Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case underwear listening hunt e podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first light. Go farther,
Speaker 1: stay longer. You know, as as we get into talking
Speaker 1: about different food I feel like it's an important thing
Speaker 1: to clarify here is like, uh, last night, me and
Speaker 1: Janice eight dinner at Josh's restaurant, but we've also hung
Speaker 1: out a bit and just socially and had some wild
Speaker 1: game that Josh and friends you go mostly by Joshua
Speaker 1: or Josh both. Yeah, that Josh has gotten from friends
Speaker 1: or harvested themselves. So if when we're talking it sounds
Speaker 1: like there's confusion ever between what we consumed in the
Speaker 1: restaurant and what we consumed like for instance, in my
Speaker 1: hotel room last night. UM, bear in mind that that
Speaker 1: there's like important distinctions there between commercially produced meat that
Speaker 1: can be sold in a restaurant and sport harvested meat
Speaker 1: and fish that you can just get from yourself or
Speaker 1: be gifted to you from a friend and share with
Speaker 1: other other friends when there's no financial transaction going on.
Speaker 1: So just bear it in mind as we talk I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna go in and clarify all this stuff all
Speaker 1: the time. And it's an important distinction, and I just
Speaker 1: want people to be aware of that as we march
Speaker 1: through some of the foods. We're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: Josh Gaines stays On restaurant. Does it annoy you? Does
Speaker 1: it annoy you? When? When? If you if you look
Speaker 1: at stays On online, there's two like things that people
Speaker 1: will point out. Just a joy like a Joe Blow.
Speaker 1: If you went and typed in staves on San Francisco,
Speaker 1: he's gonna find that you have three Michelin stars, which
Speaker 1: is like a tremendous measure of success as a chef
Speaker 1: and restaurateur. And there's gonna be another descriptor does that
Speaker 1: descriptor annoy you? Then it comes off you haven't told
Speaker 1: me what it is yet, because it's the it's the
Speaker 1: if you take a national perspective, it's the second and
Speaker 1: most blank. Yeah, you know, unfortunately, that's that's the Do
Speaker 1: you hate it? Like kind of like a no, I,
Speaker 1: I you know, I don't. I don't hate it. I
Speaker 1: mean I think that you know, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: certain reality until can you tell people what it is
Speaker 1: the second most one. Well it's it's the second most
Speaker 1: expensive restaurant in America, apparently because reporters can't do math,
Speaker 1: but because I feel like it, Um, go ahead speak. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, we we started um putting. We we we
Speaker 1: put the price you know, out front in the beginning, right,
Speaker 1: everything was included. And then if you look at you know,
Speaker 1: let's say another three star Michelin restaurant, you get a
Speaker 1: basementu price. Then there's you know, four or five supplements,
Speaker 1: and you add all those things up and it's like
Speaker 1: double the price of here. So you know you got
Speaker 1: it just by coming out and saying here's what it
Speaker 1: costs for all inclusive? Or how many courses does wind
Speaker 1: up being? Uh, it just depends anywhere from eight to
Speaker 1: you know, sixteen, So you're just laying it when you
Speaker 1: lay it all out. I was trying to put it
Speaker 1: all out there. I was trying to say, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: here's math. This is so much. You'll be here for
Speaker 1: a couple of hours, it's this much, and then it
Speaker 1: then it positions you in that way where you have
Speaker 1: all over online. Yeah, people like that expression. Yeah, how
Speaker 1: many three Michelin star restaurants are in the US. I
Speaker 1: think I think there's thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve or thirteen,
Speaker 1: some twelve and four and some other other ones in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. Uh yeah, there's one. So we were we
Speaker 1: were the first, along with another place called Venue. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think we should explain if we can just a
Speaker 1: real general idea of what Michelin stars are, it would
Speaker 1: be important because yeah, that's who's the chef. Who's the
Speaker 1: chef that killed himself when he lost the Michelin Star.
Speaker 1: I mean which one? I think there's a few, but
Speaker 1: the guy you're talking about, the famous guy his name
Speaker 1: in France. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you're talking about.
Speaker 1: So yeah, explain, like the misslim Star thing. So Michelin,
Speaker 1: I guess is the you know, it's it's also the
Speaker 1: tire company. But they started publishing a guide I think
Speaker 1: it was in the thirties maybe, uh and uh it
Speaker 1: was meant to uh you know, probably meant to sell tires,
Speaker 1: but uh, but it gave people, um, you know, a
Speaker 1: guide to uh you know, destination were the restaurants and
Speaker 1: so you know it was either one, two or three
Speaker 1: and three is basically you know the nacle of the
Speaker 1: cooking world or the restaurant world, and and and it
Speaker 1: really means that it's worth a detour, you know, a
Speaker 1: full trip to go to you know, restaurant and then
Speaker 1: in your place you are you wear a camouflage hat.
Speaker 1: I noticed last night when I was dying in here,
Speaker 1: so you had that wasn't because you were here. Actually
Speaker 1: it's just not so you. But that's the interesting thing
Speaker 1: is that, um, you're like pretty open, Like you're very
Speaker 1: open about the fact you like the hunt. Um, even
Speaker 1: though you live in a town that's perceived by many
Speaker 1: people who don't live here, like it's perceived by outside
Speaker 1: as being like a place that would be a hostile
Speaker 1: environment for hunters. Yeah, but then to be here's like
Speaker 1: a person who is sort of at the pinnacle of
Speaker 1: the restaurant world, the pinnacle of the cooking world, in
Speaker 1: this very space and just being like add out open
Speaker 1: about it. Have you ever have you ever felt blowback
Speaker 1: at all for just being like, this is what I
Speaker 1: this is what I like to do. This informs my cooking,
Speaker 1: it's my it's a lifestyle I have. I mean, you
Speaker 1: get you get blowback on you know, Instagram or something,
Speaker 1: but you don't, you know, in here. You know, it's
Speaker 1: our purpose is just for quality, right, the quality of
Speaker 1: the product. So you know, for me, the whole the
Speaker 1: whole reason for for starting hunting again was uh good meat.
Speaker 1: It's you know, you you know, as a chef, you
Speaker 1: start to chase uh quality and uh so you know
Speaker 1: I was just looking for, you know, a better quality.
Speaker 1: And so you know, over the years it led me
Speaker 1: to hunting because you can't really replace that uh you
Speaker 1: know that that quality level, you know, provided that you
Speaker 1: handle it in the right way, um as getting in
Speaker 1: yourself so or at least seeing the whole process through right. Um,
Speaker 1: so you know, whenever we're at the point just I
Speaker 1: mean to speak to that like you're you were steaming,
Speaker 1: like you don't every fish that comes into your restaurant
Speaker 1: you like to come in alive? Yeah exactly. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: we if we can get the elk in a live
Speaker 1: to it, we do that, but it might stress him
Speaker 1: out a little bit and not tasted good. And you
Speaker 1: have staff, you have like a staff fisherman. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so we have we have fishermen, and these guys bring
Speaker 1: us basically everything alive. So the whole purpose is that
Speaker 1: we get all of our stuff alive because uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the reality is is like as soon as you you know,
Speaker 1: you know, pull a trout out of the river, you know,
Speaker 1: it starts to go downhill. You either click it right there,
Speaker 1: and you know, you get to experience that kind of
Speaker 1: perfect uh taste, right, and you know there's a small window.
