The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1676 - Jesse Griffiths

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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00:00:13.000 What's up Jesse?

00:00:15.000 How are you man?

00:00:16.000 Doing really well. 0.96

00:00:16.000 You are one of the many people that are cool as fuck that I've met because of Steve Rinella. 0.96

00:00:21.000 I need to give that guy like a gift just for introducing me to cool people. 0.97

00:00:26.000 I've met at least a dozen really cool people because of Steve Rinella.

00:00:31.000 Yeah, I can believe that.

00:00:32.000 He's a powerful person and I'm honored to be included in that group.

00:00:38.000 I really am.

00:00:39.000 He's done a lot for us.

00:00:42.000 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.

00:00:54.000 It's very, very kind.

00:00:56.000 He's a very generous person.

00:00:57.000 He is.

00:00:57.000 And he's so smart and he's so important to that world, the world of wild foods.

00:01:05.000 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.

00:01:34.000 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.

00:01:40.000 It's out right now, the Hog Book.

00:01:42.000 Go get it.

00:01:43.000 Chef's Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Pigs.

00:01:48.000 But it's very inspiring.

00:01:50.000 Thank you.

00:01:51.000 Yeah, I love food.

00:01:53.000 And most of my life revolves around gathering it in some way or another.

00:01:59.000 I mean, I like to go pick blackberries a lot.

00:02:03.000 And that translates to a lot of other things. 0.99

00:02:05.000 I mean, I obviously like to kill pigs. 0.95

00:02:07.000 I also like to buy carrots, things like that. 0.94

00:02:10.000 I like to serve food.

00:02:11.000 And it's honest work.

00:02:14.000 And I'm glad that you appreciate that.

00:02:16.000 Yeah, it's, you know, I learned from Anthony Bourdain that what food really is.

00:02:22.000 It's like it's an art form that's temporary.

00:02:24.000 You know, I used to think of food as just being delicious.

00:02:27.000 And then I watched that No Reservation show, and I'm like, oh, these are artists.

00:02:31.000 Oh, it was like a shift in my head.

00:02:33.000 I had to like rethink what it meant to be a chef.

00:02:36.000 Right.

00:02:36.000 I don't know.

00:02:37.000 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.

00:02:46.000 Like we're more craftsmen than artists.

00:02:49.000 Now there's some chefs that are artists that are out there that Way smarter than me.

00:02:53.000 And they can make a foam or they can compose a dish with things that just like will blow your mind.

00:02:58.000 You're like, I don't think that's going to be good.

00:03:00.000 And then they put it together and it is really good.

00:03:02.000 I think of being a chef got really hip.

00:03:07.000 I don't know.

00:03:08.000 I mean, Bourdain had a lot to do with that, too.

00:03:10.000 But I like to tell our staff particularly just to kind of keep everybody's egos within limit that we're more craftsmen.

00:03:22.000 We're like plumbers.

00:03:23.000 We do something that's needed on a daily basis because you eat a really good meal and you're hungry the next day.

00:03:29.000 And so I think that some chefs are certainly artists, and I really admire them.

00:03:34.000 I, however, am not one of those.

00:03:36.000 You're being humble.

00:03:37.000 I get it, though.

00:03:38.000 And I like what you're saying about keeping the other people in check.

00:03:41.000 Good move.

00:03:42.000 Very smart.

00:03:43.000 Tell them they're plumbers.

00:03:44.000 Right, right.

00:03:45.000 No offense to plumbers either.

00:03:46.000 I mean, they make a hell of a lot more money than cooks do. 0.97

00:03:49.000 Well, yeah, and when your sink's broken or your toilet's backed up, you need them.

00:03:54.000 The thing about it is, though, there is an art to cooking food correctly.

00:04:00.000 There's also an art to being a carpenter, right?

00:04:02.000 There's a lot of craftsmen.

00:04:04.000 For sure, a Finnish carpenter, that's an artist.

00:04:07.000 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.

00:04:16.000 Now I think they do.

00:04:17.000 I think a lot of folks do.

00:04:19.000 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.

00:04:32.000 You're like, wow, this is a...

00:04:33.000 There's strange little projects that these people are doing, and they're composing these foods, these dishes, based on local ingredients and everything.

00:04:42.000 It just gets you excited about what you're eating.

00:04:45.000 It's a different way of looking at food.

00:04:47.000 At least it was for me.

00:04:49.000 And it changes every day, especially if that's how you're sourcing your food.

00:04:53.000 Everything is a little bit different.

00:04:55.000 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.

00:05:02.000 You're dealing with things like that every day and you can deal with that in a positive or a negative.

00:05:06.000 You can look at that as an advantage.

00:05:08.000 And so I'll concede that yes, there is a bit of an art to dealing with food like that too.

00:05:16.000 How long have you owned Dai Due for?

00:05:19.000 As a brick-and-mortar restaurant, seven years.

00:05:22.000 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.

00:05:33.000 We called it a supper club.

00:05:34.000 And we would serve...

00:05:37.000 At our heyday, we're serving 80 people every week, once a week, and just sourcing everything locally.

00:05:45.000 A lot of times just from one farm.

00:05:47.000 And then, you know, getting fish out of the Gulf or freshwater fish, local olive oil, local dairy, local cheeses, local fruit, everything.

00:05:56.000 And whatever was available, that's what we'd do.

00:05:59.000 Now, these days, I don't think that's entirely novel.

00:06:04.000 But in 2006 to 2010, it was still a little bit novel.

00:06:09.000 Not to say that eating like that is a groundbreaking idea because it's probably the second oldest idea known to humans.

00:06:18.000 But to kind of do it...

00:06:22.000 Well, I would say doing it in Texas was harder.

00:06:28.000 And no one had ever really attempted that with ingredients here because it is such a...

00:06:32.000 Rough space.

00:06:33.000 It can be.

00:06:34.000 I mean, the weather's very extreme, and the growing seasons can be great or are terrible.

00:06:40.000 We have, you know, weather events, things like that.

00:06:43.000 So when you started out in 2006, were you coming right out of culinary school?

00:06:48.000 Like, what were you doing before then?

00:06:51.000 I had just been working in restaurants.

00:06:54.000 I never went to culinary school or any school beyond high school.

00:06:58.000 And I just loved cooking.

00:07:02.000 And I'd always worked in restaurants.

00:07:04.000 But I did start to grow a little bit tired of this disconnection with food that I saw in restaurants.

00:07:10.000 I traveled to Mexico and I traveled to Europe.

00:07:13.000 And I saw in those two places that their cuisine was based on their local ingredients.

00:07:20.000 And to put it in a really extreme way, in northern Mexico, the food was wonderful, but it was very much austere.

00:07:28.000 We were looking at onions and chilies and beans, and I'm talking about the high desert.

00:07:34.000 Meat.

00:07:35.000 I mean, no seafood whatsoever, obviously.

00:07:37.000 They're a couple hours from the coast.

00:07:38.000 And they were still able to pull off this really beautiful food there.

00:07:42.000 And that was just, it was meaningful.

00:07:44.000 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.

00:07:52.000 And you saw what they were doing.

00:07:53.000 You know, here we use walnut oil and duck fat as our primary cooking fats.

00:07:58.000 And they base a whole cuisine on that region of France off of that.

00:08:02.000 And what I saw where I'm from is that we had nothing like that.

00:08:07.000 Whenever we wanted asparagus, we would order it.

00:08:09.000 Whenever we wanted a beef tenderloin, we ordered it.

00:08:12.000 And we'd get in these boxes full of, you know, random nameless animals and out-of-season produce from across the world.

00:08:20.000 I just thought that what if we could represent the bounty of this area a little better?

00:08:26.000 And I saw what you could do with an austere space like in northern Mexico.

00:08:30.000 And I'm like, certainly we can do that in central Texas because we are very uniquely poised between the coasts and north Texas.

00:08:38.000 We have prairies.

00:08:39.000 We have hill country full of game.

00:08:40.000 South Texas full of citrus and mangoes, things like that.

00:08:44.000 We have everything we need here.

00:08:46.000 I don't know what austere means.

00:08:48.000 Do you?

00:08:49.000 Not bountiful.

00:08:51.000 Do you know what it means?

00:08:51.000 I was pretending I knew what it meant for a while.

00:08:54.000 I was like, I better ask a question.

00:08:56.000 Yeah.

00:08:57.000 Not necessarily poor, but not an enriched environment.

00:09:01.000 Severe or strict in manner, attitude, or appearance.

00:09:05.000 An austere man, okay, of living conditions or way of life, having no comforts or luxuries, harsh or aesthetic.

00:09:12.000 Ascetic?

00:09:13.000 Is that a word?

00:09:14.000 Ascetic?

00:09:14.000 How do you say that?

00:09:15.000 Conditions in the prison could hardly be more astore, having an extremely plain and simple style or appearance unadorned.

00:09:24.000 The cathedral is impressive in its austere simplicity.

00:09:27.000 There you go.

00:09:27.000 Okay.

00:09:28.000 So, did you get out of high school and then immediately start working in restaurants?

00:09:32.000 I worked in restaurants all through high school.

00:09:34.000 Did you always know that you wanted to be a cook?

00:09:36.000 No, I mean, I worked in the front of the house.

00:09:38.000 I was a waiter and a bartender.

00:09:39.000 It was just a good way to make cash.

00:09:42.000 And cash, you know, I loved it, you know, as a young man.

00:09:45.000 And I, you know, I spent it on...

00:09:48.000 I tithed most of it.

00:09:50.000 No, I did not.

00:09:52.000 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?

00:10:17.000 Yes, yes.

00:10:18.000 And I mean, I think it can be great.

00:10:19.000 It really depends on the person.

00:10:20.000 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.

00:10:32.000 Right, right.

00:10:32.000 Well, that's like with everything, right?

00:10:34.000 Sure.

00:10:34.000 It's hard for people to, like, stick to a path and just grind it out.

00:10:38.000 Yeah.

00:10:39.000 And I think the chef world is a lot of grinding, huh?

00:10:42.000 Yeah, it's tough.

00:10:45.000 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.

00:10:55.000 You still do.

00:10:56.000 Don't get me wrong.

00:10:57.000 I mean, it's a lot of hard work.

00:11:01.000 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.

00:11:08.000 And I knew that it was.

00:11:10.000 Something about food just took me.

00:11:12.000 So when you first started working, just took the pay cut and went to the kitchen, you knew right away?

00:11:19.000 Yes, and I stayed in the kitchen from there on.

00:11:21.000 I never left.

00:11:23.000 And then when I started traveling, that's when I really got excited about it and just saw Food in its real way.

00:11:33.000 You know, I think a formative meal for me would be in Venice.

00:11:37.000 I was able to travel there, but I was also able to work in a kitchen.

00:11:42.000 It was in the off season.

00:11:43.000 Nobody was there because it was between the sunny season and Carnival.

00:11:49.000 And so the chef took me literally on a gondola.

00:11:51.000 Like, I mean, you can't get more romanticized than that.

00:11:55.000 He's like, we have to go to the seafood market.

00:11:57.000 Well, how do you get to the seafood market?

00:11:58.000 You get on a gondola.

00:12:01.000 And the guy takes you across the canal.

00:12:02.000 And then we went and bought the most beautiful sole, you know, like a little miniature flounder, these tiny little flatfish.

00:12:08.000 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.

00:12:18.000 And he's got three sizes of arugula.

00:12:21.000 He's got small, medium, and large.

00:12:23.000 And then he's got some lemons and he's got some olive oil.

00:12:26.000 And this guy takes this sole and he cooks it on a flat top.

00:12:30.000 And he's like, don't put any salt on it.

00:12:31.000 It's still salty from the lagoon. 1.00

00:12:33.000 And I'm like, you're full of shit, man. 1.00

00:12:34.000 I'm like, really? 1.00

00:12:36.000 I'm like, okay.

00:12:37.000 And then he cuts a lemon in half because it's winter and so the lemons are in season.

00:12:41.000 It's this beautiful lemon and he puts that on the plate.

00:12:42.000 And then he picks the small arugula and puts that on the plate because it's delicate.

00:12:46.000 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.

00:12:51.000 And I just remember thinking, like, how is that?

00:12:55.000 We could not get away with that in the United States, like serving food like that.

00:12:59.000 Here's a chef who's extremely talented.

00:13:01.000 He's been working in these hotels all over Europe his whole life.

00:13:05.000 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. 0.98

00:13:21.000 So it's to not fuck with it. 0.99

00:13:23.000 Exactly. 0.99

00:13:23.000 To know exactly when this is all you need. 0.99

00:13:27.000 Right.

00:13:27.000 And not think that you don't have to do anything to it.

00:13:32.000 And it's up here.

00:13:33.000 I mean, I want to do stuff.

00:13:35.000 I want to manipulate it all the time, of course.

00:13:38.000 When I saw that, I was like, that's food, and that's cooking, and that's hospitality, and that's nourishing right there.

00:13:45.000 I thought that was really cool.

00:13:46.000 And it was all ingredient-based, and it was all hyper-local.

00:13:49.000 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. 0.93

00:14:03.000 You don't really have to fuck with it.

00:14:04.000 At that point, your skill is really sourcing. 0.99

00:14:09.000 It's relationships that you've made with a fishmonger or a farmer or a rancher or somebody that's pressing olive oil.

00:14:18.000 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.

00:14:26.000 You can.

00:14:27.000 You can get there and play with it all you want.

00:14:29.000 My style is certainly to not play with it.

00:14:33.000 And also, I mean, there's so much wisdom in leaving stuff alone.

00:14:37.000 When you see someone do that and you know that that's all it needs, it's exciting.

00:14:43.000 There's something exciting about something that really hasn't been fucked with in that way, like as a dish. 0.82

00:14:49.000 Just if it works out.

00:14:51.000 Because there's a wisdom in creating something like that. 0.99

00:14:54.000 There's a craft in and of itself in just leaving shit alone. 0.99

00:14:59.000 Yeah, I think so. 1.00

00:15:00.000 Yeah, it's like a perfectly cooked piece of meat.

00:15:04.000 It's not requiring a lot.

00:15:06.000 It's just time and understanding what you're doing with it and salt and meat.

00:15:11.000 I mean, it's about as primitive as you get.

00:15:14.000 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.

00:15:24.000 The effort of the people that have put this dish together comes through as you're eating it.

00:15:29.000 And when it's done really well, It's like you're excited about the skill of the person who put this together.

00:15:36.000 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.

00:15:49.000 There's so much going on there.

00:15:51.000 I'm excited about the relationship we have with the rancher, too, you know, and the story that they tell.

00:15:57.000 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.

00:16:07.000 Right, right, right.

00:16:08.000 And how that, I mean, how it computes the whole system.

00:16:11.000 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.

00:16:24.000 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.

00:16:34.000 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.

00:16:47.000 When did you start doing that?

00:16:48.000 That was in 2008, so shortly after.

00:16:52.000 We started doing classes on butchery of domestic pork, which was kind of my wheelhouse.

00:16:59.000 I'd learned that in restaurant work.

00:17:02.000 I'd been a prep cook and a butcher in a restaurant.

00:17:05.000 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.

00:17:23.000 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.

00:17:31.000 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.

00:17:39.000 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.

00:17:56.000 That's also sad to me.

00:17:58.000 And you know a lot of work went into that.

00:18:01.000 And so much.

00:18:03.000 It's immeasurable.

00:18:04.000 And so being able to tie food with a source like that, with hunting or fishing or whatever, I think was really important.

00:18:11.000 So we started doing classes where we were taking people out and it's guided hunts.

00:18:17.000 And then you learn how to butcher, cook, and then you eat game throughout the weekend too.

00:18:22.000 And we still do that to this day.

00:18:24.000 And when you do this, how many times a year do you do this?

00:18:27.000 You know, well, you know, in season, it's Texas, so it's hot.

00:18:32.000 Our season typically runs, if we have a couple dove hunts or something in there, from mid-September till maybe April.

00:18:42.000 So just basically the cooler and cool and cold months of the year.

00:18:47.000 So about six, seven months.

00:18:48.000 And when you do it, would you do it on weekends?

00:18:50.000 Like when do you...

00:18:52.000 Yeah, they're typically weekend classes.

00:18:55.000 We used to do a lot of private events and now I've just gone to, we work with one ranch.

00:19:00.000 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.

00:19:12.000 They come back, we have a pretty high return rate on those.

00:19:16.000 We're about to release our schedule of those, but there's going to be very, very little seats available to those.

00:19:22.000 They fill up.

00:19:22.000 We do eight classes a year for four people.

00:19:26.000 If you're hunting, too, you're going to need small groups, right?

00:19:30.000 You really can't.

00:19:30.000 Yeah, and it's got to be very intimate.

00:19:32.000 We want everybody to see everything and put their hands on it, so it's really necessary.

00:19:36.000 We have a team of guides.

00:19:38.000 If you've never been hunting before, you have a guide.

00:19:40.000 We walk you through the whole process.

00:19:43.000 Series of events, like from sighting in the gun to, you know, it's this constant barrage of, like, learning.

00:19:50.000 And it's like, this is how you put your heel down.

00:19:52.000 You know, this is the way the wind is blowing.

00:19:54.000 This is the way we're going to walk to do this.

00:19:56.000 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.

00:20:04.000 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.

00:20:19.000 And then we teach them how to butcher it, break it down.

00:20:23.000 And then we really want them to be able to do it on their own.

00:20:26.000 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.

00:20:34.000 You know, deer liver is no good or venison tastes gamey to me or I'm not going to touch the hog topic yet.

00:20:40.000 But, you know, people are very...

00:20:44.000 Opinionated about hogs. 0.94

00:20:46.000 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.

00:20:52.000 And whether or not they go and do it in the future, I don't really know.

00:20:55.000 But I do think that it gives them some very good connectivity.

00:21:00.000 I mean, I know people that came on a trip 12 years ago that still talk about it to me.

00:21:05.000 I think it was important.

00:21:06.000 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.

00:21:17.000 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,

00:21:32.000 you know, They all had lives, they all had deaths, everything.

00:21:38.000 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?

00:21:48.000 Right.

00:21:48.000 You'll appreciate the vegetables, everything else.

00:21:50.000 You might appreciate where your clothes are made.

00:21:52.000 Right, right, right.

00:21:53.000 Or do we need a leaf blower?

00:21:56.000 You know, things like that.

00:21:58.000 Yeah, we are really disconnected from so many things that are critical for life.

00:22:04.000 I mean, there's very few people that have ever sourced any of their food.

00:22:07.000 Right.

00:22:08.000 They've never grown it.

00:22:13.000 We're good to go. 0.99

00:22:33.000 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. 0.94

00:22:46.000 And I've talked to people that go helicopter hunting, and I go, well, what do you do with all the pigs? 0.83

00:22:52.000 And they're like, you leave them there.

00:22:53.000 And I'm like, what?

00:22:55.000 I'm like, that doesn't seem...

00:22:57.000 That seems not just wasteful, but, well...

00:23:02.000 I mean, there's a lot to that.

00:23:04.000 You have to, right? 1.00

00:23:05.000 Because you have to eradicate a certain amount of those pigs. 0.96

00:23:08.000 But isn't there a lot of food that you're just letting rot? 0.98

00:23:11.000 There is.

00:23:12.000 So, I mean, this is the Pandora's Box topic for me.

00:23:17.000 I'm very vested in it.

00:23:18.000 I just wrote a book about feral hogs.

00:23:21.000 Steve Vernella, to come full circle on that, he called me the hog apologist.

00:23:27.000 Yeah.

00:23:28.000 And it's true. 0.56

00:23:29.000 But to your point, I think that, you know, we'll start there with a feral hog. 0.98

00:23:35.000 Let's explain the numbers, too, because people need to know how fucking crazy it is here in Texas. 0.75

00:23:40.000 And, of course, these numbers are not going to be clearly defined. 0.95

00:23:45.000 You know, it's hard to get a census on hogs. 1.00

00:23:47.000 So the estimate in the United States is around six million.

00:23:52.000 The estimate here in Texas is between two and four million.

00:23:56.000 So probably somewhere in the middle of that, maybe 2.6.

00:23:59.000 That's a number that you'll see a lot, maybe around 3 million, but whatever.

00:24:03.000 So literally more than the entire population of Austin.

00:24:08.000 In hogs. 0.99

00:24:09.000 In hogs. 0.99

00:24:09.000 Spread out around the state. 0.99

00:24:12.000 And in the time we've been talking about them, you know, how many have been born.

00:24:17.000 So they have no breeding season.

00:24:21.000 They can breed at a very young age.

00:24:23.000 You know, let's say five or six months is very conceivable.

00:24:29.000 And then they have a gestation period of three months, three weeks, three days.

00:24:33.000 And then they can drop a litter of, you know.

00:24:36.000 Always three days?

00:24:37.000 So you can just plan it out?

00:24:38.000 Yeah.

00:24:39.000 I mean, it's pretty precise like that.

00:24:41.000 I bet women are very jealous. 1.00

00:24:42.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:44.000 Well, I'll be giving birth on Wednesday.

00:24:46.000 Yeah.

00:24:46.000 Got it timed in.

00:24:47.000 And after that, I mean, they're able to go back into estrus pretty quickly after that.

00:24:53.000 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.

00:24:59.000 So you've got a 10-month-old animal dropping 6 babies.

00:25:06.000 And they can do it 3 times a year.

00:25:08.000 Well, twice.

00:25:09.000 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.

00:25:16.000 It might be 23 days.

00:25:17.000 I can't remember the number right now.

00:25:19.000 After they give birth.

00:25:21.000 And they're back in estrus.

00:25:22.000 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.

00:25:28.000 And so that's when you see this explosion that has happened.

00:25:30.000 And so...

00:25:32.000 They're not indigenous to this country, so they came here in the mid-1500s.

00:25:37.000 Columbus brought some to, I mean, just the Caribbean islands.

00:25:42.000 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.

00:25:52.000 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. 0.80

00:26:02.000 And so what we saw was this real slow build in pig populations.

00:26:06.000 There was also some Pacific Islanders that dropped them off in Hawaii way before that.

00:26:10.000 So if you're talking about The technical United States.

00:26:13.000 When did they drop them off in Hawaii?

00:26:15.000 It's a food source.

00:26:16.000 No, no, when?

00:26:17.000 When?

00:26:17.000 Oh, I couldn't give you a number.

00:26:20.000 It's way previous to the 1500s.

00:26:23.000 Wow, that's wild.

00:26:25.000 So that's a weird debate in Hawaii, right?

00:26:27.000 Because a lot of people are saying they're an invasive species.

00:26:29.000 And then some folks are like, well, so are people.

00:26:32.000 Sure.

00:26:33.000 Because if you think about it, the hog's been there as long as the people almost.

00:26:37.000 There's going to be a lot of parallels.

00:26:38.000 Yeah.

00:26:39.000 Yeah.

00:26:39.000 There's a very destructive European animal arrives on our shores.

00:26:47.000 Yeah.

00:26:48.000 And now there's a lot of them.

