. | ||
| There was also some Pacific Islanders that dropped them off in Hawaii way before that. | ||
| So if you're talking about The technical United States. | ||
| When did they drop them off in Hawaii? | ||
| It's a food source. | ||
| No, no, when? | ||
| When? | ||
| Oh, I couldn't give you a number. | ||
| It's way previous to the 1500s. | ||
| Wow, that's wild. | ||
| So that's a weird debate in Hawaii, right? | ||
| Because a lot of people are saying they're an invasive species. | ||
| And then some folks are like, well, so are people. | ||
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Sure. | |
| Sure. | ||
| Because if you think about it, the hog's been there as long as the people almost. | ||
| There's going to be a lot of parallels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a very destructive European animal arrives on our shores. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now there's a lot of them. | ||
| So, you know, you've got these populations exploding. | ||
| Throughout time, but really kind of concentrated in the late, you know, 1900s, you know, like the 80s. | ||
| And then you saw people, you know, you've got a guy that loves to hunt on his ranch in West Texas. | ||
| And he says to his friend in East Texas, he's like, sure as hell, I'd like to be able to shoot something out here year-round. | ||
| Buddy in East Texas is like, wow, man, I got some pigs. | ||
| And then, you know, traps a couple, throws them on a trailer. | ||
| And now you have 253 out of 254 counties in Texas have hogs, feral hogs. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And they're spreading all across the country, too, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a downward migration from Saskatchewan, you know? | ||
| Really? | ||
| And those are escaped domestic hogs. | ||
| But, I mean, let's also define what a feral hog is. | ||
| It's a pig that's just on the wrong side of a fence. | ||
| I mean, once they get out, that's a feral pig. | ||
| So I like to say it's a domestic pig. | ||
| A feral hog is just a pig without an address. | ||
| You know, they just, as soon as they get out of that pen, they're feral. | ||
| And I will readily admit, I mean, not even on purpose, but we have shot while hunting pigs that had ear tags. | ||
| You know, meaning that at one point, that was a farm pig. | ||
| It's not anymore. | ||
| And what it's doing is it's breeding like crazy out there with a feral boar. | ||
| And it's just creating more feral pigs. | ||
| So like I said, once they're on the wrong side of the fence, they're fair game. | ||
| Well, we should explain to people what happens to pigs, right? | ||
| I've talked about it on the podcast before, but if people haven't heard that episode, there's a physiological change that happens to pigs when they get wild. | ||
| So when you're saying that these are pigs, they're wild pigs, people are like, wait, but they're boars. | ||
| Boars are different than pigs. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| It's all called sous scroffa, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And once they escape, within months, their hair can become shaggier. | ||
| And we're talking about the same pig, not its offspring. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Their hair can become shaggier and their snouts will elongate in order to allow them to root more effectively because that's one of their primary ways of feeding is rooting and that's the most destructive way. | ||
| I mean they can dig three feet down in soft dirt and they're getting roots, they're getting insects, they're omnivores and they'll go after anything. | ||
| And so, once they get out, they go feral quick. | ||
| And they get street smarts, too. | ||
| I mean, they go nocturnal. | ||
| I mean, they're smart, smart animals. | ||
| And so, you add all this together, you know, the herds that were initially brought here for food, and then further domestic herds, and then you have escapees over hundreds of years of... | ||
| You know, settling in this country and you've got escaped domestic hogs. | ||
| Then you've got hogs specifically brought in for hunting, namely your Russian boars, your Eurasian boars, which are kind of the big hairy razorbacks. | ||
| How much different are those? | ||
| It's still the same species, right? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| I don't want to stand by it, but I believe it's just like a subspecies. | ||
| There's one more Latin name after Suscropha for the Eurasian. | ||
| Freely interbreeding. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| They're not hybrids where they're not... | ||
| Well, they make hybrids. | ||
| Right, but the hybrids are viable. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, so it's not like a hybrid, like a liger where they can't... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Nothing like that. | ||
| And so then you've got some kind of specific areas. | ||
| California had a lot of Russian boars brought in, and there's certain areas in Texas. | ||
| The Powderhorn Ranch down near Port O'Connor was one that had some brought in specifically and deposited there. | ||
| Is the difference in the flavor or the way they look like the flesh? | ||
| It would be really hard to determine that now because most of them over the years have interbred with your standard feral pig. | ||
| And so purebred populations of those hogs are very hard to find. | ||
| It's debatable whether the Powderhorn Ranch population is purebred Russian boar. | ||
| I've read different things about it. | ||
| Some say that it's not. | ||
| Some say that it is. | ||
| It's a high fence? | ||
| It's got a high fence around it and has had one since the 1920s, I believe. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And so whenever they brought in the boars, those are the same breeding population. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They think. | ||
| But, you know, a fence doesn't mean shit to a pig. | ||
| You know, they go under it, you know, any way around it that they can. | ||
| Flood, waters come up, they can swim, you know. | ||
| So it's not known. | ||
| But there is one sequestered population of feral hogs in the United States, and that's on Osaba Island off the coast of Georgia. | ||
| And so that was an Iberico hog. | ||
| Brought over here by the Spanish. | ||
| You know, pointy hats, long brown robes. | ||
| They dropped some hogs on that island. | ||
| And that island has sustained a population of purebred Iberico hogs to this day. | ||
| And it's called Osaba Island. | ||
| And they have an Osaba Island hog, which is a purebred Iberico hog, which is the same hog that produces the $150 a pound serrano ham. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've seen Abirco. | ||
| I've seen that name before. | ||
| Hamon. | ||
| Hamon Abirco. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So these Osaba hogs are a purebred descendant of that. | ||
| They're smaller because they suffer from insular dwarfism. | ||
| Because they're on a small area that doesn't give them a lot of space to forage, that they have to make themselves smaller generationally. | ||
| And they've exported those hogs now. | ||
| I mean, we had a farmer just north of Austin for a while that had a pair of Osaba hogs and was raising them because, I mean, purportedly, for their incredible quality. | ||
| You know, they are purebred Ibericos. | ||
| People pay top dollar for that. | ||
| Have you had one of those before? | ||
| Yeah, we had some hybrids. | ||
| Like, they were part Osaba and part other hog. | ||
| I mean, they were great. | ||
| I'm not gonna say, like, it was mind-blowing. | ||
| But, I mean, we get a lot of really high-grade domestic pork in also. | ||
| So, they were small. | ||
| They were like a medium-sized pig that put on a lot of fat. | ||
| So, yeah, it was very good. | ||
| But I wouldn't say it was the best pork I'd ever had. | ||
| Is the difference in the way domestic pork versus wild pork, the way it tastes, just primarily diet? | ||
| Or does something happen to their flavor profile when they assume this metamorphosis, when they get out and their snout extends and their hair gets bushy? | ||
| Does it change the flavor? | ||
| I would imagine some hormonal changes are happening in their bodies, right? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| You're going to see, as far as flavor goes, you can have diet and also most domestic hogs are castrated. | ||
| And what that does is it prevents something called boar taint. | ||
| And it is a, you know, some people don't like cilantro. | ||
| You know, there's maybe 7% of the people don't like cilantro. | ||
| It's like a genetic thing, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, boar taint is offensive to something like 96% of people. | ||
| I mean, like a lot of people. | ||
| It's a very strong, musty odor. | ||
| And we deal with it randomly. | ||
| I mean, when you're hunting wild pigs, you know, very, very, very few of them have been caught and castrated, the boars. | ||
| So you're going to have that hormonal influence on them. | ||
| You're also going to have diet, which is huge to me. | ||
| Like, I mean, a pig that's foraging along the coast and potentially just eating, you Or in South Texas in like mesquite scrub where there's not a lot to eat versus a hog that lives just 30 minutes southeast of here that's got four varieties of acorns and wild pecans and like nice soft ground and blackberry roots to choose from. | ||
| One of those is going to be really good, and it's that last one. | ||
| You know, they're going to put on a lot of fat and be very, very good. | ||
| So one of the things that we address constantly is the disparity in quality for wild pigs. | ||
| But, I mean, to your question of the difference between a domestic hog and a wild pig, it's mostly consistency because a domestic hog from a given farm is going to be given a pig ration, and they're going to be fairly consistent. | ||
| Now, some of them might bully their way to the front of the line and eat a little bit more. | ||
| They're pigs. | ||
| Versus a feral hog from the same property, but it's not getting fed a pig ration. | ||
| So you will see a lot of difference. | ||
| Feral hogs are typically a lot leaner, and they can be anywhere from identical in flavor to a domestic pig to very, very different. | ||
| And a lot of them, because they're omnivores, they could perhaps be on, like, they could find, like, a dead deer or something like that and start eating that. | ||
| Yeah, or a live deer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I saw one, there's a photo of one running away with a fawn in its mouth. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen it. | ||
| Oh, any picture of a pig doing anything naughty immediately gets sent to me. | ||
| Yeah, so they will go and hunt fawns. | ||
| Or they just see them. | ||
| In my book, I call them opportunistic omnivores. | ||
| I think I call them woodland vacuums with shitty manners also. | ||
| It's what they come across. | ||
| I mean, you know about the great rattlesnake debate. | ||
| What's the great rattlesnake debate? | ||
| Okay, so this is a good one. | ||
| You say it like everyone would know. | ||
| Well, of course, the great rattlesnake. | ||
| How long have you lived here? | ||
| Do you know the great rattlesnake debate, young Jamie? | ||
| No, he does not either. | ||
| So there's a sizable chunk of the Texan community that believes that rattlesnakes have stopped rattling or they're not rattling as much because if a rattlesnake rattles when something approaches it, It alerts a hog. | ||
| And a hog will kill and eat a rattlesnake pretty much with impunity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they've got really thick hides. | ||
| They don't need to worry about it. | ||
| They're going to get in there and they'll just tear up a snake. | ||
| I mean, have you seen Lonesome Dove? | ||
| The restaurant? | ||
| No, the movie. | ||
| The movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the first scenes in there is just like he's watching these two pigs eat a rattlesnake. | ||
| What year is that movie from? | ||
| Year? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| The 80s. | ||
| I mean, that's probably like... | ||
| It's based on the book, right? | ||
| The novel? | ||
| Larry McMurtry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, classic. | ||
| You've got to see that. | ||
| Well, it's a lot of things I have to do. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Put it on the list. | ||
| So... | ||
| So that's a thing. | ||
| Pigs always eat rattlesnakes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Okay, so people think that because any rattlesnake that rattles gets eaten by a pig, that the rattlesnakes that survive are like the quiet ones, the non-rattlers. | ||
| And so rattlesnakes aren't rattling as much as they used to, and so there's kind of an uptick in bites. | ||
| I personally don't subscribe to this. | ||
| I mean, I'm like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Some rattlesnakes rattle when you walk by them. | ||
| Some of them don't. | ||
| But there's a very vibrant debate on whether rattlesnakes have stopped rattling because of hogs. | ||
| Doesn't it make sense to you that that would be kind of maybe in transition? | ||
| Like if the hog problem is getting bigger, right? | ||
| And it is. | ||
| And then the rattlesnakes are getting eaten by the hogs, which they are. | ||
| Doesn't it seem like that would sort of naturally happen? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I would imagine... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it would require a lot of hogs to eat every rattlesnake that rattled, and then the snakes to, over a period of, and the time frame for this, too, according to the folklore of it, is like maybe the last 20 years. | ||
| So in 20 years, rattlesnakes are now just, I don't know, what do you call them now? | ||
| Just snakes? | ||
| You know, like they've just stopped rattling. | ||
| But they still have the rattle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just don't use it. | ||
| There was a moth in England in the late 1800s when England was becoming industrialized. | ||
| And let me see if I get this right. | ||
| The moth was white, right? | ||
| And then as the smokestacks went up, Everything got sooty and black. | ||
| And the white moth stood out really vividly against the black soot. | ||
| And birds started eating it. | ||
| There was a genetic anomaly where one of the moths might be black. | ||
| And within a very short period of time, I want to say maybe 10 or 15 years, this white moth turned black because the ones that survived were the dark ones that weren't, you know, skylit by the soot. | ||
| And so it's, I mean, I don't know if it's the same. | ||
| There's scientists out there just laughing at me right now. | ||
| But, you know, I guess it's plausible. | ||
| But there is a great debate. | ||
| I personally, I'm like, I don't know about that. | ||
| I think it's, what happens to animals when they adapt and change to environment, it's really spectacular. | ||
| Like if you see like a chameleon, how the fuck did that happen? | ||
| Or even, let's get even crazier, a cuttlefish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could become your environment, like when you see an octopus become a coral reef, like what the fuck is happening there? | ||
| How did you figure that out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long did that take? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Took a minute. | ||
| Well, we think we have a map of the entire process of how a single-celled organism eventually becomes an octopus and all the steps along the way. | ||
| And like, oh, it adapted to its environment. | ||
| But how quickly? | ||
| And how much adaption? | ||
| When you see that... | ||
| When you see an animal that can literally become the ground, like it looks like it's the bottom of the ocean, and then something comes by and it just comes out of nowhere and becomes an octopus again and snatches it up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, that's crazy. | ||
| Like, how did that happen? | ||
| How did a mule deer literally become the color of the grass that it exists in? | ||
| Or a coos deer, which is even more blended. | ||
| But even more so at the time of day that they get really active. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, ah, that thing's kind of gray. | ||
| The grass isn't gray, and then the sun goes down a little bit, and boom, the grass turns the same color as the deer. | ||
| Jamie put this up. | ||
| Cuttlefish, unlike our eyes, the eyes of cephalopods, cuttlefish, octopuses, and their relatives contain just one kind of color-sensitive protein, apparently restricting them to a black-and-white view of the world. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's even crazier then. | ||
| So how the fuck do they become the color of a... | ||
| They change color. | ||
| Yeah, and they can't even appreciate it. | ||
| They can't see it. | ||
| But how do they know that they can't see it? | ||
| Probably because they've dissected the protein that makes you see. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That I don't know. | |
| How crazy is that? | ||
| That they're becoming a color that they can't even see? | ||
| Have you ever seen when they take a, I think it was a cuttlefish, they take it and they had it swimming in a place with a checkerboard pattern and it was trying to emulate the checkerboard pattern. | ||
| You ever seen that? | ||
| No. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| it it's trying to figure it out oh oh So it's trying to figure out how to emulate this super bizarre pattern. | ||
| But in color. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well I guess that's black and white technically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| But what is it seeing? | ||
| See, watch how it settles down and then just becomes black and white. | ||
| It's trying to figure out... | ||
| It doesn't have... | ||
| See, it's black and white, whatever it can generate. | ||
| It seems like it can only generate things that are similar to the environment in which it lives. | ||
| Like there. | ||
| Like it looks like a throw rug. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me see if it's better here. | |
| It's definitely not black and white. | ||
| It's trying to figure it out though. | ||
| Look how it's changing colors, like trying to work out. | ||
| And where is it seeing this? | ||
| Is it using its eyes? | ||
| Because it seems like once its body lays down, its body tries to emulate the colors around it. | ||
| How does it sense its environment when it doesn't even seem like it can view it? | ||
| Yeah, like see there, you can tell it's trying to do like squares. | ||
| Fucking weird animal. | ||
| They're weird. | ||
| The octopuses and cuttlefishes, they're so strange. | ||
| They're such an alien creature. | ||
| If you went to another planet and they had things like that, they could just sort of blend in with their environment. | ||
| You're like, wow, we don't have anything like that here. | ||
| We do. | ||
| It's just in the ocean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So maybe you are on Team Rattlesnake. | ||
| I'm leaning towards that. | ||
| I feel like they would adapt, especially if these goddamn pigs just keep eating their buddies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| After a while, they're like, hey, I think we're going to stop this rattling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's cut the shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, maybe we'll see in another 20 years, and we'll have a little more data to back it up. | ||
| But right now, it's almost an emotive response that people have. | ||
| Snakes, stop rattling. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| You've got to be more careful out there. | ||
| It's because of the pigs. | ||
| But it's also... | ||
| That's seemingly another way to blame the pigs for something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of, like, room to blame pigs. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| And they do so much. | ||
| What is the number of, the amount of money they do in damage every year in Texas? | ||
| It's something really crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's ridiculous. | |
| I mean, and nationwide, I believe it's in the billions. | ||
| And I have to be real careful about that, too, in my staunch defense of, you know, respecting the pigs, is that, like, if you go up in a helicopter and you want to shoot a bunch of pigs, And you're not able to utilize any of them. | ||
| It doesn't bother me. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I think my whole point in this process is just trying to encourage people to eat more of the dead ones. | ||
| Simultaneously, I'd like to see people kill more of them. | ||
| I love pigs. | ||
| I think they're great. | ||
| I love hunting them. | ||
| I think they're cool. | ||
| I respect them. | ||
| I don't want them to suffer. | ||
| And I kill them very regularly, too. | ||
| And I don't feel necessarily... | ||
| I don't feel really bad about it, but I also want them to die quickly. | ||
| And I know that we need to get behind that wholesale in order to control this problem. | ||
| But I would just like to see them utilize this food more. | ||
| Well, it seems like a perfect food source if you think about it. | ||
| It's an invasive species. | ||
| You have to control the population of them. | ||
| They're very nutritious, really good for you. | ||
| They're delicious. | ||
| And they're also gross looking, so people don't feel as bad about shooting them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, there's that. | ||
| I mean, I think the debatable thing is if they're delicious. | ||
| Not on my part. | ||
| I mean, that's my role in this is to convince people because of the mythology that's out there about them. | ||
| I mean, I've heard everything from you can't eat them, period, to you can only eat them if they're under, and I have heard every weight category that you can imagine, and it's always laughable to me. | ||
| If they're under 80, 100, it goes in 20-pound increments at least, you know, to make it, you know, seem a little more scientific. | ||
| But, you know, I've eaten 300-pound boars that had testicles the size of cantaloupes, and they were absolutely delicious. | ||
| They're that big? | ||