Speaker 1: There's usually usually for all things, there's like a window.
Speaker 1: You get a window in the beginning and uh uh
Speaker 1: you know that's what maybe thirty minutes after you harvest it,
Speaker 1: whether it's meat or or or fish or whatever it
Speaker 1: may be, right, it's maybe an hour let's say an hour, right,
Speaker 1: and it's perfect. There's one particular taste you know, kind
Speaker 1: of attached to that that period of time. And then
Speaker 1: you know, as time goes by, rigor sets in. You know,
Speaker 1: you can I see your question. I was gonna ask
Speaker 1: about rigor. So if you actually do, say, you know,
Speaker 1: eat you're a piece of your elk in that first hour,
Speaker 1: will you actually be able to eat it and enjoy
Speaker 1: it before you have any sort of rigor? Exactly? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it said you know there's two there's That's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. There's basically two particular you know, sets of
Speaker 1: time before before rigor sets in, before uh, you know,
Speaker 1: any of those things really happened. There's that that taste
Speaker 1: everybody's fromil you know, any hunters familiar with that taste.
Speaker 1: And then there's that I guess what we what we
Speaker 1: call aging right where we age our meat to a
Speaker 1: certain point to where you know, the enzymes start to
Speaker 1: break down the meat and they start to make the
Speaker 1: meat more delicious or the fish more delicious. And you know,
Speaker 1: really everything has its its sweet spot where it tastes
Speaker 1: you know, perfect, right. So so our job is really
Speaker 1: to find that timing and the products lifespan and then uh,
Speaker 1: you know, choose the right point to cook it at.
Speaker 1: So you know, for an elk, for a big big
Speaker 1: piece of meta, we could hang those primal cuts for
Speaker 1: you know, a month, three months even and uh and
Speaker 1: so you know, it's really all about just kind of
Speaker 1: finding that that that right right moment when it tasts best.
Speaker 1: I want to get back into I want to spend
Speaker 1: a bunch of time on aging, because you were telling
Speaker 1: me some things like aging game that you found just
Speaker 1: from your own personal stuff, and then you're working your restaurant.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's kind of up ended some of the
Speaker 1: things that I thought were possible, some of the extremes
Speaker 1: that I thought were possible on aging and what you
Speaker 1: get on it. I also want to talk about your
Speaker 1: fish killing method. What I call what I heard E
Speaker 1: K G may But how do you properly say it?
Speaker 1: I don't speak Japanese. I wouldn't know. I call it
Speaker 1: a kids. You Yeah, I've just listened to the Japanese.
Speaker 1: Did say it when I go down to the fish market.
Speaker 1: You know, you kid? You man? I think, but you, uh,
Speaker 1: you grew up in Florida, But you did you grow
Speaker 1: up like in Florida. It's like the fisherman's paradise, right?
Speaker 1: Did you grow up a round fishing? Oh? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: grew up fishing, you know, uh, you know kind of
Speaker 1: Jack's Barracuda's tarpan sharks. You know, you name it alligators? Um?
Speaker 1: But but I um. I got out of there in
Speaker 1: high school, and then I moved to Boston and then
Speaker 1: went to school in New York and then finally came
Speaker 1: out here. Like your your family's your whole family moved.
Speaker 1: Are you just left on your own? No? I just left.
Speaker 1: I grew up around a bunch of people that grew
Speaker 1: up in New York and and you know, they always
Speaker 1: talked about the big city, big lights, and so I I,
Speaker 1: you always had a dream to get out of there
Speaker 1: and go and moved to New York. You studied what there? Well,
Speaker 1: I went to so so I went to Boston. I
Speaker 1: had some family there. Uh what plan? Don't actually going
Speaker 1: to school in Boston then? Um? Uh didn't? And then
Speaker 1: wind up going to culinary school New York in a
Speaker 1: place called French Culinary Institute. Yeah, I gave which is
Speaker 1: now I think it's called i SEC International Culinary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I gave them a beaver tail one time. Right, I
Speaker 1: was messing around for for a period of time. I
Speaker 1: was trying to mess around and finding out how the
Speaker 1: Mountain Men cook beaver you know, like, yeah, you know
Speaker 1: what you're reading about the Mountain of Arts and they
Speaker 1: love beaver tail, right, But you get the sense that
Speaker 1: it's just from oral or you know, oral stuff that
Speaker 1: was eventually transcribed into writing of people describing the Mountain
Speaker 1: Men's diet, but no one really got into how they
Speaker 1: were actually cooking it or what they're doing with it.
Speaker 1: And so I started messling with it and and put
Speaker 1: some stuff up online about messing around with beaver tail,
Speaker 1: and a guy at that at that school, I gave
Speaker 1: him one and he had his students prep it out
Speaker 1: and that it's pretty exciting stuff with beaver tail over there.
Speaker 1: I don't know if exciting comes to mind when you
Speaker 1: give like a culinary school, you know, some rare ingredient,
Speaker 1: But but what what is the what's like the makeup
Speaker 1: of the beaver tail. It's scales. It's scales over so
Speaker 1: when you look at the beaver tail, you're just seen
Speaker 1: the scally surface. Uh, that tail will be emaciated in
Speaker 1: the spring to the point where you'll see you can
Speaker 1: see the outline of the bone that runs the length
Speaker 1: of it, just like the end of the you know,
Speaker 1: the end of the spine right runs into the tail um.
Speaker 1: But in the fall it gets so fat. I think
Speaker 1: it gets like heavier and the fall when it builds
Speaker 1: up fat and when you burn off the scales, you
Speaker 1: just put it next to you, fire for a long
Speaker 1: time and eventually start to bubble and burn and you
Speaker 1: can scrape that skin away and underneath it is what
Speaker 1: looks and tastes like grizzle and fat on a real
Speaker 1: fatty ass grilled steak and you slice that thin and
Speaker 1: you'd eat it and you'd be like, that tastes exactly
Speaker 1: like grizzle. But you have to consider that the people
Speaker 1: that were eating that, um, they were living on a
Speaker 1: diet of very lean wild meat. And I think it
Speaker 1: was just like it was a fat source. Basically top
Speaker 1: the bottom just fat, and you slice it thin, put
Speaker 1: some salt on it, and it's like surprising, because it's
Speaker 1: surprising that that is what lives inside of a beaver's tail.
Speaker 1: So what about the meat? Do you eat the beaver meat?