00:26:51.000 So, you know, you've got these populations exploding.

00:26:56.000 Throughout time, but really kind of concentrated in the late, you know, 1900s, you know, like the 80s.

00:27:02.000 And then you saw people, you know, you've got a guy that loves to hunt on his ranch in West Texas.

00:27:09.000 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. 0.96

00:27:15.000 Buddy in East Texas is like, wow, man, I got some pigs. 0.98

00:27:19.000 And then, you know, traps a couple, throws them on a trailer.

00:27:23.000 And now you have 253 out of 254 counties in Texas have hogs, feral hogs.

00:27:29.000 Wow.

00:27:30.000 And they're spreading all across the country, too, right?

00:27:32.000 Yeah.

00:27:32.000 There's a downward migration from Saskatchewan, you know?

00:27:36.000 Really?

00:27:36.000 And those are escaped domestic hogs.

00:27:38.000 But, I mean, let's also define what a feral hog is.

00:27:41.000 It's a pig that's just on the wrong side of a fence. 1.00

00:27:44.000 I mean, once they get out, that's a feral pig. 1.00

00:27:47.000 So I like to say it's a domestic pig. 0.88

00:27:51.000 A feral hog is just a pig without an address.

00:27:53.000 You know, they just, as soon as they get out of that pen, they're feral.

00:27:57.000 And I will readily admit, I mean, not even on purpose, but we have shot while hunting pigs that had ear tags.

00:28:04.000 You know, meaning that at one point, that was a farm pig.

00:28:08.000 It's not anymore.

00:28:09.000 And what it's doing is it's breeding like crazy out there with a feral boar.

00:28:15.000 And it's just creating more feral pigs. 0.99

00:28:17.000 So like I said, once they're on the wrong side of the fence, they're fair game.

00:28:19.000 Well, we should explain to people what happens to pigs, right?

00:28:22.000 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.

00:28:30.000 So when you're saying that these are pigs, they're wild pigs, people are like, wait, but they're boars.

00:28:35.000 Boars are different than pigs. 0.56

00:28:36.000 They're not.

00:28:37.000 It's all called sous scroffa, right?

00:28:39.000 Correct.

00:28:40.000 And once they escape, within months, their hair can become shaggier. 0.76

00:28:43.000 And we're talking about the same pig, not its offspring. 0.76

00:28:46.000 Right.

00:28:46.000 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.

00:28:57.000 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.

00:29:07.000 And so, once they get out, they go feral quick.

00:29:11.000 And they get street smarts, too.

00:29:13.000 I mean, they go nocturnal.

00:29:14.000 I mean, they're smart, smart animals.

00:29:16.000 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...

00:29:29.000 You know, settling in this country and you've got escaped domestic hogs. 1.00

00:29:33.000 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.

00:29:42.000 How much different are those?

00:29:43.000 It's still the same species, right?

00:29:45.000 Yes, it is.

00:29:47.000 I don't want to stand by it, but I believe it's just like a subspecies.

00:29:53.000 There's one more Latin name after Suscropha for the Eurasian.

00:29:58.000 Freely interbreeding.

00:30:00.000 It's not like...

00:30:01.000 They're not hybrids where they're not... 0.99

00:30:02.000 Well, they make hybrids. 0.91

00:30:03.000 Right, but the hybrids are viable.

00:30:05.000 Absolutely.

00:30:06.000 Yeah, so it's not like a hybrid, like a liger where they can't...

00:30:09.000 No, no, no.

00:30:10.000 Nothing like that.

00:30:11.000 And so then you've got some kind of specific areas.

00:30:16.000 California had a lot of Russian boars brought in, and there's certain areas in Texas.

00:30:20.000 The Powderhorn Ranch down near Port O'Connor was one that had some brought in specifically and deposited there.

00:30:28.000 Is the difference in the flavor or the way they look like the flesh?

00:30:33.000 It would be really hard to determine that now because most of them over the years have interbred with your standard feral pig.

00:30:41.000 And so purebred populations of those hogs are very hard to find. 1.00

00:30:48.000 It's debatable whether the Powderhorn Ranch population is purebred Russian boar.

00:30:53.000 I've read different things about it.

00:30:55.000 Some say that it's not.

00:30:56.000 Some say that it is.

00:30:57.000 It's a high fence?

00:30:58.000 It's got a high fence around it and has had one since the 1920s, I believe.

00:31:03.000 Oh, wow.

00:31:03.000 And so whenever they brought in the boars, those are the same breeding population.

00:31:09.000 Right.

00:31:09.000 They think.

00:31:10.000 But, you know, a fence doesn't mean shit to a pig. 0.99

00:31:13.000 You know, they go under it, you know, any way around it that they can. 0.99

00:31:16.000 Flood, waters come up, they can swim, you know.

00:31:19.000 So it's not known.

00:31:20.000 But there is one sequestered population of feral hogs in the United States, and that's on Osaba Island off the coast of Georgia.

00:31:28.000 And so that was an Iberico hog. 0.84

00:31:31.000 Brought over here by the Spanish. 1.00

00:31:33.000 You know, pointy hats, long brown robes.

00:31:35.000 They dropped some hogs on that island. 1.00

00:31:38.000 And that island has sustained a population of purebred Iberico hogs to this day. 1.00

00:31:45.000 And it's called Osaba Island.

00:31:47.000 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.

00:31:57.000 Yeah.

00:31:57.000 I've seen Abirco.

00:31:59.000 I've seen that name before.

00:32:01.000 Hamon.

00:32:02.000 Hamon Abirco.

00:32:03.000 Yeah.

00:32:03.000 So these Osaba hogs are a purebred descendant of that.

00:32:07.000 They're smaller because they suffer from insular dwarfism.

00:32:15.000 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.

00:32:23.000 And they've exported those hogs now. 1.00

00:32:25.000 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.

00:32:36.000 You know, they are purebred Ibericos. 1.00

00:32:38.000 People pay top dollar for that.

00:32:39.000 Have you had one of those before?

00:32:41.000 Yeah, we had some hybrids.

00:32:42.000 Like, they were part Osaba and part other hog. 0.99

00:32:45.000 I mean, they were great.

00:32:45.000 I'm not gonna say, like, it was mind-blowing.

00:32:48.000 But, I mean, we get a lot of really high-grade domestic pork in also.

00:32:51.000 So, they were small.

00:32:53.000 They were like a medium-sized pig that put on a lot of fat. 0.93

00:32:55.000 So, yeah, it was very good.

00:32:58.000 But I wouldn't say it was the best pork I'd ever had.

00:33:02.000 Is the difference in the way domestic pork versus wild pork, the way it tastes, just primarily diet?

00:33:08.000 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?

00:33:17.000 Does it change the flavor?

00:33:19.000 I would imagine some hormonal changes are happening in their bodies, right?

00:33:22.000 Certainly.

00:33:23.000 You're going to see, as far as flavor goes, you can have diet and also most domestic hogs are castrated.

00:33:33.000 And what that does is it prevents something called boar taint.

00:33:37.000 And it is a, you know, some people don't like cilantro.

00:33:40.000 You know, there's maybe 7% of the people don't like cilantro.

00:33:44.000 It's like a genetic thing, right?

00:33:45.000 Yeah.

00:33:46.000 Well, boar taint is offensive to something like 96% of people.

00:33:50.000 I mean, like a lot of people.

00:33:51.000 It's a very strong, musty odor.

00:33:53.000 And we deal with it randomly.

00:33:55.000 I mean, when you're hunting wild pigs, you know, very, very, very few of them have been caught and castrated, the boars.

00:34:03.000 So you're going to have that hormonal influence on them.

00:34:07.000 You're also going to have diet, which is huge to me.

00:34:11.000 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.

00:34:32.000 One of those is going to be really good, and it's that last one.

00:34:35.000 You know, they're going to put on a lot of fat and be very, very good.

00:34:39.000 So one of the things that we address constantly is the disparity in quality for wild pigs.

00:34:49.000 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.

00:35:01.000 Now, some of them might bully their way to the front of the line and eat a little bit more. 0.99

00:35:05.000 They're pigs. 0.99

00:35:07.000 Versus a feral hog from the same property, but it's not getting fed a pig ration. 0.99

00:35:13.000 So you will see a lot of difference.

00:35:16.000 Feral hogs are typically a lot leaner, and they can be anywhere from identical in flavor to a domestic pig to very, very different.

00:35:24.000 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.

00:35:33.000 Yeah, or a live deer.

00:35:34.000 Yeah.

00:35:34.000 Well, I saw one, there's a photo of one running away with a fawn in its mouth.

00:35:38.000 Yeah, I've seen it.

00:35:39.000 Oh, any picture of a pig doing anything naughty immediately gets sent to me.

00:35:45.000 Yeah, so they will go and hunt fawns.

00:35:50.000 Or they just see them.

00:35:51.000 In my book, I call them opportunistic omnivores. 0.99

00:35:55.000 I think I call them woodland vacuums with shitty manners also. 0.99

00:36:01.000 It's what they come across. 0.96

00:36:04.000 I mean, you know about the great rattlesnake debate.

00:36:06.000 What's the great rattlesnake debate?

00:36:08.000 Okay, so this is a good one.

00:36:10.000 You say it like everyone would know.

00:36:11.000 Well, of course, the great rattlesnake.

00:36:13.000 How long have you lived here?

00:36:14.000 Do you know the great rattlesnake debate, young Jamie?

00:36:16.000 No, he does not either.

00:36:17.000 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,

00:36:34.000 It alerts a hog.

00:36:36.000 And a hog will kill and eat a rattlesnake pretty much with impunity.

00:36:41.000 Really?

00:36:41.000 Yeah.

00:36:42.000 I mean, they've got really thick hides.

00:36:44.000 They don't need to worry about it.

00:36:45.000 They're going to get in there and they'll just tear up a snake. 1.00

00:36:47.000 I mean, have you seen Lonesome Dove?

00:36:48.000 The restaurant?

00:36:49.000 No, the movie.

00:36:50.000 The movie.

00:36:51.000 Yeah.

00:36:52.000 One of the first scenes in there is just like he's watching these two pigs eat a rattlesnake.

00:36:57.000 What year is that movie from?

00:36:59.000 Year?

00:36:59.000 Yeah.

00:37:00.000 Oh, God.

00:37:00.000 The 80s.

00:37:01.000 I mean, that's probably like...

00:37:02.000 It's based on the book, right?

00:37:04.000 The novel?

00:37:04.000 Larry McMurtry.

00:37:05.000 Yeah.

00:37:07.000 I mean, classic.

00:37:08.000 You've got to see that.

00:37:09.000 Well, it's a lot of things I have to do.

00:37:11.000 I know.

00:37:11.000 Put it on the list.

00:37:13.000 So...

00:37:13.000 So that's a thing.

00:37:14.000 Pigs always eat rattlesnakes. 0.87

00:37:16.000 Well...

00:37:16.000 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.

00:37:25.000 And so rattlesnakes aren't rattling as much as they used to, and so there's kind of an uptick in bites.

00:37:32.000 I personally don't subscribe to this.

00:37:34.000 I mean, I'm like...

00:37:35.000 I don't know.

00:37:36.000 Some rattlesnakes rattle when you walk by them.

00:37:38.000 Some of them don't.

00:37:39.000 But there's a very vibrant debate on whether rattlesnakes have stopped rattling because of hogs.

00:37:48.000 Doesn't it make sense to you that that would be kind of maybe in transition?

00:37:51.000 Like if the hog problem is getting bigger, right? 0.99

00:37:54.000 And it is.

00:37:55.000 And then the rattlesnakes are getting eaten by the hogs, which they are. 1.00

00:37:58.000 Doesn't it seem like that would sort of naturally happen?

00:38:01.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:38:02.000 I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I would imagine...

00:38:05.000 I don't know.

00:38:05.000 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.

00:38:19.000 So in 20 years, rattlesnakes are now just, I don't know, what do you call them now?

00:38:23.000 Just snakes?

00:38:24.000 You know, like they've just stopped rattling.

00:38:26.000 But they still have the rattle.

00:38:27.000 Yeah.

00:38:28.000 They just don't use it.

00:38:29.000 There was a moth in England in the late 1800s when England was becoming industrialized.

00:38:38.000 And let me see if I get this right.

00:38:40.000 The moth was white, right?

00:38:43.000 And then as the smokestacks went up, Everything got sooty and black.

00:38:50.000 And the white moth stood out really vividly against the black soot.

00:38:55.000 And birds started eating it.

00:38:59.000 There was a genetic anomaly where one of the moths might be black.

00:39:06.000 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. 0.61

00:39:19.000 And so it's, I mean, I don't know if it's the same.

00:39:22.000 There's scientists out there just laughing at me right now.

00:39:25.000 But, you know, I guess it's plausible.

00:39:28.000 But there is a great debate.

00:39:30.000 I personally, I'm like, I don't know about that.

00:39:33.000 I think it's, what happens to animals when they adapt and change to environment, it's really spectacular. 0.93

00:39:42.000 Like if you see like a chameleon, how the fuck did that happen? 0.82

00:39:45.000 Or even, let's get even crazier, a cuttlefish. 0.99

00:39:47.000 Yeah.

00:39:48.000 Oh, what?

00:39:49.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:39:49.000 You could become your environment, like when you see an octopus become a coral reef, like what the fuck is happening there? 0.98

00:39:56.000 How did you figure that out? 0.92

00:39:57.000 Yeah.

00:39:57.000 How long did that take?

00:39:59.000 Yeah.

00:39:59.000 Took a minute.

00:40:01.000 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.

00:40:10.000 And like, oh, it adapted to its environment.

00:40:12.000 But how quickly?

00:40:13.000 And how much adaption?

00:40:15.000 When you see that...

00:40:17.000 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.

00:40:29.000 Right.

00:40:30.000 Like, that's crazy.

00:40:32.000 Like, how did that happen?

00:40:33.000 How did a mule deer literally become the color of the grass that it exists in?

00:40:41.000 Or a coos deer, which is even more blended.

00:40:44.000 But even more so at the time of day that they get really active.

00:40:47.000 Yeah.

00:40:48.000 It's like, ah, that thing's kind of gray.

00:40:50.000 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.

00:40:57.000 Jamie put this up.

00:41:01.000 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.

00:41:13.000 Yeah, well, that's even crazier then. 0.98

00:41:15.000 So how the fuck do they become the color of a... 0.99

00:41:18.000 They change color. 0.99

00:41:19.000 Yeah, and they can't even appreciate it.

00:41:21.000 They can't see it.

00:41:22.000 But how do they know that they can't see it?

00:41:25.000 Probably because they've dissected the protein that makes you see.

00:41:29.000 Right.

00:41:29.000 That I don't know.

00:41:31.000 How crazy is that?

00:41:32.000 That they're becoming a color that they can't even see?

00:41:37.000 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.

00:41:49.000 You ever seen that?

00:41:50.000 No.

00:41:50.000 See if you can find that.

00:41:51.000 It's so weird.

00:41:52.000 It's trying to figure it out.

00:41:58.000 Oh.

00:42:02.000 So it's trying to figure out how to emulate this super bizarre pattern.

00:42:07.000 But in color.

00:42:08.000 Yeah.

00:42:09.000 Well I guess that's black and white technically.

00:42:11.000 Yeah.

00:42:12.000 Unreal.

00:42:14.000 But what is it seeing?

00:42:15.000 See, watch how it settles down and then just becomes black and white.

00:42:20.000 It's trying to figure out...

00:42:21.000 It doesn't have...

00:42:22.000 See, it's black and white, whatever it can generate.

00:42:25.000 It seems like it can only generate things that are similar to the environment in which it lives.

00:42:30.000 Like there.

00:42:31.000 Like it looks like a throw rug.

00:42:34.000 Let me see if it's better here.

00:42:39.000 It's definitely not black and white.

00:42:43.000 It's trying to figure it out though.

00:42:45.000 Look how it's changing colors, like trying to work out.

00:42:47.000 And where is it seeing this?

00:42:50.000 Is it using its eyes?

00:42:52.000 Because it seems like once its body lays down, its body tries to emulate the colors around it.

00:42:58.000 How does it sense its environment when it doesn't even seem like it can view it?

00:43:03.000 Yeah, like see there, you can tell it's trying to do like squares. 0.99

00:43:08.000 Fucking weird animal. 0.99

00:43:12.000 They're weird. 1.00

00:43:13.000 The octopuses and cuttlefishes, they're so strange.

00:43:19.000 They're such an alien creature.

00:43:21.000 If you went to another planet and they had things like that, they could just sort of blend in with their environment.

00:43:26.000 You're like, wow, we don't have anything like that here.

00:43:27.000 We do.

00:43:28.000 It's just in the ocean.

00:43:29.000 Yeah.

00:43:31.000 So maybe you are on Team Rattlesnake.

00:43:34.000 I'm leaning towards that. 1.00

00:43:36.000 I feel like they would adapt, especially if these goddamn pigs just keep eating their buddies. 1.00

00:43:41.000 Right. 1.00

00:43:42.000 After a while, they're like, hey, I think we're going to stop this rattling.

00:43:45.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:43:46.000 Let's cut the shit. 1.00

00:43:47.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:43:48.000 I don't know.

00:43:49.000 I mean, maybe we'll see in another 20 years, and we'll have a little more data to back it up.

00:43:53.000 But right now, it's almost an emotive response that people have.

00:43:59.000 Snakes, stop rattling.

00:44:00.000 That's why.

00:44:00.000 You've got to be more careful out there.

00:44:01.000 It's because of the pigs. 0.93

00:44:02.000 But it's also... 1.00

00:44:04.000 That's seemingly another way to blame the pigs for something. 0.98

00:44:07.000 Right. 0.99

00:44:08.000 Well, there's a lot of, like, room to blame pigs. 0.98

00:44:11.000 There's so many of them. 0.98

00:44:12.000 And they do so much.

00:44:13.000 What is the number of, the amount of money they do in damage every year in Texas?

00:44:18.000 It's something really crazy. 0.98

00:44:20.000 It's ridiculous. 0.87

00:44:20.000 I mean, and nationwide, I believe it's in the billions. 0.87

00:44:23.000 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. 0.98

00:44:38.000 It doesn't bother me. 0.98

00:44:39.000 I get it.

00:44:40.000 I think my whole point in this process is just trying to encourage people to eat more of the dead ones. 1.00

00:44:49.000 Simultaneously, I'd like to see people kill more of them. 1.00

00:44:52.000 I love pigs. 1.00

00:44:53.000 I think they're great.

00:44:54.000 I love hunting them.

00:44:55.000 I think they're cool.

00:44:56.000 I respect them.

00:44:57.000 I don't want them to suffer. 1.00

00:44:59.000 And I kill them very regularly, too. 0.99

00:45:03.000 And I don't feel necessarily... 1.00

00:45:05.000 I don't feel really bad about it, but I also want them to die quickly. 0.76

00:45:09.000 And I know that we need to get behind that wholesale in order to control this problem.

00:45:14.000 But I would just like to see them utilize this food more.

00:45:18.000 Well, it seems like a perfect food source if you think about it.

00:45:21.000 It's an invasive species.

00:45:22.000 You have to control the population of them.

00:45:24.000 They're very nutritious, really good for you.

00:45:27.000 They're delicious.

00:45:28.000 And they're also gross looking, so people don't feel as bad about shooting them.

00:45:32.000 Yeah, yeah, there's that.

00:45:33.000 I mean, I think the debatable thing is if they're delicious.

00:45:36.000 Not on my part.

00:45:37.000 I mean, that's my role in this is to convince people because of the mythology that's out there about them.

00:45:43.000 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.

00:45:55.000 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.

00:46:02.000 But, you know, I've eaten 300-pound boars that had testicles the size of cantaloupes, and they were absolutely delicious.

00:46:12.000 They're that big?

00:46:12.000 Their nuts are that big?

00:46:13.000 Oh, they get big.

00:46:14.000 They get real big.

00:46:15.000 Do you make Rocky Mountain oysters out of their nuts?

00:46:18.000 There's a recipe in the book for them.

00:46:19.000 Yeah.

00:46:23.000 Just convincing people to try them.

00:46:26.000 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.

00:46:36.000 There's a lot of generational mythology.

00:46:39.000 You can't eat that pig because it's too big.

00:46:42.000 You can't eat any boar.

00:46:43.000 You'll hear that too, and it's like, that's just not true.

00:46:46.000 I eat them all the time.

00:46:47.000 And either I have a really terrible palate or that's wrong.

00:46:52.000 Well, is it a prep?

00:46:54.000 Certainly, there has to be some sort of impact on whatever their diet is, right?

00:46:58.000 But also, it's a preparation issue.

00:47:01.000 And that's where your classes come in.

00:47:04.000 And stress.

00:47:05.000 Stress on them.

00:47:06.000 Stress on the animal.

00:47:07.000 So a bigger animal takes longer to kill.

00:47:10.000 Anecdotally, and I talk about this one in the book, too.

00:47:14.000 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.

00:47:23.000 And then I was tasked with taking someone from L.A. who is in the movies to go hunting.

00:47:31.000 He'd never been hunting before.

00:47:32.000 And I was a little worried about him being able to seal the deal, as was the production crew.

00:47:37.000 And so what I did- Oh, so you're filming it?

00:47:39.000 We're filming it.

00:47:40.000 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.

00:47:50.000 So we ran snares on a fence line where the hogs would cut under there. 1.00

00:47:57.000 And we ran these wire snares on there.

00:47:58.000 I ran four snares.

00:47:59.000 And then I took him, and we went and sat in a blind.

00:48:02.000 Sure enough, we got lucky. 0.89

00:48:04.000 A pig walked out, and we got luckier. 0.99

00:48:05.000 He shot it and dropped it right there. 0.98

00:48:08.000 I mean, just a nice, like, 120-yard shot. 0.97

00:48:12.000 Pig went down.

00:48:13.000 Great! 0.94

00:48:14.000 So we go, and we get the pig.

00:48:15.000 It's about an 80-pound sow.

00:48:17.000 Throw it in the truck.

00:48:18.000 Drive to check the snares.

00:48:20.000 And when we pull up, there's another hog caught in one of the snares.

00:48:24.000 And it's still alive.

00:48:26.000 I mean, it just catches it around the torso, basically, and holds it. 0.57

00:48:30.000 But hogs, once they go through something like that, they go nuts. 1.00

00:48:35.000 I mean, they're really aggressive animals.

00:48:38.000 But this thing just laid on the ground.

00:48:40.000 It was so tired, and I felt bad.

00:48:43.000 The crew was like, let's get set up for a shot. 0.99

00:48:44.000 And I said no, and I just walked over and I shot it and killed it. 0.99

00:48:48.000 Because I was like, it's done. 1.00

00:48:50.000 It's done, you know.

00:48:51.000 And we took that animal and the other animal and they were both sows.

00:48:55.000 They were almost identical.

00:48:57.000 They were probably about 80-ish pounds each.

00:48:59.000 And we scanned and gutted them and then we butchered them both.