| Their nuts are that big? | ||
| Oh, they get big. | ||
| They get real big. | ||
| Do you make Rocky Mountain oysters out of their nuts? | ||
| There's a recipe in the book for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just convincing people to try them. | ||
| I don't care if you do or not, but I'd really like to give people the confidence to try them more and know that a lot of the things that they've heard about pigs are not true. | ||
| There's a lot of generational mythology. | ||
| You can't eat that pig because it's too big. | ||
| You can't eat any boar. | ||
| You'll hear that too, and it's like, that's just not true. | ||
| I eat them all the time. | ||
| And either I have a really terrible palate or that's wrong. | ||
| Well, is it a prep? | ||
| Certainly, there has to be some sort of impact on whatever their diet is, right? | ||
| But also, it's a preparation issue. | ||
| And that's where your classes come in. | ||
| And stress. | ||
| Stress on them. | ||
| Stress on the animal. | ||
| So a bigger animal takes longer to kill. | ||
| Anecdotally, and I talk about this one in the book, too. | ||
| And this, I mean, I think this is a really, like, cut and dry example of the impact that stress has on the flavor of an animal. | ||
| And then I was tasked with taking someone from L.A. who is in the movies to go hunting. | ||
| He'd never been hunting before. | ||
| And I was a little worried about him being able to seal the deal, as was the production crew. | ||
| And so what I did- Oh, so you're filming it? | ||
| We're filming it. | ||
| And that's, I mean, that's also, that's hard when you're like trying to, you know, hunt an animal that's got a very cute sense of smell and you've got seven people with you. | ||
| So we ran snares on a fence line where the hogs would cut under there. | ||
| And we ran these wire snares on there. | ||
| I ran four snares. | ||
| And then I took him, and we went and sat in a blind. | ||
| Sure enough, we got lucky. | ||
| A pig walked out, and we got luckier. | ||
| He shot it and dropped it right there. | ||
| I mean, just a nice, like, 120-yard shot. | ||
| Pig went down. | ||
| Great! | ||
| So we go, and we get the pig. | ||
| It's about an 80-pound sow. | ||
| Throw it in the truck. | ||
| Drive to check the snares. | ||
| And when we pull up, there's another hog caught in one of the snares. | ||
| And it's still alive. | ||
| I mean, it just catches it around the torso, basically, and holds it. | ||
| But hogs, once they go through something like that, they go nuts. | ||
| I mean, they're really aggressive animals. | ||
| But this thing just laid on the ground. | ||
| It was so tired, and I felt bad. | ||
| The crew was like, let's get set up for a shot. | ||
| And I said no, and I just walked over and I shot it and killed it. | ||
| Because I was like, it's done. | ||
| It's done, you know. | ||
| And we took that animal and the other animal and they were both sows. | ||
| They were almost identical. | ||
| They were probably about 80-ish pounds each. | ||
| And we scanned and gutted them and then we butchered them both. | ||
| We ate some of the one that he shot that night. | ||
| No, it was the next night. | ||
| We had some chops and some other stuff off of it. | ||
| And it was great. | ||
| It was lean, you know, South Texas pig. | ||
| And we took the rest of the one that we'd caught in the snare home. | ||
| To this day, the worst feral hog I've ever had. | ||
| And it was pretty much inedible. | ||
| And it had that extremely gamey flavor to it. | ||
| And I can only attribute that to stress. | ||
| I've never tasted another sow in that weight category that tasted anything like that. | ||
| And you've eaten probably hundreds of them. | ||
| Hundreds. | ||
| Hundreds. | ||
| And so, I mean, I think that that's a very clear-cut example of what stress can do. | ||
| And then also, you know, if you think about a big boar, which they get the bad rap for tasting really bad, is that, you know, they're really large animals that are hard to bring down. | ||
| If you're rifle hunting or bow hunting, it takes longer for them to die. | ||
| And then, I mean, there are the hormonal things, and those big pigs, they can be very strongly flavored. | ||
| I'm not here to argue that. | ||
| But what we try to do is approach hogs, and forgive me if I'm getting off topic, but... | ||
| In a way where we kind of categorize them where they're not all treated the same way. | ||
| But, you know, like a big boar and a big sow, and then there's a medium hog and a small hog. | ||
| And you're going to cook all those a little bit differently. | ||
| You know, you're not going to cook them, you know, if you manage to get like a 25-pound little, like, nice young pig and then a 300-pound boar. | ||
| They're not, you can't treat them the same way. | ||
| And what is the difference in what you would do with a 300-pound boar? | ||
| How you would cook it? | ||
| You know, that's going to be a lot of sausage. | ||
| You know, things like that. | ||
| Some very simple approach to it. | ||
| Something that's probably going to be highly spiced. | ||
| Maybe you're going to have to add some fat into it if it's lean. | ||
| Typically, out of the same litter, If you have a sow and a boar next to each other at the same age, the sow will probably have a little more fat on her, typically. | ||
| Also will depend on where she's at in her pregnancy cycles. | ||
| So boars tend to be leaner, but a big boar I mean, it mostly is going to be, you know, like, it's going to be like curry or chili or something that you're going to add some spice to. | ||
| You wouldn't cook a ham off of it or anything like that? | ||
| If it was particularly fatty and looked really good, then I would. | ||
| But I'm saying, like, generally. | ||
| So you would take the whole thing and turn it into sausage? | ||
| Could, yeah. | ||
| And what do you, like, how many pounds is a 300-pound boar when you dress it out? | ||
| You know, it's going to lose about 45-ish percent of its weight in offal and hair, things like that, hide. | ||
| And then take off probably another 45-50 percent off of that once you get all the bones out of it. | ||
| So you're probably yielding, you know, 100-ish pounds. | ||
| Yeah, probably a little bit less. | ||
| You know, maybe like 80 pounds, something like that, of just pure meat. | ||
| And depending on how lean they are, too. | ||
| I mean, if they've got a ton of fat, you know, they might be more bulked out. | ||
| Or they might be, you know, just real thin. | ||
| Sometimes you can see through their ribs. | ||
| Sometimes there's, you know, bacon on them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so normally when you process sausage like that, so you have your cuts. | ||
| And then do you have like standard recipes where you add X amount of fat? | ||
| X amount of spices, and then you do it all yourself, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All the blending. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I'm usually a 20-25% fat in the sausage. | ||
| So if it's a very lean hog, we simply just package that into four-pound packages and freeze that. | ||
| And when you say fat, are you talking about domestic fat? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you get domestic pork fat, or do you use any other kind of fat? | ||
| Generally, I'll use pork fat if I'm making specifically burgers. | ||
| I mean for like burgers, cheeseburgers. | ||
| I like to add in beef fat. | ||
| Or I'll do like 10% beef fat and 10% bacon. | ||
| Would you do a pork burger? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pork burger. | ||
| Really good. | ||
| How come nobody does that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's an interesting, like you're saying pork burger. | ||
| I'm like, this is madness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, it makes sense, right? | ||
| You have elk burgers, moose burgers. | ||
| Why not pork? | ||
| I don't think I've ever heard of a pork burger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially if you're going to like do a nice thin, you know, like charred patty. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Really well cooked. | ||
| And you mix it with some nice fat, like beef fat and bacon. | ||
| And I think it's excellent. | ||
| What are your thoughts on sous vide? | ||
| I've got two turkey legs back at the house. | ||
| I mean, I'm going to have to run here in like three hours. | ||
| That are cooking for 24 hours. | ||
| I don't use it a lot, but I think there's some applications that it works really well for, especially with game. | ||
| You know, your steak-ish cuts can be really good. | ||
| I think you do that a lot, right? | ||
| I used to, yeah. | ||
| I haven't sous vide'd in a long time. | ||
| I don't often like take a back strap and sous vide it. | ||
| I prefer to just cook it on the grill. | ||
| I will sous vide things like ribs and things like turkey legs that I think will benefit from a very, very long controlled cooking where they don't get overcooked. | ||
| So then I can usually, I like to put them on the grill afterwards. | ||
| Yeah, I was watching a YouTube video yesterday where this guy cooked an inexpensive chuck steak and he sous vide it for 24 hours and then grilled it. | ||
| So he sous vide'd it, I think it was, I think he did it at 125 degrees for 24 hours. | ||
| And it just like broke down all of the collagen and all of the hard stiff stuff that's in that kind of a hard, you know, like a more firm cut of meat. | ||
| And then afterwards he grilled it. | ||
| So he grilled the outside of it, got a nice sear on it, nice crust, and was cutting through it. | ||
| It was like, this is literally better than a ribeye. | ||
| He was like, because you get all the flavor from all this fat and all this gristle and everything breaking down slowly over the course of 24 hours. | ||
| So all that tough stuff becomes very tender and then seared it on the outside. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a great tool. | ||
| And what I like also about it is that it's an empowering tool. | ||
| Because sometimes people, they get into something. | ||
| You know, they're like kind of technologically, they just like to nerd out on something. | ||
| SUV is a classic way for somebody to do that. | ||
| If you're struggling with cooking game or it's like, oh, it's come out tough or this or that, I love to see tools like that enter into the lexicon. | ||
| Or, I mean, hell, a crock pot. | ||
| For me, the crock pot is one of the coolest kitchen tools ever if you're a game cook. | ||
| Because what it does is it enables you to cook for a very long time in a precise temperature with no flame. | ||
| You can go to bed, you can go to work, whatever. | ||
| And you come back and it's cooked. | ||
| It's like, oh, that elk shank that I had, it was tough. | ||
| You undercooked it, essentially. | ||
| But a crockpot is just a really simple way for people to achieve that. | ||
| And then sous vide is kind of the modern update of a tool like that. | ||
| So I always appreciate anything that helps people just want to get more out of their game, or if it's food in general. | ||
| Just get excited about cooking, I think, is just so beneficial to everyone. | ||
| The only thing that would worry me about suviing is the plastic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like leaching plastic, leaching chemicals. | ||
| We had this woman, Dr. Shanna Swan. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| How to say her name? | ||
| She was on the podcast talking about the issue with chemicals from plastic affecting people's endocrine systems and the fact that there's a thing called phthalates. | ||
| It's spelled with a P. P-T-H-P. I think I've seen that before. | ||
| And phthalates, when they're introduced into mammals in utero, they're showing that they have a profound effect on their sexual reproductive systems. | ||
| And they think the same thing is happening to people. | ||
| And there's a direct correlation. | ||
| What is her book called again? | ||
| We should probably pull up her book so she could... | ||
| Sorry, I pre-googled phthalates and sous vide, and it says it's okay. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| How come? | ||
| They take out the BPA. Oh, they're free of phthalates and BPA. Okay, so in this case, phthalates in large doses like BPA can compete with hormones, in this case testosterone, but most plastic wraps, Ziploc bags, freezer bags, | ||
| and sous vide bags are free of phthalates and BPA. The change from polyvinylidine chloride to polyethylene was for safety, but it did make the cling wrap cling less. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I didn't even know there was specifically sous vide bags. | ||
| I've only used Ziploc. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Those vacuum sealed bags. | ||
| And I don't do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's your book. | |
| And I have always been imposed. | ||
| We don't do it at the restaurant. | ||
| This is our book, Countdown, How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. | ||
| Shannon Swan. | ||
| You don't use it at your restaurant, sous vide? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, we don't. | ||
| And it's because, I mean, you know, maybe it is BPA free, but there's still something about just cooking in plastic to me. | ||
| And it's a once every two or three month deal for me. | ||
| I mean, we're going out of town this weekend and I wanted to be able to just like, you know, cook it, throw it in the cooler and throw it on the grill. | ||
| You know, and it's something I don't like to make a habit out of without knowing the science behind it other than I don't like plastic. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's just something about it creeps me out. | ||
| Yeah, no, I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It's also, if you're thinking about, like, what you're doing is so back to the world, like, you know, back to the earth. | ||
| You know, you're hunting and then gathering up fresh local ingredients and cooking it. | ||
| Like, it's... | ||
| Put it in a plastic bag and then you use a thermometer that's got a digital thing and you're boiling the water kind of like that. | ||
| Now you're in this weird sort of modern... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Seems a bit disingenuous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's just... | ||
| Maybe it's just a perception thing. | ||
| I mean, if it's the best way to cook something, it's the best way to cook something, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's a couple ways. | ||
| Like these turkey legs, I'm really excited about them. | ||
| You seem really excited about your turkey legs. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| You cook them and then you grill after you're done? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You achieve a certain temperature? | ||
| Put a little fat in there, you know, whatever kind of saucy type stuff. | ||
| You know, there's some garlic floating around in there, salt and pepper and... | ||
| Some spices, things like that. | ||
| And then they're just going to come out and just get slowly cooked and crisped up on the grill. | ||
| And I think that that method is something we use in the restaurant, just extensively, is to cook things beforehand until they're tender. | ||
| And then we'd let them cool. | ||
| And then to order, we're cooking them over a hot grill. | ||
| We do that with ribs. | ||
| We do beef ribs with wild boar ribs, pork ribs. | ||
| We do that with chicken hearts. | ||
| We do that with duck quarters, anything like that, where you can take Something and kind of cook it to where it's tender and then just, you know, set it aside. | ||
| I mean, put it in the refrigerator for a few days and then when it's time to grill it, it comes out and you're just adding some char and smoke, crisping the skin on it, maybe glazing it with something. | ||
| And I think it's just a really great way to kind of just reverse that whole process where instead of browning it in the middle and then braising it, you're braising it, then cooling it and then browning it. | ||
| It's a very, like, Mexican technique right there. | ||
| Where so many meats are slow cooked and then you know like when you get a taco on the street that's like it's been it's just been cooked forever and then it's just hit on this flat this plancha that just like sears it and you know reheats it and it's just and that's where you get that crust and that Maillard reaction and everything and it's just it's brilliant and it's broken down and tender and I think that applying that to game I mean you can do domestic animals too of course but applying it to game is really good trick. | ||
| And when you do that in terms of cooking it and then refrigerating it, what temperature do you like to bring it back up to before you sear it on the outside? | ||
| I usually like to go cold. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because if it is really tender, let's say some elk ribs. | ||
| And you cook them in whatever method. | ||
| Maybe you wrap them up real well and you put them in the oven and cook them until they're tender. | ||
| Or you braise them in pure fat like a confit. | ||
| And then they're pretty tender. | ||
| I'm not saying falling apart tender, but if you get them to where they're almost tender, if you let them come back up to room temperature, they're going to start to get a little floppy and hard to deal with. | ||
| If you go cold onto the grill and start to manage that crust on there, they'll be a lot easier to handle. | ||
| So I typically will go cold onto the grill. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It is because there's not a thick amount of meat on those ribs, too, right? | ||
| So you don't have to worry about it being really cold in the center if you're charring in the outside. | ||
| It'll heat up the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and just give it ample time, you know. | ||
| It doesn't have to be a ripping hot grill, necessarily. | ||
| It kind of depends on what you're doing. | ||
| But, you know, you could take 30 minutes to kind of get a nice crust on a rack of ribs. | ||
| And I do it with hog ribs all the time because they're so variable. | ||
| You know, they could have two inches of meat on them or you could like be able to read a book through them sometimes. | ||
| I mean they can just be so thin. | ||
| So if you want to like par cook them and then throw them on the grill afterwards, it's just a really good simple way to make that happen. | ||
| And are you – do you like to use a meat thermometer or are you doing it all by touch and feel? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean these are – these things are cooked to shred. | ||
| You know, these things are, they're at 190 plus for multiple, yeah, almost all these things that I'm describing. | ||
| These are well done pieces of meat. | ||
| I mean, not like... | ||
| Because it's hog. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, or the cuts that I'm talking. | ||
| I'm talking about I particularly like to do this on your slow cooking cuts, your shanks, your ribs, you know, like pieces of shoulder, things that have to cook for a very long time anyway. | ||
| Not necessarily like your backstrap or your loin that you're cooking medium rare. | ||
| I'm applying this more to things that I want to cook until they're like almost falling apart. | ||
| But, you know, just a little bit shy of that. | ||
| And then they don't have any crust on the outside. | ||
| Because, I mean, one method would be to just simply poach hog ribs in water. | ||
| Like, there's a method for that in that book. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Poaching them? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or it works really well with venison ribs, too. | ||
| If they're particularly lean, you just put them in water. | ||
| You season the water really heavily with onions and spices and garlic and whatever, ginger, whatever. | ||
| And then cook them until they're almost done and then you pull them out. | ||
| Cool them off a little bit and then finish those on a grill and then you can glaze them with something that's sweet and sour and sticky and whatever from there. | ||
| And they're excellent. | ||
| And it gets them very tender and then you go in and get them crispy and add that smoke component at the very end. | ||
| And is this how you've always done it or is it something like you figured out along the way? | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of twofold. | ||
| You know, we've always done that for many years with hog and venison ribs specifically. | ||
| But then, you know, in a restaurant setting, it's got some big advantages. | ||
| Like, we do a whole beef rib. | ||
| And the thing can weigh, depending on the cow, three and a half pounds raw. | ||
| So it's a whole beef rib. | ||
| And what we'll do is we will season that and then we'll submerge that in hot beef fat and cook that at a very low temperature, which is called a confit, where we're basically just braising it in fat until it's tender, it's tied, and then we pull it out and cool it. | ||
| And then to order, I mean, because that process takes four or five hours. | ||
| And then to order that cold, tender, but firm beef rib just goes onto a hot grill and gets rolled on a grill until it's hot throughout and it gets crisp on the outside. | ||
| And so you get a little bit of smoke and some texture on the outside and the meat's just falling apart tenderly. | ||
| And you just know when to do it just based on how many times you've done it in the past. | ||
| Are you timing things? | ||
| Yeah, we're timing that. | ||
| Definitely there's an amount of time that that beef rib is going to need to cook. | ||
| But also you have to get in there because animals are different. | ||
| Each one is a little different. | ||
| It might take a little longer, a little shorter amount of time. | ||
| We want it to be tender. | ||
| You just make sure it's tender. | ||
| Then we actually cool it in the fat and then reheat the fat and pull it out. | ||
| And then... | ||
| When you're grilling things, are you cooking over wood? | ||
| Is that what you're doing? | ||
| Oak coals. | ||
| We use post oak. | ||
| Do you use lump charcoal or are you actually using the wood itself? | ||
| In the restaurant, we're using just wood. | ||
| No charcoal. | ||
| Why do you do that? | ||
| What's the benefits of using wood? | ||