Speaker 1: We just put that on top like a little it's
Speaker 1: like a little toiret topping you could make. You could,
Speaker 1: really you could cook the meat down and then put
Speaker 1: this stuff on there, like make its own little fat
Speaker 1: source on there. Alright, I'm gonna give you a recipe
Speaker 1: for beaver tail after this already got it. I don't
Speaker 1: want to know what you need. Yeah. Um, So yeah,
Speaker 1: that was that was my runn into that place. But
Speaker 1: I had some other point I was gonna make about
Speaker 1: beaver beaver tails. Yeah, I don't know. Did you know
Speaker 1: by this point, like when you were going to school,
Speaker 1: Like at what point growing up, did you know you
Speaker 1: had a knack for cooking? And then also, at what
Speaker 1: point did it be that you started to associate hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing with your interest in cooking. Well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I ever I thought I had a knack
Speaker 1: for cooking in the beginning. I think that You're like,
Speaker 1: I had to I had to pay some bills, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and so I got a you know, restaurant job.
Speaker 1: Why Stually, my first restaurant job was in Florida. I
Speaker 1: was dishwasher the Japanese restaurant. And um, and I just
Speaker 1: always had restaurant jobs because they were easy to get.
Speaker 1: You know, back then, you can, you know, any any
Speaker 1: you know, schmuck can get a restaurant job. So I
Speaker 1: was just, you know, it was just what I had.
Speaker 1: And when you were back there scrubbing dishes, you were like,
Speaker 1: some of a bitch man, this is what I'm I
Speaker 1: do with my life? What you know? I I So
Speaker 1: I grew up doing martial arts, and I started once
Speaker 1: about five or so, and uh and so the organization
Speaker 1: of actually dishwashing and and getting you know, a pile
Speaker 1: of ship thrown at you, you know, play a bust
Speaker 1: you know, bus tubs of uh of plates and cups,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and having and having to go
Speaker 1: through the process of like rinsing them, washing them, getting
Speaker 1: in there, getting out of dishwasher, getting put away, drying them, wax.
Speaker 1: It was like this movement, you know, smartial arts movement.
Speaker 1: So I was excited about it. Really, I like my
Speaker 1: dishwashing job. So there was the fastest dishwasher in town. Man, right,
Speaker 1: a COVID of dishwasher. You know that it worked for
Speaker 1: me when I was my short little stit in the
Speaker 1: kitchen when we had new guys washing dishes and me,
Speaker 1: and they'd be just crossing in the weeds and be
Speaker 1: at the end of the night where not only do
Speaker 1: they have all the cups and dishes and plates and
Speaker 1: still we're coming at them, but the whole kitchen is
Speaker 1: just breaking down. So now there's you know, pots was
Speaker 1: you know, stuff stuck on them, and cheese melted everywhere,
Speaker 1: and all kinds of pans, and man, if you just
Speaker 1: jumped in there a couple of nights and gave him
Speaker 1: like an hour of your time and just busted but
Speaker 1: with them, and then all of a sudden, it's like
Speaker 1: your rapport with them was just golden forever. You know,
Speaker 1: they're just like, all right, man, I like you. I
Speaker 1: like you forever. This dude can handle burned on cheese.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, I don't want to I don't want to
Speaker 1: like labor your bio, but I do want understand kind
Speaker 1: of how you came to be who you are. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I think it was really random, you know,
Speaker 1: it was really just kind of happenstance in my opinion.
Speaker 1: You know, I I I was interested in certain things,
Speaker 1: you know, cooking, you know, his physical act. And I
Speaker 1: think you know, growing up doing martial arts, it was
Speaker 1: you know, a relationship to crafts, right, I mean, you
Speaker 1: know it's a craft and so but in fact, I
Speaker 1: went back and forth on cooking and martial arts for
Speaker 1: a long period of time when I first started, you know,
Speaker 1: after I went to corner school. Like you were, like
Speaker 1: you were doing competitive martial arts. Uh yeah, yeah, when
Speaker 1: I was younger, I did I did I do Chinese
Speaker 1: martial arts and and and so. Um, you know I
Speaker 1: did some compete when I was younger, but um, but
Speaker 1: I always went back and forth and because you know,
Speaker 1: really practicing took up so much time. Uh and uh
Speaker 1: and so cooking at that time was you know, distraction
Speaker 1: from practicing. And so I went back and forth and
Speaker 1: and finally around twenty you know, twenty or so, I
Speaker 1: gave up and and just just you know, needed to
Speaker 1: pay my bills, and you know, I started cooking full time.
Speaker 1: And uh and so and where were you then? I
Speaker 1: was in Boston. I was in Boston. What kind of
Speaker 1: food were you doing? Uh? Just like be stro food,
Speaker 1: you know, random bistro I worked out. I worked a
Speaker 1: couple of restaurants in Boston that are well known. Um,
Speaker 1: but uh, but it was it was you know, it's
Speaker 1: like I used to sneak in the bathroom, like read
Speaker 1: my like martial arts book, you know, a little scrolls
Speaker 1: and ship in the bathroom. I was like, oh, I
Speaker 1: gotta breakdown. It's fifteen minute break and we go read
Speaker 1: my scrolls in the bathroom. So so I was went
Speaker 1: back and forth, um and uh. And it wasn't really
Speaker 1: until I came out to San Francisco where I really
Speaker 1: really like, uh started to Um. It was what thirteen
Speaker 1: years ago I really started to, uh, you know, focus
Speaker 1: wholly on cooking. So so working working, working in other
Speaker 1: places at the time. Still, Yeah, So well, yeah, when
Speaker 1: I came out here, I worked at a place in
Speaker 1: the South Bay called H T J. Little little, um,
Speaker 1: little restaurant that it's been around for maybe like twenty
Speaker 1: five years, and I had a garden in the back.
Speaker 1: But but it allowed me to really refocus and really
Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know, treated as a career and
Speaker 1: um and uh, you know, it was a learning process.
Speaker 1: I came out here and there was all these incredible products,
Speaker 1: you know, coming from the East Coast, where there's there's
Speaker 1: just not the same you know, you know, convergence of
Speaker 1: you know, all all these amazing things. There's like a
Speaker 1: there's a cheese producing region here, there's a wine producing region.
Speaker 1: You know, you can you can you know, go outside
Speaker 1: and and hunt. I guess you can do that anywhere.
Speaker 1: But um, but basically they have everything everything you would
Speaker 1: want here as a chef to really produce good fit.
Speaker 1: You felt that, like you felt that the the ingredients
Speaker 1: available to you and the products available to you was
Speaker 1: just better here than it was in the East. I mean,
Speaker 1: go you know, you go to Whole Foods. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know about now, right, it's a little different now.
Speaker 1: But when I came here, Yeah, for sure. I mean
Speaker 1: you can go to Whole Foods and you can look
Speaker 1: at you know, three varieties of radish, whereas you know
Speaker 1: the you know, uh that I was named that place
Speaker 1: in the East Coast. I don't know if you got
Speaker 1: a supermarket out there, and at that time it was
Speaker 1: just just wasn't the same. Yeah, maybe it's because I
Speaker 1: was dirt poor when I lived in the East Coast.