00:49:04.000 We ate some of the one that he shot that night.

00:49:07.000 No, it was the next night.

00:49:08.000 We had some chops and some other stuff off of it.

00:49:10.000 And it was great. 0.97

00:49:11.000 It was lean, you know, South Texas pig.

00:49:13.000 And we took the rest of the one that we'd caught in the snare home.

00:49:18.000 To this day, the worst feral hog I've ever had.

00:49:22.000 And it was pretty much inedible.

00:49:24.000 And it had that extremely gamey flavor to it.

00:49:28.000 And I can only attribute that to stress.

00:49:30.000 I've never tasted another sow in that weight category that tasted anything like that.

00:49:35.000 And you've eaten probably hundreds of them.

00:49:36.000 Hundreds.

00:49:37.000 Hundreds.

00:49:38.000 And so, I mean, I think that that's a very clear-cut example of what stress can do.

00:49:45.000 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.

00:49:54.000 If you're rifle hunting or bow hunting, it takes longer for them to die.

00:50:00.000 And then, I mean, there are the hormonal things, and those big pigs, they can be very strongly flavored.

00:50:06.000 I'm not here to argue that.

00:50:07.000 But what we try to do is approach hogs, and forgive me if I'm getting off topic, but... 1.00

00:50:13.000 In a way where we kind of categorize them where they're not all treated the same way.

00:50:18.000 But, you know, like a big boar and a big sow, and then there's a medium hog and a small hog.

00:50:24.000 And you're going to cook all those a little bit differently.

00:50:26.000 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.

00:50:33.000 They're not, you can't treat them the same way.

00:50:35.000 And what is the difference in what you would do with a 300-pound boar?

00:50:39.000 How you would cook it?

00:50:40.000 You know, that's going to be a lot of sausage.

00:50:42.000 You know, things like that.

00:50:43.000 Some very simple approach to it.

00:50:46.000 Something that's probably going to be highly spiced.

00:50:48.000 Maybe you're going to have to add some fat into it if it's lean.

00:50:51.000 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.

00:51:03.000 Also will depend on where she's at in her pregnancy cycles. 1.00

00:51:08.000 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.

00:51:21.000 You wouldn't cook a ham off of it or anything like that?

00:51:23.000 If it was particularly fatty and looked really good, then I would.

00:51:28.000 But I'm saying, like, generally.

00:51:32.000 So you would take the whole thing and turn it into sausage?

00:51:35.000 Could, yeah.

00:51:36.000 And what do you, like, how many pounds is a 300-pound boar when you dress it out?

00:51:41.000 You know, it's going to lose about 45-ish percent of its weight in offal and hair, things like that, hide.

00:51:52.000 And then take off probably another 45-50 percent off of that once you get all the bones out of it.

00:51:59.000 So you're probably yielding, you know, 100-ish pounds.

00:52:04.000 Yeah, probably a little bit less.

00:52:05.000 You know, maybe like 80 pounds, something like that, of just pure meat.

00:52:09.000 And depending on how lean they are, too.

00:52:12.000 I mean, if they've got a ton of fat, you know, they might be more bulked out.

00:52:15.000 Or they might be, you know, just real thin.

00:52:18.000 Sometimes you can see through their ribs.

00:52:20.000 Sometimes there's, you know, bacon on them.

00:52:23.000 Right.

00:52:23.000 And so normally when you process sausage like that, so you have your cuts.

00:52:29.000 And then do you have like standard recipes where you add X amount of fat?

00:52:34.000 X amount of spices, and then you do it all yourself, right?

00:52:38.000 Yes.

00:52:38.000 All the blending.

00:52:39.000 Yes.

00:52:40.000 So I'm usually a 20-25% fat in the sausage.

00:52:44.000 So if it's a very lean hog, we simply just package that into four-pound packages and freeze that.

00:52:51.000 And when you say fat, are you talking about domestic fat?

00:52:53.000 Yes.

00:52:54.000 So you get domestic pork fat, or do you use any other kind of fat?

00:52:59.000 Generally, I'll use pork fat if I'm making specifically burgers.

00:53:03.000 I mean for like burgers, cheeseburgers.

00:53:06.000 I like to add in beef fat.

00:53:08.000 Or I'll do like 10% beef fat and 10% bacon.

00:53:12.000 Would you do a pork burger?

00:53:14.000 Absolutely.

00:53:14.000 Really?

00:53:15.000 Yeah.

00:53:15.000 Pork burger.

00:53:16.000 Really good.

00:53:17.000 How come nobody does that?

00:53:18.000 I don't know.

00:53:19.000 That's an interesting, like you're saying pork burger.

00:53:21.000 I'm like, this is madness.

00:53:22.000 Yeah.

00:53:23.000 But I mean, it makes sense, right?

00:53:25.000 You have elk burgers, moose burgers.

00:53:26.000 Why not pork?

00:53:27.000 I don't think I've ever heard of a pork burger.

00:53:29.000 Yeah.

00:53:29.000 Especially if you're going to like do a nice thin, you know, like charred patty.

00:53:33.000 Right.

00:53:33.000 Really well cooked.

00:53:35.000 And you mix it with some nice fat, like beef fat and bacon.

00:53:38.000 And I think it's excellent.

00:53:40.000 What are your thoughts on sous vide?

00:53:42.000 I've got two turkey legs back at the house.

00:53:45.000 I mean, I'm going to have to run here in like three hours.

00:53:49.000 That are cooking for 24 hours.

00:53:51.000 I don't use it a lot, but I think there's some applications that it works really well for, especially with game.

00:53:59.000 You know, your steak-ish cuts can be really good.

00:54:04.000 I think you do that a lot, right?

00:54:05.000 I used to, yeah.

00:54:07.000 I haven't sous vide'd in a long time.

00:54:10.000 I don't often like take a back strap and sous vide it.

00:54:13.000 I prefer to just cook it on the grill.

00:54:16.000 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.

00:54:28.000 So then I can usually, I like to put them on the grill afterwards.

00:54:31.000 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.

00:54:41.000 So he sous vide it, I think he did it at 125 degrees for 24 hours and it just broke down all of the collagen and all of the hard, stiff stuff that's in that kind of a more firm cut of meat and then Right.

00:55:23.000 Yeah, I mean, it's a great tool.

00:55:26.000 And what I like also about it is that it's an empowering tool.

00:55:30.000 Because sometimes people, they get into something.

00:55:34.000 You know, they're like kind of technologically, they just like to nerd out on something.

00:55:38.000 SUV is a classic way for somebody to do that.

00:55:42.000 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.

00:55:52.000 Or, I mean, hell, a crock pot.

00:55:54.000 For me, the crock pot is one of the coolest kitchen tools ever if you're a game cook.

00:56:01.000 Because what it does is it enables you to cook for a very long time in a precise temperature with no flame.

00:56:06.000 You can go to bed, you can go to work, whatever.

00:56:08.000 And you come back and it's cooked.

00:56:10.000 It's like, oh, that elk shank that I had, it was tough.

00:56:13.000 You undercooked it, essentially.

00:56:15.000 But a crockpot is just a really simple way for people to achieve that.

00:56:20.000 And then sous vide is kind of the modern update of a tool like that.

00:56:25.000 So I always appreciate anything that helps people just want to get more out of their game, or if it's food in general.

00:56:33.000 Just get excited about cooking, I think, is just so beneficial to everyone.

00:56:37.000 The only thing that would worry me about suviing is the plastic.

00:56:41.000 Yeah.

00:56:41.000 Like leaching plastic, leaching chemicals.

00:56:44.000 We had this woman, Dr. Shanna Swan.

00:56:48.000 Is that correct?

00:56:50.000 How to say her name?

00:56:52.000 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.

00:57:06.000 It's spelled with a P. P-T-H-P. I think I've seen that before.

00:57:11.000 And phthalates, when they're introduced into mammals in utero, they're showing that they have a profound effect on their sexual reproductive systems.

00:57:23.000 And they think the same thing is happening to people.

00:57:26.000 And there's a direct correlation.

00:57:29.000 What is her book called again?

00:57:30.000 We should probably pull up her book so she could... 1.00

00:57:32.000 Sorry, I pre-googled phthalates and sous vide, and it says it's okay.

00:57:35.000 Oh, really?

00:57:36.000 How come?

00:57:37.000 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,

00:57:53.000 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.

00:58:08.000 Okay.

00:58:09.000 I didn't even know there was specifically sous vide bags.

00:58:14.000 I've only used Ziploc.

00:58:15.000 Oh, yeah.

00:58:16.000 Those vacuum sealed bags.

00:58:17.000 And I don't do it.

00:58:18.000 That's your book.

00:58:19.000 And I have always been imposed.

00:58:21.000 We don't do it at the restaurant.

00:58:22.000 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.

00:58:30.000 Shannon Swan.

00:58:33.000 You don't use it at your restaurant, sous vide?

00:58:35.000 No.

00:58:36.000 No?

00:58:36.000 No, we don't.

00:58:37.000 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.

00:58:43.000 And it's a once every two or three month deal for me.

00:58:46.000 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.

00:58:52.000 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.

00:58:59.000 Right.

00:58:59.000 You know, it's just something about it creeps me out.

00:59:01.000 Yeah, no, I get it.

00:59:02.000 I get it.

00:59:03.000 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.

00:59:13.000 You know, you're hunting and then gathering up fresh local ingredients and cooking it.

00:59:17.000 Like, it's...

00:59:18.000 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.

00:59:25.000 Now you're in this weird sort of modern...

00:59:28.000 Yeah.

00:59:29.000 Seems a bit disingenuous.

00:59:30.000 Yeah.

00:59:30.000 Well, it's just...

00:59:31.000 Maybe it's just a perception thing.

00:59:33.000 I mean, if it's the best way to cook something, it's the best way to cook something, right?

00:59:36.000 Yeah, I think there's a couple ways.

00:59:38.000 Like these turkey legs, I'm really excited about them.

00:59:41.000 You seem really excited about your turkey legs.

00:59:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:59:43.000 I mean...

00:59:44.000 How do you do that?

00:59:46.000 What do you do?

00:59:46.000 You cook them and then you grill after you're done?

00:59:49.000 Yeah.

00:59:49.000 You achieve a certain temperature?

00:59:51.000 Put a little fat in there, you know, whatever kind of saucy type stuff.

00:59:55.000 You know, there's some garlic floating around in there, salt and pepper and...

00:59:59.000 Some spices, things like that.

01:00:00.000 And then they're just going to come out and just get slowly cooked and crisped up on the grill.

01:00:04.000 And I think that that method is something we use in the restaurant, just extensively, is to cook things beforehand until they're tender.

01:00:14.000 And then we'd let them cool.

01:00:15.000 And then to order, we're cooking them over a hot grill.

01:00:18.000 We do that with ribs.

01:00:19.000 We do beef ribs with wild boar ribs, pork ribs.

01:00:23.000 We do that with chicken hearts.

01:00:24.000 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.

01:00:34.000 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.

01:00:43.000 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.

01:00:53.000 It's a very, like, Mexican technique right there.

01:00:57.000 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.

01:01:24.000 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?

01:01:34.000 I usually like to go cold.

01:01:36.000 Really?

01:01:36.000 Because if it is really tender, let's say some elk ribs.

01:01:42.000 And you cook them in whatever method.

01:01:45.000 Maybe you wrap them up real well and you put them in the oven and cook them until they're tender.

01:01:49.000 Or you braise them in pure fat like a confit.

01:01:52.000 And then they're pretty tender.

01:01:55.000 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.

01:02:03.000 If you go cold onto the grill and start to manage that crust on there, they'll be a lot easier to handle.

01:02:09.000 So I typically will go cold onto the grill.

01:02:12.000 Really?

01:02:12.000 It is because there's not a thick amount of meat on those ribs, too, right?

01:02:17.000 So you don't have to worry about it being really cold in the center if you're charring in the outside.

01:02:20.000 It'll heat up the whole thing.

01:02:21.000 Yeah, I mean, and just give it ample time, you know.

01:02:24.000 It doesn't have to be a ripping hot grill, necessarily.

01:02:27.000 It kind of depends on what you're doing.

01:02:28.000 But, you know, you could take 30 minutes to kind of get a nice crust on a rack of ribs.

01:02:33.000 And I do it with hog ribs all the time because they're so variable.

01:02:37.000 You know, they could have...

01:02:49.000 Yeah, I mean these things are cooked To shred.

01:02:59.000 You know, these things are, they're at 190 plus for multiple, yeah, almost all these things that I'm describing.

01:03:05.000 These are well done pieces of meat.

01:03:08.000 I mean, not like...

01:03:09.000 Because it's hog.

01:03:10.000 Yes.

01:03:10.000 Well, or the cuts that I'm talking.

01:03:12.000 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.

01:03:21.000 I think?

01:03:39.000 Because, I mean, one method would be to just simply poach hog ribs in water.

01:03:45.000 Like, there's a method for that in that book.

01:03:48.000 Really?

01:03:49.000 Poaching them?

01:03:50.000 Sure.

01:03:51.000 Or it works really well with venison ribs, too.

01:03:53.000 If they're particularly lean, you just put them in water.

01:03:55.000 You season the water really heavily with onions and spices and garlic and whatever, ginger, whatever.

01:04:01.000 And then cook them until they're almost done and then you pull them out.

01:04:05.000 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.

01:04:14.000 And they're excellent.

01:04:15.000 And it gets them very tender and then you go in and get them crispy and add that smoke component at the very end.

01:04:22.000 And is this how you've always done it or is it something like you figured out along the way?

01:04:26.000 Yeah, it's kind of twofold.

01:04:28.000 You know, we've always done that for many years with hog and venison ribs specifically.

01:04:33.000 But then, you know, in a restaurant setting, it's got some big advantages.

01:04:38.000 Like, we do a whole beef rib.

01:04:41.000 And the thing can weigh, depending on the cow, three and a half pounds raw.

01:04:45.000 So it's a whole beef rib.

01:04:47.000 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.

01:05:02.000 And then to order, I mean, because that process takes four or five hours.

01:05:06.000 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.

01:05:16.000 And so you get a little bit of smoke and some texture on the outside and the meat's just falling apart tenderly.

01:05:23.000 And you just know when to do it just based on how many times you've done it in the past.

01:05:27.000 Are you timing things?

01:05:29.000 Yeah, we're timing that.

01:05:31.000 Definitely there's an amount of time that that beef rib is going to need to cook.

01:05:34.000 But also you have to get in there because animals are different.

01:05:37.000 Each one is a little different.

01:05:39.000 It might take a little longer, a little shorter amount of time.

01:05:42.000 We want it to be tender.

01:05:44.000 You just make sure it's tender.

01:05:46.000 Then we actually cool it in the fat and then reheat the fat and pull it out.

01:05:49.000 And then...

01:05:50.000 When you're grilling things, are you cooking over wood?

01:05:54.000 Is that what you're doing?

01:05:55.000 Oak coals.

01:05:56.000 We use post oak.

01:05:58.000 Do you use lump charcoal or are you actually using the wood itself?

01:06:04.000 In the restaurant, we're using just wood.

01:06:07.000 No charcoal.

01:06:07.000 Why do you do that?

01:06:08.000 What's the benefits of using wood?

01:06:10.000 We just like wood.

01:06:12.000 We just like the smoke.

01:06:13.000 We cook over hot fires there.

01:06:16.000 Very hot fires.

01:06:18.000 We need a lot of heat.

01:06:20.000 Charcoal pops a lot, too.

01:06:22.000 And just have always preferred just post oak.

01:06:25.000 You know, just nice ripping fire, spread some coals out, and then we're grilling steaks and things over that bread.

01:06:30.000 Everything gets cooked over that.

01:06:32.000 And it's just because the flavor imparts?

01:06:34.000 Yeah.

01:06:35.000 I mean, there's some cultural value to that, too.

01:06:38.000 I mean, we live in an oak-rich area.

01:06:41.000 And everything, you know, like barbecue in this specific area has always been smoked over.

01:06:46.000 Oak, maybe a little bit of con.

01:06:48.000 If you go west, you're going to start to see more mesquite.

01:06:52.000 More in south, you're going to see mesquite.

01:06:54.000 And you go east, you start to see things like hickory.

01:06:56.000 And so, I mean, the wood you're burning, I think, also has some cultural import, too.

01:07:02.000 And so it all kind of factors into the whole dish in the end, you know?

01:07:07.000 It's just like how you made that and what tree you cooked it over.

01:07:11.000 Right.

01:07:12.000 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?

01:07:25.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:07:28.000 Cooking concepts, as far as that goes, I know.

01:07:33.000 An animal over burning wood that's abundant.

01:07:37.000 Both of those things, hopefully.

01:07:38.000 An abundant animal over an abundant wood would make the most sense.

01:07:42.000 And there's something about fire and cooking over fire, too, that it just taps into some weird ancient memories or something.

01:07:51.000 It's very satisfying and exciting to cook straight over a fire.

01:07:55.000 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.

01:08:03.000 Yeah.

01:08:04.000 I mean, I can't even speak to it.

01:08:06.000 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.

01:08:13.000 It's why we all stare at fires.

01:08:16.000 You can't.

01:08:17.000 You just stare at fires.

01:08:19.000 Also, you want to cook things over fires, and when you have a fire, you want to cook everything over a fire.

01:08:24.000 Yeah, they're beautiful.

01:08:25.000 There's something about it.

01:08:26.000 It's like this crazy nature, like this reaction that you can sort of help and manipulate.

01:08:34.000 You start moving the logs around and adding logs.

01:08:38.000 It's cooking over a campfire.

01:08:41.000 It's one of the most satisfying things I think I've ever done in my life.

01:08:44.000 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.

01:08:54.000 And, you know, he had these little grates that he could just sort of like sit things down to cook meat over.

01:08:59.000 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.

01:09:08.000 And I was like, This is so sad.

01:09:10.000 Something about cooking over a fire.

01:09:12.000 Like, you make a fire, you sit there, you just shot an animal, you're cooking.

01:09:16.000 It seems so much different than any other kind of food you ever have.

01:09:19.000 Yeah.

01:09:20.000 I mean, agreed.

01:09:20.000 I mean, we set up our restaurant.

01:09:22.000 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.

01:09:29.000 Where there's a big fire.

01:09:31.000 I know that.

01:09:32.000 When we were talking to the architect, I was like, this is what I want someone to see when they walk in the door.

01:09:39.000 We have a rail, a butchery rail, where they can bring carcasses down to the table, which is wide open.

01:09:45.000 There is no prep area in the whole restaurant that you can't see.

01:09:48.000 You can see everything except for the walk-in and the office.

01:09:52.000 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.

01:10:04.000 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.

01:10:12.000 I understand what's happening here.

01:10:15.000 There's meat, and there's trays full of ripening tomatoes and peaches and everything out there right now.

01:10:21.000 Because that's the only place we have to ripen them.

01:10:23.000 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.

01:10:29.000 You don't even need to ask your server.

01:10:30.000 So what's this place all about?

01:10:31.000 Right.

01:10:32.000 You see it right in front of you.

01:10:33.000 And it's so self-explanatory and simple, but also like exciting.

01:10:39.000 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?

01:10:45.000 Yeah, it's a crank.

01:10:46.000 Yeah, crank style, you know, which to me is just the best.

01:10:48.000 You just adjust it over the heat.

01:10:49.000 We have two.

01:10:50.000 One's a flat top and one's just a grill grate, although they're both interchangeable, too.

01:10:54.000 We can put different grill surfaces in there as needed.

01:10:57.000 So when you say one's a flat top, but like a frying, like a flat?

01:11:00.000 Like a flat top plancha style, just a solid piece of metal that you sear things on.

01:11:07.000 There's smoke everywhere.

01:11:08.000 There's a little bit of smoke to it, but you're still cooking over a campfire. 1.00

01:11:11.000 It's probably incredibly inefficient to toast bread over a fire, but fuck it. 0.99

01:11:18.000 But isn't that kind of part of what you're doing? 0.99

01:11:21.000 It doesn't have to be efficient.

01:11:23.000 There's something cool about the fact that you are doing it over just wood, oak fire.

01:11:29.000 Yeah.

01:11:30.000 Yeah.

01:11:30.000 And it's more fun.

01:11:32.000 Yeah.

01:11:32.000 And it's appealing.

01:11:34.000 If you just want to go to a restaurant and just want to eat some food that tastes good, that's great.

01:11:38.000 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.

01:11:48.000 Mm-hmm.

01:11:48.000 And it's tangible.

01:11:52.000 You feel different about the experience.

01:11:55.000 Right.

01:11:56.000 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.

01:12:07.000 He had pearl snap, long sleeve shirt, he had on his hat, he had on his jeans, and he was just watching.

01:12:15.000 And I looked over at him and I kind of just, you know, eye contact.

01:12:18.000 I nodded at him and then he was still watching and I just, you know, then I looked up again.

01:12:22.000 I was like, hi, how are you?

01:12:24.000 And he looked at me and he goes, I know what you're doing here.

01:12:27.000 And he turned around and walked away.

01:12:30.000 And I, I just, I almost cried.

01:12:32.000 I was like, you know, cause that's like, I mean, he, he, I knew what he meant.

01:12:37.000 He was like, I know what you're doing here.

01:12:39.000 And it wasn't like, I know you're trying to get away with something.

01:12:42.000 He's like, I see what you're doing here because, you know, I mean, he was probably in his 70s.

01:12:47.000 And he probably, hopefully, was thinking about the way his grandparents ate.

01:12:55.000 And those words were just, they were very powerful.

01:12:58.000 And I'll never forget that.

01:12:59.000 It was really cool.

01:13:00.000 I know what you're doing here.

01:13:02.000 And he smiled and walked off.

01:13:04.000 Yes, sir.

01:13:05.000 If you know, you know.

01:13:06.000 Yeah.

01:13:07.000 Right.

01:13:08.000 These people that come and take your classes, is there a demographic?

01:13:15.000 Is it wide open?

01:13:17.000 Is it a large spectrum?

01:13:22.000 Yes and no.

01:13:23.000 We have, I mean, I think if you split it between new hunters and experienced hunters, we're right at about 50%.

01:13:28.000 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.

01:13:38.000 And then we have a lot of people that come because they want to learn more about the butchery side of it.

01:13:44.000 And a lot of times they're just like, yeah, I don't really care if I kill a deer.

01:13:47.000 I've got a place to go kill deer.

01:13:49.000 But they'll set it out and they're having fun, but what they're there for is learning about utilization.

01:13:56.000 And then you've got your brand new hunters.

01:13:59.000 Demographically, no.

01:14:02.000 It's not as divergent as I'd like to see it.

01:14:07.000 I really wish that there was more seats at the table for people.

01:14:13.000 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.

01:14:25.000 And I really want to see hunting available to everybody.

01:14:30.000 I think that it gets people involved in responsible gun ownership, resource management, appreciation of meat and animal management.

01:14:45.000 From across a more diverse background, too.