| We just like wood. | ||
| We just like the smoke. | ||
| We cook over hot fires there. | ||
| Very hot fires. | ||
| We need a lot of heat. | ||
| Charcoal pops a lot, too. | ||
| And just have always preferred just post oak. | ||
| You know, just nice ripping fire, spread some coals out, and then we're grilling steaks and things over that bread. | ||
| Everything gets cooked over that. | ||
| And it's just because the flavor imparts? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's some cultural value to that, too. | ||
| I mean, we live in an oak-rich area. | ||
| And everything, you know, like barbecue in this specific area has always been smoked over. | ||
| Oak, maybe a little bit of con. | ||
| If you go west, you're going to start to see more mesquite. | ||
| More in south, you're going to see mesquite. | ||
| And you go east, you start to see things like hickory. | ||
| And so, I mean, the wood you're burning, I think, also has some cultural import, too. | ||
| And so it all kind of factors into the whole dish in the end, you know? | ||
| It's just like how you made that and what tree you cooked it over. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you think about doing that, and you think about cooking over oak fires, this has got to be something that's been done here for a long, long time, right? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Cooking concepts, as far as that goes, I know. | ||
| An animal over burning wood that's abundant. | ||
| Both of those things, hopefully. | ||
| An abundant animal over an abundant wood would make the most sense. | ||
| And there's something about fire and cooking over fire, too, that it just taps into some weird ancient memories or something. | ||
| It's very satisfying and exciting to cook straight over a fire. | ||
| It's a very different feeling than putting something on a frying pan over a burner or a gas burner, which is all nice and everything, but there's a feeling that you get when you're cooking something over fire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I can't even speak to it. | ||
| I mean, you said it, but I mean, I don't know how to address it without just tapping into something that we don't understand, but it's there. | ||
| It's why we all stare at fires. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You just stare at fires. | ||
| Also, you want to cook things over fires, and when you have a fire, you want to cook everything over a fire. | ||
| Yeah, they're beautiful. | ||
| There's something about it. | ||
| It's like this crazy nature, like this reaction that you can sort of help and manipulate. | ||
| You start moving the logs around and adding logs. | ||
| It's cooking over a campfire. | ||
| It's one of the most satisfying things I think I've ever done in my life. | ||
| Remember, that's one of the things that got me hooked on hunting to begin with is when I went with Rinella, we shot a mule deer and then we cooked the liver over the campfire. | ||
| And, you know, he had these little grates that he could just sort of like sit things down to cook meat over. | ||
| And then he cooked, I forget like what kind of container he cooked the liver in, but just so like liver and sauteed it in some grease. | ||
| And I was like, This is so sad. | ||
| Something about cooking over a fire. | ||
| Like, you make a fire, you sit there, you just shot an animal, you're cooking. | ||
| It seems so much different than any other kind of food you ever have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, agreed. | ||
| I mean, we set up our restaurant. | ||
| It's, you know, it's very open on the inside, and we have a big table where all the butchery happens, and then there's just a hearth. | ||
| Where there's a big fire. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| When we were talking to the architect, I was like, this is what I want someone to see when they walk in the door. | ||
| We have a rail, a butchery rail, where they can bring carcasses down to the table, which is wide open. | ||
| There is no prep area in the whole restaurant that you can't see. | ||
| You can see everything except for the walk-in and the office. | ||
| And so I wanted people to be able to see what was happening on that table, whether it's on one side they're making breads and cakes, and on the other side there's a feral hog getting broken down, and then there's a fire. | ||
| And if you walk in, and it's the same thing you're talking about, you walk in the door, you see those two things, and you're like, I got the concept. | ||
| I understand what's happening here. | ||
| There's meat, and there's trays full of ripening tomatoes and peaches and everything out there right now. | ||
| Because that's the only place we have to ripen them. | ||
| So when you see all these components and then you see a fire and it's like, eh, you got the concept down right now. | ||
| You don't even need to ask your server. | ||
| So what's this place all about? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You see it right in front of you. | ||
| And it's so self-explanatory and simple, but also like exciting. | ||
| You know, you go to a place and they have that kind of, do you have like one of those Argentine style things where you raise it lower on a wheel? | ||
| Yeah, it's a crank. | ||
| Yeah, crank style, you know, which to me is just the best. | ||
| You just adjust it over the heat. | ||
| We have two. | ||
| One's a flat top and one's just a grill grate, although they're both interchangeable, too. | ||
| We can put different grill surfaces in there as needed. | ||
| So when you say one's a flat top, but like a frying, like a flat? | ||
| Like a flat top plancha style, just a solid piece of metal that you sear things on. | ||
| There's smoke everywhere. | ||
| There's a little bit of smoke to it, but you're still cooking over a campfire. | ||
| It's probably incredibly inefficient to toast bread over a fire, but fuck it. | ||
| But isn't that kind of part of what you're doing? | ||
| It doesn't have to be efficient. | ||
| There's something cool about the fact that you are doing it over just wood, oak fire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's more fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's appealing. | ||
| If you just want to go to a restaurant and just want to eat some food that tastes good, that's great. | ||
| But if you want to go to a restaurant where someone is cooking over fire and you've got the fruit ripening and you've got all this whole experience, there's something more to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And it's tangible. | ||
| You feel different about the experience. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I had this experience one time when I was down in the front and I was prepping and I looked up and there was this old guy, old Texan, very much so. | ||
| He had pearl snap, long sleeve shirt, he had on his hat, he had on his jeans, and he was just watching. | ||
| And I looked over at him and I kind of just, you know, eye contact. | ||
| I nodded at him and then he was still watching and I just, you know, then I looked up again. | ||
| I was like, hi, how are you? | ||
| And he looked at me and he goes, I know what you're doing here. | ||
| And he turned around and walked away. | ||
| And I, I just, I almost cried. | ||
| I was like, you know, cause that's like, I mean, he, he, I knew what he meant. | ||
| He was like, I know what you're doing here. | ||
| And it wasn't like, I know you're trying to get away with something. | ||
| He's like, I see what you're doing here because, you know, I mean, he was probably in his 70s. | ||
| And he probably, hopefully, was thinking about the way his grandparents ate. | ||
| And those words were just, they were very powerful. | ||
| And I'll never forget that. | ||
| It was really cool. | ||
| I know what you're doing here. | ||
| And he smiled and walked off. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| If you know, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| These people that come and take your classes, is there a demographic? | ||
| Is it wide open? | ||
| Is it a large spectrum? | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| We have, I mean, I think if you split it between new hunters and experienced hunters, we're right at about 50%. | ||
| You know, we have people that have never hunted before or maybe went hunting once and didn't, you know, succeed or get an animal or whatever. | ||
| And then we have a lot of people that come because they want to learn more about the butchery side of it. | ||
| And a lot of times they're just like, yeah, I don't really care if I kill a deer. | ||
| I've got a place to go kill deer. | ||
| But they'll set it out and they're having fun, but what they're there for is learning about utilization. | ||
| And then you've got your brand new hunters. | ||
| Demographically, no. | ||
| It's not as divergent as I'd like to see it. | ||
| I really wish that there was more seats at the table for people. | ||
| I mean, if your grandfather or great-grandfather wasn't allowed to own a gun, you know, the likelihood that you've gotten into hunting now is greatly diminished, I think. | ||
| And I really want to see hunting available to everybody. | ||
| I think that it gets people involved in responsible gun ownership, resource management, appreciation of meat and animal management. | ||
| From across a more diverse background, too. | ||
| And so, no, I mean, frankly, it's not as diverse as I'd like it to be. | ||
| And we're trying to do some things that mitigate that. | ||
| And we're just trying to get more different people in there. | ||
| To these classes. | ||
| But no, it's kind of what you think it would be. | ||
| It's more mostly affluent white males. | ||
| Although we get a lot of women in there. | ||
| We used to do a class for women, just a class. | ||
| Just women. | ||
| And that was a lot of fun, you know, introducing them. | ||
| We'd have women guides come in and kind of to help just kind of decrease any kind of feelings that they'd have about what our preconceptions of what that situation would be like. | ||
| And, you know, it was really rewarding. | ||
| And I think that as we Move forward and we're educators and and I think it helps, you know, and there's a lot of debate about like recruitment and things like that about like do we have enough resources for everybody in the country to hunt and things like that but at the end of the day it's like I want anybody that that wants to to be able to to do it get their foot in the door somehow and so I'll work with some organizations like Texas Parks and Wildlife, | ||
| Parks and Wildlife Foundation, Stewards of the Wild, TWA, Texas Wildlife Association, because they've got some really good outreach programs, a lot of youth programs, you know, and just trying to just get more people involved in the outdoors because it's something they need to be aware of. | ||
| If they don't pursue it for the rest of their lives, that's fine. | ||
| But I think even that one experience can be very formative. | ||
| And pigs have got to be like the best thing to do that too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Plentiful, easy to locate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you know the stats behind private land in Texas. | ||
| It's a very privately owned state, which is in a lot of ways great. | ||
| I mean we have a lot of land stewardship and a lot of these natural places that are just protected because they are privately held. | ||
| But at the same time, it's the most often asked question for me. | ||
| If a new hunter comes and they're like, okay, great. | ||
| We just did this course. | ||
| I got a deer and a pig. | ||
| I'm going to go home. | ||
| And then they're like, so where do I go next? | ||
| And I'm like, well, I don't know. | ||
| You've got to make friends. | ||
| And that's where the hogs come in. | ||
| Because they're so invasive, it makes them a little more accessible to someone who just wants to hunt. | ||
| And that's – early on, that's what I did. | ||
| I had connections with farmers. | ||
| And because I was buying chickens or tomatoes or whatever from this farm and that farm, you can just randomly ask, hey, do you have a pig problem? | ||
| And most of the time they're going to be like, not always but sometimes. | ||
| And next thing you know, you probably have a place to hunt pigs or at least try. | ||
| And I always urge people to start there if they want. | ||
| I mean, this is kind of a Texas-specific topic right now, but maybe not. | ||
| You've got to make those connections and get out there. | ||
| there and hogs being the most undervalued of all the game species like hunting deer is it's it's very profitable and it's going to be hard to just be like hey do you guys shoot a big buck off your property people are like yeah no yeah that's that's for my kids but if you're like hey do you mind if i help you know call this hog issue that you have you're probably going to find people to | ||
| And when you take a pig and you hunt it with someone, when you break it down, what is the first thing you do as far as like, do you bring coolers with you? | ||
| Do you cool it down immediately? | ||
| Do you hang it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is, I mean, you probably didn't know that we're getting into like probably the most contentious thing that I'm going to say. | ||
| And how you cool game down. | ||
| And like... | ||
| Because I get into this a lot with people. | ||
| Because the way I like to do it is vastly different from the standard practice of it. | ||
| I mean, this is like... | ||
| Like, Davy Crockett surrendered at the Alamo Territory. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I never put a pig or a deer, or any game, or any meat for that matter, directly on ice. | ||
| So, we're in a hot place, and I understand the sheer necessity for getting something cold quickly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the two words that I want to drive home with people to improve their experiences with game meats in general, and hogs specifically, is cold and dry. | ||
| When you put a hog on ice and then coat it with ice, then it starts to soak into the meat. | ||
| You're getting water in there. | ||
| So water can be a vector for bacteria, and so that can actually help it go off. | ||
| By adding in more moisture to the meat. | ||
| And it also makes it very floppy. | ||
| Like when you put it on a cutting board to cut it, there's just water coming everywhere. | ||
| The meat is very wet. | ||
| If you grind it, you will have some moisture come out of it. | ||
| I can guarantee you if you bring some meat to me to process. | ||
| And I've processed, you know, hundreds of animals for other people. | ||
| And many times they'll bring them. | ||
| Well, they used to. | ||
| They're not allowed to anymore. | ||
| Bring them to me iced down like that and after I would make some lynx sausage and put them on a tray there's a bunch of water on that tray and I guarantee you that's because it was soaked and there was just a lot more water in that meat. | ||
| Now Obviously, you're like, well then how do you get it cold? | ||
| What we do is the same exact thing. | ||
| We wrap it really well in trash bags. | ||
| We take unscented contractor bags and wrap that animal up really well and we face it so the cavity is pointing down and then we ice the hell out of it and open the drain plug. | ||
| We're doing virtually the same thing that everybody else is doing except we're avoiding that direct contact between the ice and the meat. | ||
| You wouldn't go to the store and buy a ribeye. | ||
| It's a hot day. | ||
| I'm going to keep it cold. | ||
| I'm going to take it out of the package and stick it on some ice. | ||
| Just as humans, there's some sort of weird voodoo that we think happens. | ||
| We put this pig in there. | ||
| Somebody told us, you can't eat pigs. | ||
| They're dangerous. | ||
| They carry diseases. | ||
| It's stinky. | ||
| It's mean looking. | ||
| It had mud all over it. | ||
| You get it all cleaned up and you put it in the cooler. | ||
| And you open that drain plug, and this red water comes out. | ||
| And what is that? | ||
| You're like, that's all that bad shit, right? | ||
| You know, that's all that, you know, that's the gaminess. | ||
| That's Satan, you know, just coming right out of there, you know? | ||
| Be gone. | ||
| And that's not really how it's working, you know? | ||
| I feel like you're doing more damage than good. | ||
| I mean, and to carry the point a little more, I had a guy bring me an axis once and it had been iced and the water had pooled and the beautiful loin on that axis had half been submerged in water and so half of it was just like this pure, beautiful magenta color. | ||
| The other half was just a floppy gray and it was trash. | ||
| And there's no way to mitigate that? | ||
| There's no way to bring it back? | ||
| Once it's soaked in there, it's soaked in there. | ||
| It's just water-soaked meat. | ||
| And no industry does that. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| And it's also the most logical thing. | ||
| I mean, how do you get a beer cold? | ||
| You don't wrap it in an unscented contractor bag and dip it in some ice. | ||
| You just throw it right on ice. | ||
| That's the straightest line between hot and cold. | ||
| But you'll get there if you do it this way. | ||
| It really works well for me. | ||
| Of course, do whatever you want out there. | ||
| But I also deal with people that have negative experiences with hogs a lot, or game in general. | ||
| And while I can't knowingly say that that's where that... | ||
| That result came from is from improper handling right there, but maybe. | ||
| If it's a consistent problem and that's a consistent way that they're being handled, then it's suspect to me. | ||
| And what do you think about like when people put coolers in and then they put like frozen milk jugs filled with water and they use that to cool a cooler down? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think you're going to get it as cold. | ||
| I mean, you've got plastics and insulator, and so you're not going to have it as cold as if you just iced it. | ||
| I mean, fill it a third of the way up with ice, put your pig in there, like I said, cavity down so no water can pool in there, and then cover that thing as much as that cooler will hold with ice and pop the drain plug so that any liquid's coming out. | ||
| And that thing is going to be cold. | ||
| I mean, it's going to be right at 32, 34 degrees. | ||
| And you can come back to that eight days later and pull it out and it'll be almost dry to the touch minus a little bit of condensation and a real pleasure to cut on the board, you know, for me. | ||
| I mean, cutting is fun to me, but when I get this floppy, wet, you know, big quarter, I'm like, oh, no good. | ||
| Yeah, no, that makes sense. | ||
| The covering it in ice and the contractor bags, all that makes sense. | ||
| But that's... | ||
| A lot of folks are just doing it the way you were talking about earlier, just throwing it right on ice. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Deer and hogs, that's the way that it's mostly done. | ||
| I've even heard... | ||
| One of my guides tells me that his family growing up, they put bleach in the water. | ||
| They made ice water and they put bleach in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, I mean, but that just... | ||
| I mean, that is just purely... | ||
| It's so basic that, you know, that animal's dirty. | ||
| Let's clean it. | ||
| And so let's bleach it. | ||
| You know, not like enough bleach to make us sick, but, you know, enough bleach to just... | ||
| How much bleach is okay in a glass of water? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And so, but that's, it's the same mentality. | ||
| I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's crazy. | |
| And that red stream that's coming out of there, you know, our brains register that as the bad stuff coming out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Not really. | ||
| Right. | ||
| God, that's crazy that they use bleach. | ||
| I can't even believe that. | ||
| But I can. | ||
| I've heard some crazy stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I once had a guy tell me that the only way to make a large adult boar palatable, and you only had 20 minutes to execute this after you killed it, and his ranch manager insisted upon this, was to get it back and, let's say, manually stimulate the dead pig. | ||
| Post-mortem. | ||
| The penis area of the dead pig? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That sounds like a guy was looking for an excuse to jerk off a pig. | ||
| I was like, I think the problem is not with gamey boars, but I think your problem lies in ranch managers. | ||
| So that's the spectrum of game care that I've heard. | ||
| Is this like some superstitious thing? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So all told. | ||
| Imagine if that's what you just got to do. | ||
| Just yank it out of them. | ||
| Just slowly. | ||
| Take your time. | ||
| My unscented contractor bag seems a little tame now, right? | ||
| Like, you're like, okay. | ||
| Some merit. | ||
| I know some folks, I don't know if they still do this, but there was a product that was for sale that they were actually advertising on MeatEater that was, you would hook it up to game and electrocute it afterwards. | ||
| Did you ever use that? | ||
| No, I've never used that. | ||
| But there's a company that we buy a lot of game from that is incredibly progressive in their methodology in getting wild game into the commercial food system. | ||
| It's called Broken Arrow Ranch, and they're in Ingram, Texas. | ||
| And they will drive around with shooters. | ||
| And an inspector on site. | ||
| And a refrigerated trailer. | ||
| And the shooters will kill non-game animals. | ||
| So, no whitetail. | ||
| But like Axis and Saika and Fallow Deer. | ||
| No guy. | ||
| And then they will process on site. | ||
| But they use that, I believe they call it electrostimulation. | ||
| And they use that process to bleed them out. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Shockingly better meat. | ||
| Electrostimulation is a process that involves connecting cables from a special electrical current generating device to a freshly killed deer or antelope carcass and applying a surge of electricity to the carcass for about one minute. | ||
| Electrical current is alternately switched on and off during the stimulation process. | ||