Speaker 1: You know what we were talking about yesterday driving around
Speaker 1: here is, um, we're kind of in the last couple
Speaker 1: of days. You've done kind of a tour where San
Speaker 1: Jose down to Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz up to here.
Speaker 1: It was like where I you know, where I grew up,
Speaker 1: where I've lived most of my life. When you are
Speaker 1: in an agricultural area, you're usually looking at stuff that's
Speaker 1: fed to stuff that will become food, right like where
Speaker 1: groups like alfalfa and feed corn. When you're driving around California,
Speaker 1: like be like, oh, ship, there's a field of cauliflower
Speaker 1: or there's you know, there's like products you know where
Speaker 1: you're like, you're you're able to in this climate in
Speaker 1: this area grow the actual things that you eat. You know,
Speaker 1: all the artichokes, tree nuts. It just kind of gives
Speaker 1: you a different relationship to how stuff is after because
Speaker 1: most people just look at are looking more at commodities
Speaker 1: when they look at agricultural fields rather than looking at
Speaker 1: like finished table ready items being grown unless you have
Speaker 1: a garden. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Out here, you know,
Speaker 1: it's got everything, but it's still you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's you know, all that stuff out here is still
Speaker 1: most of the majority of it's still you know, kind
Speaker 1: of monoculture and and um, you know, you know, cities
Speaker 1: devoted to just artichokes, right, So it's still it still
Speaker 1: has its issues out here. Right. So it's really all
Speaker 1: the small it's it's it's it's all practices, right until
Speaker 1: you really get into the smaller practices than it. Then
Speaker 1: you know there's a there's a lot of issues with
Speaker 1: with you know, agriculture in general. So when you when
Speaker 1: you got there, I need to start your own. Is
Speaker 1: this the first restaurant you started? Yeah? Did you at
Speaker 1: the same time decide to be that You're gonna get
Speaker 1: a restaurant and get a farm? Well, I mean I yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you need a farm to to really have
Speaker 1: the best things. Like most restaurants don't have a goddamn farm.
Speaker 1: Well that's true, but you know, if you're gonna make
Speaker 1: good food, you gotta have farm. If you if you're
Speaker 1: still good to be like that. That's as simple as that.
Speaker 1: Like if you have a rest if I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: a restaurant, a farm, need a fisherman, you know, need
Speaker 1: to get need to get media, a certain place, you
Speaker 1: need to find uh you know, uh, you know dry goods.
Speaker 1: So you know, as a chef, you gotta you gotta
Speaker 1: go through, uh, you gotta audit your list of of
Speaker 1: how are you really procure ingredients if you really want
Speaker 1: to get to to a place where you're actually producing
Speaker 1: good food in earnest, Right, So explain the farm that
Speaker 1: goes with stays On. Is it called says On farm? Uh? Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: we'll call it that. It's just I saw it written
Speaker 1: somewhere you got a duck hanging up somewhere, and I
Speaker 1: saw it, said like, yeah, that's just in our internal language.
Speaker 1: We don't we just our farm, right, it's called the farm.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's just you know, you gotta you have
Speaker 1: to you know, you got you have a you have choices, right,
Speaker 1: you can pick up the phone as a chevy you
Speaker 1: can call you know, your your purveyor, your wholesaler and say, hey, look,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, take six heads of lettuce today, right, Um.
Speaker 1: But you know that the whole process of of wholesaling
Speaker 1: is you know, there's there's a middleman there, there's a
Speaker 1: you know usually maybe another middleman, someone who actually sources
Speaker 1: all this stuff out. Then there's the actual producer. So
Speaker 1: you're separated and by the time it gets a restaurant,
Speaker 1: you're five layers away from from getting the actual product.
Speaker 1: So you know, it goes to a whole, it goes
Speaker 1: to you know, shipping, it goes through holding in the warehouse,
Speaker 1: and then maybe you get it maybe three or four
Speaker 1: or five, six, seven days later, right, So at that point,
Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't taste have any resemblance to really
Speaker 1: what a great product really is anymore. You know, the
Speaker 1: aroma was gone. That that that original taste when you
Speaker 1: picked it has gone. And and most likely the product
Speaker 1: itself is is you know, some from some seed that
Speaker 1: was uh, you know, spliced and diced you know, seven
Speaker 1: different ways to to have no resemblance of the the
Speaker 1: original taste of that product. So we just wanted to
Speaker 1: to you know, take it back to a time to
Speaker 1: where everything had flavor, right, I mean really since what
Speaker 1: World War one or two or where it was that
Speaker 1: you know, everything has been you know, um, you kind
Speaker 1: of bastardize our seeds, our seeds and you know all
Speaker 1: the produce you know, I mean you really think about, um,
Speaker 1: you know how many people have eating a ripe tomato,
Speaker 1: you know, from a great seed off the vine when
Speaker 1: it's when it's truly like right, it's very few. So
Speaker 1: that was our purpose. We wanted to just you know,
Speaker 1: have great products. You know. That's the thing that comes
Speaker 1: up a lot in conversations about food. I feel like
Speaker 1: over the last two decades or whatever, is uh, the
Speaker 1: I sit on both sides of what I'm gonna bring
Speaker 1: up where people talk about the industrialization of food, Okay,
Speaker 1: and we generally now sort of talk about it as
Speaker 1: a negative because we have the luxury in this country,
Speaker 1: We had the luxury of like eating very fine food.
Speaker 1: But to contextualize it a little bit, just to show
Speaker 1: you that, just to demonstrate, like my how I sit
Speaker 1: on both sizes contextualized a little bit. During World War two,
Speaker 1: we had estimates very but perhaps some millions of people
Speaker 1: starved to death in Europe. We had rations in this
Speaker 1: country on you know, there was like dairy rations, meat rations,
Speaker 1: major shortages, and coming out of that, it wasn't long
Speaker 1: after that that we got used to this idea that
Speaker 1: we might be in the very near future entering into
Speaker 1: another major world conflict with the Soviet Union. And I
Speaker 1: think at the time the most pressed thing issue was
Speaker 1: how can we create a system where we have the
Speaker 1: capability of throwing a switch and feeding Europe and fielding
Speaker 1: this military. And so we just like, it wasn't that
Speaker 1: we got lost our way. It's just that we had
Speaker 1: a period where our priorities were completely different and we
Speaker 1: and then some good things came out of it, like
Speaker 1: that we would bank soil right, You'd have like farms
Speaker 1: that were put out that when dairy prices dropped, rather
Speaker 1: than having a dairy farmer go out of business, we
Speaker 1: would subsidize them so that they could stay ready to
Speaker 1: jump into action should the need occur. So now we
Speaker 1: look at it. I feel like now we look at
Speaker 1: were like we're getting away from that, We're getting away
Speaker 1: from the industrialization. I feel like we always gonna keep
Speaker 1: an open eye for the fact that it's just because
Speaker 1: we have the luxury of doing that. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: like evil people trying to do evil ship because just
Speaker 1: people trying to get ready for a catastrophe which we
Speaker 1: had just witnessed happened. No, it's true. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we we operate within a very narrow little hole, right,
Speaker 1: so so so our you know, our ore are in
Speaker 1: our little hole, you know, our little pond we were are.