01:14:48.000 And so, no, I mean, frankly, it's not as diverse as I'd like it to be.

01:14:56.000 And we're trying to do some things that mitigate that.

01:14:59.000 And we're just trying to get more different people in there.

01:15:03.000 To these classes.

01:15:05.000 But no, it's kind of what you think it would be.

01:15:08.000 It's more mostly affluent white males.

01:15:14.000 Although we get a lot of women in there. 1.00

01:15:16.000 We used to do a class for women, just a class. 1.00

01:15:22.000 Just women. 1.00

01:15:23.000 And that was a lot of fun, you know, introducing them.

01:15:26.000 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. 0.98

01:15:36.000 And, you know, it was really rewarding.

01:15:42.000 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,

01:16:12.000 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.

01:16:29.000 If they don't pursue it for the rest of their lives, that's fine.

01:16:32.000 But I think even that one experience can be very formative.

01:16:37.000 And pigs have got to be like the best thing to do that too.

01:16:40.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:16:41.000 Plentiful, easy to locate.

01:16:43.000 Yeah.

01:16:44.000 But you know the stats behind private land in Texas.

01:16:48.000 It's a very privately owned state, which is in a lot of ways great.

01:16:52.000 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.

01:17:02.000 But at the same time, it's the most often asked question for me.

01:17:05.000 If a new hunter comes and they're like, okay, great.

01:17:08.000 We just did this course.

01:17:09.000 I got a deer and a pig.

01:17:11.000 I'm going to go home.

01:17:12.000 And then they're like, so where do I go next?

01:17:15.000 And I'm like, well, I don't know.

01:17:16.000 You've got to make friends.

01:17:19.000 And that's where the hogs come in. 1.00

01:17:22.000 Because they're so invasive, it makes them a little more accessible to someone who just wants to hunt.

01:17:28.000 And that's – early on, that's what I did.

01:17:30.000 I had connections with farmers.

01:17:32.000 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?

01:17:43.000 And most of the time they're going to be like, not always but sometimes.

01:17:46.000 And next thing you know, you probably have a place to hunt pigs or at least try.

01:17:51.000 And I always urge people to start there if they want.

01:17:55.000 I mean, this is kind of a Texas-specific topic right now, but maybe not.

01:18:00.000 You've got to make those connections and get out there.

01:18:02.000 And hogs being the most undervalued Yeah. 1.00

01:18:15.000 Yeah.

01:18:29.000 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?

01:18:40.000 Do you cool it down immediately?

01:18:41.000 Do you hang it?

01:18:42.000 Yeah.

01:18:43.000 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.

01:18:51.000 And how you cool game down.

01:18:55.000 And like...

01:18:57.000 Because I get into this a lot with people.

01:19:00.000 Because the way I like to do it is vastly different from the standard practice of it.

01:19:07.000 I mean, this is like...

01:19:09.000 Like, Davy Crockett surrendered at the Alamo Territory.

01:19:12.000 Really?

01:19:13.000 Yeah.

01:19:13.000 So, I never put a pig or a deer, or any game, or any meat for that matter, directly on ice.

01:19:22.000 So, we're in a hot place, and I understand the sheer necessity for getting something cold quickly.

01:19:29.000 Yeah.

01:19:29.000 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.

01:19:40.000 When you put a hog on ice and then coat it with ice, then it starts to soak into the meat.

01:19:48.000 You're getting water in there.

01:19:50.000 So water can be a vector for bacteria, and so that can actually help it go off.

01:19:55.000 By adding in more moisture to the meat.

01:19:57.000 And it also makes it very floppy.

01:20:01.000 Like when you put it on a cutting board to cut it, there's just water coming everywhere.

01:20:05.000 The meat is very wet.

01:20:07.000 If you grind it, you will have some moisture come out of it.

01:20:11.000 I can guarantee you if you bring some meat to me to process.

01:20:16.000 And I've processed, you know, hundreds of animals for other people.

01:20:20.000 And many times they'll bring them.

01:20:21.000 Well, they used to.

01:20:22.000 They're not allowed to anymore.

01:20:24.000 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.

01:20:38.000 Now Obviously, you're like, well then how do you get it cold?

01:20:42.000 What we do is the same exact thing.

01:20:44.000 We wrap it really well in trash bags.

01:20:46.000 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.

01:20:55.000 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.

01:21:02.000 You wouldn't go to the store and buy a ribeye.

01:21:06.000 It's a hot day.

01:21:07.000 I'm going to keep it cold.

01:21:08.000 I'm going to take it out of the package and stick it on some ice.

01:21:12.000 Just as humans, there's some sort of weird voodoo that we think happens. 0.99

01:21:19.000 We put this pig in there. 0.91

01:21:22.000 Somebody told us, you can't eat pigs.

01:21:24.000 They're dangerous.

01:21:25.000 They carry diseases. 0.98

01:21:26.000 It's stinky. 0.99

01:21:27.000 It's mean looking. 0.91

01:21:28.000 It had mud all over it.

01:21:29.000 You get it all cleaned up and you put it in the cooler.

01:21:32.000 And you open that drain plug, and this red water comes out.

01:21:36.000 And what is that? 1.00

01:21:37.000 You're like, that's all that bad shit, right? 1.00

01:21:39.000 You know, that's all that, you know, that's the gaminess. 1.00

01:21:41.000 That's Satan, you know, just coming right out of there, you know?

01:21:45.000 Be gone.

01:21:46.000 And that's not really how it's working, you know?

01:21:51.000 I feel like you're doing more damage than good.

01:21:54.000 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,

01:22:11.000 beautiful magenta color.

01:22:12.000 The other half was just a floppy gray and it was trash. 0.83

01:22:16.000 And there's no way to mitigate that?

01:22:17.000 There's no way to bring it back?

01:22:18.000 Once it's soaked in there, it's soaked in there.

01:22:20.000 It's just water-soaked meat.

01:22:22.000 And no industry does that.

01:22:26.000 And I get it.

01:22:27.000 And it's also the most logical thing.

01:22:30.000 I mean, how do you get a beer cold?

01:22:31.000 You don't wrap it in an unscented contractor bag and dip it in some ice.

01:22:36.000 You just throw it right on ice.

01:22:38.000 That's the straightest line between hot and cold.

01:22:42.000 But you'll get there if you do it this way.

01:22:44.000 It really works well for me.

01:22:46.000 Of course, do whatever you want out there.

01:22:49.000 But I also deal with people that have negative experiences with hogs a lot, or game in general.

01:22:56.000 And while I can't knowingly say that that's where that...

01:23:02.000 That result came from is from improper handling right there, but maybe.

01:23:06.000 If it's a consistent problem and that's a consistent way that they're being handled, then it's suspect to me.

01:23:13.000 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?

01:23:26.000 Yeah, I don't think you're going to get it as cold.

01:23:28.000 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.

01:23:35.000 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.

01:23:50.000 And that thing is going to be cold.

01:23:52.000 I mean, it's going to be right at 32, 34 degrees.

01:23:55.000 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.

01:24:06.000 I mean, cutting is fun to me, but when I get this floppy, wet, you know, big quarter, I'm like, oh, no good.

01:24:13.000 Yeah, no, that makes sense.

01:24:16.000 The covering it in ice and the contractor bags, all that makes sense.

01:24:20.000 But that's...

01:24:21.000 A lot of folks are just doing it the way you were talking about earlier, just throwing it right on ice.

01:24:26.000 Absolutely.

01:24:27.000 Deer and hogs, that's the way that it's mostly done.

01:24:29.000 I've even heard...

01:24:30.000 One of my guides tells me that his family growing up, they put bleach in the water.

01:24:34.000 They made ice water and they put bleach in there.

01:24:36.000 What?

01:24:37.000 Yeah, I mean, but that just...

01:24:38.000 I mean, that is just purely...

01:24:42.000 It's so basic that, you know, that animal's dirty.

01:24:46.000 Let's clean it.

01:24:47.000 And so let's bleach it.

01:24:49.000 You know, not like enough bleach to make us sick, but, you know, enough bleach to just...

01:24:54.000 How much bleach is okay in a glass of water?

01:24:56.000 I don't know.

01:24:57.000 And so, but that's, it's the same mentality.

01:25:00.000 I think.

01:25:00.000 That's crazy.

01:25:01.000 And that red stream that's coming out of there, you know, our brains register that as the bad stuff coming out.

01:25:06.000 Right.

01:25:06.000 Not really.

01:25:07.000 Right.

01:25:08.000 God, that's crazy that they use bleach.

01:25:10.000 I can't even believe that.

01:25:11.000 But I can.

01:25:12.000 I've heard some crazy stories.

01:25:16.000 Okay.

01:25:16.000 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,

01:25:37.000 was to get it back and, let's say, manually stimulate the dead pig. 0.95

01:25:46.000 Post-mortem. 1.00

01:25:47.000 The penis area of the dead pig? 0.99

01:25:49.000 Correct. 1.00

01:25:52.000 That sounds like a guy was looking for an excuse to jerk off a pig. 0.99

01:25:55.000 I was like, I think the problem is not with gamey boars, but I think your problem lies in ranch managers. 0.99

01:26:04.000 So that's the spectrum of game care that I've heard.

01:26:07.000 Is this like some superstitious thing?

01:26:09.000 I think so.

01:26:10.000 Wow.

01:26:11.000 So all told.

01:26:12.000 Imagine if that's what you just got to do.

01:26:14.000 Just yank it out of them.

01:26:15.000 Just slowly.

01:26:16.000 Take your time.

01:26:17.000 My unscented contractor bag seems a little tame now, right?

01:26:21.000 Like, you're like, okay.

01:26:23.000 Some merit.

01:26:24.000 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.

01:26:41.000 Did you ever use that?

01:26:42.000 No, I've never used that.

01:26:43.000 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.

01:26:55.000 It's called Broken Arrow Ranch, and they're in Ingram, Texas.

01:26:58.000 And they will drive around with shooters.

01:27:03.000 And an inspector on site.

01:27:05.000 And a refrigerated trailer.

01:27:07.000 And the shooters will kill non-game animals.

01:27:10.000 So, no whitetail.

01:27:12.000 But like Axis and Saika and Fallow Deer.

01:27:14.000 No guy.

01:27:15.000 And then they will process on site.

01:27:18.000 But they use that, I believe they call it electrostimulation.

01:27:21.000 And they use that process to bleed them out.

01:27:25.000 There it is.

01:27:26.000 Shockingly better meat.

01:27:29.000 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.

01:27:40.000 Electrical current is alternately switched on and off during the stimulation process.

01:27:45.000 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.

01:27:54.000 And it says, what does it do to meat?

01:27:57.000 Meat muscle must be cut away from the bone while the carcass is in rigor mortis, the stiffening of the carcass after death.

01:28:05.000 Muscles cut away from the bone during rigor mortis will contract and compact The meat fibers tightly together resulting in toughening of the meat.

01:28:14.000 Electrostimulation causes electrochemical reactions which avoid this stiffening.

01:28:19.000 There are three beneficial effects of electrostimulation.

01:28:23.000 Improved flavor, improved shelf life, and tenderization.

01:28:29.000 Tenderization is subjective, whether or not it's improved, right?

01:28:32.000 Because there's something about an elk steak or something like that or a game animal.

01:28:35.000 I like a chew to it.

01:28:36.000 I like it.

01:28:37.000 I don't want it to taste like a filet mignon.

01:28:39.000 I don't want it to be like butter where you can cut it with a spoon.

01:28:41.000 Right.

01:28:42.000 Yeah.

01:28:44.000 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.

01:28:54.000 What's it called again?

01:28:55.000 What's the name of it?

01:28:55.000 Broken Arrow Ranch.

01:28:56.000 I've heard of them.

01:28:57.000 I've heard of them.

01:28:58.000 Does Paul Saladino tell us about them?

01:29:00.000 Probably.

01:29:03.000 Yeah.

01:29:03.000 Do you use that electrical stimulation process?

01:29:06.000 Have you ever used that on Neil Guy or anything else?

01:29:09.000 No.

01:29:09.000 Not personally, but I mean we do get stuff at the restaurant that is from that company that does it.

01:29:14.000 But no, I've never done it.

01:29:15.000 And I mean, I want to say, I think I saw it on a video once.

01:29:18.000 It might be as simple as just like hooking it up to a 12-volt battery.

01:29:22.000 Yeah.

01:29:23.000 Wow.

01:29:24.000 But it seems like it's hooking it up, jolting it, let it go, jolt it, let it go.

01:29:29.000 Probably there's like a pulse to it, right?

01:29:32.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:29:33.000 I'd love to witness it, but I mean, it seems to have some merit.

01:29:36.000 Yeah, I've heard of people doing it with cows too, right?

01:29:39.000 Don't they do it with cow meat? 0.99

01:29:41.000 I'm not sure about the beef industry.

01:29:44.000 Yeah.

01:29:46.000 I mean, it makes sense.

01:29:47.000 Have you ever had that done to you if you have an injury?

01:29:49.000 No.

01:29:50.000 I've had it done, it's called dry needling.

01:29:53.000 So they stick these acupuncture-style needles.

01:29:55.000 I had a back thing going on.

01:29:57.000 And they stuck these acupuncture needles all on my back and then connected these little clips to some sort of electrical device.

01:30:04.000 And as you're lying there on this massage bed, it's like...

01:30:08.000 Oh.

01:30:11.000 And it's like your back is like flexing and relaxing, contracting and relaxing.

01:30:16.000 And when it does that, it like really loosens it up.

01:30:19.000 It feels good.

01:30:20.000 So it just makes sense that it would make food taste better too.

01:30:24.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:30:25.000 Muscles.

01:30:25.000 Like working muscles.

01:30:27.000 Is there any other like unusual preparation methods that you employ?

01:30:33.000 No, no.

01:30:36.000 Other than the unscented contractor bags?

01:30:39.000 Yeah, that's pretty lame.

01:30:42.000 No, I'm pretty straightforward.

01:30:44.000 This is very technical.

01:30:46.000 I mean, the non-hunters out there might be a little lost, but I skin and then gut almost universally.

01:30:52.000 A lot of people do that in reverse.

01:30:54.000 How come?

01:30:55.000 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.

01:31:08.000 We typically get it done pretty quick.

01:31:10.000 But other than that, nothing controversial like my ranch manager story.

01:31:15.000 And are you using entrails, anything of the pigs?

01:31:19.000 Are you using that for sausage casing?

01:31:21.000 No.

01:31:22.000 No, I've never done that.

01:31:23.000 And I get asked that a lot.

01:31:25.000 It's just sheer laziness that I've never flushed some casings out there.

01:31:29.000 I buy them.

01:31:30.000 It's a real boring story.

01:31:32.000 But we buy our sausage casings.

01:31:33.000 But we do often use liver, heart, kidneys, and call fat out of hogs. 1.00

01:31:40.000 You know, just your real basic offal, you know, like the big four out of there.

01:31:46.000 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?

01:31:54.000 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.

01:32:09.000 Right.

01:32:09.000 It'll render this trichinae larvae inert.

01:32:13.000 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.

01:32:25.000 And then when you get down from there, it'll take longer.

01:32:29.000 Trichinosis is a concern.

01:32:31.000 Brucellosis, pseudorabies, tularemia.

01:32:35.000 There's a lot of things that you could potentially get from a wild hog.

01:32:40.000 But almost all of those are mitigated completely by that freezing and cooking process.

01:32:45.000 Also wearing gloves while you're processing them.

01:32:48.000 And that's something that I'm very insistent on, is wearing gloves.

01:32:52.000 Why is that?

01:32:53.000 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.

01:33:03.000 And so it's just, I mean, it's an easy thing.

01:33:05.000 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.

01:33:11.000 But just always have those, and I insist that everybody else wears gloves.

01:33:14.000 Now on the butchery table, once I get all that stuff out of there, I, you know, gloves off.

01:33:19.000 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. 1.00

01:33:31.000 So you don't have to worry about anything like that.

01:33:33.000 And the cases are very, very rare.

01:33:37.000 The last study I read, particular to Texas, is that trichinosis was very low in the feral swine herd here in Texas.

01:33:45.000 But it was higher in other places for some reason.

01:33:48.000 I have no idea why.

01:33:49.000 Yeah, but trichinosis is just one of many things you're going to have to deal with, as you're saying.

01:33:53.000 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?

01:34:07.000 I've got to stay on brand for this one.

01:34:10.000 It's hogs all the way, man. 1.00

01:34:13.000 I do love axis.

01:34:14.000 I mean, in Texas, that's the king.

01:34:18.000 And Axis is like a... 1.00

01:34:22.000 Low-impact hog.

01:34:23.000 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.

01:34:31.000 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.

01:34:39.000 Yeah, the freeze killed thousands of them, right?

01:34:42.000 I love axis deer.

01:34:45.000 You know, I like a very diverse freezer.

01:34:48.000 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.

01:34:55.000 That's really what I'm going for.

01:34:56.000 I don't really have a favorite.

01:34:57.000 I'm not trying to cop out. 0.93

01:34:58.000 But when it does come to pigs...

01:35:01.000 I do prefer slow-cooked and ground preparations anyway, normally.

01:35:07.000 In ground?

01:35:09.000 Like one of those whole pigs? 0.58

01:35:11.000 No, no. 0.91

01:35:11.000 I mean like ground. 0.91

01:35:12.000 Oh, ground.

01:35:12.000 I thought you were talking about luau.

01:35:15.000 No, no.

01:35:16.000 Do you ever do that?

01:35:17.000 We've done some kind of...

01:35:20.000 Ah, versions of that.

01:35:21.000 Well, I mean, we'll do stuff for a long time in Dutch ovens buried in coals.

01:35:25.000 I've never dug a pit.

01:35:26.000 I've done a lot of rotisserie hogs, like whole pigs on electric rotisseries and in the smokers, too. 0.97

01:35:33.000 One of the things you did when I went hunting with Rinella is we cooked a mule deer head.

01:35:39.000 Under the ground.

01:35:40.000 Like a barbacoa.

01:35:41.000 Yeah.

01:35:42.000 It was really wild.

01:35:43.000 Yeah.

01:35:43.000 It was delicious.

01:35:44.000 It tasted like smoked pork.

01:35:46.000 Yeah.

01:35:46.000 It was really, it was interesting.

01:35:48.000 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.

01:35:57.000 So that's pretty cool.

01:35:58.000 Yeah, it was pretty cool.

01:35:59.000 Yeah.

01:36:00.000 Yeah.

01:36:00.000 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.

01:36:06.000 Yeah.

01:36:07.000 Do you ever eat the brains?

01:36:09.000 No, not really.

01:36:12.000 I rarely will take the time to skin like a hog's head out, but I will sometimes. 0.93

01:36:17.000 There's a few recipes in the book for heads and usually don't go scooping brains out.

01:36:22.000 I don't know why.

01:36:23.000 I've had lamb's brains before.

01:36:25.000 Have you ever had grilled lamb's brains?

01:36:26.000 I've had poached and fried lamb's brains.

01:36:29.000 And then also beef brains.

01:36:31.000 You know, sesos is a somewhat common taco.

01:36:34.000 What's it called?

01:36:35.000 Sesos?

01:36:35.000 Sesos.

01:36:36.000 It means brains in Spanish.

01:36:37.000 Oh, really?

01:36:37.000 Yeah.

01:36:38.000 It's a somewhat common taco filling.

01:36:41.000 Really?

01:36:42.000 Especially further south you get.

01:36:43.000 Oh, you got to go to the legit spots.

01:36:45.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:36:46.000 You're not getting that at...

01:36:48.000 Chipotle.

01:36:49.000 No.

01:36:51.000 Yeah, I mean, how much of a market is there for beef brains?

01:36:55.000 I mean, somewhat.

01:36:57.000 I mean, but the beef heads move.

01:37:00.000 You know, barbacoa is a big deal.

01:37:02.000 Right.

01:37:02.000 I mean, if you've ever had, like, real deal, amazing, like, pit-cooked barbacoa, it's, I mean, it's good stuff.

01:37:10.000 Yeah, it's cheeks, right?

01:37:12.000 It's like mostly...

01:37:13.000 It's everything.

01:37:14.000 Is it jaw?

01:37:15.000 What are you eating?

01:37:16.000 Yeah.

01:37:16.000 If you're in a legit barbacoa place, there's going to be cuts.

01:37:20.000 You're going to have ojo.

01:37:21.000 You're going to have cachete, which is the cheek.

01:37:23.000 You're going to have lengua, the tongue.

01:37:25.000 You're going to have paleta, which is the palate on top of the mouth.

01:37:33.000 I think that's everything.

01:37:34.000 And then you can get a Mixta, which is going to be everything together.

01:37:37.000 But if you're at a really good, like, real deal, South Texas, Potawakoa place, you're going to be able to order.

01:37:44.000 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. 1.00

01:37:50.000 Really?

01:37:51.000 Yeah.

01:37:52.000 Is that the thing?

01:37:53.000 Yeah.

01:37:54.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:37:55.000 Maybe they struggle with vision problems.

01:37:58.000 And so they think that...

01:37:59.000 I don't know.

01:38:00.000 I'm projecting that.

01:38:01.000 I don't want to be held to that.

01:38:04.000 Well, also, you've got to think.

01:38:05.000 I mean, there's only two per head.

01:38:07.000 So they go quick.

01:38:09.000 Right, but I've never even heard of people eating cow's eyes other than when I was hosting Fear Factor.

01:38:13.000 Yeah.

01:38:14.000 I think we fed cow eyes to people then. 0.78

01:38:16.000 Yeah.

01:38:17.000 Definitely.

01:38:17.000 Sheep's eyes, lamb's eyes.

01:38:19.000 The head thing, it's not a common thing if you asked a normal person, like, do you eat an animal's head?

01:38:30.000 Right.

01:38:31.000 Or even fish heads, right?

01:38:32.000 Like, cheeks.

01:38:33.000 Fish cheeks are delicious.

01:38:34.000 Yeah.

01:38:35.000 And the throats or the collars.

01:38:37.000 Yeah.

01:38:37.000 Often thrown away.

01:38:39.000 Yeah.

01:38:40.000 I mean, if the fish is big enough, just peel the cheek out.

01:38:44.000 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.

01:38:55.000 Or a dove.

01:38:56.000 Let's put it more in the context of a dove.

01:38:58.000 And then I mean the same thing.

01:39:00.000 I'll be like, I like to pluck my dove whole.

01:39:02.000 I'll take the dove and I'll pluck the entire thing.

01:39:04.000 And people are like, that takes too long.

01:39:06.000 And I'm like, how long did it take you to drive to the spot that you dove hunted?

01:39:10.000 You know, like, an hour and 15 minutes.

01:39:13.000 I'm like, each way?

01:39:14.000 And it's like, it's really notable.

01:39:17.000 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.

01:39:24.000 I want to shoot these doves.

01:39:25.000 I got my new dove belt. 1.00

01:39:26.000 I got my new gun.

01:39:27.000 I got all this stuff.

01:39:28.000 I drove, you know, two and a half hours overall.

