Jesse Griffiths, founder of Dai Due (austin since 2006), rejects plastic in cooking but embraces slow-fire methods like sous vide-grilled turkey legs or post-oak-smoked hog ribs. His The Hog Book—self-published after a decade—debunks myths about feral swine, detailing stress impacts on meat quality (e.g., snared pigs taste gamey) and gendered marketing ("wild boar" over "feral hog"). Griffiths advocates hunting invasive species like nilgai or bass for sustainability, contrasting Texas’s pragmatic approach with catch-and-release policies elsewhere. The conversation underscores how hyper-local sourcing and traditional techniques redefine wild food ethics and accessibility. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.