Speaker 1: Our focus is purely tastes, right, it's tasting along with
Speaker 1: taste comes from others saying anyway, saying that you're guilty.
Speaker 1: Why I just claimed. But I think that there's like
Speaker 1: there's a way that when when we lose I think
Speaker 1: we lose sight of some of the motivations of how
Speaker 1: stuff came to be and treated like it was just
Speaker 1: bad decision making. Yeah, you like it's all just Monsanto
Speaker 1: just trying to make next right, Yeah, but it's like
Speaker 1: a lot of factors at play, right, Yeah, No, it's
Speaker 1: not just the evil uncle right then that yeah, but
Speaker 1: but you yeah, but now just to get back to
Speaker 1: where we are, Yeah, now, we do have at this
Speaker 1: moment in time the luxury to have like to pursue
Speaker 1: perfection and absolute ripeness and food rather than just shelf stability. Well,
Speaker 1: there's also some really cool solutions too that you see
Speaker 1: coming around, right especially with with the age of technology.
Speaker 1: There's there's a clue is loop agriculture systems that are
Speaker 1: happening that produce you know, I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: twenty x the volume of of product and in a
Speaker 1: really small space, so you can put you know, one
Speaker 1: of the most interesting ones is uh. You know, it's
Speaker 1: completely closed loop. So what that means is really you've
Speaker 1: got you know, a little pot, a little capsule, and
Speaker 1: it's an artificial and growing environment, and you can fit
Speaker 1: a ton of product in there. You can grow a
Speaker 1: ton of product in a very small space. Um, you produce.
Speaker 1: You can produce uh. I don't remember what the numbers were,
Speaker 1: but I think it's roughly x uh the volume of
Speaker 1: food out of this little small space. You can also
Speaker 1: control the nutrient drink that goes in. You can control
Speaker 1: the sun cycle, you know, all of those elements that
Speaker 1: go into growing food. And since it's closed loop, you're
Speaker 1: basically recycling you know, all of that taste and all
Speaker 1: of the nutrient drink. So um, and it's all computerized. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so you can basically, let's say you had uh,
Speaker 1: you know, an artichoke that was perfect in uh two
Speaker 1: thousand one in you know, Salinas, when that was the
Speaker 1: best arti shark you ever had in your life, you
Speaker 1: could go you can go look up all of the
Speaker 1: historical data or all the weather data, and you can
Speaker 1: plug in those data points to this closed loop system
Speaker 1: and you can basically replicate that exactly. So there's some
Speaker 1: cool stuff coming out also, but that's in that would
Speaker 1: have interesting implications for the wine world. Yeah, well see
Speaker 1: the issue with that now. But the issue is that
Speaker 1: you lose a little bit of what's called taroa right
Speaker 1: you know, because you can still produce a delicious sweet plant.
Speaker 1: That's that's great, that's the way that you maybe like it.
Speaker 1: But you can ever replicate really truly the taste of nature, right,
Speaker 1: It doesn't just it's not possible you can. So so
Speaker 1: that's the downside of that. Where uh, where in your
Speaker 1: if we're in if we're checking back in on and
Speaker 1: on your biography, and at this point we kind of
Speaker 1: got you where you're here. You got a restaurant, you
Speaker 1: got a farm, Um, where did like you're sort of
Speaker 1: a where did your re awareness of hunting come in?
Speaker 1: Because you were like exposed to it in a way
Speaker 1: in Florida and we're aware that it was the thing
Speaker 1: people do. You'd like to run around out the wood, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you run around, you know, as a kid, you run
Speaker 1: around and there's Alegan run around with spears. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: at least to try to hunt ut wild boars with spears.
Speaker 1: Never successful, but you know it was waiting the tree
Speaker 1: and try to throw a spear down. But it was
Speaker 1: it was more of a you know, just just being
Speaker 1: a kid, you know, trying to exactly you get some frogs.
Speaker 1: You know, we get frogs and we uh, you know,
Speaker 1: eat some water moccasins and rattlesnakes and stuff. But but
Speaker 1: you know, it can't it came around because of products.
Speaker 1: It's it's really taste. Right. At a certain point you
Speaker 1: look at you start to dissect all of our practices,
Speaker 1: you know, and all of our food practices, um and
Speaker 1: at a certain point realize is a chef that that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, grain fed beef doesn't taste good anymore? Right,
Speaker 1: You start to notice, you know, it's a process. We
Speaker 1: start to notice the fact that that beef, you know,
Speaker 1: or or meat in general, everything tastes like corn, or
Speaker 1: everything tastes like shitty wheat, you know, or whatever it
Speaker 1: may taste like. So, so the whole purpose was was taste. Really,
Speaker 1: that's our whole purposes really taste. Right now, do we
Speaker 1: really you know, find a product that did is uh,
Speaker 1: you know, like it once was or or or whatever
Speaker 1: our reference points are for a particular product, right like,
Speaker 1: what is what is the most delicious uh meat? What
Speaker 1: is the most delicious lettuce? You know? And then so
Speaker 1: your experience is wild game kind of started to shape
Speaker 1: your impressions of what was possible and what could be
Speaker 1: done and what things would taste like variations. Well, I've
Speaker 1: been I've been getting uh, you know, we get we
Speaker 1: get a lot of we get a lot of hunters
Speaker 1: here that give us meat, you know, get u s
Speaker 1: wild ducks or or deer or whatever and just kind
Speaker 1: of donate it to me. And um, so been eating
Speaker 1: it for a few years out here. Um surprising. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of hunters in California, or at least a handful. Um.
Speaker 1: Some friends would pass long stuff you check out. They
Speaker 1: just passed along meat I eat here and duck and
Speaker 1: and um I got you interested. Well it just yeah,
Speaker 1: it just it. It really re sparked that or reignited
Speaker 1: that spark, right, And uh, I mean wild ducks are
Speaker 1: really delicious, right and wild meats you know, really good.
Speaker 1: We treat it the right way. So so at a
Speaker 1: certain point, I just want to get it myself, you know,
Speaker 1: I just I just wanted to. I wanted to, you know,
Speaker 1: have all wild meat. So there's the thing that happens.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can explain this to me. When you're looking
Speaker 1: at when you're reading about chefs and reading about great restaurants,
Speaker 1: you're always seeing that that anyone can produce I shouldn't
Speaker 1: say anyone, but yeah, let's just say anyone can produce
Speaker 1: this great dish once, okay. But the true sign of expertise,
Speaker 1: so like mastering your craft is that you can do
Speaker 1: it seventy times in a night or whatever number of
Speaker 1: times in a night and have it be the same.