01:39:31.000 And then I took five minutes to breast the birds out. 0.99

01:39:34.000 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. 0.99

01:39:43.000 I think that's a little weird to me. 0.98

01:39:47.000 We definitely put our feet down at the processing of something.

01:39:53.000 So pulling that fish cheek out is like, I don't know if I have time for that.

01:39:57.000 It's just like, man, you spent a lot of time on everything else in there.

01:40:01.000 And it's just for some reason we view the processing of animals in a real negative or as like a chore.

01:40:08.000 You know, like, oh, I got to do this.

01:40:09.000 I'm not saying everybody, but specifically to dove hunters, they're just like, I'm not doing that.

01:40:15.000 It's not worth it.

01:40:16.000 It's totally worth it.

01:40:16.000 I mean, you can eat two doves as a meal per person.

01:40:22.000 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.

01:40:30.000 And there's a lot of meat, a lot of meat on the legs, but you know what I mean?

01:40:32.000 Like, relatively.

01:40:33.000 There's something.

01:40:34.000 A couple bites.

01:40:34.000 There's something.

01:40:35.000 And the little hearts, the little lizards.

01:40:37.000 Not lizards, livers and gizzards in there.

01:40:41.000 Totally worth it to me.

01:40:43.000 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.

01:40:51.000 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.

01:41:03.000 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.

01:41:09.000 They're like, what are you talking about?

01:41:12.000 I don't know if they've made it this far.

01:41:15.000 They probably have because up until now it's been like acceptable hunting.

01:41:18.000 But now you're talking about the bird of peace.

01:41:21.000 That doesn't seem to a lot of folks to be food.

01:41:26.000 Yeah.

01:41:28.000 But it's probably the one animal.

01:41:30.000 It's probably hunted more than any other bird in this country, right?

01:41:33.000 Is that true?

01:41:33.000 I don't know the stats on that.

01:41:35.000 I do know.

01:41:35.000 Oh, I bet more people dove hunt than duck hunt.

01:41:37.000 Really?

01:41:38.000 Yeah.

01:41:38.000 It's the biggest outdoor event that happens in Texas.

01:41:42.000 It'll be September 1st.

01:41:44.000 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.

01:41:53.000 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, [...

01:42:02.000 Really?

01:42:03.000 That's opening day of dove season?

01:42:05.000 Yeah, it's an event.

01:42:07.000 It's a huge cultural event.

01:42:09.000 It has a lot of weight.

01:42:11.000 It's like the kickoff for hunting season.

01:42:15.000 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.

01:42:23.000 But for me, dove hunting is...

01:42:26.000 It's very casual in that you don't need a lot of equipment or time, but I highly value the food from that.

01:42:34.000 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.

01:42:44.000 Even if you slow cook them and peel all the meat off and make some flautas or...

01:42:50.000 Or manicotti or something like that out of that mean.

01:42:52.000 You can totally stretch that.

01:42:54.000 What's a dove similar to in taste?

01:42:58.000 Quail?

01:42:59.000 Is it?

01:42:59.000 Yeah.

01:43:00.000 I mean, I think it's a little more, has a little stronger flavor than quail, but I think they're very, very good.

01:43:08.000 It tastes just like a really profoundly birdy in a way.

01:43:13.000 Profoundly birdy?

01:43:14.000 Yeah.

01:43:14.000 Is that okay?

01:43:16.000 I'm trying to figure out what that means.

01:43:20.000 Profoundly birdy.

01:43:22.000 Chickeny.

01:43:22.000 Yeah, I mean, we're dancing around the chicken.

01:43:27.000 Like a chicken thigh times six.

01:43:30.000 But with a different richness to it, right?

01:43:33.000 Definitely a different texture.

01:43:34.000 I mean, you want to eat the breasts. 1.00

01:43:36.000 You can eat them medium rare, just like you would any...

01:43:38.000 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.

01:43:46.000 Yeah, dinosaurs.

01:43:47.000 So strange.

01:43:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:43:49.000 But it's red meat.

01:43:50.000 Very, very.

01:43:51.000 And probably one of the more beefy-flavored birds, and that's also...

01:43:57.000 Ribeye in the sky, right?

01:43:58.000 Yeah, it doesn't taste anything like a ribeye.

01:43:59.000 Why do they call it that?

01:44:00.000 Because it rhymes!

01:44:03.000 I mean, you know, and also just make sure we're differentiating.

01:44:08.000 We're not talking about whooping cranes here.

01:44:10.000 You know, you've got to be very clear on that because there is a mode of response that people will have about sandhills.

01:44:15.000 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.

01:44:28.000 There's a town in Texas, Eagle Lake, is the goose hunting capital of the world.

01:44:32.000 It's where Andy Griffith used to go, you know, and shoot like 50 snow geese, you know.

01:44:37.000 And they don't come down here so much anymore.

01:44:40.000 I mean, it's just like the populations are kind of hanging up north of us now.

01:44:44.000 And as that's happened, what you've seen is a proliferation of sandhill cranes coming down.

01:44:50.000 And they will devastate some agricultural fields as well.

01:44:53.000 And so the hunting for those has increased a lot.

01:44:57.000 They're very beautiful birds, too.

01:44:59.000 You see what they look like?

01:45:01.000 Sandhill crane?

01:45:01.000 Very large.

01:45:03.000 They hunt them a lot in the panhandle and also towards the coast.

01:45:05.000 And they're very good.

01:45:06.000 They're very good to eat.

01:45:08.000 Very beefy, you know, and very approachable.

01:45:11.000 Oh, that looks like a dinosaur.

01:45:12.000 Yeah.

01:45:13.000 Look at that freaky head. 1.00

01:45:15.000 Wow, what a weird-looking bird.

01:45:16.000 Yeah.

01:45:17.000 And there's very sustainable numbers of them, too.

01:45:22.000 How crazy is it that that thing gives off a red meat that literally looks like a steak?

01:45:27.000 Yeah.

01:45:28.000 Yeah, look at that.

01:45:29.000 That's crazy!

01:45:33.000 I mean, it's insane.

01:45:34.000 I mean, I would never have imagined.

01:45:36.000 I'd say, well, it's maybe a deer or something like that.

01:45:38.000 If you said, no, that's a crane, I'd say that you're out of your mind.

01:45:42.000 Somebody lied to you.

01:45:44.000 How weird is that?

01:45:46.000 Is there any other bird that has that rich red of flesh?

01:45:49.000 Oh, a goose.

01:45:50.000 Goose does too?

01:45:51.000 Sure.

01:45:51.000 Really?

01:45:52.000 Sure.

01:45:52.000 Like that?

01:45:53.000 I mean, even wild ducks, I mean, are approaching that.

01:45:56.000 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.

01:46:03.000 And what does sandhill crane taste like?

01:46:06.000 Like I said, it's beefy.

01:46:07.000 It has a very...

01:46:08.000 But it doesn't taste like a ribeye?

01:46:09.000 No.

01:46:10.000 No.

01:46:10.000 I mean, approachable.

01:46:13.000 I would say like mild, probably leaning more towards mild venison than a bird.

01:46:19.000 Makes sense.

01:46:20.000 Would be my best guess at describing it.

01:46:23.000 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.

01:46:30.000 Yeah.

01:46:30.000 I mean, the breast meat on that is as white as a chicken breast in the store.

01:46:35.000 And just a couple notches up in flavor from there.

01:46:40.000 I mean, it's got some really good flavor, but very mild, I think.

01:46:44.000 Yeah, I think so, too.

01:46:46.000 Do you cook turkeys in peanut oil?

01:46:49.000 Do you ever do that?

01:46:51.000 What do you mean?

01:46:52.000 Like deep-fried turkey in peanut oil?

01:46:54.000 The whole thing?

01:46:55.000 Yeah.

01:46:55.000 No.

01:46:56.000 You act like you've never heard of this before.

01:46:57.000 Oh, you mean like- Have you heard of that before?

01:47:00.000 Yeah.

01:47:00.000 You're frying a whole turkey.

01:47:00.000 Yeah.

01:47:01.000 I mean, we're not necessarily talking about a wild turkey.

01:47:03.000 Well, I did it with a wild turkey.

01:47:04.000 Oh, how was it?

01:47:05.000 Yeah.

01:47:05.000 It was really good.

01:47:06.000 Yeah.

01:47:07.000 Because I've done it- Fried turkey.

01:47:08.000 I always did it with turkeys.

01:47:09.000 Yeah.

01:47:10.000 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.

01:47:15.000 They were both really good.

01:47:16.000 The legs came out?

01:47:17.000 Yeah.

01:47:18.000 That would be my fear in frying a wild turkey, because in my experience, those legs need a long time. 0.92

01:47:25.000 And sometimes they don't break down, even compared to a domestic turkey.

01:47:29.000 I mean, frying a domestic turkey, sure.

01:47:31.000 I mean, it's huge.

01:47:31.000 Brine it, fry it.

01:47:33.000 But no, most of the time, turkeys pound the breasts, make little cutlets out of those. 1.00

01:47:40.000 I'll make a lot of sausage with the breast.

01:47:41.000 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.

01:47:54.000 You know what I saw that people are doing that's really kind of interesting?

01:47:56.000 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.

01:48:06.000 So apparently like with fishing bows, like bow fishing setups, Mm-hmm.

01:48:20.000 Mm-hmm.

01:48:30.000 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.

01:48:41.000 And apparently it tastes really good.

01:48:43.000 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.

01:48:54.000 Have you ever seen that episode?

01:48:56.000 I don't know where Bourdain was, but he ate an iguana.

01:48:59.000 And he will not stop going off about how disgusting it is.

01:49:03.000 Really?

01:49:03.000 It's just highly entertaining, you know, because his ability to eat things was pretty profound.

01:49:08.000 But he hated it, and he makes a really big deal out of it.

01:49:13.000 It's fun watching, to watch him talk about iguana.

01:49:16.000 That's weird because these people in these YouTube videos seem to be enjoying it.

01:49:19.000 Yeah.

01:49:20.000 Especially this one guy that made it in this Asian dish over rice.

01:49:23.000 He made wings, essentially.

01:49:24.000 Yeah.

01:49:25.000 You know, like some sort of a Chinese chicken wing dish.

01:49:29.000 Yeah, absolutely try it.

01:49:30.000 And there's a million of them down there.

01:49:32.000 Dude, some of them are so big.

01:49:33.000 This lady, there's this one lady that I follow on YouTube, and she's shooting these iguanas that are five feet long. 1.00

01:49:40.000 Ooh.

01:49:41.000 They're so big.

01:49:42.000 She's holding this thing up, and it's like a small dog. 1.00

01:49:45.000 This is crazy how big a fucking iguana is. 1.00

01:49:48.000 They're really big sometimes. 1.00

01:49:50.000 These people that live by canals, in particular, they're all around their lawns, just destroying... 0.99

01:49:56.000 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. 0.99

01:50:05.000 Like, yeah. 0.98

01:50:07.000 Here's some people that catch them like...

01:50:10.000 Yeah, pull it, like, where she shows the one she whacked. 1.00

01:50:13.000 Look at the size of that fucking thing! 0.99

01:50:15.000 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. 1.00

01:50:23.000 Yeah.

01:50:25.000 But it's become a thing now, because they're trying to kill them, because they're all over the place in Florida, apparently.

01:50:33.000 Oh.

01:50:34.000 Yeah, like, I mean, pythons, iguans.

01:50:37.000 Well, that's the thing they have to do, right?

01:50:39.000 Make pythons profitable.

01:50:42.000 I know they're trying to eat pythons.

01:50:44.000 They're trying to figure out whether or not pythons are, like, good to eat.

01:50:48.000 Have you ever heard of people eating a python?

01:50:50.000 What about rattlesnake?

01:50:51.000 Sure, sure.

01:50:52.000 You like rattlesnake?

01:50:53.000 Yeah, it's fine.

01:50:54.000 I mean...

01:50:55.000 It's not preferred?

01:50:57.000 Yeah, it's not something I'm going to go out of my way to kill.

01:50:59.000 I mean, personally, I have a little bit of a pact with them.

01:51:01.000 It's like, I don't bite them, they don't bite me.

01:51:04.000 But I will definitely, if somebody cooks a rattlesnake, I'll eat it.

01:51:08.000 What about bear?

01:51:10.000 You know, it's nothing I've ever had.

01:51:12.000 See, I haven't traveled.

01:51:12.000 You've never had bear?

01:51:13.000 No.

01:51:14.000 Really?

01:51:14.000 No.

01:51:15.000 I have not traveled to hunt, nor do I really...

01:51:19.000 It's not very appealing to me, but...

01:51:22.000 To hunt a bear or to travel to hunt?

01:51:24.000 Both.

01:51:25.000 Well, I mean, no, no, no.

01:51:26.000 I would eat bear all day long if you served it to me.

01:51:28.000 But I don't mean to derail your question about bear, but no, I mean, I'd have to go somewhere to hunt bears.

01:51:37.000 And I'm really like, I like to hunt here.

01:51:39.000 This is like my zone.

01:51:41.000 So like if, I mean, I'm going to Utah to help, I've been brought up there to butcher an elk.

01:51:48.000 And they're like, do you want to shoot an elk?

01:51:50.000 And I was like, I'm good.

01:51:51.000 Really?

01:51:51.000 Yeah.

01:51:52.000 Because they live in Utah and not in Texas?

01:51:55.000 Yeah, it's not mine.

01:51:57.000 You're very specific.

01:51:58.000 Yeah.

01:51:59.000 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.

01:52:09.000 But yet you do like to hunt neil guy, which is elk-sized. 0.85

01:52:13.000 No.

01:52:15.000 Actually, I like to go on neil guy hunts. 1.00

01:52:17.000 Oh, you don't like to hunt them personally?

01:52:19.000 I'd probably decline shooting a Noga. 1.00

01:52:20.000 I might shoot a little one. 0.64

01:52:21.000 But really, I would go with someone and happily process it and hang out with them and everything. 0.97

01:52:30.000 I don't want to pull the trigger on it.

01:52:31.000 How come?

01:52:33.000 I like to manage my freezer very specifically.

01:52:37.000 I like whitetails and hogs and turkeys and all the things. 0.99

01:52:41.000 I like to hunt as close to my house as possible.

01:52:44.000 Not out of laziness, but out of this like...

01:52:47.000 I get this sense of locality and how that's my animal right there.

01:52:55.000 I know a guy's invasive, but it's also, like I said, it's so big.

01:53:00.000 That it would just, it would fill my freezer and then I'd be done.

01:53:03.000 Like I stop when I'm done.

01:53:05.000 Like I don't keep going.

01:53:06.000 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.

01:53:12.000 I know that I can come back to hogs and kind of fill in if there's an emergency. 0.96

01:53:16.000 I don't, I haven't bought meat in 12 years or something.

01:53:19.000 But a nil guy is just so big. 1.00

01:53:22.000 That I usually would pass.

01:53:24.000 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.

01:53:31.000 But you do enjoy the meat.

01:53:34.000 You were raving about how delicious they are.

01:53:36.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:53:37.000 I love it.

01:53:38.000 I love it.

01:53:39.000 But I don't personally feel like I need to fill up my freezer with just that one animal.

01:53:45.000 I understand what you're saying.

01:53:46.000 And you enjoy the hunting as well.

01:53:48.000 For deer and pigs.

01:53:50.000 And just kind of very specific numbers of all these animals that I know to get me through the year.

01:53:56.000 Is there anything connected to it that's unsavory because of the fact that they're exotic?

01:54:01.000 No.

01:54:01.000 They're imported here?

01:54:02.000 No, I mean, so is a hog.

01:54:03.000 Right. 0.99

01:54:04.000 But a long fucking time ago. 0.95

01:54:06.000 You can find a receipt on the Neil guy. 0.97

01:54:09.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:54:10.000 I mean, we're coming up right at 100 years on Neil guy.

01:54:13.000 That's when they were introduced?

01:54:14.000 Yeah.

01:54:14.000 No, I have no problem with that.

01:54:16.000 And we serve them widely in the restaurant because of those qualities.

01:54:19.000 Because they are...

01:54:21.000 First off, they're invasives.

01:54:23.000 They don't like corn.

01:54:24.000 So even if there is a corn feeder around there spitting out GMO corn, they're going to avoid it.

01:54:29.000 And their feed is so natural, which is why we really like to serve those in the restaurant the most.

01:54:34.000 Because highly renewable resource right there.

01:54:40.000 One animal, you know, is a ton of meat.

01:54:43.000 And there's just a lot of really good qualities about the nilgai, about eating nilgai. 0.99

01:54:47.000 But pulling the trigger on one?

01:54:49.000 Probably pass.

01:54:50.000 I get it.

01:54:50.000 I understand what you're saying.

01:54:52.000 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?

01:55:01.000 Yeah.

01:55:02.000 Yeah, I think so.

01:55:04.000 And then, yeah, not to just come back to the size constantly, but that is a thing.

01:55:08.000 And I really enjoy hunting whitetail and hunting hogs and hunting turkeys and things like that.

01:55:15.000 Yeah, maybe it is more of a traditional.

01:55:18.000 What is Neil Guy similar to in taste?

01:55:21.000 I would say...

01:55:24.000 Elk...

01:55:26.000 Venice...

01:55:28.000 It's a little milder than most whitetail.

01:55:32.000 And...

01:55:34.000 But it's almost a tenderness issue, too, because for some reason that animal is just very tender.

01:55:41.000 Really?

01:55:41.000 Like even an older one.

01:55:43.000 That's crazy because it's so rough looking.

01:55:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:55:46.000 And the meat is very dark texturally.

01:55:50.000 Pull up a photo of a Neil guy just so people can see how— Yeah, nobody ever believes it.

01:55:53.000 They're like, oh, they're blue.

01:55:54.000 And they're like, they're not blue.

01:55:55.000 I'm like, they're blue.

01:55:57.000 It's really crazy.

01:55:58.000 They're a wild-looking thing with the horns, too.

01:56:01.000 They have crazy horns. 0.77

01:56:02.000 Wait till you see them run.

01:56:03.000 Yeah?

01:56:04.000 Just the way they just kind of lope along.

01:56:07.000 And it looks like it's slow, but it's very fast.

01:56:09.000 I mean, they're really fast animals.

01:56:12.000 What a weird-looking animal.

01:56:13.000 Weird-looking animal.

01:56:14.000 So unique.

01:56:15.000 And they're from Asia? 0.97

01:56:16.000 Is that where they're from?

01:56:17.000 India.

01:56:18.000 India.

01:56:18.000 And so when you're looking at an animal like that...

01:56:24.000 Everything looks off.

01:56:25.000 Like, the head looks too small for the body.

01:56:27.000 It doesn't look like the horns fit.

01:56:29.000 Like, it looks like a fake animal.

01:56:31.000 It looks like some animal in some weird novel.

01:56:34.000 Yeah.

01:56:35.000 I think the Latin name is, like, Bocephus something.

01:56:38.000 Look at that one in the left corner there, Jamie. 0.99

01:56:40.000 That thing is blue as fuck. 1.00

01:56:41.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:56:41.000 Look how crazy blue that is. 1.00

01:56:43.000 Blue bulls.

01:56:44.000 So weird.

01:56:46.000 They're very cool.

01:56:47.000 Do the females have antlers, too? 1.00

01:56:49.000 Yes.

01:56:50.000 Or horns, I guess?

01:56:52.000 These are horns.

01:56:53.000 So they don't fall.

01:56:54.000 So it's a kind of antelope, right?

01:56:55.000 Yes.

01:56:56.000 Wow.

01:56:57.000 Look at that thing. 0.92

01:56:59.000 That looks fake.

01:57:00.000 That looks like someone took a cow and they made some crazy CGI rest of the body.

01:57:09.000 Interesting animal.

01:57:10.000 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.

01:57:22.000 What is that about?

01:57:24.000 Well, just to dry out a little bit.

01:57:26.000 And we hit a real...

01:57:30.000 Because usually down there it's warm.

01:57:32.000 Even in December, it can get pretty warm.

01:57:35.000 And we got a random nice cold front where it dropped into the 40s that night.

01:57:39.000 And I just wanted it to be dry to the touch.

01:57:41.000 Not necessarily a deep dry aging crust on it, but just a little bit.

01:57:47.000 I wanted it to be dry to the touch.

01:57:49.000 It goes back to what I was talking about earlier with keeping them cold in the coolers.

01:57:54.000 Cold and dry.

01:57:55.000 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.

01:58:05.000 And so we left it out.

01:58:07.000 It was hanging.

01:58:08.000 It was in the 40s that night.

01:58:09.000 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.

01:58:21.000 You've got to deal with whatever you've got, the situation.

01:58:23.000 And so we'd let it go overnight, and then we started cutting the next day.

01:58:27.000 And when it has that crust on it, that sort of dry outer crust, what is going on with that?

01:58:32.000 You can't eat that once it has that, right?

01:58:34.000 You have to cut that off?

01:58:35.000 It depends on the extent that it's gotten to.

01:58:38.000 When you vax seal that, it'll usually go away.

01:58:41.000 It'll rehydrate.

01:58:42.000 Really?

01:58:42.000 Yeah.

01:58:43.000 So if you have that...

01:58:44.000 If it's not too bad.

01:58:45.000 I mean, like, if you've got a couple days where it's, like, hard and black, just overnight, once that vax sealed...

01:58:51.000 I mean, funny, those guys, the meat-eater guys...

01:58:55.000 We literally can't enjoy eating meat more than those guys.

01:58:59.000 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.

01:59:11.000 And it wasn't like, I imagine on another show, they're like, I can't wait to get that buck home.

01:59:16.000 Cut! 1.00

01:59:16.000 And they're like, I don't care. 1.00

01:59:17.000 Do whatever you want with it.

01:59:18.000 But those guys are like...

01:59:20.000 We're taking all of this home.

01:59:23.000 When we were fishing, the guy's like, this one? 0.99

01:59:26.000 And the producer's like, kill it. 1.00

01:59:28.000 Kill it. 1.00

01:59:29.000 I'm like, wow, guys! 1.00

01:59:30.000 They are legitimately into eating that.

01:59:35.000 And so, yeah, when we were backsealing all that, we were cutting it into just big pieces and preserving it.

01:59:41.000 But it's fine.

01:59:43.000 It will rehydrate a little bit.

01:59:44.000 Now, if you've got a dry, aging crust on it from a few days...

01:59:48.000 You're probably going to need to trim it off, but you'll know.

01:59:51.000 But like I said, once it vac seals, it tends to rehydrate a little bit.

01:59:54.000 The attitude that those guys have on that crew is directly related to the trickle-down effect from Rinella.

01:59:59.000 Yeah.

01:59:59.000 For sure.

02:00:00.000 They're into it.

02:00:01.000 Yeah.

02:00:01.000 Well, he's established a real good sort of ideal and an ethic for that community.

02:00:08.000 Yeah.

02:00:08.000 Their crews are amazing.

02:00:09.000 They're so fun.