| During this process, the muscles of the carcass contract as a result of the electrical stimulation and relax each time as the electrical current is switched off. | ||
| And it says, what does it do to meat? | ||
| Meat muscle must be cut away from the bone while the carcass is in rigor mortis, the stiffening of the carcass after death. | ||
| Muscles cut away from the bone during rigor mortis will contract and compact The meat fibers tightly together resulting in toughening of the meat. | ||
| Electrostimulation causes electrochemical reactions which avoid this stiffening. | ||
| There are three beneficial effects of electrostimulation. | ||
| Improved flavor, improved shelf life, and tenderization. | ||
| Tenderization is subjective, whether or not it's improved, right? | ||
| Because there's something about an elk steak or something like that or a game animal. | ||
| I like a chew to it. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I don't want it to taste like a filet mignon. | ||
| I don't want it to be like butter where you can cut it with a spoon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, that company does that and then they're able – they overnight game meets all over the country and it's super high quality. | ||
| What's it called again? | ||
| What's the name of it? | ||
| Broken Arrow Ranch. | ||
| I've heard of them. | ||
| I've heard of them. | ||
| Does Paul Saladino tell us about them? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you use that electrical stimulation process? | ||
| Have you ever used that on Neil Guy or anything else? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not personally, but I mean we do get stuff at the restaurant that is from that company that does it. | ||
| But no, I've never done it. | ||
| And I mean, I want to say, I think I saw it on a video once. | ||
| It might be as simple as just like hooking it up to a 12-volt battery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But it seems like it's hooking it up, jolting it, let it go, jolt it, let it go. | ||
| Probably there's like a pulse to it, right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'd love to witness it, but I mean, it seems to have some merit. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard of people doing it with cows too, right? | ||
| Don't they do it with cow meat? | ||
| I'm not sure about the beef industry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it makes sense. | ||
| Have you ever had that done to you if you have an injury? | ||
| No. | ||
| I've had it done, it's called dry needling. | ||
| So they stick these acupuncture-style needles. | ||
| I had a back thing going on. | ||
| And they stuck these acupuncture needles all on my back and then connected these little clips to some sort of electrical device. | ||
| And as you're lying there on this massage bed, it's like... | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| And it's like your back is like flexing and relaxing, contracting and relaxing. | ||
| And when it does that, it like really loosens it up. | ||
| It feels good. | ||
| So it just makes sense that it would make food taste better too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Muscles. | ||
| Like working muscles. | ||
| Is there any other like unusual preparation methods that you employ? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Other than the unscented contractor bags? | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty lame. | ||
| No, I'm pretty straightforward. | ||
| This is very technical. | ||
| I mean, the non-hunters out there might be a little lost, but I skin and then gut almost universally. | ||
| A lot of people do that in reverse. | ||
| How come? | ||
| Well, especially with pigs, I like to be able to have a fully fleshed out carcass that I can do a very good job of retaining as much fat as I can and then just come back and do the gutting process. | ||
| We typically get it done pretty quick. | ||
| But other than that, nothing controversial like my ranch manager story. | ||
| And are you using entrails, anything of the pigs? | ||
| Are you using that for sausage casing? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I've never done that. | ||
| And I get asked that a lot. | ||
| It's just sheer laziness that I've never flushed some casings out there. | ||
| I buy them. | ||
| It's a real boring story. | ||
| But we buy our sausage casings. | ||
| But we do often use liver, heart, kidneys, and call fat out of hogs. | ||
| You know, just your real basic offal, you know, like the big four out of there. | ||
| Now, when it comes to pigs, one of the things that you have to think about because they're omnivores is trichinosis and things along those lines, right? | ||
| One of the things that I've heard about sous vide is that you can take a pig and as long as you cook it for a certain amount of time, you could cook it at like 140 degrees and it's still like as long as you do it for enough time, it'll kill everything in there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It'll render this trichinae larvae inert. | ||
| And if you couple that with freezing below 5 degrees, you know, a couple weeks of freezing, and then you hit that temperature and, you know, there's like a gradation, you know, at 145, it's pretty quick. | ||
| And then when you get down from there, it'll take longer. | ||
| Trichinosis is a concern. | ||
| Brucellosis, pseudorabies, tularemia. | ||
| There's a lot of things that you could potentially get from a wild hog. | ||
| But almost all of those are mitigated completely by that freezing and cooking process. | ||
| Also wearing gloves while you're processing them. | ||
| And that's something that I'm very insistent on, is wearing gloves. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because when you're in contact with their reproductive and digestive organs, specifically, if you have any cuts or anything on your hands, that's when you can expose yourself to brucellosis. | ||
| And so it's just, I mean, it's an easy thing. | ||
| I mean, I have in my truck in the parking lot right now, I got boxes of gloves, you know, just in case I kill a pig on the way home. | ||
| But just always have those, and I insist that everybody else wears gloves. | ||
| Now on the butchery table, once I get all that stuff out of there, I, you know, gloves off. | ||
| But if you're concerned about that with hogs, which is a lucid concern, I'd say just like go with all the slow cooking methods where you're taking them to 190 for four hours. | ||
| So you don't have to worry about anything like that. | ||
| And the cases are very, very rare. | ||
| The last study I read, particular to Texas, is that trichinosis was very low in the feral swine herd here in Texas. | ||
| But it was higher in other places for some reason. | ||
| I have no idea why. | ||
| Yeah, but trichinosis is just one of many things you're going to have to deal with, as you're saying. | ||
| Do you prefer like a meat, like a game meat that you can cook medium rare or like an axis or something like that to pigs in terms of like what your own taste buds are or does it vary? | ||
| I've got to stay on brand for this one. | ||
| It's hogs all the way, man. | ||
| I do love axis. | ||
| I mean, in Texas, that's the king. | ||
| And Axis is like a... | ||
| Low-impact hog. | ||
| I mean, they're invasive as well and need to be controlled, but they kind of, like where they live, is in kind of the pricier parts of the state. | ||
| So it's really hard to gain access to hunt axis deer, even though they need to be controlled, although that freeze did a real good job of it. | ||
| Yeah, the freeze killed thousands of them, right? | ||
| I love axis deer. | ||
| You know, I like a very diverse freezer. | ||
| You know, I want to have some turkey in there and some pig and some whitetail and some axis and then a ton of fish. | ||
| That's really what I'm going for. | ||
| I don't really have a favorite. | ||
| I'm not trying to cop out. | ||
| But when it does come to pigs... | ||
| I do prefer slow-cooked and ground preparations anyway, normally. | ||
| In ground? | ||
| Like one of those whole pigs? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I mean like ground. | ||
| Oh, ground. | ||
| I thought you were talking about luau. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Do you ever do that? | ||
| We've done some kind of... | ||
| Ah, versions of that. | ||
| Well, I mean, we'll do stuff for a long time in Dutch ovens buried in coals. | ||
| I've never dug a pit. | ||
| I've done a lot of rotisserie hogs, like whole pigs on electric rotisseries and in the smokers, too. | ||
| One of the things you did when I went hunting with Rinella is we cooked a mule deer head. | ||
| Under the ground. | ||
| Like a barbacoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was really wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was delicious. | ||
| It tasted like smoked pork. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was really, it was interesting. | ||
| And I think he got the recipe from an old book, an old book about like mountain men and how they used to like to take mule deer heads and cook them underground. | ||
| So that's pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the head's got so much beautiful meat and if you just really cook it for a long time, but it's got to go a long time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you ever eat the brains? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I rarely will take the time to skin like a hog's head out, but I will sometimes. | ||
| There's a few recipes in the book for heads and usually don't go scooping brains out. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I've had lamb's brains before. | ||
| Have you ever had grilled lamb's brains? | ||
| I've had poached and fried lamb's brains. | ||
| And then also beef brains. | ||
| You know, sesos is a somewhat common taco. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Sesos? | ||
| Sesos. | ||
| It means brains in Spanish. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a somewhat common taco filling. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Especially further south you get. | ||
| Oh, you got to go to the legit spots. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're not getting that at... | ||
| Chipotle. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, how much of a market is there for beef brains? | ||
| I mean, somewhat. | ||
| I mean, but the beef heads move. | ||
| You know, barbacoa is a big deal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, if you've ever had, like, real deal, amazing, like, pit-cooked barbacoa, it's, I mean, it's good stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it's cheeks, right? | ||
| It's like mostly... | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| Is it jaw? | ||
| What are you eating? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If you're in a legit barbacoa place, there's going to be cuts. | ||
| You're going to have ojo. | ||
| You're going to have cachete, which is the cheek. | ||
| You're going to have lengua, the tongue. | ||
| You're going to have paleta, which is the palate on top of the mouth. | ||
| I think that's everything. | ||
| And then you can get a Mixta, which is going to be everything together. | ||
| But if you're at a really good, like, real deal, South Texas, Potawakoa place, you're going to be able to order. | ||
| And you've got to get there early in the morning because all the old guys show up and get the eyes first, if that's what you're looking for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that the thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe they struggle with vision problems. | ||
| And so they think that... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I'm projecting that. | ||
| I don't want to be held to that. | ||
| Well, also, you've got to think. | ||
| I mean, there's only two per head. | ||
| So they go quick. | ||
| Right, but I've never even heard of people eating cow's eyes other than when I was hosting Fear Factor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we fed cow eyes to people then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Sheep's eyes, lamb's eyes. | ||
| The head thing, it's not a common thing if you asked a normal person, like, do you eat an animal's head? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or even fish heads, right? | ||
| Like, cheeks. | ||
| Fish cheeks are delicious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the throats or the collars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Often thrown away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if the fish is big enough, just peel the cheek out. | ||
| I mean, it goes to something that's just like, to me, if that's a fish that you caught, It's a very interesting stance to take. | ||
| Or a dove. | ||
| Let's put it more in the context of a dove. | ||
| And then I mean the same thing. | ||
| I'll be like, I like to pluck my dove whole. | ||
| I'll take the dove and I'll pluck the entire thing. | ||
| And people are like, that takes too long. | ||
| And I'm like, how long did it take you to drive to the spot that you dove hunted? | ||
| You know, like, an hour and 15 minutes. | ||
| I'm like, each way? | ||
| And it's like, it's really notable. | ||
| It's like, this is a thing that I want to do that, I mean, I was excited about the day before opening season, and I really wanted to get out there and do that. | ||
| I want to shoot these doves. | ||
| I got my new dove belt. | ||
| I got my new gun. | ||
| I got all this stuff. | ||
| I drove, you know, two and a half hours overall. | ||
| And then I took five minutes to breast the birds out. | ||
| And then when it was suggested that I might want to pluck the entire bird, which takes about four minutes per bird, I'm like, you know, I don't got time for that shit. | ||
| I think that's a little weird to me. | ||
| We definitely put our feet down at the processing of something. | ||
| So pulling that fish cheek out is like, I don't know if I have time for that. | ||
| It's just like, man, you spent a lot of time on everything else in there. | ||
| And it's just for some reason we view the processing of animals in a real negative or as like a chore. | ||
| You know, like, oh, I got to do this. | ||
| I'm not saying everybody, but specifically to dove hunters, they're just like, I'm not doing that. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| It's totally worth it. | ||
| I mean, you can eat two doves as a meal per person. | ||
| I mean, cooked right and served with a few other things, you know, versus, you know, eight dove breasts, you know, and it's like you can really stretch them a lot. | ||
| And there's a lot of meat, a lot of meat on the legs, but you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, relatively. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's something. | |
| A couple bites. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's something. | |
| And the little hearts, the little lizards. | ||
| Not lizards, livers and gizzards in there. | ||
| Totally worth it to me. | ||
| And I don't think it takes that much longer, but it speaks a lot to the amount of time that we value and to that part of the process. | ||
| And we'll sit in the stand for five hours, but, you know, like cleaning up the call fat off that deer is, you know, five minutes we just don't have anymore. | ||
| Eating doves, for a lot of people, just saying dove hunting, there's a lot of people that don't hunt that are listening to this right now. | ||
| They're like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I don't know if they've made it this far. | ||
| They probably have because up until now it's been like acceptable hunting. | ||
| But now you're talking about the bird of peace. | ||
| That doesn't seem to a lot of folks to be food. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's probably the one animal. | ||
| It's probably hunted more than any other bird in this country, right? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I don't know the stats on that. | ||
| I do know. | ||
| Oh, I bet more people dove hunt than duck hunt. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the biggest outdoor event that happens in Texas. | ||
| It'll be September 1st. | ||
| I mean, if you've ever been – just get outside of a suburb in any town in Texas on September 1st at around 4 in the afternoon. | ||
| And if you don't know what's happening, which is pretty hilarious because this happens every year, you'll think that it's World War III because it's just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's opening day of dove season? | ||
| Yeah, it's an event. | ||
| It's a huge cultural event. | ||
| It has a lot of weight. | ||
| It's like the kickoff for hunting season. | ||
| There's people that I won't see all year, and then I'll see them for opening day if I get an invite to be a guest at that field. | ||
| But for me, dove hunting is... | ||
| It's very casual in that you don't need a lot of equipment or time, but I highly value the food from that. | ||
| If I go out with a friend and we manage to get eight doves, if we're clever about it, we're both going to feed our families for at least one meal off of that. | ||
| Even if you slow cook them and peel all the meat off and make some flautas or... | ||
| Or manicotti or something like that out of that mean. | ||
| You can totally stretch that. | ||
| What's a dove similar to in taste? | ||
| Quail? | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a little more, has a little stronger flavor than quail, but I think they're very, very good. | ||
| It tastes just like a really profoundly birdy in a way. | ||
| Profoundly birdy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that okay? | ||
| I'm trying to figure out what that means. | ||
| Profoundly birdy. | ||
| Chickeny. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we're dancing around the chicken. | ||
| Like a chicken thigh times six. | ||
| But with a different richness to it, right? | ||
| Definitely a different texture. | ||
| I mean, you want to eat the breasts. | ||
| You can eat them medium rare, just like you would any... | ||
| I want to hunt sandhill cranes, because I can't believe what those things look like when you cook a breast, that it literally looks like a beefsteak. | ||
| Yeah, dinosaurs. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it's red meat. | ||
| Very, very. | ||
| And probably one of the more beefy-flavored birds, and that's also... | ||
| Ribeye in the sky, right? | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't taste anything like a ribeye. | ||
| Why do they call it that? | ||
| Because it rhymes! | ||
| I mean, you know, and also just make sure we're differentiating. | ||
| We're not talking about whooping cranes here. | ||
| You know, you've got to be very clear on that because there is a mode of response that people will have about sandhills. | ||
| And it's also pretty interesting, too, that as migration patterns change with geese, particularly in mostly eastern and coastal Texas, Where goose hunting used to be huge. | ||
| There's a town in Texas, Eagle Lake, is the goose hunting capital of the world. | ||
| It's where Andy Griffith used to go, you know, and shoot like 50 snow geese, you know. | ||
| And they don't come down here so much anymore. | ||
| I mean, it's just like the populations are kind of hanging up north of us now. | ||
| And as that's happened, what you've seen is a proliferation of sandhill cranes coming down. | ||
| And they will devastate some agricultural fields as well. | ||
| And so the hunting for those has increased a lot. | ||
| They're very beautiful birds, too. | ||
| You see what they look like? | ||
| Sandhill crane? | ||
| Very large. | ||
| They hunt them a lot in the panhandle and also towards the coast. | ||
| And they're very good. | ||
| They're very good to eat. | ||
| Very beefy, you know, and very approachable. | ||
| Oh, that looks like a dinosaur. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that freaky head. | ||
| Wow, what a weird-looking bird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's very sustainable numbers of them, too. | ||
| How crazy is it that that thing gives off a red meat that literally looks like a steak? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, look at that. | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| I mean, it's insane. | ||
| I mean, I would never have imagined. | ||
| I'd say, well, it's maybe a deer or something like that. | ||
| If you said, no, that's a crane, I'd say that you're out of your mind. | ||
| Somebody lied to you. | ||
| How weird is that? | ||
| Is there any other bird that has that rich red of flesh? | ||
| Oh, a goose. | ||
| Goose does too? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like that? | ||
| I mean, even wild ducks, I mean, are approaching that. | ||
| It definitely has a richness to it, a little bit more than duck, but, you know, depending on the species and what a duck's eating. | ||
| And what does sandhill crane taste like? | ||
| Like I said, it's beefy. | ||
| It has a very... | ||
| But it doesn't taste like a ribeye? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, approachable. | ||
| I would say like mild, probably leaning more towards mild venison than a bird. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Would be my best guess at describing it. | ||
| It's funny because a turkey you would think would be just as dinosaur-y as that, but you shoot them, it looks like a turkey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the breast meat on that is as white as a chicken breast in the store. | ||
| And just a couple notches up in flavor from there. | ||
| I mean, it's got some really good flavor, but very mild, I think. | ||
| Yeah, I think so, too. | ||
| Do you cook turkeys in peanut oil? | ||
| Do you ever do that? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Like deep-fried turkey in peanut oil? | ||
| The whole thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| You act like you've never heard of this before. | ||
| Oh, you mean like- Have you heard of that before? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're frying a whole turkey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we're not necessarily talking about a wild turkey. | ||
| Well, I did it with a wild turkey. | ||
| Oh, how was it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was really good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I've done it- Fried turkey. | ||