Speaker 1: And then you can do that for weeks, right, and
Speaker 1: just like executed again and again and again. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you use that measure of success, but yeah,
Speaker 1: you're familiar with That's the thing people bring up when
Speaker 1: talking about being a great cook. But with wild game,
Speaker 1: you look at me like you've never heard I've never
Speaker 1: heard of that, to be honest, Yeah, I was reading that.
Speaker 1: I was reading someone talking about that. No, I was
Speaker 1: reading there a day someone saying I was reading a
Speaker 1: profile of chef in the New Yorker. Makes sense, And
Speaker 1: it was a guy saying like, yeah, um, perfection to
Speaker 1: me is three eggs, like eggs benedict, without a mistake,
Speaker 1: without one returned, without one customer return sure, like as
Speaker 1: as the craft of cooking goes. Yeah, so I hear
Speaker 1: that now and then. And on the other hand, with
Speaker 1: wild game, you're opening yourself up to such a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of variability because they're not the same. You know,
Speaker 1: if you if you identified, like if you have a
Speaker 1: farm and you're identified. Man, this this dude at this
Speaker 1: farm produces some goodass lamb because he's got some breed
Speaker 1: of lamb that works well on the land where he
Speaker 1: raises it. He's got a great irrigated pasture with like
Speaker 1: the right blend of forbes and grasses, and his alfalfa
Speaker 1: is beautiful, and he's able to run this thing. And
Speaker 1: when I get a leg of land from him this year.
Speaker 1: It's great, I get a leg of land from him
Speaker 1: next year. It's great. That ship isn't what wild game
Speaker 1: is like. Well, because you shooting, you're shooting an animal.
Speaker 1: But you know, I don't know. I look, it looked
Speaker 1: like a good animal. I shot it, but I got
Speaker 1: over there and had recently crashed into a porcupine, so
Speaker 1: its entire belly was full of quills and every one
Speaker 1: of those injuries was full of post. It was emaciated.
Speaker 1: Or I shot it and wasn't the first guy that
Speaker 1: shot it, because it's back leg on the side not
Speaker 1: facing me had been injured by a it, and so
Speaker 1: you know, it was packed with dirt and it was
Speaker 1: a mass. Or I killed some big crazy buck that
Speaker 1: had been rotting hard for two months and hasn't probably
Speaker 1: eaten a liquor grass for two months, and tasted like ship.
Speaker 1: Or I shot a deer and it fell into a
Speaker 1: big sinkhole and I couldn't get it out till a
Speaker 1: couple of days later, with a rope and a buddy
Speaker 1: holding my ankles. So I'm just saying that isn't like
Speaker 1: this dude that produces these wonderful lambs time and time again,
Speaker 1: it's like you can't there is like perfection is out there,
Speaker 1: but perfection isn't always out there. Yeah, I think like
Speaker 1: we we killed like whatever it was going on that
Speaker 1: year in Idaho and we killed Yanni. We killed some
Speaker 1: stomper bucks in Idaho. And I don't know what was
Speaker 1: going on that year in Idaho, but that was like
Speaker 1: it was the best mule deer meat ever. And I'm
Speaker 1: eating a shipload of mule deer right and I don't know.
Speaker 1: It defied everything you're supposed because supposed to be like
Speaker 1: big giant bucks on taste. These are big giant bucks
Speaker 1: pre rut that had two which is of tallow on
Speaker 1: their back. And we're great. So that's my question, Well,
Speaker 1: how do you deal with all the lack how do
Speaker 1: you deal with all the lack of consistency when you're
Speaker 1: as a chef who's dealing with wild game and not
Speaker 1: just commercially produced wild game, but on your own, you're
Speaker 1: dealing with hunted wild game. Yeah, for us, For for us,
Speaker 1: that's all. I mean, every product is like that, right,
Speaker 1: I mean the whole for us. You know, it's so
Speaker 1: specialized that you know, when we get a radish in
Speaker 1: one day from the farm, it's not necessarily the same
Speaker 1: as the next day from the farm, right, so you
Speaker 1: can you can you know, uh, you know, take that
Speaker 1: theory with with any product that you use. Could be
Speaker 1: the rain, could be you know, the amount of sun
Speaker 1: you get in one day, could be uh, you know,
Speaker 1: their diet. But every product changes a little bit every day.
Speaker 1: So the way that we operate is we basically get
Speaker 1: a product in the door, look at it, and then
Speaker 1: decide what to do from there. Because even if you're
Speaker 1: getting you know, that lamb, you know, maybe they forgot
Speaker 1: to feed it one day. Who knows, maybe the lamb
Speaker 1: is sick, you don't, you don't know, right, So so
Speaker 1: everything changes just to touch, and even if it's just incrementally,
Speaker 1: it still changes every day. And so our focus is
Speaker 1: really on kind of capturing that taste. So you know,
Speaker 1: if we get uh, if we get a buck in
Speaker 1: it's very um um bucky, then you know, you've got
Speaker 1: to decide what to do with it from there. So
Speaker 1: do you grind it to maybe purge some of that
Speaker 1: flavor out? You know, maybe you throak in and salt
Speaker 1: water for salted water for a few days, just to
Speaker 1: kind of purge it and have have a clean flavor.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's like that that mule deer you've got and
Speaker 1: just throw it right and grill. You don't even age it.
Speaker 1: So it just depends. And so so our whole operating
Speaker 1: system in the kitchen is based on really kind of
Speaker 1: assessing what the product is and then deciding, you know,
Speaker 1: what methods to go through for preservation and so that
Speaker 1: that you know, select just selecting the right product is
Speaker 1: is a huge part of it. But um, you know
Speaker 1: you can either for us, we either especially sparticularly meat
Speaker 1: and game. You know, you either choose either use it
Speaker 1: right there or there's some sort of continuation and the
Speaker 1: preservation process that happens. So whether it's aging or curing
Speaker 1: or grinding into a sausage or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just just like anything else. Can you
Speaker 1: take this menu and do the many that you served
Speaker 1: last night and do a sort of speed walkthrough? Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I got one over here. Well I want people to
Speaker 1: get I want people to get a sense of of
Speaker 1: what of what dishes you like to serve. Well, um,
Speaker 1: let's see you had a fistfull caviar, start white sturge
Speaker 1: and caviar. It's white surgeon caviar. It's farmed, right, it's
Speaker 1: farm caviar. But we we but that is a fish
Speaker 1: that that is a fish that a Felican fish for Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the Columbia drainage, they have like uh, you know
Speaker 1: they have see they have uh open seasons and within
Speaker 1: those seasons they have kill seasons. Were allowed to like
Speaker 1: harvest sturgeon. We were making our own sturgeon caviare this
Speaker 1: year with a very abundant sturgeon called shovel nose sturgeon.
Speaker 1: But it's material in the Yellowstone River. Yeah, you're about
Speaker 1: ten a day shovel noses and you get them in
Speaker 1: the spring. They're about you know, a big one to
Speaker 1: be two and a half feet long. So, but they
Speaker 1: have caviar inside. Yeah, but it's it's like painstaking the eggs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna put it through a little sieve. You gotta
Speaker 1: just mess with it. No, there's nothing to save out.