02:00:10.000 It's a fun show to do.

02:00:12.000 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.

02:00:24.000 And the fishing one, man, God, those fish look delicious.

02:00:30.000 And we had such an incredible variety of fish that night.

02:00:35.000 I had never – when we were gigging, I've never seen a pompano and come into the bay like that.

02:00:39.000 I mean I had to do like a legality check real quick.

02:00:42.000 I mean it was like pompano and I'm like, well – and he's like, yes, stab.

02:00:46.000 I mean, it was so out of character for those to be in there, but to catch pompano, trout, flounder...

02:00:52.000 Is there certain fish that you're not allowed to spear?

02:00:55.000 Yeah, game fish.

02:00:56.000 Right, like a bass.

02:00:57.000 Like you can't go spear a bass.

02:00:59.000 Or a redfish.

02:01:00.000 Like if you're in the bay and you see a red go by, hands off.

02:01:04.000 But we can catch them on rod and reel.

02:01:05.000 How odd is that?

02:01:08.000 It's super complicated.

02:01:09.000 You get into redfish politics in Texas. 0.72

02:01:11.000 It's a good thing.

02:01:12.000 Don't spear the redfish.

02:01:14.000 Let them go.

02:01:14.000 It's too easy to spear?

02:01:16.000 No.

02:01:18.000 I think it is a very valuable game fish.

02:01:22.000 The sustainability of their populations is paramount.

02:01:27.000 There's been problems in the past with overfishing of redfish specifically.

02:01:33.000 And their designation as a game fish came at great political cost.

02:01:38.000 In the 1980s, Paul Prudhomme, who was a famous New Orleans chef, he started blackening redfish.

02:01:47.000 And at the time, food trends could really take hold.

02:01:51.000 And this one did.

02:01:52.000 And every restaurant in the country started blackening redfish.

02:01:55.000 And the market for it skyrocketed.

02:01:57.000 And they started catching breeding-sized female redfish in these huge nets.

02:02:07.000 And within a couple years, the population was getting decimated.

02:02:10.000 And so conservation organizations came in, notably CCA, which is the Coastal Conservation Association, came in and got them designated as a game fish.

02:02:22.000 And at that point, you're not going to be able to stab them anymore.

02:02:26.000 That makes sense.

02:02:27.000 They're a very important fish down there.

02:02:29.000 So you can't just net them either?

02:02:30.000 No.

02:02:31.000 No, you can't commercially fish them at all in Texas anymore, which is really interesting.

02:02:35.000 Or serve a wild-caught redfish in Texas.

02:02:39.000 Really?

02:02:39.000 So when you buy redfish in Texas, what are you buying?

02:02:42.000 Farm-raised.

02:02:44.000 Oh.

02:02:45.000 And how do they do that?

02:02:45.000 Do they do it in the ocean, like pens?

02:02:47.000 No.

02:02:48.000 Towards the coast, there's a lot of redfish farms down there.

02:02:53.000 They just have a giant swimming pool?

02:02:55.000 Yeah.

02:02:56.000 So redfish survive really well in brackish and freshwater.

02:02:58.000 So there's lakes around San Antonio that have redfish in them.

02:03:02.000 Calaveras and Brawnic.

02:03:03.000 They live in completely fresh water and thrive.

02:03:06.000 Yeah, they're real hardy.

02:03:07.000 They can live in anything.

02:03:08.000 And so they are raised on big fish farms.

02:03:12.000 They took a hell of a hit in the freeze, those farms did.

02:03:15.000 So from what I've heard, it's really hard to get farm-raised fish here.

02:03:19.000 And my understanding is that if you have a wild-caught redfish on your menu here, that's not legal.

02:03:25.000 Interesting.

02:03:26.000 And isn't that the fish you're using for fish and chips?

02:03:30.000 Black drum.

02:03:31.000 Black drum.

02:03:32.000 Yeah.

02:03:32.000 So kind of a cousin, a red drum and a black drum.

02:03:35.000 And black drum is a huge commercial fishery here.

02:03:38.000 Interestingly, they catch them on trot lines.

02:03:40.000 So you're familiar with the trot line, which is one line with many hooks, probably 100 hooks hanging off of it.

02:03:45.000 And they typically will bait the hook with a little piece of wood that's been soaked in fish oil.

02:03:52.000 And I just put that on the hook and then they catch black drum on that.

02:03:55.000 Why a little piece of wood?

02:03:57.000 Because it's not dirty bait.

02:03:59.000 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.

02:04:05.000 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.

02:04:10.000 Oh, wow.

02:04:10.000 So they just smell it.

02:04:11.000 Yeah, they have little barbels on there which indicates that they're using scent mostly.

02:04:17.000 So that's a highly sustainable wild commercial fishery.

02:04:23.000 It is as of now.

02:04:24.000 So we buy a lot of black drum because it's a good market fish.

02:04:31.000 And do you prefer that for fish and chips?

02:04:34.000 Do you like doing that because it's a Texas fish?

02:04:37.000 Yes, I do prefer it for fish and chips.

02:04:39.000 I like the texture on that.

02:04:41.000 Your fish and chips is off the charts, man.

02:04:43.000 Oh, thank you.

02:04:44.000 So good.

02:04:45.000 Well, everything in your restaurant is great.

02:04:46.000 Thank you.

02:04:47.000 But I've been having an itch for your fish and chips.

02:04:50.000 Fried fish to me is like, I mean, you know...

02:04:54.000 Somebody asked me, like, fishing or hunting?

02:04:56.000 I'm like, I'd be lying if I said hunting.

02:04:58.000 Really?

02:04:59.000 Yeah, I like eating fish a lot.

02:05:01.000 Yeah.

02:05:02.000 But also, right around fall, when it starts to get cool, you'd probably ask me that question.

02:05:06.000 I'd be like, let's go hunting.

02:05:08.000 It's fine.

02:05:08.000 There's something about fish and chips, though.

02:05:10.000 Whoever figured that out?

02:05:11.000 Oh, yeah.

02:05:11.000 The batter, the fact that, you know, the fish stays kind of tender because the batter is really kind of protecting it, right?

02:05:19.000 Steaming.

02:05:20.000 Yeah.

02:05:20.000 Steaming in there.

02:05:21.000 It's a...

02:05:22.000 It's a tricky thing to get, too.

02:05:23.000 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.

02:05:35.000 But yeah, I mean, that's a British deal, as far as I know.

02:05:38.000 It seems like it.

02:05:39.000 I mean, they're always talking about it.

02:05:40.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:05:43.000 But, I mean, fried fish in general, to me, is kind of just, I probably eat too much of it.

02:05:48.000 Fish and chips is one of those things, too, where it seems quite simple, right?

02:05:55.000 Like you're just battering fish and then deep frying it.

02:05:58.000 But man, there's just a wide range of quality and result when it comes to fish and chip.

02:06:05.000 And then the sauce, like what are you dipping it in?

02:06:07.000 Are you using tartar sauce?

02:06:09.000 Are you using something novel?

02:06:11.000 Like what are you doing?

02:06:12.000 I like, well, any kind of mayonnaise-based sauce that's got something piquant in there, like a pickle.

02:06:18.000 We do a pickled pepper.

02:06:20.000 We get a lot of these little cherry bomb peppers, which are like round, spicy peppers, and we pickle those.

02:06:26.000 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.

02:06:34.000 So it's got a little spice, a little heat.

02:06:36.000 Yeah, but still that acid and that crunch, and it's still mayonnaise-based, which is, you know, fried fish and mayonnaise.

02:06:43.000 And are you using locally sourced potatoes when you're doing the chips?

02:06:47.000 You know, that's a great question.

02:06:49.000 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.

02:07:01.000 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,

02:07:16.000 it was like mashed potatoes and french fries.

02:07:19.000 And we made a shift, a conscientious shift to organic potatoes that aren't necessarily from Texas.

02:07:26.000 And it was the first time in the life of the business that we had purposely sourced from outside of Texas.

02:07:33.000 And I think we're going to continue it.

02:07:35.000 You know, I'm really strict about the organic because potatoes can be like little chemical bombs.

02:07:40.000 But, you know, in season we buy a lot of potatoes.

02:07:43.000 And then we're in season right now.

02:07:44.000 Potatoes are in season.

02:07:46.000 No.

02:07:47.000 So, yeah, a little divulge something on this.

02:07:51.000 Is there a particular place, is it like Idaho or whatever, where you get the best potatoes?

02:07:56.000 A lot of the organic growing happens in Colorado.

02:07:59.000 Colorado?

02:08:00.000 Yeah.

02:08:01.000 And do potatoes taste different when they come from different parts of the country?

02:08:05.000 Not a russet, in my experience.

02:08:08.000 It's all the same.

02:08:08.000 Yeah, there's a lot of sugar content.

02:08:10.000 And consistent russets are just real easy potatoes to cook.

02:08:14.000 What do you think about sweet potato chips?

02:08:16.000 I love them, personally.

02:08:17.000 I love sweet potatoes.

02:08:19.000 Do you ever do it that way?

02:08:20.000 Like make potato, like french fries, like fish and chip style steak fries?

02:08:25.000 Not for that dish, but we have done lots of fried sweet potatoes, lots of thin cut chips.

02:08:30.000 We do a lot of raw venison with sweet potato chips because I love sweet potatoes and venison together.

02:08:37.000 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.

02:08:49.000 Because I love sweet potatoes and game in general.

02:08:52.000 And what do you prefer to, like, if you're gonna make potato chips or fries, what do you prefer?

02:08:57.000 Do you prefer, like, duck fat or what kind of fat do you like to cook them in?

02:09:00.000 Well, I mean, we have a fryer now, and, like, using animal fats in the fryer is not a possible thing anymore.

02:09:07.000 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.

02:09:17.000 It's dangerous, very dangerous.

02:09:20.000 But, I mean, my preference would probably be, I love beef fat for frying.

02:09:25.000 Of course I love lard.

02:09:27.000 I like the neutrality of it.

02:09:29.000 But getting, like, duck fat in that volume is, you know, whenever I see, like, duck fat fries, I'm like, ah.

02:09:35.000 How are you doing that?

02:09:37.000 That's a lot of duck fat.

02:09:38.000 Maybe they're doing one blanch in duck fat and then coming back and finishing them in a peanut oil or a canola oil.

02:09:48.000 Is it just because it's hard to find that kind of volume of duck fat?

02:09:50.000 That's a lot of duck fat.

02:09:52.000 Yeah.

02:09:54.000 When you say that you have a fryer, are you using canola oil?

02:09:59.000 We use a non-GMO canola oil.

02:10:01.000 And that's another big step that we took, you know, in that the viability of the restaurant kind of came down to...

02:10:11.000 We'd made so many very strict choices over the years, and then we...

02:10:16.000 We're like, we need crispy things for the people, you know?

02:10:19.000 And it's like, people like fried foods. 0.85

02:10:21.000 And we weren't, it was very difficult to manage that in a pot, you know, for a busy ass restaurant.

02:10:28.000 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.

02:10:37.000 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.

02:10:44.000 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.

02:10:54.000 You know, they love french fries.

02:10:56.000 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.

02:11:05.000 And so we finally went with a fryer and then started sourcing organic potatoes.

02:11:11.000 Did it make a difference in the taste?

02:11:13.000 It's just neutral.

02:11:15.000 Texturally, it can make some differences.

02:11:19.000 We used to fry our donuts in beef fat, and I think that those could be a little...

02:11:24.000 Sometimes you'd get a little chapsticky.

02:11:28.000 They'd be like...

02:11:29.000 I mean, they were good. 0.99

02:11:30.000 Damn, that sounds good. 0.99

02:11:30.000 It's great. 0.99

02:11:32.000 I mean, our inlard is excellent.

02:11:35.000 And I think your body recognizes those fats so much better.

02:11:38.000 I'm not...

02:11:39.000 I'm not particularly excited about using canola oil at all.

02:11:44.000 And there's no other options that are viable for your...

02:11:46.000 No, I mean, not cost-wise.

02:11:48.000 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.

02:11:56.000 Really?

02:11:56.000 Yeah.

02:11:56.000 Oh, I mean, it would be astronomical.

02:11:59.000 It's food, like the prices around foods are just, are like so unknown to the public.

02:12:05.000 And we still, I mean, our sourcing is so good.

02:12:10.000 But, you know, we had to make that concession almost to be like, well, we need a fryer because we do fried chicken.

02:12:18.000 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.

02:12:26.000 Dangerous.

02:12:26.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:27.000 We were so lucky nobody ever got burnt.

02:12:30.000 Or there was never a fire.

02:12:31.000 Yeah, because you overheat it.

02:12:33.000 Oh, really?

02:12:34.000 Oh.

02:12:34.000 Yeah.

02:12:35.000 And you're just using a gas burner, too, so it's not like you can regulate it.

02:12:40.000 For years.

02:12:40.000 Oh, wow.

02:12:41.000 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.

02:12:48.000 Jesus.

02:12:48.000 Yeah.

02:12:49.000 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?

02:12:57.000 Yeah.

02:12:57.000 Do you try to train people?

02:13:00.000 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?

02:13:06.000 It's really beneficial, of course, for people to have experience.

02:13:12.000 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.

02:13:20.000 I mean, there's something really great about that.

02:13:23.000 Because our restaurant's not flashy, and it's definitely not the cool place to work anymore.

02:13:30.000 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.

02:13:40.000 That's not the cool place to work.

02:13:41.000 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.

02:13:51.000 I think it's a...

02:13:53.000 Sure place to cook.

02:13:55.000 Maybe I'm not choosing that word wisely, but you come there to learn very simple methods.

02:14:03.000 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.

02:14:12.000 Right, right, right.

02:14:14.000 Which is not our style. 0.99

02:14:15.000 That fussy shit, that doesn't do anything to me. 1.00

02:14:18.000 There's a place for it. 1.00

02:14:19.000 I get it.

02:14:19.000 It's kind of cool.

02:14:20.000 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.

02:14:32.000 Yeah, me too.

02:14:33.000 But I mean, obviously.

02:14:34.000 But, you know, maybe a young cook doesn't see it the same way.

02:14:40.000 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.

02:14:50.000 We need those bad, you know, or this is how you have to treat these tomatoes.

02:14:53.000 They need to be sorted through daily, if not twice daily.

02:14:57.000 To pick out all the ripe ones.

02:14:59.000 And, you know, like, you know, why is Jesse so excited? 0.99

02:15:03.000 He's like, oh, the fucking blueberries are here, you know, for the first time. 0.98

02:15:06.000 So it's like the little things like that. 0.99

02:15:09.000 Or like, you know, why don't we have lemons in our iced tea?

02:15:13.000 It's because it's just not that time of year.

02:15:17.000 Yeah, you're all about what's in season and what's available right now.

02:15:21.000 Right.

02:15:22.000 So how often are you changing your menu?

02:15:24.000 We used to change it a lot more.

02:15:27.000 And these days we're trying to really like to kind of control waste more.

02:15:32.000 We're just trying to lock in a menu for about a month at a time.

02:15:36.000 And as this great thing that has happened simultaneously as the business has grown is that the producers grow too.

02:15:45.000 Like they've been scaling up.

02:15:47.000 They've been learning distribution.

02:15:49.000 And more importantly, you've seen farmers just get so smart, you know, with how they plant and how they rotate.

02:15:56.000 And so in the past, when, you know, you'd plan on seeing green beans, maybe in mid-June, now we see them in early May.

02:16:06.000 I think?

02:16:22.000 And really shine.

02:16:23.000 I need to have all this stuff.

02:16:25.000 It needs to look really good and I need to have some consistency to it too.

02:16:29.000 I need all the radishes to be vaguely the same size.

02:16:33.000 And so you start to see the whole system kind of step up and scale.

02:16:39.000 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.

02:16:47.000 And now you just have a lot more of it.

02:16:50.000 You know, a lot more times of year, too.

02:16:53.000 And it's a very exciting time, and the distribution's better.

02:16:56.000 Like, we don't have to go out and get all that stuff anymore.

02:16:58.000 They bring it to us.

02:16:59.000 It's wonderful.

02:17:00.000 Is it difficult to get relationships with ranchers and just, like, find the right people to work with?

02:17:05.000 I mean, no.

02:17:07.000 We're locked in.

02:17:08.000 You know, we've been using our chicken farmer, our pork farmer, and cattle, I mean, our beef provider, for years.

02:17:17.000 I mean, we're not changing anything.

02:17:20.000 It's just like, those are the people we deal with.

02:17:22.000 And I mean, through better or worse, we have to raise our prices.

02:17:27.000 I'm like, it's cool.

02:17:28.000 It's worth it to me because of mutual loyalties.

02:17:30.000 And I think that a lot of the food system exists on those relationships.

02:17:35.000 And so we've been getting our chickens from the same lady for so long.

02:17:39.000 Like, you know, every Wednesday, you know, Jane shows up.

02:17:43.000 And I'm like, what's up, Jane?

02:17:44.000 And she just brings us our chickens. 1.00

02:17:45.000 And they're all perfect and best chicken you've ever had.

02:17:47.000 And is she a free-range lady? 1.00

02:17:49.000 Does she other chickens wander around? 1.00

02:17:52.000 Rotational pasturing.

02:17:53.000 Like Joel Salatin style?

02:17:55.000 Yeah, but they don't range anything behind it like Salatin.

02:17:59.000 It's just chickens, but they're moving everything around.

02:18:02.000 It's very high quality.

02:18:03.000 We can also get a very young bird at a specific size.

02:18:06.000 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.

02:18:14.000 And so she's able to do that.

02:18:16.000 And, yeah, it's a very good quality.

02:18:19.000 The processing is very good.

02:18:21.000 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. 1.00

02:18:29.000 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?

02:18:38.000 Is that how it works?

02:18:39.000 So there's going to be two categories with that.

02:18:42.000 One is going to be non-game, you know, antelope and deer, and the other one's going to be feral swine.

02:18:49.000 When you say non-game, it's just because it's invasive.

02:18:52.000 It's not listed as a game animal, which means that, simply put, it's not a white-tailed deer.

02:18:57.000 It's just not native to Texas.

02:18:59.000 Right.

02:19:00.000 So anything that's been exotic, that's been imported here, and interestingly enough, that also applies to elk, right?

02:19:08.000 Like elk is thought of almost as an invasive, which is weird because it used to be native.

02:19:14.000 Right.

02:19:15.000 Well, any elk that's here now has been brought in.

02:19:19.000 And so, ostensibly, it's just been purchased as a livestock.

02:19:23.000 And that's what it is.

02:19:25.000 So, anything but whitetail.

02:19:29.000 And so, those fall in a very low, I don't want to say unregulated, but less regulated level than feral hogs do.

02:19:42.000 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.

02:19:52.000 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.

02:20:02.000 We've had elk before.

02:20:04.000 Maybe some ranch is trying to cull out some of the elk that they brought in for hunting.

02:20:09.000 I see that as a byproduct, an animal that's been eating a wild diet.

02:20:16.000 And so I'm like, yeah, we can bring that in.

02:20:19.000 And then as far as the hogs go, those are trapped live. 1.00

02:20:23.000 And brought in.

02:20:24.000 So there's trappers that are working with the processor that we use.

02:20:29.000 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.

02:20:36.000 So there's a state inspector.

02:20:38.000 It can be either state or federal.

02:20:39.000 It can be USDA or a state.

02:20:41.000 If it's not crossing state lines, it can be state.

02:20:44.000 And so we use a state inspector.

02:20:47.000 Our processor does, rather.

02:20:50.000 That animal looks healthy.

02:20:51.000 Great.

02:20:52.000 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.

02:20:57.000 And they're feral swine and they're treated basically the same as a domestic pig.

02:21:04.000 I mean, they get a little more scrutiny on them because they're wild.

02:21:08.000 He's checking livers and kidneys and stuff like that on the carcass.

02:21:11.000 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? 0.99

02:21:19.000 The snare?

02:21:20.000 How do they keep the hogs from freaking out? 1.00

02:21:22.000 Yeah, that's a really good question.

02:21:24.000 So they do freak out.

02:21:26.000 But the best way I can describe it, and we'll never really know...

02:21:30.000 Because we don't experience a lot of that flavor, you know, that off-putting, like, gaminess from the trapped pigs.

02:21:39.000 And I've discussed this with our processor.

02:21:41.000 What we think is that there's a spike in stress and then kind of a plateau.

02:21:47.000 Now, they're going to be stressed, but that initial stress is probably like an adrenaline rush. 0.99

02:21:52.000 And I'm totally speaking out of my ass right now. 0.98

02:21:54.000 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. 0.99

02:22:09.000 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.

02:22:17.000 But so, I mean, there is a high degree of stress.

02:22:19.000 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.

02:22:29.000 And so at that point, we are...

02:22:36.000 Yeah.

02:22:50.000 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.

02:23:06.000 Right.

02:23:07.000 So when they capture them and they keep them for several days, what are they doing during those several days?

02:23:11.000 They're running tests on them?

02:23:13.000 No.

02:23:13.000 They're just feeding them?

02:23:14.000 They're just feeding them.

02:23:15.000 Really?

02:23:15.000 Until it's their time.

02:23:16.000 And then when it's their time, then they examine them?

02:23:18.000 It's not an examination.

02:23:19.000 It's a visual check.

02:23:21.000 It's like they're standing.

02:23:22.000 I mean, I'm sure they have.

02:23:24.000 I mean, if it's obviously sick or injured or something, they're probably going to condemn it.

02:23:30.000 But why are they capturing it and then holding them for a few days and feeding them?

02:23:33.000 It's mostly going to have to do with slaughtering schedules.

02:23:36.000 Like, I mean, most of these small places that are willing to do it are running on a pretty strict, like Tuesdays.

02:23:42.000 Trapper brings them in on Friday.

02:23:43.000 They got to stay there till Tuesday when it's time.

02:23:46.000 So you couldn't just do a helicopter hunt, blow out 20 pigs, and then bring them back to your restaurant and serve it?

02:23:53.000 Correct.

02:23:54.000 I cannot do that.

02:23:55.000 There is some sort of a protocol involved in processing.

02:23:57.000 The anti-mortem inspection is not happening.

02:24:02.000 Anti-mortem?

02:24:05.000 A-N-T-E. Before. 0.99

02:24:08.000 So, I mean, that just brings up a much wider topic in how do we get feral hogs into the food system safely.

02:24:18.000 And this is kind of the bottleneck.

02:24:20.000 But also, this level of inspection is not something I disagree with at all.

02:24:24.000 Right.

02:24:24.000 It seems like it's prudent.

02:24:25.000 It's very prudent.

02:24:26.000 And so, because it's so prudent, that's where I kind of get stuck.

02:24:31.000 It's like, how do we feed the poor?

02:24:34.000 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? 0.98

02:24:41.000 But we can't have inspectors flying around in another helicopter with binoculars like the brown-spotted one on the left.

02:24:48.000 How are you going to manage it?

02:24:50.000 It's going to be really tricky, but I think that...