| I always did it with turkeys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I took half of it and I did it on a Traeger and then I took the other half and I did it in the deep fryer. | ||
| They were both really good. | ||
| The legs came out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That would be my fear in frying a wild turkey, because in my experience, those legs need a long time. | ||
| And sometimes they don't break down, even compared to a domestic turkey. | ||
| I mean, frying a domestic turkey, sure. | ||
| I mean, it's huge. | ||
| Brine it, fry it. | ||
| But no, most of the time, turkeys pound the breasts, make little cutlets out of those. | ||
| I'll make a lot of sausage with the breast. | ||
| But like real mild sausages, like not just anything, but, you know, like a really light, delicately spiced sausage, like a Boudin Blanc or something out of Turkey where it really shines. | ||
| You know what I saw that people are doing that's really kind of interesting? | ||
| I got into a rabbit hole the other day where I was Googling something and I started watching videos about people hunting iguanas in Florida. | ||
| So apparently like with fishing bows, like bow fishing setups, Mm-hmm. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| With like sort of a brown teriyaki or some kind of sauce and shallots and I was watching these guys cook this and I was like, that is fascinating. | ||
| And apparently it tastes really good. | ||
| And if you cook them well, you know what you're doing and it's got a very distinct kind of almost chickeny flavor to it but with just a little bit of extra robustness. | ||
| Have you ever seen that episode? | ||
| I don't know where Bourdain was, but he ate an iguana. | ||
| And he will not stop going off about how disgusting it is. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's just highly entertaining, you know, because his ability to eat things was pretty profound. | ||
| But he hated it, and he makes a really big deal out of it. | ||
| It's fun watching, to watch him talk about iguana. | ||
| That's weird because these people in these YouTube videos seem to be enjoying it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially this one guy that made it in this Asian dish over rice. | ||
| He made wings, essentially. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like some sort of a Chinese chicken wing dish. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely try it. | ||
| And there's a million of them down there. | ||
| Dude, some of them are so big. | ||
| This lady, there's this one lady that I follow on YouTube, and she's shooting these iguanas that are five feet long. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| They're so big. | ||
| She's holding this thing up, and it's like a small dog. | ||
| This is crazy how big a fucking iguana is. | ||
| They're really big sometimes. | ||
| These people that live by canals, in particular, they're all around their lawns, just destroying... | ||
| If they have a garden, they destroy everything in the garden, eat all the plants, eat all the food, and they're these big-ass, weird, fucking invasive lizards. | ||
| Like, yeah. | ||
| Here's some people that catch them like... | ||
| Yeah, pull it, like, where she shows the one she whacked. | ||
| Look at the size of that fucking thing! | ||
| And, you know, you really own, I don't know if there's any back meat or whatever, but they're mostly, I think, just eating the legs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's become a thing now, because they're trying to kill them, because they're all over the place in Florida, apparently. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah, like, I mean, pythons, iguans. | ||
| Well, that's the thing they have to do, right? | ||
| Make pythons profitable. | ||
| I know they're trying to eat pythons. | ||
| They're trying to figure out whether or not pythons are, like, good to eat. | ||
| Have you ever heard of people eating a python? | ||
| What about rattlesnake? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| You like rattlesnake? | ||
| Yeah, it's fine. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's not preferred? | ||
| Yeah, it's not something I'm going to go out of my way to kill. | ||
| I mean, personally, I have a little bit of a pact with them. | ||
| It's like, I don't bite them, they don't bite me. | ||
| But I will definitely, if somebody cooks a rattlesnake, I'll eat it. | ||
| What about bear? | ||
| You know, it's nothing I've ever had. | ||
| See, I haven't traveled. | ||
| You've never had bear? | ||
| No. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
| I have not traveled to hunt, nor do I really... | ||
| It's not very appealing to me, but... | ||
| To hunt a bear or to travel to hunt? | ||
| Both. | ||
| Well, I mean, no, no, no. | ||
| I would eat bear all day long if you served it to me. | ||
| But I don't mean to derail your question about bear, but no, I mean, I'd have to go somewhere to hunt bears. | ||
| And I'm really like, I like to hunt here. | ||
| This is like my zone. | ||
| So like if, I mean, I'm going to Utah to help, I've been brought up there to butcher an elk. | ||
| And they're like, do you want to shoot an elk? | ||
| And I was like, I'm good. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they live in Utah and not in Texas? | ||
| Yeah, it's not mine. | ||
| You're very specific. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, also, it's real big, and I would rather hunt three or four whitetails versus that one elk, and that's somebody else's elk. | ||
| But yet you do like to hunt neil guy, which is elk-sized. | ||
| No. | ||
| Actually, I like to go on neil guy hunts. | ||
| Oh, you don't like to hunt them personally? | ||
| I'd probably decline shooting a Noga. | ||
| I might shoot a little one. | ||
| But really, I would go with someone and happily process it and hang out with them and everything. | ||
| I don't want to pull the trigger on it. | ||
| How come? | ||
| I like to manage my freezer very specifically. | ||
| I like whitetails and hogs and turkeys and all the things. | ||
| I like to hunt as close to my house as possible. | ||
| Not out of laziness, but out of this like... | ||
| I get this sense of locality and how that's my animal right there. | ||
| I know a guy's invasive, but it's also, like I said, it's so big. | ||
| That it would just, it would fill my freezer and then I'd be done. | ||
| Like I stop when I'm done. | ||
| Like I don't keep going. | ||
| Like if I'm, if I've, once I've hit, you know, that number of deer that I think I need for the year, I'm done. | ||
| I know that I can come back to hogs and kind of fill in if there's an emergency. | ||
| I don't, I haven't bought meat in 12 years or something. | ||
| But a nil guy is just so big. | ||
| That I usually would pass. | ||
| I mean, I could probably be talked into it, but I really would rather go with somebody that was doing it and help with the whole processing side of it. | ||
| But you do enjoy the meat. | ||
| You were raving about how delicious they are. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But I don't personally feel like I need to fill up my freezer with just that one animal. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| And you enjoy the hunting as well. | ||
| For deer and pigs. | ||
| And just kind of very specific numbers of all these animals that I know to get me through the year. | ||
| Is there anything connected to it that's unsavory because of the fact that they're exotic? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| They're imported here? | ||
| No, I mean, so is a hog. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But a long fucking time ago. | ||
| You can find a receipt on the Neil guy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, we're coming up right at 100 years on Neil guy. | ||
| That's when they were introduced? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I have no problem with that. | ||
| And we serve them widely in the restaurant because of those qualities. | ||
| Because they are... | ||
| First off, they're invasives. | ||
| They don't like corn. | ||
| So even if there is a corn feeder around there spitting out GMO corn, they're going to avoid it. | ||
| And their feed is so natural, which is why we really like to serve those in the restaurant the most. | ||
| Because highly renewable resource right there. | ||
| One animal, you know, is a ton of meat. | ||
| And there's just a lot of really good qualities about the nilgai, about eating nilgai. | ||
| But pulling the trigger on one? | ||
| Probably pass. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| And do you like it because, like, also that deer and hogs and turkeys and stuff like this is kind of traditional Texas hunting fair? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| And then, yeah, not to just come back to the size constantly, but that is a thing. | ||
| And I really enjoy hunting whitetail and hunting hogs and hunting turkeys and things like that. | ||
| Yeah, maybe it is more of a traditional. | ||
| What is Neil Guy similar to in taste? | ||
| I would say... | ||
| Elk... | ||
| Venice... | ||
| It's a little milder than most whitetail. | ||
| And... | ||
| But it's almost a tenderness issue, too, because for some reason that animal is just very tender. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Like even an older one. | ||
| That's crazy because it's so rough looking. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the meat is very dark texturally. | ||
| Pull up a photo of a Neil guy just so people can see how— Yeah, nobody ever believes it. | ||
| They're like, oh, they're blue. | ||
| And they're like, they're not blue. | ||
| I'm like, they're blue. | ||
| It's really crazy. | ||
| They're a wild-looking thing with the horns, too. | ||
| They have crazy horns. | ||
| Wait till you see them run. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Just the way they just kind of lope along. | ||
| And it looks like it's slow, but it's very fast. | ||
| I mean, they're really fast animals. | ||
| What a weird-looking animal. | ||
| Weird-looking animal. | ||
| So unique. | ||
| And they're from Asia? | ||
| Is that where they're from? | ||
| India. | ||
| India. | ||
| And so when you're looking at an animal like that... | ||
| Everything looks off. | ||
| Like, the head looks too small for the body. | ||
| It doesn't look like the horns fit. | ||
| Like, it looks like a fake animal. | ||
| It looks like some animal in some weird novel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think the Latin name is, like, Bocephus something. | |
| Look at that one in the left corner there, Jamie. | ||
| That thing is blue as fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look how crazy blue that is. | ||
| Blue bulls. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| They're very cool. | ||
| Do the females have antlers, too? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or horns, I guess? | ||
| These are horns. | ||
| So they don't fall. | ||
| So it's a kind of antelope, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| That looks fake. | ||
| That looks like someone took a cow and they made some crazy CGI rest of the body. | ||
| Interesting animal. | ||
| Now, one of the things that I noticed when you guys did that hunt down in South Texas with Rinella on the meat eater show for Neil Guy is you wanted the meat to hang overnight and get a crust on it. | ||
| What is that about? | ||
| Well, just to dry out a little bit. | ||
| And we hit a real... | ||
| Because usually down there it's warm. | ||
| Even in December, it can get pretty warm. | ||
| And we got a random nice cold front where it dropped into the 40s that night. | ||
| And I just wanted it to be dry to the touch. | ||
| Not necessarily a deep dry aging crust on it, but just a little bit. | ||
| I wanted it to be dry to the touch. | ||
| It goes back to what I was talking about earlier with keeping them cold in the coolers. | ||
| Cold and dry. | ||
| That's just the two best things I can think of for Getting an animal from carcass to butchering and start cutting on it as I want it to be very cold and very dry. | ||
| And so we left it out. | ||
| It was hanging. | ||
| It was in the 40s that night. | ||
| Now, it would have been optimal to have let it hang for, I mean, a few days at a nice temperature, but we just didn't have it, which is, I mean, commonplace when you're processing animals. | ||
| You've got to deal with whatever you've got, the situation. | ||
| And so we'd let it go overnight, and then we started cutting the next day. | ||
| And when it has that crust on it, that sort of dry outer crust, what is going on with that? | ||
| You can't eat that once it has that, right? | ||
| You have to cut that off? | ||
| It depends on the extent that it's gotten to. | ||
| When you vax seal that, it'll usually go away. | ||
| It'll rehydrate. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you have that... | ||
| If it's not too bad. | ||
| I mean, like, if you've got a couple days where it's, like, hard and black, just overnight, once that vax sealed... | ||
| I mean, funny, those guys, the meat-eater guys... | ||
| We literally can't enjoy eating meat more than those guys. | ||
| We spent hours just frantically vac-sealing stuff so that every member on that crew could pack two soft Yeti coolers full of all the meat and fish that they could possibly carry. | ||
| And it wasn't like, I imagine on another show, they're like, I can't wait to get that buck home. | ||
| Cut! | ||
| And they're like, I don't care. | ||
| Do whatever you want with it. | ||
| But those guys are like... | ||
| We're taking all of this home. | ||
| When we were fishing, the guy's like, this one? | ||
| And the producer's like, kill it. | ||
| Kill it. | ||
| I'm like, wow, guys! | ||
| They are legitimately into eating that. | ||
| And so, yeah, when we were backsealing all that, we were cutting it into just big pieces and preserving it. | ||
| But it's fine. | ||
| It will rehydrate a little bit. | ||
| Now, if you've got a dry, aging crust on it from a few days... | ||
| You're probably going to need to trim it off, but you'll know. | ||
| But like I said, once it vac seals, it tends to rehydrate a little bit. | ||
| The attitude that those guys have on that crew is directly related to the trickle-down effect from Rinella. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| They're into it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's established a real good sort of ideal and an ethic for that community. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their crews are amazing. | ||
| They're so fun. | ||
| It's a fun show to do. | ||
| And it's also one of the things that I love about that show and particularly loved about, well really both episodes you did down there, the fishing one and the hunting one, is you cook afterwards. | ||
| And the fishing one, man, God, those fish look delicious. | ||
| And we had such an incredible variety of fish that night. | ||
| I had never – when we were gigging, I've never seen a pompano and come into the bay like that. | ||
| I mean I had to do like a legality check real quick. | ||
| I mean it was like pompano and I'm like, well – and he's like, yes, stab. | ||
| I mean, it was so out of character for those to be in there, but to catch pompano, trout, flounder... | ||
| Is there certain fish that you're not allowed to spear? | ||
| Yeah, game fish. | ||
| Right, like a bass. | ||
| Like you can't go spear a bass. | ||
| Or a redfish. | ||
| Like if you're in the bay and you see a red go by, hands off. | ||
| But we can catch them on rod and reel. | ||
| How odd is that? | ||
| It's super complicated. | ||
| You get into redfish politics in Texas. | ||
| It's a good thing. | ||
| Don't spear the redfish. | ||
| Let them go. | ||
| It's too easy to spear? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think it is a very valuable game fish. | ||
| The sustainability of their populations is paramount. | ||
| There's been problems in the past with overfishing of redfish specifically. | ||
| And their designation as a game fish came at great political cost. | ||
| In the 1980s, Paul Prudhomme, who was a famous New Orleans chef, he started blackening redfish. | ||
| And at the time, food trends could really take hold. | ||
| And this one did. | ||
| And every restaurant in the country started blackening redfish. | ||
| And the market for it skyrocketed. | ||
| And they started catching breeding-sized female redfish in these huge nets. | ||
| And within a couple years, the population was getting decimated. | ||
| And so conservation organizations came in, notably CCA, which is the Coastal Conservation Association, came in and got them designated as a game fish. | ||
| And at that point, you're not going to be able to stab them anymore. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| They're a very important fish down there. | ||
| So you can't just net them either? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, you can't commercially fish them at all in Texas anymore, which is really interesting. | ||
| Or serve a wild-caught redfish in Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| So when you buy redfish in Texas, what are you buying? | ||
| Farm-raised. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And how do they do that? | ||
| Do they do it in the ocean, like pens? | ||
| No. | ||
| Towards the coast, there's a lot of redfish farms down there. | ||
| They just have a giant swimming pool? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So redfish survive really well in brackish and freshwater. | ||
| So there's lakes around San Antonio that have redfish in them. | ||
| Calaveras and Brawnic. | ||
| They live in completely fresh water and thrive. | ||
| Yeah, they're real hardy. | ||
| They can live in anything. | ||
| And so they are raised on big fish farms. | ||
| They took a hell of a hit in the freeze, those farms did. | ||
| So from what I've heard, it's really hard to get farm-raised fish here. | ||
| And my understanding is that if you have a wild-caught redfish on your menu here, that's not legal. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And isn't that the fish you're using for fish and chips? | ||
| Black drum. | ||
| Black drum. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So kind of a cousin, a red drum and a black drum. | ||
| And black drum is a huge commercial fishery here. | ||
| Interestingly, they catch them on trot lines. | ||
| So you're familiar with the trot line, which is one line with many hooks, probably 100 hooks hanging off of it. | ||
| And they typically will bait the hook with a little piece of wood that's been soaked in fish oil. | ||
| And I just put that on the hook and then they catch black drum on that. | ||
| Why a little piece of wood? | ||
| Because it's not dirty bait. | ||
| They don't have to, you know, have a bunch of cut fish or whatever, shrimp or whatever it is that they would need to bait that line with. | ||
| But instead they can just go through and have a little dowel with a hole in it and just bait all their eggs with that. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So they just smell it. | ||
| Yeah, they have little barbels on there which indicates that they're using scent mostly. | ||
| So that's a highly sustainable wild commercial fishery. | ||
| It is as of now. | ||
| So we buy a lot of black drum because it's a good market fish. | ||
| And do you prefer that for fish and chips? | ||
| Do you like doing that because it's a Texas fish? | ||
| Yes, I do prefer it for fish and chips. | ||
| I like the texture on that. | ||
| Your fish and chips is off the charts, man. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| So good. | ||
| Well, everything in your restaurant is great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| But I've been having an itch for your fish and chips. | ||
| Fried fish to me is like, I mean, you know... | ||
| Somebody asked me, like, fishing or hunting? | ||
| I'm like, I'd be lying if I said hunting. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I like eating fish a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But also, right around fall, when it starts to get cool, you'd probably ask me that question. | ||
| I'd be like, let's go hunting. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| There's something about fish and chips, though. | ||
| Whoever figured that out? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The batter, the fact that, you know, the fish stays kind of tender because the batter is really kind of protecting it, right? | ||
| Steaming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Steaming in there. | ||
| It's a... | ||
| It's a tricky thing to get, too. | ||
| I mean, making really good fish and chips is hard, and I hope that we get it right all the time, because it's a hard balance to achieve with the lightness of the batter and being super crispy and that fish being cooked really nicely. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, that's a British deal, as far as I know. | ||
| It seems like it. | ||
| I mean, they're always talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, fried fish in general, to me, is kind of just, I probably eat too much of it. | ||
| Fish and chips is one of those things, too, where it seems quite simple, right? | ||
| Like you're just battering fish and then deep frying it. | ||
| But man, there's just a wide range of quality and result when it comes to fish and chip. | ||
| And then the sauce, like what are you dipping it in? | ||
| Are you using tartar sauce? | ||
| Are you using something novel? | ||
| Like what are you doing? | ||
| I like, well, any kind of mayonnaise-based sauce that's got something piquant in there, like a pickle. | ||
| We do a pickled pepper. | ||
| We get a lot of these little cherry bomb peppers, which are like round, spicy peppers, and we pickle those. | ||
| Instead of your traditional cucumber pickle, which would be chopped and put into a tartar sauce or capers or anything like that, we put that pickled cherry bomb pepper. | ||
| So it's got a little spice, a little heat. | ||
| Yeah, but still that acid and that crunch, and it's still mayonnaise-based, which is, you know, fried fish and mayonnaise. | ||
| And are you using locally sourced potatoes when you're doing the chips? | ||
| You know, that's a great question. | ||