Speaker 1: So when you open them up, when you get a female,
Speaker 1: you open them up and you know some fish have
Speaker 1: like the skein, right, the sack that holds the eggs
Speaker 1: like the most the easiest example of over egg to
Speaker 1: clean would be salmon where you open up that skein
Speaker 1: and you can just kind of like the eggs just
Speaker 1: kind of fall away. On sturgeon, the skein and the
Speaker 1: eggs are just like almost interwoven where each egg needs
Speaker 1: to be kind of separated from the skein, and it's
Speaker 1: it's painstaking, like you get it where you have a
Speaker 1: ton of it, and then we just cleaned it for
Speaker 1: a long time and they were like, dude, I can't
Speaker 1: keep cleaning these eggs. And then we salt water the
Speaker 1: eggs and just ate them. You've seen you've seen the
Speaker 1: commercial process a cavy are right, I have never seen
Speaker 1: how they do it. So they just take they take, uh,
Speaker 1: I mean it's the same, right, Maybe it's more on
Speaker 1: this like wild surge and shovel nose, but but on
Speaker 1: you know, like a white sturge and you take the
Speaker 1: caviar shack out, you throw it into a sieve and
Speaker 1: the sieve is you know, the right side for the beads.
Speaker 1: But but they just rub it. They rubb it pretty hard,
Speaker 1: and they rub it and then it breaks away all
Speaker 1: the membrane and only the eggs based then they basically
Speaker 1: drop it in in a salted water bath and then
Speaker 1: a lot of that stuff will well, a lot of
Speaker 1: the membrane will float. You just lift it off and
Speaker 1: then the caviars left over, and they repeat that process
Speaker 1: till it's clean. The shovel nosed sturgeon, uh there egg
Speaker 1: is probably about this is this ballpark in it, but
Speaker 1: their eggs probably about half the diameter of a white sturgeon.
Speaker 1: There's another you know, there's also another sturgeon or another
Speaker 1: caviard that comes out of the Yellowstone is um paddlefish
Speaker 1: caviar which people collect and that's bigger and that's a
Speaker 1: high grade caviar. And then we used to get caviar
Speaker 1: out of uh you know, and there's even a commercial
Speaker 1: market for for white Great lakes. Whitefish have a pretty
Speaker 1: good caviar and that's the thing that people you know,
Speaker 1: it's rod and real angers can catch. The reason I
Speaker 1: bring that up is not just like as you walk
Speaker 1: through this, I want to just establish what these things
Speaker 1: even though you're dealing with a commercially caught version or
Speaker 1: you're dealing with uh, you know, something that's in the
Speaker 1: commercial chain, right that can be legally purchased and soul
Speaker 1: in the restaurant that so much of what you're dealing
Speaker 1: with would also be identified as a type of wild
Speaker 1: game because, especially in the ocean, pretty much anything you're
Speaker 1: buying for restaurants things that people can go catch on
Speaker 1: their own on sport fishing tackle. Right, So sturgeon, Uh
Speaker 1: though most people don't do it, most fishermen don't do it.
Speaker 1: Um producing caveat is something that just like anybody could
Speaker 1: go do from a wide variety of fish. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: got they did. They got a surgeon fishing out here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's some kill seasons. Wasn't Scott Peterson when he
Speaker 1: cut up his wife and dumped her in San Francisco Bay.
Speaker 1: Part of his defense was that he was sturgeon fishing
Speaker 1: When they asked him why he was out in the
Speaker 1: boat that day, did you know that? I have no idea.
Speaker 1: He did. And me and my fake uncle Donn used
Speaker 1: to troll stripers in San Francisco Bay and we would
Speaker 1: go right, it was baiting the sturgeon. So yeah, as
Speaker 1: he was doing a chum line. Um. Yeah, me, my
Speaker 1: fake uncle don used to uh do some trolling for
Speaker 1: stripe bass out here in San Francisco Bay back in
Speaker 1: two thousand four, and we would just troll right in
Speaker 1: front of the jail. We're they we're Scott Peterson is
Speaker 1: housed the prison him. Yeah, what's it called. It's not
Speaker 1: a San San Quentin. San Quentin. Yeah, yeah, they got
Speaker 1: they got like watch towers. You we would, I'm not
Speaker 1: shooting you. We would be trolling by. You'd wave at
Speaker 1: dudes and watched towers. I feel like there's some sort
Speaker 1: of environmental issues over there, maybe some waste or something.
Speaker 1: I was describing to be honest, that we would that
Speaker 1: I would say that those for for toxic fish, they
Speaker 1: were delicious. So out of the next one turbot, Yeah,
Speaker 1: with diamond turbo. So diamond turbots is just a just
Speaker 1: a local, local species of turbo and a little it's
Speaker 1: smaller for the most part, um but you can fish it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you brought that fish too. You showed me the
Speaker 1: fish one of your guys that the fish was alive
Speaker 1: on a plate, like alive, alive and in it wasn't
Speaker 1: how how many minutes went by? Five six, and I
Speaker 1: was presented with so one minute, the fish is there
Speaker 1: on my plate alive. I grabbed its jaw and it
Speaker 1: was very flexible, and in a couple minutes later, I
Speaker 1: had the liver two ways, well different his liver and
Speaker 1: a different fishes liver two ways. You had made chitlands, right,
Speaker 1: explain that. So you got so you you basically like
Speaker 1: you know, on especially a fish like turbo, you've got,
Speaker 1: I mean, you could use almost the whole thing, right,
Speaker 1: every everything is good about it as long as you're
Speaker 1: you know, especially when it's alive a few minutes before.
Speaker 1: But um, the the guts, uh, the heart, the livers
Speaker 1: and and and essentially the chiplands are the the intestines,
Speaker 1: the intestinal track and the stomach are all delicious. You
Speaker 1: just had to clean it properly. So we boil it
Speaker 1: in salted water a few times, scrape it out, boil it,
Speaker 1: scrape it out, boil it. Uh, and then once you
Speaker 1: chill it down, it's got this little you know, crunchy texture. Um.