02:24:53.000 The conversations need to start, and that's key, is how do we safely integrate hogs into the food chain also without monetizing them? 0.99

02:25:05.000 Because once you monetize them, the impetus to getting rid of them is gone.

02:25:12.000 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.

02:25:25.000 People are going to be like, wait a minute.

02:25:26.000 Why do we want to kill all these things? 0.99

02:25:28.000 Why don't we capture a couple of them and breed them? 1.00

02:25:31.000 You know?

02:25:32.000 Yeah.

02:25:32.000 And this is – I was actually talking about this the other day because this happened.

02:25:38.000 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.

02:25:51.000 And I'm like, it goes back to one of the first things that we talked about.

02:25:54.000 It was like, what side of the fence is that pig on? 0.99

02:25:56.000 That is a domestic hog. 0.99

02:25:58.000 That is not a wild boar anymore.

02:26:01.000 They don't retract though, do they?

02:26:03.000 Do they retract back to domestic looking?

02:26:06.000 Does their nose shrink and does their fur change texture?

02:26:08.000 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.

02:26:18.000 And there is a darkening of the flesh that you're getting from a wild hog, right?

02:26:25.000 Is that just a dietary thing?

02:26:28.000 Yes.

02:26:30.000 You will also see, like, in, I hate to use the word, like, heritage breed, but, like, in a really good mix.

02:26:38.000 Like, the domestic pigs we get at the restaurant are...

02:26:42.000 Used to be a large black red wattle mix.

02:26:45.000 They're typically...

02:26:46.000 Like if I see pork in a grocery store, it's like pale pink.

02:26:49.000 And it's like, ours never looks like that.

02:26:51.000 It's much deeper red.

02:26:53.000 And then a feral hog can go way... 0.96

02:26:56.000 Almost to like beef red.

02:26:58.000 Really?

02:26:58.000 Yeah, I've seen them really dark before.

02:27:01.000 It really depends.

02:27:02.000 And it's got to be a mixture of diet.

02:27:04.000 Stress can also play into that too.

02:27:07.000 But they...

02:27:09.000 They put on fat real well once you catch them and you keep them.

02:27:14.000 They're like street kids. 0.92

02:27:16.000 They're like, oh, I'm not going to miss a meal ever again.

02:27:20.000 They're into eating.

02:27:21.000 And so they put on almost exorbitant amounts of fat when you capture them and feed them out.

02:27:26.000 Are there bears in Texas?

02:27:27.000 Not that many, right?

02:27:29.000 There are.

02:27:29.000 I saw a picture of one in South Texas a few days ago.

02:27:32.000 You cannot hunt them.

02:27:33.000 You can't hunt any bears in Texas?

02:27:34.000 Nope.

02:27:35.000 Really?

02:27:35.000 Interesting.

02:27:36.000 Nope.

02:27:36.000 Not enough.

02:27:37.000 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.

02:27:45.000 Wow.

02:27:46.000 That's really pretty far south.

02:27:47.000 Yeah.

02:27:48.000 I mean, if I was down there hunting, I'd hope that I'd know what I was looking at.

02:27:53.000 You know, if it was like low light, I'd be like, Giant boar.

02:27:57.000 So have they immigrated from somewhere else and made their way into Texas?

02:28:01.000 I assume so.

02:28:01.000 They used to be native here, just like the elk.

02:28:04.000 Right.

02:28:05.000 That's what I was getting at.

02:28:07.000 They don't do that with bears, though.

02:28:10.000 This is the way they do that with elk.

02:28:13.000 No, no, no.

02:28:14.000 Repopulate them.

02:28:15.000 I mean, I feel, and I could definitely be wrong, I feel that this bear naturally made its way down there.

02:28:23.000 Yeah, why is that with predators?

02:28:27.000 Is it because of the impact it'll have on local fawns and calves and things along those lines?

02:28:33.000 I think calves being the key word there.

02:28:35.000 This is a beef state.

02:28:37.000 And reintroduction of predators is not on the table.

02:28:41.000 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.

02:28:51.000 And even if you have a depredation tag, it's dangerous.

02:28:55.000 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.

02:29:06.000 So it was climbing into the thing with alpacas and it just couldn't resist. 0.97

02:29:09.000 It was just whacking like, you know, fucking ten of them at a time. 0.97

02:29:12.000 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. 0.98

02:29:35.000 And it's kind of interesting, the cultural differences, because here, it would be like a no-brainer.

02:29:40.000 Like, you don't even have to have a tag. 0.98

02:29:41.000 Just shoot that mountain lion that's trying to kill all your livestock. 0.97

02:29:46.000 But in California, they're like, let it live, man. 0.99

02:29:49.000 Yeah, it's complicated.

02:29:51.000 And yeah, there's definitely a different mentality here.

02:29:55.000 You've probably picked up on that.

02:29:57.000 I have.

02:29:57.000 I like it here.

02:29:59.000 There's a silliness to California that is just, it's really apparent when you get out of there.

02:30:06.000 I'm like, oh, that's what everybody's always talking about.

02:30:08.000 And it was sort of accentuated by COVID, by the way people reacted and still react.

02:30:13.000 There's a lot of folks that just, they don't want it to be better.

02:30:17.000 They don't want the pandemic to be over.

02:30:20.000 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.

02:30:30.000 It's really interesting.

02:30:32.000 It's a fascinating psychological experiment.

02:30:35.000 I'll follow some people on social media and I'll read some of their panic porn posts.

02:30:40.000 And then I'm like, okay, where's this person from?

02:30:42.000 And you click and it's like almost always a blue city.

02:30:45.000 It's almost always someone who lives in some urban population, in some Democrat-run city.

02:30:54.000 And it's like, wow, this is sort of a universal thing.

02:30:59.000 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.

02:31:07.000 They don't want to accept that things are better now than they were months ago.

02:31:11.000 What shapes geographic regions to have almost a personality?

02:31:19.000 It's interesting, right?

02:31:20.000 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,

02:31:35.000 oh, I'm going to pick this avocado.

02:31:38.000 And here you have...

02:31:40.000 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. 0.65

02:31:52.000 I mean, it's like, how does that formative mentality translate to huge geographic areas?

02:32:00.000 And I think there's something to it.

02:32:02.000 I mean, I always see it through food, of course.

02:32:04.000 The food there and the food here is also very different.

02:32:06.000 Well, it's so defining.

02:32:07.000 Food is so defining of a population.

02:32:10.000 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.

02:32:20.000 It's like there's some sort of fermented...

02:32:21.000 Fermented shark, they bury it for a long time. 0.98

02:32:23.000 He said it is so un-fucking-believably disgusting that you can't believe that these people enjoy it as a delicacy. 0.96

02:32:33.000 Have you had that? 0.99

02:32:33.000 No. 0.99

02:32:35.000 I'll pass.

02:32:35.000 I know.

02:32:36.000 I said I like fish.

02:32:37.000 I want to try it. 0.99

02:32:39.000 Just to know what the fuck is up. 0.99

02:32:40.000 Yeah, I don't know if I can do that. 0.99

02:32:42.000 I'm sure of what that smells like.

02:32:44.000 I mean, not sure, but I bet the level.

02:32:46.000 I mean, you're probably five feet away from it before you start retching.

02:32:49.000 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.

02:32:57.000 My friend Tony was next to me. 0.99

02:32:59.000 He's like, what the fuck? 1.00

02:33:00.000 You're going to eat that? 1.00

02:33:00.000 That smell. 1.00

02:33:01.000 It smelled so barney.

02:33:03.000 Yeah.

02:33:04.000 It was good though, right?

02:33:05.000 It was good.

02:33:05.000 Yeah.

02:33:06.000 It was good, but it really smelled like innards.

02:33:08.000 Yeah.

02:33:09.000 You know, like animals. 1.00

02:33:10.000 It smelled like a dirty animal's butt. 1.00

02:33:12.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:33:13.000 Yeah, I've had experiences.

02:33:15.000 I had a sausage in France one time.

02:33:16.000 It was Andouillette.

02:33:17.000 And it was like, it came out and I was going through that phase of try everything and cut into it.

02:33:24.000 And I was like, oh, you know, it tastes like poo-poo and pee-pee. 0.92

02:33:27.000 It's like, it is vile.

02:33:30.000 Like, terrible.

02:33:31.000 But evidently, it's like the more profound that is, the better that sausage is.

02:33:35.000 And Culturally, that's what they're looking for.

02:33:39.000 And I'm sure that translates into stuff that we eat, too, you know, and find completely normal.

02:33:44.000 I wonder what that would be.

02:33:45.000 I don't know.

02:33:46.000 But maybe that said that our food is so bland and chicken breasty that maybe that doesn't translate in retrospect.

02:33:54.000 I mean, like, is that really what we...

02:33:56.000 I mean, when you think of American food, you do think of bland chicken breasty, chicken tenders, hot dogs.

02:34:03.000 You think of bland food, but that's not really...

02:34:05.000 It's like, what is the...

02:34:06.000 If you looked at the pie chart of the percentage of food that Americans eat...

02:34:10.000 But what's crazy that we're eating that nobody else is eating?

02:34:13.000 I don't know.

02:34:15.000 Nothing.

02:34:15.000 Yeah.

02:34:16.000 Right?

02:34:17.000 I can't think of anything.

02:34:18.000 We got too lucky.

02:34:19.000 The bounty of food here.

02:34:21.000 I remember watching, I watched a steak documentary.

02:34:24.000 I think it's called The Steak Revolution.

02:34:26.000 It was on some Apple documentary.

02:34:28.000 It was on iMovie or whatever.

02:34:30.000 And I was watching how they figured out in other countries what people were doing differently in America in terms of growing their cows.

02:34:39.000 And that the cows were bigger and they were fatter.

02:34:42.000 And then they were going to places like, you know, like different steakhouses, different famous places.

02:34:48.000 You know, like Peter Luger's in Brooklyn, which is like a famous steakhouse.

02:34:52.000 And you go there and they're like, okay, what are you doing differently?

02:34:55.000 How are you getting your cow so fat?

02:34:57.000 And then they were trying to change everything over in Europe to try to emulate some of these American steakhouses.

02:35:03.000 Because the idea of just eating a place where you only eat steak is like...

02:35:08.000 I know that's an Italy thing.

02:35:10.000 Yeah, I was about to say, like Bistecca Fiorentina is huge.

02:35:13.000 But have you seen those ribeyes?

02:35:15.000 They look nothing like a ribeye here in the States.

02:35:18.000 Very small.

02:35:19.000 Small and red and almost just devoid of marbling.

02:35:23.000 Yeah, and it's particularly because of their diet, right?

02:35:26.000 Because they're just eating grass only.

02:35:28.000 And they're not eating corn.

02:35:29.000 Yeah.

02:35:29.000 We like that corn-fed, fatty...

02:35:33.000 Sweet.

02:35:34.000 Yeah.

02:35:34.000 And it's almost like that animal's...

02:35:36.000 You're eating a sick person.

02:35:38.000 You're eating a sick animal.

02:35:40.000 I mean like bloated them and got them all to the point where all that marbling, like that's not good. 0.99

02:35:45.000 If you eat an elk and it was marbled like that, you'd be like, what the fuck is wrong with this animal?

02:35:50.000 You know, it's never like that. 0.98

02:35:52.000 But a cow, that's what you look for. 1.00

02:35:54.000 You look for a really sloppy, lazy, obese, Castrated bull. 0.99

02:36:01.000 Right. 0.95

02:36:01.000 That's what we're eating. 0.95

02:36:02.000 That's what we prefer.

02:36:03.000 We were brought in to do a class one time, a butchery class, and the guy who was hosting had a hog for us.

02:36:12.000 He's like, no, I'll have a pig for you.

02:36:13.000 I was like, great.

02:36:15.000 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.

02:36:24.000 And they did nothing but feed it deer corn, which is just a very cheap feed corn.

02:36:30.000 It's like a GMO corn and they just fed it nothing but corn, which is, I'm sure the pig was happy.

02:36:35.000 I don't know.

02:36:36.000 I can't say that with any, you know. 0.95

02:36:40.000 I have knowledge of the pig's mood. 0.85

02:36:41.000 But it got real fat. 0.95

02:36:43.000 I mean, it got so fat that it's hard for me to convey how fat that pig got.

02:36:47.000 But we showed up, and it was carcass at this point.

02:36:52.000 It had been killed and skinned and gutted.

02:36:53.000 But in front of us, what we were looking at, it was coated in so much fat that its eyes were basically...

02:37:01.000 Almost swollen shut because the fat deposits around the eyes had almost closed its eyes.

02:37:06.000 Wow.

02:37:07.000 The loin on it, for the listeners, was probably about a two-inch loin or backstrap.

02:37:13.000 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.

02:37:19.000 And it had about eight or nine inches of fat on top of that.

02:37:25.000 So if you're typically looking at a pork chop, it'll have like a little...

02:37:28.000 I would say it would be about, you know, 15 to 25% of the width of a pork chop, typically.

02:37:35.000 This one had whatever.

02:37:36.000 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. 0.98

02:37:45.000 It was a pig. 0.99

02:37:45.000 They don't self-regulate. 0.99

02:37:47.000 And it just went to town on this.

02:37:49.000 And it was a real lesson, you know.

02:37:53.000 First off, it's like, no, you need to feed it some pig ration if you're going to do that.

02:37:58.000 And secondly, this is not good stuff to eat.

02:38:01.000 It didn't taste good?

02:38:02.000 It tasted great.

02:38:03.000 It did?

02:38:04.000 It was like, I mean...

02:38:05.000 So you mean corn is not good stuff to eat.

02:38:06.000 Is that what you're saying?

02:38:07.000 Corn, right. 0.95

02:38:08.000 Sorry.

02:38:09.000 I mean, it's unhealthy.

02:38:10.000 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.

02:38:20.000 I was having trouble gripping my knives, everything.

02:38:23.000 The fat was just, it was just in the air.

02:38:26.000 Really?

02:38:26.000 It was crazy.

02:38:28.000 And as we're, you know, we're dicing the meat, you know, like this is for sausage.

02:38:32.000 We had a pile like two feet high of just white, pure white fat on one side.

02:38:37.000 And I'm like, man, I hope you like lard because that is what you are doing.

02:38:41.000 You need to learn how to make soap or something because you are rich with lard right now.

02:38:48.000 And it was a very soft sauce.

02:38:49.000 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.

02:38:57.000 Because acorns, they've got this beautiful, like, ivory, pinkish, firm fat.

02:39:02.000 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.

02:39:10.000 Yeah, I shot a wild pig with Steve.

02:39:14.000 It was a sow and it was kind of a really crazy adventure actually.

02:39:19.000 We shot it on this hill.

02:39:22.000 It was like on the side of a very steep hill.

02:39:25.000 And as I shot it, it died and it rolled down this hill.

02:39:29.000 And as it rolled down this hill, it got all the way to the bottom and we tried to pull it up.

02:39:35.000 We tried to, but it was too steep.

02:39:36.000 And so we decided to try to take it down and then walk.

02:39:39.000 And then while we're doing this, it's in the middle of the night.

02:39:42.000 And we're on a ranch that has mountain lions.

02:39:44.000 We're carrying a half a pig.

02:39:46.000 Each guy's carrying a half a pig on their back.

02:39:48.000 And we're stumbling through the woods.

02:39:51.000 In the bottom of this creek basin, and then we eventually wound up hanging it.

02:39:55.000 We're like, we can't do this anymore.

02:39:56.000 We have to hang this thing. 0.59

02:39:57.000 Because I was going to break my neck.

02:39:58.000 We kept falling, you know, carrying this. 0.99

02:40:01.000 It was a big pig, too.

02:40:02.000 And they're so specifically heavy, like in a weird way.

02:40:06.000 They move around a lot.

02:40:06.000 Yeah.

02:40:07.000 Well, this one had thick acorn fat on it.

02:40:11.000 And it really tasted delicious.

02:40:13.000 But it was a smell to it.

02:40:15.000 It had like an acorn-y type smell.

02:40:18.000 That's one thing that I've really never had and I really am interested in trying is blueberry bear.

02:40:24.000 Like a bear that's been eating blueberries.

02:40:26.000 Because Steve says that is literally one of the very best meats you could ever eat.

02:40:31.000 Yeah, you were talking about that with Clay Nucle.

02:40:32.000 Yeah, have you ever had that?

02:40:34.000 No, no.

02:40:34.000 Remember, I've never tried bear.

02:40:35.000 Oh, that's right.

02:40:36.000 Yeah.

02:40:37.000 But I remember Clay talking about that.

02:40:40.000 I mean, he's just definitely the bear expert, too.

02:40:43.000 How come you've never had bear?

02:40:44.000 Like a guy like you, I would imagine you would try to seek that out.

02:40:47.000 Sure.

02:40:48.000 I mean, nobody ever gave me any.

02:40:50.000 I mean, I've just eaten pretty much everything from around here, but never had bear.

02:40:54.000 And like I said, there's not a lot of the hunting travel.

02:40:57.000 Right, right, right, right.

02:40:58.000 Just very, very specific to Texas.

02:41:00.000 It is.

02:41:01.000 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.

02:41:08.000 And then it makes you think about your own diet.

02:41:11.000 Like, it's not just what tastes good.

02:41:14.000 Like, what are you doing to the actual tissue of your body itself?

02:41:17.000 And how much of that is impacted by your diet?

02:41:20.000 Right.

02:41:21.000 Right.

02:41:22.000 And in the anarchy that's happening out there, how do you select an animal to be the best, too?

02:41:30.000 Especially when it comes to pigs, because it's just like, who knows?

02:41:34.000 Even when it comes to cows, right?

02:41:35.000 There's a lot of folks who prefer grass-fed beef for the taste, for the texture.

02:41:40.000 It's a chewier texture.

02:41:44.000 And just for the fact that it's probably healthier to eat in that way, right?

02:41:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:41:50.000 It's a way more natural thing.

02:41:52.000 It's grass-fed, grass-finished beef.

02:41:55.000 And many people don't love that.

02:41:58.000 We started off with a grass-fed, grass-finished steak program at the restaurant.

02:42:04.000 And it was...

02:42:05.000 In Texas, it was very difficult.

02:42:08.000 A lot of people just didn't like it.

02:42:10.000 And when somebody doesn't like their salad, it's one thing.

02:42:14.000 And when you're in Texas and somebody doesn't like their steak, it's another thing.

02:42:18.000 What was the thing about it?

02:42:19.000 Because it's still delicious.

02:42:21.000 Is it just not what they're accustomed to?

02:42:23.000 It's texture and flavor.

02:42:24.000 I mean, the gristly parts are harder.

02:42:29.000 It's not as tender and it doesn't have that sweetness.

02:42:32.000 And it's got that grassy, almost game meat flavor to it.

02:42:36.000 It's very robust beef.

02:42:41.000 And not for everybody.

02:42:42.000 And so eventually we had to go with a grass...

02:42:48.000 You know, an animal that puts on more fat, but also eats some grain in the field.

02:42:54.000 Like a free choice grain.

02:42:55.000 Never goes to a feedlot, which is, I mean, key for us.

02:43:00.000 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.

02:43:08.000 So it's a good middle ground.

02:43:10.000 It's a great middle ground.

02:43:11.000 And also the breed choice, you know, Wagyu.

02:43:13.000 You know, it's also a recognizable, very marketable word right there.

02:43:18.000 Everybody knows Wagyu is synonymous with beef quality.

02:43:22.000 But then we're able to deal with just one person, one lady. 1.00

02:43:25.000 You know, she's awesome. 1.00

02:43:26.000 I mean, she's so good at it. 0.87

02:43:27.000 Mariana Peeler.

02:43:28.000 I mean, just creating amazing beef.

02:43:32.000 But just in a really good way that's more appealing to people.

02:43:36.000 Have you met Doug Duren?

02:43:38.000 No.

02:43:40.000 Doug lives in Wisconsin.

02:43:42.000 He's a great guy.

02:43:43.000 Shout out to Doug.

02:43:44.000 But Doug has a farm in Wisconsin, and the deer that they hunt, they're basically corn-fed.

02:43:50.000 They're eating this GMO corn that's everywhere.

02:43:54.000 It's growing.

02:43:55.000 Yeah.

02:43:55.000 That's where you find them.

02:43:57.000 You find them in the cornfields.

02:43:59.000 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.

02:44:08.000 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.

02:44:18.000 Yeah.

02:44:19.000 I mean, it's big here, too.

02:44:21.000 I mean, think corn feeders. 0.67

02:44:22.000 Right, right, right.

02:44:22.000 Corn feeders are omnipresent.

02:44:24.000 You know, that's how you hunt here.

02:44:26.000 Yeah.

02:44:27.000 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.

02:44:36.000 I don't knock it.

02:44:39.000 It's a great way to hunt.

02:44:41.000 And if that's what your goal is, just gather up some meat, it's a great way to do it.

02:44:45.000 But there's something about hunting that's supposed to be difficult to find an animal.

02:44:51.000 I've hunted bears over bait, and it's part of you that goes, hmm.

02:44:55.000 I don't think I like doing this.

02:44:57.000 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. 0.97

02:45:03.000 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. 0.95

02:45:12.000 It's that time. 0.88

02:45:13.000 It's that time that we have and that we're able to give to this vocation in order to achieve success.

02:45:20.000 It's like we don't have a week to spend trying to get that doe.

02:45:25.000 Right.

02:45:26.000 I definitely prefer not to.

02:45:28.000 At our classes, we offer both.

02:45:33.000 If that's what you want to do, you can do that.

02:45:35.000 We can also go take a walk.

02:45:38.000 Definitely prefer the walk.

02:45:40.000 If you've got your wits about you, you can usually make that walk pay off, too.

02:45:46.000 Yeah.

02:45:47.000 Yeah.

02:45:48.000 And it's also you learn about what the animal, what senses the animal utilizes in terms of like sense of smell and sight.

02:45:57.000 And the thing about pigs too is they don't see very well, right?

02:45:59.000 So you can kind of freeze.

02:46:01.000 Yeah, I mean, that's debatable, but in my mind, pigs don't see well at all. 0.63

02:46:05.000 Some people will say, yeah, they see.

02:46:07.000 I'm like, what I think about pigs and their senses is that, I mean, it's scent.

02:46:11.000 They can smell you so far away.

02:46:15.000 They can hear you, and they can see you.

02:46:18.000 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.

02:46:31.000 If they smell you, they turn around and run away.

02:46:34.000 That's my experience generally is that they have – that sense of smell is so acute.

02:46:40.000 That's really – What you have to play to get in front of them. 0.82

02:46:45.000 That said, I will get people really close to pigs. 0.88

02:46:50.000 We can get 20, 30 yards if we're dead downwind on them.

02:46:53.000 You could never do that on a deer.

02:46:56.000 It's just out of the question.

02:46:58.000 Even kind of in open ground, I've gotten within maybe 15 yards just by moving kind of slow.

02:47:05.000 And if they've got their heads down and they're eating grass or they're just rooting or something...