| You know, as of pre-COVID, I can honestly say that 100% of our products, out of our vegetables, meat, dairy, things like that, I mean, almost everything was sourced locally. | ||
| Once we got into COVID and had to—I mean, there's really boring reasons behind it, but, you know, like, we needed some consistency and we needed some comforting foods because people were like—they really wanted mashed—for the first three months, it was like mashed potatoes and french fries. | ||
| And we made a shift, a conscientious shift to organic potatoes that aren't necessarily from Texas. | ||
| And it was the first time in the life of the business that we had purposely sourced from outside of Texas. | ||
| And I think we're going to continue it. | ||
| You know, I'm really strict about the organic because potatoes can be like little chemical bombs. | ||
| But, you know, in season we buy a lot of potatoes. | ||
| And then we're in season right now. | ||
| Potatoes are in season. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, yeah, a little divulge something on this. | ||
| Is there a particular place, is it like Idaho or whatever, where you get the best potatoes? | ||
| A lot of the organic growing happens in Colorado. | ||
| Colorado? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And do potatoes taste different when they come from different parts of the country? | ||
| Not a russet, in my experience. | ||
| It's all the same. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of sugar content. | ||
| And consistent russets are just real easy potatoes to cook. | ||
| What do you think about sweet potato chips? | ||
| I love them, personally. | ||
| I love sweet potatoes. | ||
| Do you ever do it that way? | ||
| Like make potato, like french fries, like fish and chip style steak fries? | ||
| Not for that dish, but we have done lots of fried sweet potatoes, lots of thin cut chips. | ||
| We do a lot of raw venison with sweet potato chips because I love sweet potatoes and venison together. | ||
| And a crispy sweet potato is a really good vehicle for like some venison tartare or venison ceviche or parisa or anything like that, like raw venison. | ||
| Because I love sweet potatoes and game in general. | ||
| And what do you prefer to, like, if you're gonna make potato chips or fries, what do you prefer? | ||
| Do you prefer, like, duck fat or what kind of fat do you like to cook them in? | ||
| Well, I mean, we have a fryer now, and, like, using animal fats in the fryer is not a possible thing anymore. | ||
| We used to fry stovetop in pure beef fat, and it was tough to manage that in a big Dutch oven, just rolling with beef fat. | ||
| It's dangerous, very dangerous. | ||
| But, I mean, my preference would probably be, I love beef fat for frying. | ||
| Of course I love lard. | ||
| I like the neutrality of it. | ||
| But getting, like, duck fat in that volume is, you know, whenever I see, like, duck fat fries, I'm like, ah. | ||
| How are you doing that? | ||
| That's a lot of duck fat. | ||
| Maybe they're doing one blanch in duck fat and then coming back and finishing them in a peanut oil or a canola oil. | ||
| Is it just because it's hard to find that kind of volume of duck fat? | ||
| That's a lot of duck fat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you say that you have a fryer, are you using canola oil? | ||
| We use a non-GMO canola oil. | ||
| And that's another big step that we took, you know, in that the viability of the restaurant kind of came down to... | ||
| We'd made so many very strict choices over the years, and then we... | ||
| We're like, we need crispy things for the people, you know? | ||
| And it's like, people like fried foods. | ||
| And we weren't, it was very difficult to manage that in a pot, you know, for a busy ass restaurant. | ||
| And so we finally, and that's funny, you've totally like nailed me on like these two changes, these two minor changes that we made at the restaurant. | ||
| I'm really, I'm so happy to like talk about it though, because it's like, if there's anything about our restaurant, it's like transparency. | ||
| And it's like, but those are two things that we have definitely become flexible on over the years because of just like the dining public. | ||
| You know, they love french fries. | ||
| And then to have a whole fryer full of locally sourced beef fat, not viable, not to mention outrageously expensive to get all that beef fat. | ||
| And so we finally went with a fryer and then started sourcing organic potatoes. | ||
| Did it make a difference in the taste? | ||
| It's just neutral. | ||
| Texturally, it can make some differences. | ||
| We used to fry our donuts in beef fat, and I think that those could be a little... | ||
| Sometimes you'd get a little chapsticky. | ||
| They'd be like... | ||
| I mean, they were good. | ||
| Damn, that sounds good. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I mean, our inlard is excellent. | ||
| And I think your body recognizes those fats so much better. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I'm not particularly excited about using canola oil at all. | ||
| And there's no other options that are viable for your... | ||
| No, I mean, not cost-wise. | ||
| Rather, I mean, because if it broke it down into the price of an order of fries, it would just, I mean, it would be, you know, it was $9, you know. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I mean, it would be astronomical. | ||
| It's food, like the prices around foods are just, are like so unknown to the public. | ||
| And we still, I mean, our sourcing is so good. | ||
| But, you know, we had to make that concession almost to be like, well, we need a fryer because we do fried chicken. | ||
| And as volumes were going up, it's just like we just can't handle this pot and this poor guy over here just like trying to manage the flame under it. | ||
| Dangerous. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| We were so lucky nobody ever got burnt. | ||
| Or there was never a fire. | ||
| Yeah, because you overheat it. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're just using a gas burner, too, so it's not like you can regulate it. | ||
| For years. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Like six years, you know, it's just a big old Dutch oven full of rendered beef fat, you know, and chicken just ripping in there. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And how do you, like, when you have a cook, like if someone, if you hire someone as a cook, like how much experience does that person have to have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you try to train people? | ||
| Do you want them to have a certain amount of previous restaurant experience as a cook or as a line chef or something like that? | ||
| It's really beneficial, of course, for people to have experience. | ||
| But at the same time, I do have kind of a soft spot for people that don't have a lot of experience and have really good attitudes. | ||
| I mean, there's something really great about that. | ||
| Because our restaurant's not flashy, and it's definitely not the cool place to work anymore. | ||
| So we need somebody with that old mentality to walk in and be like, I do want to just cook pork chops over a burning fire all day long. | ||
| That's not the cool place to work. | ||
| I would think that if I was a kid who wanted to learn how to cook or I was someone who wanted to get into, you know, cooking and being a chef someday, I would gravitate towards your place immediately. | ||
| I think it's a... | ||
| Sure place to cook. | ||
| Maybe I'm not choosing that word wisely, but you come there to learn very simple methods. | ||
| But if you can't perfectly cook that pork chop, then you don't really need to move on to the next thing, like tweezing microgreens onto a foam or whatever. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Which is not our style. | ||
| That fussy shit, that doesn't do anything to me. | ||
| There's a place for it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It's kind of cool. | ||
| But it's like, if I had to choose between a really well-cooked piece of meat and some potatoes and some vegetables versus that, I would take the really well-cooked piece of meat every time. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| But I mean, obviously. | ||
| But, you know, maybe a young cook doesn't see it the same way. | ||
| And that has to be something that they're into, you know, and coming and knowing the story behind all the food and being like, you know, don't throw out those beet greens. | ||
| We need those bad, you know, or this is how you have to treat these tomatoes. | ||
| They need to be sorted through daily, if not twice daily. | ||
| To pick out all the ripe ones. | ||
| And, you know, like, you know, why is Jesse so excited? | ||
| He's like, oh, the fucking blueberries are here, you know, for the first time. | ||
| So it's like the little things like that. | ||
| Or like, you know, why don't we have lemons in our iced tea? | ||
| It's because it's just not that time of year. | ||
| Yeah, you're all about what's in season and what's available right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how often are you changing your menu? | ||
| We used to change it a lot more. | ||
| And these days we're trying to really like to kind of control waste more. | ||
| We're just trying to lock in a menu for about a month at a time. | ||
| And as this great thing that has happened simultaneously as the business has grown is that the producers grow too. | ||
| Like they've been scaling up. | ||
| They've been learning distribution. | ||
| And more importantly, you've seen farmers just get so smart, you know, with how they plant and how they rotate. | ||
| And so in the past, when you'd plan on seeing green beans, maybe in mid-June, now we see them in early May, because people are planting a different variety. | ||
| And so what that enables us to do is have a dish with green beans on it for maybe two months. | ||
| And it's a more competitive market has created these markets for farmers. | ||
| It's been great, it's like, "Oh, well, if I want to go to the farmer's market and really I need to have all this stuff. | ||
| It needs to look really good and I need to have some consistency to it too. | ||
| I need all the radishes to be vaguely the same size. | ||
| And so you start to see the whole system kind of step up and scale. | ||
| And it's really exciting because you've got, you've had, you know, 10 years ago, very high quality organically grown food coming in. | ||
| And now you just have a lot more of it. | ||
| You know, a lot more times of year, too. | ||
| And it's a very exciting time, and the distribution's better. | ||
| Like, we don't have to go out and get all that stuff anymore. | ||
| They bring it to us. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| Is it difficult to get relationships with ranchers and just, like, find the right people to work with? | ||
| I mean, no. | ||
| We're locked in. | ||
| You know, we've been using our chicken farmer, our pork farmer, and cattle, I mean, our beef provider, for years. | ||
| I mean, we're not changing anything. | ||
| It's just like, those are the people we deal with. | ||
| And I mean, through better or worse, we have to raise our prices. | ||
| I'm like, it's cool. | ||
| It's worth it to me because of mutual loyalties. | ||
| And I think that a lot of the food system exists on those relationships. | ||
| And so we've been getting our chickens from the same lady for so long. | ||
| Like, you know, every Wednesday, you know, Jane shows up. | ||
| And I'm like, what's up, Jane? | ||
| And she just brings us our chickens. | ||
| And they're all perfect and best chicken you've ever had. | ||
| And is she a free-range lady? | ||
| Does she other chickens wander around? | ||
| Rotational pasturing. | ||
| Like Joel Salatin style? | ||
| Yeah, but they don't range anything behind it like Salatin. | ||
| It's just chickens, but they're moving everything around. | ||
| It's very high quality. | ||
| We can also get a very young bird at a specific size. | ||
| So, you know, we're looking at, like, around two pounds, maybe a little bit, two and a quarter per bird, so relatively small chickens. | ||
| And so she's able to do that. | ||
| And, yeah, it's a very good quality. | ||
| The processing is very good. | ||
| You know, she knows how to rotate that pasture, and then she also knows how to process that bird, chill it, and transport it, everything. | ||
| Now what is the deal with wild game in Texas in terms of whether or not you could, is it only invasives that you can sell on menus? | ||
| Is that how it works? | ||
| So there's going to be two categories with that. | ||
| One is going to be non-game, you know, antelope and deer, and the other one's going to be feral swine. | ||
| When you say non-game, it's just because it's invasive. | ||
| It's not listed as a game animal, which means that, simply put, it's not a white-tailed deer. | ||
| It's just not native to Texas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So anything that's been exotic, that's been imported here, and interestingly enough, that also applies to elk, right? | ||
| Like elk is thought of almost as an invasive, which is weird because it used to be native. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| Well, any elk that's here now has been brought in. | ||
| And so, ostensibly, it's just been purchased as a livestock. | ||
| And that's what it is. | ||
| So, anything but whitetail. | ||
| And so, those fall in a very low, I don't want to say unregulated, but less regulated level than feral hogs do. | ||
| And so that's why your company like Broken Arrow Ranch is out there field harvesting, electro-stimulating, and then bringing that stuff to us. | ||
| Otherwise, we can get that stuff that's been trapped, you know, in a trap and then loaded onto a trailer and processed at a slaughtering facility. | ||
| We've had elk before. | ||
| Maybe some ranch is trying to cull out some of the elk that they brought in for hunting. | ||
| I see that as a byproduct, an animal that's been eating a wild diet. | ||
| And so I'm like, yeah, we can bring that in. | ||
| And then as far as the hogs go, those are trapped live. | ||
| And brought in. | ||
| So there's trappers that are working with the processor that we use. | ||
| And so they'll go out and they'll trap the pigs and then they will bring those in and they get what's called an anti-mortem inspection. | ||
| So there's a state inspector. | ||
| It can be either state or federal. | ||
| It can be USDA or a state. | ||
| If it's not crossing state lines, it can be state. | ||
| And so we use a state inspector. | ||
| Our processor does, rather. | ||
| That animal looks healthy. | ||
| Great. | ||
| They're slaughtered, processed, and then he takes another look at them and then they get a blue stamp on them and they're good to go. | ||
| And they're feral swine and they're treated basically the same as a domestic pig. | ||
| I mean, they get a little more scrutiny on them because they're wild. | ||
| He's checking livers and kidneys and stuff like that on the carcass. | ||
| And when they trap them, how do they keep that effect that you were talking about when that one hog got caught in the loop, whatever they call it? | ||
| The snare? | ||
| How do they keep the hogs from freaking out? | ||
| Yeah, that's a really good question. | ||
| So they do freak out. | ||
| But the best way I can describe it, and we'll never really know... | ||
| Because we don't experience a lot of that flavor, you know, that off-putting, like, gaminess from the trapped pigs. | ||
| And I've discussed this with our processor. | ||
| What we think is that there's a spike in stress and then kind of a plateau. | ||
| Now, they're going to be stressed, but that initial stress is probably like an adrenaline rush. | ||
| And I'm totally speaking out of my ass right now. | ||
| But this is what we perceive it to be because the feral hog meat that we get in is never gamey like that experience I had with the snared pig or have randomly experienced with other hogs. | ||
| And so we think that it plateaus because they're kept in captivity for maybe a couple days, you know, at the facility, and then they're run through. | ||
| But so, I mean, there is a high degree of stress. | ||
| And it also begs the question, it was like, you know, like, one of our things is the stress on animals, you know, and then when you have a wild animal, the stress is out of control. | ||
| So at that point, we are tacitly making a decision between eating the invasive in the only legal way that we have or not. | ||
| And what we have to take with that is the stress on that trapped animal. | ||
| And it's not something that I like and it would be something that I would like to be addressed. | ||
| But at this point, it's like… We have to deal with a certain system with hogs because the oversight on them is fairly strenuous because they are more likely to carry diseases than that elk or that Psyche deer. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when they capture them and they keep them for several days, what are they doing during those several days? | ||
| They're running tests on them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| They're just feeding them? | ||
| They're just feeding them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Until it's their time. | ||
| And then when it's their time, then they examine them? | ||
| It's not an examination. | ||
| It's a visual check. | ||
| It's like they're standing. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure they have. | ||
| I mean, if it's obviously sick or injured or something, they're probably going to condemn it. | ||
| But why are they capturing it and then holding them for a few days and feeding them? | ||
| It's mostly going to have to do with slaughtering schedules. | ||
| Like, I mean, most of these small places that are willing to do it are running on a pretty strict, like Tuesdays. | ||
| Trapper brings them in on Friday. | ||
| They got to stay there till Tuesday when it's time. | ||
| So you couldn't just do a helicopter hunt, blow out 20 pigs, and then bring them back to your restaurant and serve it? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I cannot do that. | ||
| There is some sort of a protocol involved in processing. | ||
| The anti-mortem inspection is not happening. | ||
| Anti-mortem? | ||
| A-N-T-E. Before. | ||
| So, I mean, that just brings up a much wider topic in how do we get feral hogs into the food system safely. | ||
| And this is kind of the bottleneck. | ||
| But also, this level of inspection is not something I disagree with at all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It seems like it's prudent. | ||
| It's very prudent. | ||
| And so, because it's so prudent, that's where I kind of get stuck. | ||
| It's like, how do we feed the poor? | ||
| How do we get feral hogs out there into the food system to feed as many people as we can because they're rotting in the field? | ||
| But we can't have inspectors flying around in another helicopter with binoculars like the brown-spotted one on the left. | ||
| How are you going to manage it? | ||
| It's going to be really tricky, but I think that... | ||
| The conversations need to start, and that's key, is how do we safely integrate hogs into the food chain also without monetizing them? | ||
| Because once you monetize them, the impetus to getting rid of them is gone. | ||
| So, I mean, for instance, you have all of a sudden this burgeoning market for feral hog meat and, you know, pork is getting $3.50 a pound but a feral hog is at $6.50. | ||
| People are going to be like, wait a minute. | ||
| Why do we want to kill all these things? | ||
| Why don't we capture a couple of them and breed them? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is – I was actually talking about this the other day because this happened. | ||
| I knew a couple of people that were selling wild boar, but what they had done is they had captured, trapped a couple years before and were just breeding them and then just selling the meat as wild boar. | ||
| And I'm like, it goes back to one of the first things that we talked about. | ||
| It was like, what side of the fence is that pig on? | ||
| That is a domestic hog. | ||
| That is not a wild boar anymore. | ||
| They don't retract though, do they? | ||
| Do they retract back to domestic looking? | ||
| Does their nose shrink and does their fur change texture? | ||
| Whenever I'd see pictures of these pigs, I never saw them in person, but they were shaggy and black, just like your kind of cut rate average feral hog. | ||
| And there is a darkening of the flesh that you're getting from a wild hog, right? | ||
| Is that just a dietary thing? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You will also see, like, in, I hate to use the word, like, heritage breed, but, like, in a really good mix. | ||
| Like, the domestic pigs we get at the restaurant are... | ||
| Used to be a large black red wattle mix. | ||
| They're typically... | ||
| Like if I see pork in a grocery store, it's like pale pink. | ||
| And it's like, ours never looks like that. | ||
| It's much deeper red. | ||
| And then a feral hog can go way... | ||
| Almost to like beef red. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, I've seen them really dark before. | ||
| It really depends. | ||
| And it's got to be a mixture of diet. | ||
| Stress can also play into that too. | ||
| But they... | ||
| They put on fat real well once you catch them and you keep them. | ||
| They're like street kids. | ||
| They're like, oh, I'm not going to miss a meal ever again. | ||
| They're into eating. | ||
| And so they put on almost exorbitant amounts of fat when you capture them and feed them out. | ||
| Are there bears in Texas? | ||
| Not that many, right? | ||
| There are. | ||
| I saw a picture of one in South Texas a few days ago. | ||
| You cannot hunt them. | ||
| You can't hunt any bears in Texas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| Really? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Not enough. | ||
| There's, I think, a few in East Texas, but the one that I saw a picture of one near Carrizo Springs, which is, I mean, almost to the border. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's really pretty far south. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if I was down there hunting, I'd hope that I'd know what I was looking at. | ||
| You know, if it was like low light, I'd be like, Giant boar. | ||
| So have they immigrated from somewhere else and made their way into Texas? | ||