02:47:11.000 You can get really close to them if the wind's right.

02:47:13.000 I think the closest I ever got to a pig that I shot was probably about five feet.

02:47:19.000 What?

02:47:19.000 Yeah.

02:47:20.000 And it was the wind.

02:47:21.000 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.

02:47:31.000 We happened to have the wind in our faces and I came around.

02:47:33.000 We were walking.

02:47:34.000 We didn't have a rifle or anything. 0.98

02:47:36.000 Walked around a corner, and there's a pig. 0.99

02:47:39.000 Like, there's a pig right there. 0.97

02:47:41.000 And I just backtracked. 0.92

02:47:42.000 The wind was blowing at me.

02:47:43.000 I backtracked, and I was like, you know, like, hey, Larry, we got to go get a rifle.

02:47:48.000 He's like, what? 0.94

02:47:48.000 I'm like, there's a pig right there. 0.94

02:47:50.000 Went back, got the rifle, came back. 0.96

02:47:52.000 The pig had moved and was facing me, but had his head down.

02:47:56.000 And there were so many acorns. 0.88

02:47:58.000 I mean, I could just imagine just the crunch, crunch, crunch that was happening in that pig's jaw. 0.90

02:48:03.000 He couldn't hear anything over the wind. 0.90

02:48:04.000 The wind was bad.

02:48:05.000 And he seemed so excited about his acorns.

02:48:09.000 And I couldn't even look through the scope.

02:48:12.000 I mean, it was...

02:48:13.000 That close?

02:48:14.000 Six feet-ish.

02:48:16.000 Wow!

02:48:17.000 That's where he was.

02:48:17.000 He was kind of on the edge of a big drop.

02:48:20.000 And in fact, after I shot him, he dropped all the way down.

02:48:24.000 But I mean, that really shows you what their, not only their senses, but their dispositions.

02:48:31.000 Like when they get excited, particularly about two things, there's nothing that's going to pull them away from those two things.

02:48:38.000 What a strange animal they are.

02:48:39.000 What keeps their populations in check overseas? 0.99

02:48:42.000 Oh, I mean, you can see videos of downtown Milan and Germany where these pigs are just running down the streets.

02:48:50.000 I mean, they have far less predators over there.

02:48:54.000 I don't know.

02:48:55.000 And then I don't know what the hunting situations are over there either.

02:48:58.000 There's feral hog problems around the world.

02:49:01.000 China, you know, definitely in Europe.

02:49:04.000 And here, I mean, probably bleeding into Mexico a little bit.

02:49:07.000 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.

02:49:16.000 You really see that from places like England.

02:49:20.000 They have a very different take on hunting, for the most part, than we do.

02:49:25.000 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.

02:49:34.000 Right.

02:49:35.000 It's a very tiered system.

02:49:37.000 Even fishing, you know, you're going to pay for it.

02:49:41.000 And so I think that most people have, you know, of course they develop a different view of it.

02:49:46.000 And also they prefer carp over there, which is so weird.

02:49:50.000 They actually enjoy carp fishing.

02:49:52.000 Whereas carp for us are just thought to be like sort of a junky fish.

02:49:55.000 Yeah.

02:49:56.000 I mean, they're okay to eat.

02:49:59.000 There's a lot better fish out there to eat than carp, I think.

02:50:02.000 Yeah.

02:50:02.000 Well, you're a big fan of eating bass, right?

02:50:04.000 Yeah, I eat bass.

02:50:06.000 That's a controversial...

02:50:07.000 I eat bass because it makes people mad.

02:50:11.000 And I don't target bass.

02:50:14.000 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.

02:50:20.000 Why does it make people mad?

02:50:22.000 It's a...

02:50:24.000 You know, we've...

02:50:27.000 We've made the largemouth bass a species.

02:50:31.000 I mean, it's similar to elk, man.

02:50:33.000 I mean, like, elk has status.

02:50:37.000 Big white-tailed deer have status.

02:50:40.000 On the coast, there's so many fish to eat on the coast, but on the coast, a big speckled trout has status.

02:50:46.000 It has more status than a redfish.

02:50:49.000 Why?

02:50:49.000 I don't know.

02:50:51.000 But in freshwater, the bass has it in the south, and in the north, it would be the walleye.

02:50:55.000 That's the status.

02:50:56.000 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.

02:51:04.000 Right, and it's just silly, because there's a lot of bass out there.

02:51:08.000 I mean, there's a lot of them.

02:51:09.000 And they've just decided that that species is off-limit.

02:51:15.000 I mean, Parks and Wildlife establishes rules.

02:51:18.000 About what you can keep, what size you can keep on a bass.

02:51:22.000 And those were determined by biologists, and I trust those more than...

02:51:27.000 I mean, it's also highly monetized.

02:51:29.000 So, I mean, you think about bass tournaments, I mean, you can win $50,000.

02:51:32.000 Right.

02:51:33.000 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.

02:51:45.000 And to me, it's weird.

02:51:47.000 Have you ever seen a tournament bass fisherman when he's reeling that fish in?

02:51:52.000 There's no joy.

02:51:53.000 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.

02:52:05.000 And then you drive it to another part of the lake and then you let it go.

02:52:16.000 It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

02:52:18.000 I mean, you're really inconveniencing that fish.

02:52:21.000 It was a Mitch Hedberg joke, I think, right?

02:52:23.000 It's like, just made it late for something.

02:52:26.000 I can't remember.

02:52:27.000 It's real weird to me.

02:52:29.000 It is weird.

02:52:32.000 There's so much value placed on that one species.

02:52:35.000 It does have some qualities.

02:52:36.000 It's aggressive.

02:52:37.000 It's hard fighting.

02:52:38.000 It jumps.

02:52:39.000 It jumps out of the water.

02:52:41.000 It hits lures.

02:52:43.000 You can catch it in the summer months.

02:52:45.000 There's a lot of qualities behind a largemouth bass, one of which is also pretty damn tasty.

02:52:51.000 It's in the same family as a bluegill or a crappie.

02:52:54.000 Do they basically taste the same as a bluegill or crappie?

02:52:57.000 I mean, I've had bass, but I haven't had it since I was a teenager.

02:53:00.000 Yeah, it's very good.

02:53:01.000 It has a larger flake than either of those fish.

02:53:04.000 It is a sunfish.

02:53:06.000 It's in the sunfish species, or genus.

02:53:12.000 I think it's great.

02:53:13.000 Now, I don't keep them often, and usually I'll just put them back.

02:53:17.000 But every once in a while, I will keep the bass.

02:53:19.000 But why do you put them back when you put them back?

02:53:22.000 I'm usually fishing for something else, and I have enough fish, but there are times where I do want to keep them.

02:53:29.000 Well, there's a situation with trout.

02:53:31.000 People love to cast the fly fish for trout and release them.

02:53:37.000 It's almost entirely catch and release in some places, which is weird.

02:53:42.000 It's weird.

02:53:43.000 You're just stabbing them in the face with a hook, pulling them in, freaking them out, and then letting them go. 0.94

02:53:48.000 Yeah, so geographically, I'd like to take this opportunity to pretty much piss off the entire nation and agree.

02:53:54.000 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.

02:54:03.000 Yeah.

02:54:04.000 So there's stretches of land.

02:54:06.000 Now, do they do that with catch and release only?

02:54:08.000 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?

02:54:17.000 Maintaining numbers.

02:54:18.000 I mean, you think about how the size of these streams and the amount of pressure they get. 0.98

02:54:23.000 I can talk all the shit I want because I'm here in Texas and there's reservoirs all around me. 0.95

02:54:28.000 There's fishing opportunities on lakes. 0.99

02:54:30.000 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.

02:54:39.000 But in the mountain states, it's basically just trout.

02:54:44.000 And then if everybody was hammering those fish, then there wouldn't be enough to go around.

02:54:49.000 And I get that.

02:54:50.000 But I'm just like, I'm going to leave them alone if I can't eat them.

02:54:52.000 And if you can point me to...

02:54:54.000 A beaver pond full of brook trout that are totally overpopulated.

02:54:58.000 It's just like, I'll go take care of business.

02:55:00.000 I'll catch 7-inch brook trout all day long and be happy as a clam.

02:55:04.000 Yeah, people love those little tiny trout for like lunch. 0.82

02:55:08.000 They're great for...

02:55:09.000 Is it a flavor thing?

02:55:11.000 Do they taste different when trout get larger?

02:55:13.000 Little tender fish, you know?

02:55:15.000 And just, I mean, brook trout particularly, I love.

02:55:18.000 And they're, of all the trout species in the mountain states, typically they're the ones that are the most renewable.

02:55:25.000 Yeah.

02:55:26.000 It's just interesting that there's not a shortage of bass.

02:55:29.000 It must be the sport thing.

02:55:31.000 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.

02:55:40.000 Right.

02:55:41.000 Yeah, but meanwhile, they're everywhere.

02:55:42.000 It's weird.

02:55:43.000 But also, like, a trophy-sized bass or a trophy-sized pretty much anything I'm putting back.

02:55:49.000 Like, if I catch, you know, an 18-pound catfish, I'm putting it back in the water.

02:55:54.000 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.

02:56:00.000 I'm going to take the two, three, four pounders out.

02:56:04.000 And that goes for most fish that I'm going to catch.

02:56:06.000 Have you ever noodled?

02:56:07.000 No, no.

02:56:09.000 I just don't see myself doing that.

02:56:11.000 No, I'm good.

02:56:11.000 I saw a dude's hand who got bit by a snapping turtle.

02:56:14.000 He was noodling for catfish.

02:56:16.000 I think Rinella might have had it on his Instagram.

02:56:18.000 Probably does.

02:56:18.000 He loves that gore.

02:56:19.000 Missing fingers.

02:56:20.000 I would imagine.

02:56:22.000 I was always thinking, you can get caught by a snapping turtle, right?

02:56:26.000 Or a snake?

02:56:27.000 Yeah.

02:56:28.000 I'm good.

02:56:29.000 I'm good.

02:56:29.000 But I follow a bunch of people on Instagram that are always noodling.

02:56:33.000 And they'll just get in there and let this goddamn thing bite their arm. 0.99

02:56:37.000 And then they pull it out. 0.99

02:56:38.000 Ryan Callahan was talking about it.

02:56:40.000 Bite marks over his arm.

02:56:42.000 They bite into your arm.

02:56:44.000 It's extreme.

02:56:44.000 You have to grab them by the gills.

02:56:47.000 What kind of nonsense is this? 0.96

02:56:49.000 I don't know. 0.82

02:56:50.000 Maybe you've experienced everything else.

02:56:52.000 I guess.

02:56:52.000 But they're not good to eat, right?

02:56:54.000 A giant catfish like that? 0.88

02:56:56.000 Oh, we're talking about flatheads.

02:56:57.000 They're good.

02:56:58.000 They're really good.

02:56:58.000 Even the giant ones?

02:56:59.000 Yeah, what's your general feeling on catfish?

02:57:02.000 I like catfish.

02:57:03.000 Oh, you'd love flathead.

02:57:04.000 Yeah?

02:57:05.000 Is that a particularly delicious type of catfish?

02:57:07.000 It is.

02:57:07.000 Even when they're fairly big.

02:57:10.000 They are.

02:57:11.000 They're excellent.

02:57:12.000 Flathead is more of a hunter.

02:57:15.000 I mean, they don't eat like the detritus or dead fish.

02:57:18.000 I mean, if you're going to catch a flathead, you're probably going to have to be using live bait.

02:57:22.000 They're very predatory.

02:57:24.000 And I think that's what translates into them being so delicious.

02:57:28.000 But they're also very fatty and mild.

02:57:32.000 For me, a flathead is the best tasting catfish out there.

02:57:35.000 Really?

02:57:36.000 Yeah.

02:57:37.000 I love catfish, too.

02:57:38.000 I mean, I really do.

02:57:39.000 I know that's kind of...

02:57:40.000 Some people don't like them.

02:57:42.000 We were just in Arkansas.

02:57:43.000 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...

02:57:56.000 Started this thing, and it's really incredible.

02:57:59.000 He's moved to this old black church, and the business is called Black Duck Revival, this guy named Jonathan Wilkins.

02:58:07.000 And it's just really incredible.

02:58:10.000 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.

02:58:22.000 Very old methods.

02:58:23.000 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.

02:58:34.000 It was really incredible because of the I mean, the cultural weight of it, too.

02:58:41.000 You know, he's African American, and he knows the history of this area and what it's like to exist up there.

02:58:48.000 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.

02:58:52.000 The perspective was incredible.

02:58:55.000 And what catfish is.

02:58:57.000 Catfish is the opposite of bass.

02:59:00.000 It's not this big flashy sport fish and nobody has a big tournament for it, but it's a food fish.

02:59:07.000 And it's a very specific food fish, too.

02:59:09.000 It's not for everybody.

02:59:11.000 There's a great quote from Willard Scott.

02:59:13.000 I can't remember.

02:59:15.000 It's like...

02:59:16.000 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.

02:59:25.000 You know, Willard Scott.

02:59:27.000 Right, the weather guy.

02:59:28.000 Yeah, was wishing the old ladies, the 100-year-old ladies a happy birthday. 0.72

02:59:31.000 The other hill he wanted to die on was catfish.

02:59:34.000 Wow.

02:59:35.000 How weird.

02:59:37.000 I was watching this video the other day of catfish in England.

02:59:41.000 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.

02:59:50.000 So now they start eating pigeons.

02:59:53.000 Have you seen that?

02:59:54.000 Yes, I think I saw a video of that.

02:59:55.000 It's crazy.

02:59:56.000 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.

03:00:04.000 And it's so weird to see because you always think of catfish as like you were saying, like they eat dead things.

03:00:11.000 They eat anything.

03:00:11.000 Yeah.

03:00:12.000 But I did not know that they would go get a pigeon.

03:00:14.000 Watch this show.

03:00:15.000 Oh, yeah.

03:00:15.000 I've seen this.

03:00:17.000 Look how sneaky they are.

03:00:19.000 Well, you know what we were using in bait in Arkansas?

03:00:21.000 What?

03:00:22.000 Soap.

03:00:23.000 There's a certain brand of soap that is made with pork lard.

03:00:32.000 But it's still, oh my god.

03:00:33.000 Look at that.

03:00:34.000 Wild.

03:00:36.000 Oh, we got away!

03:00:39.000 But it's really crazy because they're hunting in like an inch of water.

03:00:43.000 Yeah.

03:00:44.000 Like, they literally are getting themselves and almost beaching themselves.

03:00:47.000 Well, I don't think people realize that catfish are high-level predators.

03:00:50.000 I mean, most of the time they are feeding higher in the water column than you might think, and also for crawfish, minnows, anything.

03:01:00.000 I mean, pigeons.

03:01:01.000 I can't imagine this, though.

03:01:03.000 This is so strange.

03:01:05.000 I know there's other fish that do target birds.

03:01:08.000 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.

03:01:18.000 So it was like little duck feet moving, and he was catching muskies on this little duckling.

03:01:23.000 Like a little wind-up bath toy.

03:01:25.000 Yeah, similar.

03:01:26.000 And as he was reeling it in, he was catching muskies.

03:01:29.000 Yeah.

03:01:29.000 I mean, there's plenty of footage out there of, like, little ducklings getting eaten by, I mean, catfish, too.

03:01:35.000 You know, like I said, they get a bad rap for bottom feeders. 1.00

03:01:38.000 But, I mean, when we were in Arkansas, we were fishing literally a couple inches below.

03:01:41.000 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. 0.91

03:01:50.000 You know, they're going to eat all over the place. 0.71

03:01:53.000 And it was just so eye-opening to see that you're in this crazy swamp and we're using soap as bait.

03:02:00.000 Why soap?

03:02:01.000 They love it.

03:02:02.000 What kind?

03:02:02.000 Like Irish Spring?

03:02:04.000 The brand is Zote.

03:02:06.000 Oh, there's a very specific kind of brand?

03:02:08.000 Yeah.

03:02:09.000 I'd actually seen it before in a lake around here.

03:02:11.000 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. 0.99

03:02:18.000 And I'm like, oh shit, you too. 0.98

03:02:19.000 Like, really? 1.00

03:02:20.000 Zote Soap?

03:02:21.000 Why Zote Soap?

03:02:23.000 What is it about that soap?

03:02:24.000 It's this pink soap.

03:02:25.000 It smells like soap and the catfish love it.

03:02:28.000 Huh.

03:02:29.000 Zote soap is great catfish because the fats are in it.

03:02:32.000 It leaves a trail that catfish will follow if it melted down a small amount of bacon grease and garlic to it.

03:02:38.000 Then pour it into a container.

03:02:39.000 Garlic seems a weird choice.

03:02:41.000 This bait does not work well at all on rod and reel.

03:02:46.000 Huh.

03:02:47.000 Yeah, it's just for like limb lines and trot lines.

03:02:50.000 I wonder why it wouldn't work good on rod and reel though.

03:02:53.000 Does that make any sense to you?

03:02:56.000 It will probably dissolve as you cast, if you have to recast it and bring it in.

03:03:01.000 Oh, okay, that makes sense.

03:03:02.000 Water friction on it will probably make it dissolve.

03:03:04.000 Yeah, soap, right?

03:03:05.000 Like washing your hands.

03:03:06.000 I mean, you could literally take a piece of it that wasn't being used as bait.

03:03:11.000 How long did it take you to write this book?

03:03:14.000 A decade. 1.00

03:03:16.000 Damn! 0.99

03:03:17.000 So this is the fruit of many, many days of labor. 1.00

03:03:21.000 Yeah.

03:03:23.000 I mean, most of it in the last two years, but it really took a long time.

03:03:29.000 And I'm glad because what it gave me is the data.

03:03:33.000 Of, you know, dozens of hunting schools and then hog butchery classes of people asking questions.

03:03:40.000 You know, being like, hey, I mean, this is the situation I was in.

03:03:43.000 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.

03:03:50.000 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,

03:04:06.000 which is, like I mentioned earlier, it's like four sizes.

03:04:10.000 You have a big boar, a big sow, a medium hog, and a small hog.

03:04:13.000 And then how to butcher each one of those in the most efficient way.

03:04:17.000 And then the recipes, the subsequent recipes that you can prepare from that specific size.

03:04:26.000 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. 1.00

03:04:36.000 How did wild pigs get gendered in terms of food value? 1.00

03:04:42.000 Like when you go to a restaurant, you always get wild boar. 0.98

03:04:45.000 It's always wild boar, which is horseshit. 0.98

03:04:48.000 Well, right. 0.98

03:04:48.000 I addressed that. 0.98

03:04:49.000 Oh, do you?

03:04:50.000 So I used to sell at the farmer's market when we first started making sausage.

03:04:56.000 I think we called it feral hog chorizo, let's say.

03:05:03.000 The marketability is not good.

03:05:06.000 You change that to wild boar and then people want it.

03:05:10.000 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.

03:05:23.000 And you say Russian boar even if it's a sow?

03:05:26.000 Yes.

03:05:27.000 Yes, that covers everything, you know.

03:05:29.000 But wild boar kind of is very nebulous.

03:05:33.000 But I address that in there, and I'm like, listen, everybody, I am going to call all pigs boars.

03:05:41.000 Sometimes. 0.93

03:05:42.000 And usually in the title of a recipe.

03:05:44.000 Right.

03:05:45.000 Because it's semantics.

03:05:47.000 Right.

03:05:47.000 Yeah.

03:05:48.000 It's like humankind is mankind.

03:05:50.000 Sure.

03:05:51.000 Yeah.

03:05:51.000 Sure.

03:05:52.000 It's a boar.

03:05:53.000 Yeah.

03:05:53.000 But it's weird.

03:05:54.000 It is.

03:05:55.000 No, I get it.

03:05:55.000 Yeah.

03:05:56.000 I get it.

03:05:56.000 And I'll be very clear that it's a marketability thing.

03:06:02.000 Well, it's also the way it sounds.

03:06:04.000 Like, wild boar sounds delicious.

03:06:06.000 Feral hog does not sound good.

03:06:08.000 Yeah. 0.96

03:06:08.000 Sounds like a gross... 0.96

03:06:09.000 It's clinical.

03:06:10.000 Yeah.

03:06:10.000 It also just sounds dirty.

03:06:12.000 Yeah. 0.99

03:06:13.000 Dirty little wild piggy. 0.98

03:06:14.000 Yeah. 0.98

03:06:15.000 You want a little more adventure in your menu descriptor, the wild boar.

03:06:20.000 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.

03:06:31.000 Agreed.

03:06:32.000 There's so many of them.

03:06:34.000 There's a low level to entry, a low bar to entry rather.

03:06:38.000 You basically don't even have a season in most states that have them.

03:06:42.000 You can hunt them 365 days a year.

03:06:45.000 You can get a lot of tags.

03:06:46.000 You could hunt quite a few of them.

03:06:49.000 And they're delicious.

03:06:51.000 Yeah.

03:06:53.000 It's available online.

03:06:56.000 I have the first printing sold out via our Kickstarter campaign and online sales.

03:07:02.000 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.

03:07:08.000 Do you have an e-book?

03:07:10.000 No, we don't.

03:07:11.000 Are you going to do that at all?

03:07:12.000 Probably not.

03:07:13.000 We self-published and are self-distributing this book.

03:07:16.000 It is not available on Amazon.

03:07:18.000 It is 100% me and the photographer.

03:07:21.000 It's our project.

03:07:23.000 So where would one go to get this?

03:07:25.000 It's easy.

03:07:26.000 It's thehogbook.com.

03:07:27.000 Thehogbook.com.

03:07:28.000 Well, that is easy.

03:07:29.000 How did no one already have that?

03:07:31.000 Congratulations.

03:07:32.000 And St. John's Press?

03:07:34.000 Yeah.

03:07:34.000 Is that just like a...

03:07:35.000 It's the first book from St. John's Press.

03:07:40.000 Okay.

03:07:40.000 So thehogbook.com.

03:07:42.000 Go there.

03:07:43.000 Get it.

03:07:43.000 And the end of July, people will be shipping out.

03:07:47.000 Well, after this podcast, you're going to sell it.

03:07:50.000 Mid-August.

03:07:51.000 Mid-August.

03:07:52.000 Yeah.

03:07:52.000 So thank you, Jesse.

03:07:53.000 I appreciate it, man.

03:07:54.000 And thanks for having such an awesome restaurant.

03:07:55.000 And I really enjoyed talking to you.

03:07:58.000 Yeah, I really appreciate being here.

03:08:00.000 Thank you so much.

03:08:00.000 My pleasure.

03:08:02.000 Daidue, it's in Austin, Texas.

03:08:04.000 How do you say it on the URL? How do you spell it?

03:08:08.000 D-A-I-D-U-E. D-A-I-D-U-E. D-A-I-D-U-E.com?

03:08:13.000 Correct.

03:08:13.000 Okay.

03:08:14.000 Bye, everybody.

03:08:14.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 01, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1676 - Jesse Griffiths

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