| I assume so. | ||
| They used to be native here, just like the elk. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what I was getting at. | ||
| They don't do that with bears, though. | ||
| This is the way they do that with elk. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Repopulate them. | ||
| I mean, I feel, and I could definitely be wrong, I feel that this bear naturally made its way down there. | ||
| Yeah, why is that with predators? | ||
| Is it because of the impact it'll have on local fawns and calves and things along those lines? | ||
| I think calves being the key word there. | ||
| This is a beef state. | ||
| And reintroduction of predators is not on the table. | ||
| Yeah, we were looking up mountain lions and mountain lions here are not protected at all, which is really interesting because it's so different than California where there's zero hunting of mountain lions allowed ever. | ||
| And even if you have a depredation tag, it's dangerous. | ||
| Like people that have had animals, like there was a woman that had an alpaca farm and she had this one particular mountain lion that was thrill killing. | ||
| So it was climbing into the thing with alpacas and it just couldn't resist. | ||
| It was just whacking like, you know, fucking ten of them at a time. | ||
| And she got a depredation permit to kill this mountain lion and the death threats that she started receiving were so terrifying to her that she abandoned the idea and just took the loss because all these people were furious at her for wanting to kill a mountain lion that was clearly just targeting these imprisoned alpacas and slaughtering them. | ||
| And it's kind of interesting, the cultural differences, because here, it would be like a no-brainer. | ||
| Like, you don't even have to have a tag. | ||
| Just shoot that mountain lion that's trying to kill all your livestock. | ||
| But in California, they're like, let it live, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's complicated. | ||
| And yeah, there's definitely a different mentality here. | ||
| You've probably picked up on that. | ||
| I have. | ||
| I like it here. | ||
| There's a silliness to California that is just, it's really apparent when you get out of there. | ||
| I'm like, oh, that's what everybody's always talking about. | ||
| And it was sort of accentuated by COVID, by the way people reacted and still react. | ||
| There's a lot of folks that just, they don't want it to be better. | ||
| They don't want the pandemic to be over. | ||
| They seem to be enjoying the chaos of the uprooting of society and everybody being terrified and forced to wear three masks and stay indoors no matter what. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| It's a fascinating psychological experiment. | ||
| I'll follow some people on social media and I'll read some of their panic porn posts. | ||
| And then I'm like, okay, where's this person from? | ||
| And you click and it's like almost always a blue city. | ||
| It's almost always someone who lives in some urban population, in some Democrat-run city. | ||
| And it's like, wow, this is sort of a universal thing. | ||
| There's a lot of folks that seem to be enjoying the fact that things are scary and that we're in a state of chaos. | ||
| They don't want to accept that things are better now than they were months ago. | ||
| What shapes geographic regions to have almost a personality? | ||
| It's interesting, right? | ||
| I remember a long time ago I compared through the lens of food the cuisine of California to the cuisine of Texas, where if you look at the natives in Napa Valley, it's just like, oh, I'm going to pick this avocado. | ||
| And here you have... | ||
| A Comanche, you know, opening up a vein on his horse, drinking some blood so he can just make it a couple more days on a raid or maybe he's getting chased by rangers. | ||
| I mean, it's like, how does that formative mentality translate to huge geographic areas? | ||
| And I think there's something to it. | ||
| I mean, I always see it through food, of course. | ||
| The food there and the food here is also very different. | ||
| Well, it's so defining. | ||
| Food is so defining of a population. | ||
| You know, one of the things that Bourdain told me, he said, the most disgusting food he ever ate was pickled shark from, like, Iceland, I think it was. | ||
| It's like there's some sort of fermented... | ||
| Fermented shark, they bury it for a long time. | ||
| He said it is so un-fucking-believably disgusting that you can't believe that these people enjoy it as a delicacy. | ||
| Have you had that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'll pass. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I said I like fish. | ||
| I want to try it. | ||
| Just to know what the fuck is up. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if I can do that. | ||
| I'm sure of what that smells like. | ||
| I mean, not sure, but I bet the level. | ||
| I mean, you're probably five feet away from it before you start retching. | ||
| Dude, I just was in Salt Lake City, and I ate at this super legit Mexican place, and I got menudo, and it smelled like a barn. | ||
| My friend Tony was next to me. | ||
| He's like, what the fuck? | ||
| You're going to eat that? | ||
| That smell. | ||
| It smelled so barney. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was good though, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was good. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It was good, but it really smelled like innards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like animals. | ||
| It smelled like a dirty animal's butt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I've had experiences. | ||
| I had a sausage in France one time. | ||
| It was Andouillette. | ||
| And it was like, it came out and I was going through that phase of try everything and cut into it. | ||
| And I was like, oh, you know, it tastes like poo-poo and pee-pee. | ||
| It's like, it is vile. | ||
| Like, terrible. | ||
| But evidently, it's like the more profound that is, the better that sausage is. | ||
| And Culturally, that's what they're looking for. | ||
| And I'm sure that translates into stuff that we eat, too, you know, and find completely normal. | ||
| I wonder what that would be. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But maybe that said that our food is so bland and chicken breasty that maybe that doesn't translate in retrospect. | ||
| I mean, like, is that really what we... | ||
| I mean, when you think of American food, you do think of bland chicken breasty, chicken tenders, hot dogs. | ||
| You think of bland food, but that's not really... | ||
| It's like, what is the... | ||
| If you looked at the pie chart of the percentage of food that Americans eat... | ||
| But what's crazy that we're eating that nobody else is eating? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I can't think of anything. | ||
| We got too lucky. | ||
| The bounty of food here. | ||
| I remember watching, I watched a steak documentary. | ||
| I think it's called The Steak Revolution. | ||
| It was on some Apple documentary. | ||
| It was on iMovie or whatever. | ||
| And I was watching how they figured out in other countries what people were doing differently in America in terms of growing their cows. | ||
| And that the cows were bigger and they were fatter. | ||
| And then they were going to places like, you know, like different steakhouses, different famous places. | ||
| You know, like Peter Luger's in Brooklyn, which is like a famous steakhouse. | ||
| And you go there and they're like, okay, what are you doing differently? | ||
| How are you getting your cow so fat? | ||
| And then they were trying to change everything over in Europe to try to emulate some of these American steakhouses. | ||
| Because the idea of just eating a place where you only eat steak is like... | ||
| I know that's an Italy thing. | ||
| Yeah, I was about to say, like Bistecca Fiorentina is huge. | ||
| But have you seen those ribeyes? | ||
| They look nothing like a ribeye here in the States. | ||
| Very small. | ||
| Small and red and almost just devoid of marbling. | ||
| Yeah, and it's particularly because of their diet, right? | ||
| Because they're just eating grass only. | ||
| And they're not eating corn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We like that corn-fed, fatty... | ||
| Sweet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's almost like that animal's... | ||
| You're eating a sick person. | ||
| You're eating a sick animal. | ||
| I mean like bloated them and got them all to the point where all that marbling, like that's not good. | ||
| If you eat an elk and it was marbled like that, you'd be like, what the fuck is wrong with this animal? | ||
| You know, it's never like that. | ||
| But a cow, that's what you look for. | ||
| You look for a really sloppy, lazy, obese, Castrated bull. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what we're eating. | ||
| That's what we prefer. | ||
| We were brought in to do a class one time, a butchery class, and the guy who was hosting had a hog for us. | ||
| He's like, no, I'll have a pig for you. | ||
| I was like, great. | ||
| And so we show up and they had, just to be safe, they had had the hog and they had trapped it and they kept it in the pen for like, I want to say like a month. | ||
| And they did nothing but feed it deer corn, which is just a very cheap feed corn. | ||
| It's like a GMO corn and they just fed it nothing but corn, which is, I'm sure the pig was happy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't say that with any, you know. | ||
| I have knowledge of the pig's mood. | ||
| But it got real fat. | ||
| I mean, it got so fat that it's hard for me to convey how fat that pig got. | ||
| But we showed up, and it was carcass at this point. | ||
| It had been killed and skinned and gutted. | ||
| But in front of us, what we were looking at, it was coated in so much fat that its eyes were basically... | ||
| Almost swollen shut because the fat deposits around the eyes had almost closed its eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| The loin on it, for the listeners, was probably about a two-inch loin or backstrap. | ||
| Or basically, essentially, when you're looking at a pork chop, the meaty part, the meaty oval part of the loin is about two inches. | ||
| And it had about eight or nine inches of fat on top of that. | ||
| So if you're typically looking at a pork chop, it'll have like a little... | ||
| I would say it would be about, you know, 15 to 25% of the width of a pork chop, typically. | ||
| This one had whatever. | ||
| I mean, it was about eight or nine inches of pure fat on top of it because just after one month of only eating corn, and I don't think it stopped. | ||
| It was a pig. | ||
| They don't self-regulate. | ||
| And it just went to town on this. | ||
| And it was a real lesson, you know. | ||
| First off, it's like, no, you need to feed it some pig ration if you're going to do that. | ||
| And secondly, this is not good stuff to eat. | ||
| It didn't taste good? | ||
| It tasted great. | ||
| It did? | ||
| It was like, I mean... | ||
| So you mean corn is not good stuff to eat. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Corn, right. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I mean, it's unhealthy. | ||
| But we were, I will never forget that day, we were sliding around on the floor just because it almost aerosolized while we were doing the butchery demo. | ||
| I was having trouble gripping my knives, everything. | ||
| The fat was just, it was just in the air. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| And as we're, you know, we're dicing the meat, you know, like this is for sausage. | ||
| We had a pile like two feet high of just white, pure white fat on one side. | ||
| And I'm like, man, I hope you like lard because that is what you are doing. | ||
| You need to learn how to make soap or something because you are rich with lard right now. | ||
| And it was a very soft sauce. | ||
| And I can identify on a feral pig if it's been eating a lot of corn versus, you know, more natural, like, acorn diet. | ||
| Because acorns, they've got this beautiful, like, ivory, pinkish, firm fat. | ||
| Whereas corn, when you touch it, even when it's cold, it comes off on your fingers and it's a little bit, I hate the word greasy, but it is. | ||
| Yeah, I shot a wild pig with Steve. | ||
| It was a sow and it was kind of a really crazy adventure actually. | ||
| We shot it on this hill. | ||
| It was like on the side of a very steep hill. | ||
| And as I shot it, it died and it rolled down this hill. | ||
| And as it rolled down this hill, it got all the way to the bottom and we tried to pull it up. | ||
| We tried to, but it was too steep. | ||
| And so we decided to try to take it down and then walk. | ||
| And then while we're doing this, it's in the middle of the night. | ||
| And we're on a ranch that has mountain lions. | ||
| We're carrying a half a pig. | ||
| Each guy's carrying a half a pig on their back. | ||
| And we're stumbling through the woods. | ||
| In the bottom of this creek basin, and then we eventually wound up hanging it. | ||
| We're like, we can't do this anymore. | ||
| We have to hang this thing. | ||
| Because I was going to break my neck. | ||
| We kept falling, you know, carrying this. | ||
| It was a big pig, too. | ||
| And they're so specifically heavy, like in a weird way. | ||
| They move around a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this one had thick acorn fat on it. | ||
| And it really tasted delicious. | ||
| But it was a smell to it. | ||
| It had like an acorn-y type smell. | ||
| That's one thing that I've really never had and I really am interested in trying is blueberry bear. | ||
| Like a bear that's been eating blueberries. | ||
| Because Steve says that is literally one of the very best meats you could ever eat. | ||
| Yeah, you were talking about that with Clay Nucle. | ||
| Yeah, have you ever had that? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Remember, I've never tried bear. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I remember Clay talking about that. | ||
| I mean, he's just definitely the bear expert, too. | ||
| How come you've never had bear? | ||
| Like a guy like you, I would imagine you would try to seek that out. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, nobody ever gave me any. | ||
| I mean, I've just eaten pretty much everything from around here, but never had bear. | ||
| And like I said, there's not a lot of the hunting travel. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Just very, very specific to Texas. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I mean, it's so obvious, but it seems crazy that what an animal eats has that much of an impact on what it tastes like. | ||
| And then it makes you think about your own diet. | ||
| Like, it's not just what tastes good. | ||
| Like, what are you doing to the actual tissue of your body itself? | ||
| And how much of that is impacted by your diet? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And in the anarchy that's happening out there, how do you select an animal to be the best, too? | ||
| Especially when it comes to pigs, because it's just like, who knows? | ||
| Even when it comes to cows, right? | ||
| There's a lot of folks who prefer grass-fed beef for the taste, for the texture. | ||
| It's a chewier texture. | ||
| And just for the fact that it's probably healthier to eat in that way, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a way more natural thing. | ||
| It's grass-fed, grass-finished beef. | ||
| And many people don't love that. | ||
| We started off with a grass-fed, grass-finished steak program at the restaurant. | ||
| And it was... | ||
| In Texas, it was very difficult. | ||
| A lot of people just didn't like it. | ||
| And when somebody doesn't like their salad, it's one thing. | ||
| And when you're in Texas and somebody doesn't like their steak, it's another thing. | ||
| What was the thing about it? | ||
| Because it's still delicious. | ||
| Is it just not what they're accustomed to? | ||
| It's texture and flavor. | ||
| I mean, the gristly parts are harder. | ||
| It's not as tender and it doesn't have that sweetness. | ||
| And it's got that grassy, almost game meat flavor to it. | ||
| It's very robust beef. | ||
| And not for everybody. | ||
| And so eventually we had to go with a grass... | ||
| You know, an animal that puts on more fat, but also eats some grain in the field. | ||
| Like a free choice grain. | ||
| Never goes to a feedlot, which is, I mean, key for us. | ||
| I don't want that animal to be 90 days just on corn, but it has a free choice feed of grains while it's foraging grass. | ||
| So it's a good middle ground. | ||
| It's a great middle ground. | ||
| And also the breed choice, you know, Wagyu. | ||
| You know, it's also a recognizable, very marketable word right there. | ||
| Everybody knows Wagyu is synonymous with beef quality. | ||
| But then we're able to deal with just one person, one lady. | ||
| You know, she's awesome. | ||
| I mean, she's so good at it. | ||
| Mariana Peeler. | ||
| I mean, just creating amazing beef. | ||
| But just in a really good way that's more appealing to people. | ||
| Have you met Doug Duren? | ||
| No. | ||
| Doug lives in Wisconsin. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| Shout out to Doug. | ||
| But Doug has a farm in Wisconsin, and the deer that they hunt, they're basically corn-fed. | ||
| They're eating this GMO corn that's everywhere. | ||
| It's growing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where you find them. | ||
| You find them in the cornfields. | ||
| And particularly after they've harvested the corn, you know, after they've cut it all down with the combines, all the stuff that's left on the ground, I mean, you just see deer everywhere out there. | ||
| But those deer, that's a big part of their diet is corn, and it's a really mild-tasting, like, soft, kind of tenderish meat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's big here, too. | ||
| I mean, think corn feeders. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Corn feeders are omnipresent. | ||
| You know, that's how you hunt here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not necessarily 100% of the time, but if you say you're going deer hunting, you're probably going to be sitting in front of a corn feeder. | ||
| I don't knock it. | ||
| It's a great way to hunt. | ||
| And if that's what your goal is, just gather up some meat, it's a great way to do it. | ||
| But there's something about hunting that's supposed to be difficult to find an animal. | ||
| I've hunted bears over bait, and it's part of you that goes, hmm. | ||
| I don't think I like doing this. | ||
| Because I definitely don't like doing it as much as like elk hunting where you're going into the mountains trying to find them, make sure you don't get winded. | ||
| If you could just sit in front of a place that you know an animal's going to come by and have lunch, you know, it's kind of fucked up. | ||
| It's that time. | ||
| It's that time that we have and that we're able to give to this vocation in order to achieve success. | ||
| It's like we don't have a week to spend trying to get that doe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I definitely prefer not to. | ||
| At our classes, we offer both. | ||
| If that's what you want to do, you can do that. | ||
| We can also go take a walk. | ||
| Definitely prefer the walk. | ||
| If you've got your wits about you, you can usually make that walk pay off, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's also you learn about what the animal, what senses the animal utilizes in terms of like sense of smell and sight. | ||
| And the thing about pigs too is they don't see very well, right? | ||
| So you can kind of freeze. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's debatable, but in my mind, pigs don't see well at all. | ||
| Some people will say, yeah, they see. | ||
| I'm like, what I think about pigs and their senses is that, I mean, it's scent. | ||
| They can smell you so far away. | ||
| They can hear you, and they can see you. | ||
| But if they hear you or see you and don't confirm with smell, they kind of like – they're either like just don't care and kind of go about their business or they'll kind of do a slow walk in another direction, things like that. | ||
| If they smell you, they turn around and run away. | ||
| That's my experience generally is that they have – that sense of smell is so acute. | ||
| That's really – What you have to play to get in front of them. | ||
| That said, I will get people really close to pigs. | ||
| We can get 20, 30 yards if we're dead downwind on them. | ||
| You could never do that on a deer. | ||
| It's just out of the question. | ||
| Even kind of in open ground, I've gotten within maybe 15 yards just by moving kind of slow. | ||
| And if they've got their heads down and they're eating grass or they're just rooting or something... | ||
| You can get really close to them if the wind's right. | ||
| I think the closest I ever got to a pig that I shot was probably about five feet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was the wind. | ||
| I was walking with a friend and we were in this beautiful high point in East Texas and there was acorns all over the ground and the wind was just ripping. | ||
| We happened to have the wind in our faces and I came around. | ||
| We were walking. | ||
| We didn't have a rifle or anything. | ||
| Walked around a corner, and there's a pig. | ||
| Like, there's a pig right there. | ||
| And I just backtracked. | ||
| The wind was blowing at me. | ||
| I backtracked, and I was like, you know, like, hey, Larry, we got to go get a rifle. | ||
| He's like, what? | ||
| I'm like, there's a pig right there. | ||
| Went back, got the rifle, came back. | ||
| The pig had moved and was facing me, but had his head down. | ||
| And there were so many acorns. | ||
| I mean, I could just imagine just the crunch, crunch, crunch that was happening in that pig's jaw. | ||
| He couldn't hear anything over the wind. | ||
| The wind was bad. | ||
| And he seemed so excited about his acorns. | ||
| And I couldn't even look through the scope. | ||
| I mean, it was... | ||
| That close? | ||
| Six feet-ish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| That's where he was. | ||
| He was kind of on the edge of a big drop. | ||
| And in fact, after I shot him, he dropped all the way down. | ||
| But I mean, that really shows you what their, not only their senses, but their dispositions. | ||
| Like when they get excited, particularly about two things, there's nothing that's going to pull them away from those two things. | ||
| What a strange animal they are. | ||
| What keeps their populations in check overseas? | ||
| Oh, I mean, you can see videos of downtown Milan and Germany where these pigs are just running down the streets. | ||
| I mean, they have far less predators over there. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And then I don't know what the hunting situations are over there either. | ||
| There's feral hog problems around the world. | ||
| China, you know, definitely in Europe. | ||
| And here, I mean, probably bleeding into Mexico a little bit. | ||
| It's interesting how countries that don't have a cultural history of hunting have a very different take on people hunting, even if they're eating a lot of meat. | ||
| You really see that from places like England. | ||
| They have a very different take on hunting, for the most part, than we do. | ||
| Well, it's been, in England particularly, just the space and the system that they've set up over so long is hunting is not available to everybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a very tiered system. | ||
| Even fishing, you know, you're going to pay for it. | ||
| And so I think that most people have, you know, of course they develop a different view of it. | ||
| And also they prefer carp over there, which is so weird. | ||
| They actually enjoy carp fishing. | ||
| Whereas carp for us are just thought to be like sort of a junky fish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they're okay to eat. | ||
| There's a lot better fish out there to eat than carp, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you're a big fan of eating bass, right? | ||
| Yeah, I eat bass. | ||
| That's a controversial... | ||
| I eat bass because it makes people mad. | ||
| And I don't target bass. | ||
| If I catch one and it's nice, perfect, you know, it's like 15 inches long and I can keep it, I'll keep it. | ||
| Why does it make people mad? | ||
| It's a... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, we've... | |
| We've made the largemouth bass a species. | ||
| I mean, it's similar to elk, man. | ||
| I mean, like, elk has status. | ||
| Big white-tailed deer have status. | ||
| On the coast, there's so many fish to eat on the coast, but on the coast, a big speckled trout has status. | ||
| It has more status than a redfish. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But in freshwater, the bass has it in the south, and in the north, it would be the walleye. | ||
| That's the status. | ||
| But the bass have it in a different way than the walleye do, or certainly elk, in that people don't want you to eat them. | ||
| Right, and it's just silly, because there's a lot of bass out there. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of them. | ||
| And they've just decided that that species is off-limit. | ||
| I mean, Parks and Wildlife establishes rules. | ||
| About what you can keep, what size you can keep on a bass. | ||
| And those were determined by biologists, and I trust those more than... | ||
| I mean, it's also highly monetized. | ||
| So, I mean, you think about bass tournaments, I mean, you can win $50,000. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Jim Harrison, the author, he said that tournament fishing for bass—I think he was speaking specifically about this—is like playing tennis with living balls. | ||
| And to me, it's weird. | ||
| Have you ever seen a tournament bass fisherman when he's reeling that fish in? | ||
| There's no joy. | ||
| I mean, it's just like crank it in as fast as you can, sling it into the boat, grab it, hold on to it, and then put it in the live well and you're screaming because you just won $25,000. | ||
| And then you drive it to another part of the lake and then you let it go. | ||
| And it's all – oh, man. | ||
| I just dug myself a big hole. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| You're making a lot of good points. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense to me at all. | ||
| I mean, you're really inconveniencing that fish. | ||
| It was a Mitch Hedberg joke, I think, right? | ||
| It's like, just made it late for something. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| It's real weird to me. | ||
| It is weird. | ||
| There's so much value placed on that one species. | ||
| It does have some qualities. | ||
| It's aggressive. | ||
| It's hard fighting. | ||
| It jumps. | ||
| It jumps out of the water. | ||
| It hits lures. | ||
| You can catch it in the summer months. | ||
| There's a lot of qualities behind a largemouth bass, one of which is also pretty damn tasty. | ||
| It's in the same family as a bluegill or a crappie. | ||
| Do they basically taste the same as a bluegill or crappie? | ||
| I mean, I've had bass, but I haven't had it since I was a teenager. | ||
| Yeah, it's very good. | ||
| It has a larger flake than either of those fish. | ||
| It is a sunfish. | ||
| It's in the sunfish species, or genus. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| Now, I don't keep them often, and usually I'll just put them back. | ||
| But every once in a while, I will keep the bass. | ||
| But why do you put them back when you put them back? | ||
| I'm usually fishing for something else, and I have enough fish, but there are times where I do want to keep them. | ||
| Well, there's a situation with trout. | ||
| People love to cast the fly fish for trout and release them. | ||
| It's almost entirely catch and release in some places, which is weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| You're just stabbing them in the face with a hook, pulling them in, freaking them out, and then letting them go. | ||
| Yeah, so geographically, I'd like to take this opportunity to pretty much piss off the entire nation and agree. | ||
| If I, you know, am visiting New Mexico and I want to do a little fishing and I roll up to a trout stream and it says catch and release only, I keep driving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's stretches of land. | ||
| Now, do they do that with catch and release only? | ||
| Is it specifically because they want to maintain the numbers or is it because they want to establish sort of an ethic for the area? | ||
| Maintaining numbers. | ||
| I mean, you think about how the size of these streams and the amount of pressure they get. | ||
| I can talk all the shit I want because I'm here in Texas and there's reservoirs all around me. | ||
| There's fishing opportunities on lakes. | ||
| And rivers and streams for me where I can go and catch all the sunfish and catfish that I want and not harm the population at all. | ||
| But in the mountain states, it's basically just trout. | ||
| And then if everybody was hammering those fish, then there wouldn't be enough to go around. | ||
| And I get that. | ||
| But I'm just like, I'm going to leave them alone if I can't eat them. | ||
| And if you can point me to... | ||
| A beaver pond full of brook trout that are totally overpopulated. | ||
| It's just like, I'll go take care of business. | ||
| I'll catch 7-inch brook trout all day long and be happy as a clam. | ||
| Yeah, people love those little tiny trout for like lunch. | ||
| They're great for... | ||
| Is it a flavor thing? | ||
| Do they taste different when trout get larger? | ||
| Little tender fish, you know? | ||
| And just, I mean, brook trout particularly, I love. | ||
| And they're, of all the trout species in the mountain states, typically they're the ones that are the most renewable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just interesting that there's not a shortage of bass. | ||
| It must be the sport thing. | ||
| It must be the tournament thing that's making people not want to eat them because, like, they're thinking that you, by eating them, you're lessening the population, lessening the opportunities. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, but meanwhile, they're everywhere. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| But also, like, a trophy-sized bass or a trophy-sized pretty much anything I'm putting back. | ||
| Like, if I catch, you know, an 18-pound catfish, I'm putting it back in the water. | ||
| I mean, I don't think the eating qualities are going to be good, and I also think that I want that thing to go back out there and repopulate. | ||
| I'm going to take the two, three, four pounders out. | ||
| And that goes for most fish that I'm going to catch. | ||
| Have you ever noodled? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I just don't see myself doing that. | ||
| No, I'm good. | ||
| I saw a dude's hand who got bit by a snapping turtle. | ||
| He was noodling for catfish. | ||
| I think Rinella might have had it on his Instagram. | ||
| Probably does. | ||
| He loves that gore. | ||
| Missing fingers. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| I was always thinking, you can get caught by a snapping turtle, right? | ||
| Or a snake? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| But I follow a bunch of people on Instagram that are always noodling. | ||
| And they'll just get in there and let this goddamn thing bite their arm. | ||
| And then they pull it out. | ||
| Ryan Callahan was talking about it. | ||
| Bite marks over his arm. | ||
| They bite into your arm. | ||
| It's extreme. | ||
| You have to grab them by the gills. | ||
| What kind of nonsense is this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe you've experienced everything else. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But they're not good to eat, right? | ||
| A giant catfish like that? | ||
| Oh, we're talking about flatheads. | ||
| They're good. | ||
| They're really good. | ||
| Even the giant ones? | ||
| Yeah, what's your general feeling on catfish? | ||
| I like catfish. | ||
| Oh, you'd love flathead. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Is that a particularly delicious type of catfish? | ||
| It is. | ||
| Even when they're fairly big. | ||
| They are. | ||
| They're excellent. | ||
| Flathead is more of a hunter. | ||
| I mean, they don't eat like the detritus or dead fish. | ||
| I mean, if you're going to catch a flathead, you're probably going to have to be using live bait. | ||
| They're very predatory. | ||
| And I think that's what translates into them being so delicious. | ||
| But they're also very fatty and mild. | ||
| For me, a flathead is the best tasting catfish out there. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love catfish, too. | ||
| I mean, I really do. | ||
| I know that's kind of... | ||
| Some people don't like them. | ||
| We were just in Arkansas. | ||
| We had an incredible experience up there because I was able to go and be on the other side of a class where there's this guy that is... | ||
| Started this thing, and it's really incredible. | ||
| He's moved to this old black church, and the business is called Black Duck Revival, this guy named Jonathan Wilkins. | ||
| And it's just really incredible. | ||
| He does duck and goose hunts up there in Arkansas, and he also offers this class where you can go and learn how to limb-line and trot-line catfish in these swamps. | ||
| Very old methods. | ||
| You know, you're just basically tying these cords to trees with hooks and baiting them and then coming back the next day and you're just weaving your way through these swamps and catching these old catfish. | ||
| It was really incredible because of the I mean, the cultural weight of it, too. | ||
| You know, he's African American, and he knows the history of this area and what it's like to exist up there. | ||
| And also, it's just great for me to go and take a class, you know, and not be on the other end of it. | ||
| The perspective was incredible. | ||
| And what catfish is. | ||
| Catfish is the opposite of bass. | ||
| It's not this big flashy sport fish and nobody has a big tournament for it, but it's a food fish. | ||
| And it's a very specific food fish, too. | ||
| It's not for everybody. | ||
| There's a great quote from Willard Scott. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| If I am remembered for anything, I want to go down in history as the person who let the world know that catfish is the finest eating fish out there. | ||
| You know, Willard Scott. | ||
| Right, the weather guy. | ||
| Yeah, was wishing the old ladies, the 100-year-old ladies a happy birthday. | ||
| The other hill he wanted to die on was catfish. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| How weird. | ||
| I was watching this video the other day of catfish in England. | ||
| Apparently there's an invasive catfish that they put in some area in England, and they've decimated the population of everything else in that, because they're a predatory catfish. | ||
| So now they start eating pigeons. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| Yes, I think I saw a video of that. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| These catfish will like sneak up real close to these pigeons and then explode and jump on them and drag these pigeons down into the water. | ||
| And it's so weird to see because you always think of catfish as like you were saying, like they eat dead things. | ||
| They eat anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I did not know that they would go get a pigeon. | ||
| Watch this show. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I've seen this. | ||
| Look how sneaky they are. | ||
| Well, you know what we were using in bait in Arkansas? | ||
| What? | ||
| Soap. | ||
| There's a certain brand of soap that is made with pork lard. | ||
| But it's still, oh my god. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| Oh, we got away! | ||
| But it's really crazy because they're hunting in like an inch of water. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they literally are getting themselves and almost beaching themselves. | ||
| Well, I don't think people realize that catfish are high-level predators. | ||
| I mean, most of the time they are feeding higher in the water column than you might think, and also for crawfish, minnows, anything. | ||
| I mean, pigeons. | ||
| I can't imagine this, though. | ||
| This is so strange. | ||
| I know there's other fish that do target birds. | ||
| I remember reading once about this guy who was hunting for muskies, and he figured out how to make a lure that looked like a duck. | ||
| So it was like little duck feet moving, and he was catching muskies on this little duckling. | ||
| Like a little wind-up bath toy. | ||
| Yeah, similar. | ||
| And as he was reeling it in, he was catching muskies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's plenty of footage out there of, like, little ducklings getting eaten by, I mean, catfish, too. | ||
| You know, like I said, they get a bad rap for bottom feeders. | ||
| But, I mean, when we were in Arkansas, we were fishing literally a couple inches below. | ||
| The baits were just suspended right below the surface, and those fish were coming all the way up there to eat, which shows you that they're just, I mean, they're the hogs of the creek. | ||
| You know, they're going to eat all over the place. | ||
| And it was just so eye-opening to see that you're in this crazy swamp and we're using soap as bait. | ||
| Why soap? | ||
| They love it. | ||
| What kind? | ||
| Like Irish Spring? | ||
| The brand is Zote. | ||
| Oh, there's a very specific kind of brand? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd actually seen it before in a lake around here. | ||
| One of the guides had sworn by it and I thought it was a one-off and then I get up there to Arkansas and he's like, no, Zote Soap. | ||
| And I'm like, oh shit, you too. | ||
| Like, really? | ||
| Zote Soap? | ||
| Why Zote Soap? | ||
| What is it about that soap? | ||
| It's this pink soap. | ||
| It smells like soap and the catfish love it. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Zote soap is great catfish because the fats are in it. | ||
| It leaves a trail that catfish will follow if it melted down a small amount of bacon grease and garlic to it. | ||
| Then pour it into a container. | ||
| Garlic seems a weird choice. | ||
| This bait does not work well at all on rod and reel. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah, it's just for like limb lines and trot lines. | ||
| I wonder why it wouldn't work good on rod and reel though. | ||
| Does that make any sense to you? | ||
| It will probably dissolve as you cast, if you have to recast it and bring it in. | ||
| Oh, okay, that makes sense. | ||
| Water friction on it will probably make it dissolve. | ||
| Yeah, soap, right? | ||
| Like washing your hands. | ||
| I mean, you could literally take a piece of it that wasn't being used as bait. | ||
| How long did it take you to write this book? | ||
| A decade. | ||
| Damn! | ||
| So this is the fruit of many, many days of labor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, most of it in the last two years, but it really took a long time. | ||
| And I'm glad because what it gave me is the data. | ||
| Of, you know, dozens of hunting schools and then hog butchery classes of people asking questions. | ||
| You know, being like, hey, I mean, this is the situation I was in. | ||
| You know, the hog looked like this or can you eat a pig or can you eat the boar, you know, that's over 200 pounds or 180, 120 or 80, whatever it is. | ||
| And like, so getting fed those questions and then able to go through and just really curate the answers to all those questions and then gave us time to kind of To coalesce this approach that we have to butchering and processing pigs, which is, like I mentioned earlier, it's like four sizes. | ||
| You have a big boar, a big sow, a medium hog, and a small hog. | ||
| And then how to butcher each one of those in the most efficient way. | ||
| And then the recipes, the subsequent recipes that you can prepare from that specific size. | ||
| Trying to not overcomplicate it, but give somebody a really good reference as to avoid that one-size-fits-all approach to hogs, which you find so much. | ||
| How did wild pigs get gendered in terms of food value? | ||
| Like when you go to a restaurant, you always get wild boar. | ||
| It's always wild boar, which is horseshit. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| I addressed that. | ||
| Oh, do you? | ||
| So I used to sell at the farmer's market when we first started making sausage. | ||
| I think we called it feral hog chorizo, let's say. | ||
| The marketability is not good. | ||
| You change that to wild boar and then people want it. | ||
| And I addressed that because it's like I know that not every pig is a boar, but You know, well, also, I mean, you could say, like, Russian boar is that, like, subspecies. | ||
| And you say Russian boar even if it's a sow? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, that covers everything, you know. | ||
| But wild boar kind of is very nebulous. | ||
| But I address that in there, and I'm like, listen, everybody, I am going to call all pigs boars. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| And usually in the title of a recipe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because it's semantics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like humankind is mankind. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's a boar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's weird. | ||
| It is. | ||
| No, I get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And I'll be very clear that it's a marketability thing. | ||
| Well, it's also the way it sounds. | ||
| Like, wild boar sounds delicious. | ||
| Feral hog does not sound good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sounds like a gross... | ||
| It's clinical. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It also just sounds dirty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dirty little wild piggy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You want a little more adventure in your menu descriptor, the wild boar. | ||
| I love that you made this book, though, because I think that if somebody wants to get involved in hunting and they're thinking about starting out, like, there's no better animal to start out with than pigs, rather. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| There's a low level to entry, a low bar to entry rather. | ||
| You basically don't even have a season in most states that have them. | ||
| You can hunt them 365 days a year. | ||
| You can get a lot of tags. | ||
| You could hunt quite a few of them. | ||
| And they're delicious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's available online. | ||
| I have the first printing sold out via our Kickstarter campaign and online sales. | ||
| The second printing is on its way to being sold out and that should be here mid-August, but it can still be pre-ordered. | ||
| Do you have an e-book? | ||
| No, we don't. | ||
| Are you going to do that at all? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| We self-published and are self-distributing this book. | ||
| It is not available on Amazon. | ||
| It is 100% me and the photographer. | ||
| It's our project. | ||
| So where would one go to get this? | ||
| It's easy. | ||
| It's thehogbook.com. | ||
| Thehogbook.com. | ||
| Well, that is easy. | ||
| How did no one already have that? | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| And St. John's Press? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that just like a... | ||
| It's the first book from St. John's Press. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So thehogbook.com. | ||
| Go there. | ||
| Get it. | ||
| And the end of July, people will be shipping out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, after this podcast, you're going to sell it. | |
| Mid-August. | ||
| Mid-August. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So thank you, Jesse. | ||
| I appreciate it, man. | ||
| And thanks for having such an awesome restaurant. | ||
| And I really enjoyed talking to you. | ||
| Yeah, I really appreciate being here. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Daidue, it's in Austin, Texas. | ||
| How do you say it on the URL? How do you spell it? | ||
| D-A-I-D-U-E. D-A-I-D-U-E. D-A-I-D-U-E.com? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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