Speaker 1: But it was it was shocking to have that, Like
Speaker 1: how good it was? The delicious right? Yeah, the little
Speaker 1: on sauce on there, we've got we've got the sauce
Speaker 1: called sas on sauce. It's a it's our it's our
Speaker 1: seasoning elixir. And it's like it's basically a brew uh
Speaker 1: made of seaweeds, local seaweeds, local little silver fish, all
Speaker 1: of the excess bones and trim and anything that we
Speaker 1: get from our fish. And then it's grilled or barbecued
Speaker 1: or and then it's mixed together and it's basically inoculated
Speaker 1: with a with a bacteria, and then it's allowed to
Speaker 1: culture and ferment and it turns into this kind of
Speaker 1: a lixir that's like the savory almost crossed between white
Speaker 1: soy and fish sauce. And so we season a lot
Speaker 1: of things with that. You'll bathe that'll fish, you'll bathe
Speaker 1: the fish and testines in that stuff. Yeah, but season
Speaker 1: a little bit in that season yeah. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: the livers we the livers are are are basically salted
Speaker 1: or rinsed in salted water like a brine, right, because
Speaker 1: you've got to purge the liver um and uh, and
Speaker 1: then you you salt the liver a little bit. And
Speaker 1: then and then we um either poaching salted water, we
Speaker 1: grill it or we we you know, the version you
Speaker 1: had was basically halted for about a week ranch and
Speaker 1: then put in uh a seasoning paste which is like
Speaker 1: stays on seasoning past. It's kind of like a misa
Speaker 1: it's basically the same thing as a misa um. So
Speaker 1: you had one version that was poached in one version
Speaker 1: that was salted and seasoned in our seasoning paste. And
Speaker 1: then the ribs slab explain what you do with the
Speaker 1: fish ribs or how the fish rib has become like
Speaker 1: a little serving tray grilled little rib yeah, yeah, uh so,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I guess really the reason for that was
Speaker 1: because you know, the bones still have meat on it, right,
Speaker 1: they have they have flavor, they have taste, so and
Speaker 1: and typically all the little tail pieces anything you might
Speaker 1: feel might be tough. You know, the connective tissue of
Speaker 1: the um. You know the skirts, the little a little
Speaker 1: skirt around the outside of the fin, right basically the
Speaker 1: ship that nine percent of fishermen throwing the garbage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's and you know that stuff is full of flavor,
Speaker 1: like a lot a lot of those little little sweet
Speaker 1: bits or you know that that's the sweetmeat to me
Speaker 1: because it's full of flavor. It's the stuff that gets
Speaker 1: a lot of use. Um and that's all gets chopped
Speaker 1: up and then basically mixed into this chopped seasoned mixture.
Speaker 1: And then and then put back on the bone and
Speaker 1: then brushed with a sauce and then grilled, and so
Speaker 1: it's like a little riblet. Do you know that? In
Speaker 1: and I see I'm sitting right next to one of
Speaker 1: the scopier's books. That's how a scopia would handle carp.
Speaker 1: Ye know, in a lot of other countries, carper like
Speaker 1: a very popular food fish. And in fact they were
Speaker 1: introduced into the Great Lakes when when the Great Lakes
Speaker 1: fisheries were declining at like catastrophic rates. Um a fish
Speaker 1: cultural has had the idea that they would put common
Speaker 1: carp into the Great Lakes to make up for the
Speaker 1: loss of food fish from environmental destruction in the Great Lakes.
Speaker 1: But it is obviously never caught out with Americans. Like
Speaker 1: Americans don't like the generally speaking, Americans don't like to
Speaker 1: eat carp. But scopiers carp recipes would basically be that
Speaker 1: you poach to fish whatever you're gonna do to it
Speaker 1: to be able to strip all meat off the bone.
Speaker 1: Then he would mix that with all kinds of good
Speaker 1: ship to eat. Right like you said, you're a little
Speaker 1: you're a little chopped up combination you put on there.
Speaker 1: But he would mix it with butter cream truffles, and
Speaker 1: then lay the carp's tail and head down where they belong,
Speaker 1: and reform the fish's body out of this concoction that
Speaker 1: he would make, and then putting new scales back on
Speaker 1: it and serve that as carp. And once you go
Speaker 1: through all that, that carp becomes pretty damn good. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't have a whole lot to do with carpet anymore.
Speaker 1: He just Yeah, it's like it tastes like a truffle. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: a creamy a creamy truffle kind of moose. Well, back then,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of a lot of um masking,
Speaker 1: right because you guys, handling was a little different back then, right,
Speaker 1: And now we've got we have so much information that
Speaker 1: we can we can uh, you know, we've learned from
Speaker 1: other other you know, cultures that like like Japan is
Speaker 1: a great example of handling, right where everything's just handled
Speaker 1: so well that the taste winds up being clean and
Speaker 1: kind of pure, right, like it the records. Yeah, it's like,
Speaker 1: I guess that's the way of putting it is. The
Speaker 1: way you're handling stuff that's so fresh, is you're just
Speaker 1: trying like showcasing what the thing is. You're not using
Speaker 1: it to make some other thing out of it. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you're not doing like a radical transformation. What's good. It's
Speaker 1: good enough to where you you don't need to write,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no need to you know, stuff it
Speaker 1: full of troubles and cream because it already tastes the lessous.
Speaker 1: You just can't, you know, you can't screw it up.
Speaker 1: So the rib slabs, then you cook the tail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: yet you had the head, you had the tail. The
Speaker 1: rib slabs and the head and the tail are basically
Speaker 1: just just purged and salted water. Uh. And then we
Speaker 1: we poached them and then we grill them. So he's
Speaker 1: poaching for a few minutes at the low temperature I
Speaker 1: think it's like sixty degrees just to set the head. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so it basically cooks the head, you know, evenly
Speaker 1: all the way through and um and and loosens up
Speaker 1: all the all the good bits like the little the
Speaker 1: lips and the connective tissue and the cart lit or
Speaker 1: whatever whatever is and whatever the makeup of the fishes.
Speaker 1: But it loosens all that stuff up. Um. And then
Speaker 1: we grill it. And then you you just pull it
Speaker 1: all apart, right, so the whole thing falls apart basically,
Speaker 1: and then all of that good stuff on the inside,
Speaker 1: which is really one of my favorite pieces or my
Speaker 1: favorite bits, is you know, easily easy to get at.
Speaker 1: So on the like on the fish were eating last night,
Speaker 1: we ate the head, the tail, the trim, the guts.
Speaker 1: The hell do you guys do with the the flame
Speaker 1: the meat? Well that's what you ate in the little
Speaker 1: bull with the flowers. So that's just served raw. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just wrong. And then when you kill a fish.
Speaker 1: I learned this from my friend Helen Chow because I
Speaker 1: was out fishing with Helen Chow and her boyfriend John Um.
Speaker 1: We're at this one time dicking around on a on
Speaker 1: a fish and charter and the fish they would catch,
Speaker 1: they would John would kind of sever the spine and
Speaker 1: then run a hunkle wire down the interior of the
Speaker 1: spinal cord to relax the fish. And I was explaining
Speaker 1: to you last night that in South America, I watched
Speaker 1: amor Indians do that with big turtles that they would catch.
Speaker 1: Because if he was ever caught a snap turtle and
Speaker 1: you cut snap turtle's head off the heads very much.
Speaker 1: We call it it's not alive in any kind of
Speaker 1: sense of the word of being cognizant, but it's full
Speaker 1: of activity. The body is clenched up, and the body
Speaker 1: stays absolutely clenched up, and not like rigor mortis, for
Speaker 1: just like a nervous system clenched up for hours up
Speaker 1: to eight hours before I think finally relaxes and you
Speaker 1: can skin it. And they would do that practice e
Speaker 1: K G. May. I'm sure that's not the word they
Speaker 1: used down there, but they would say differently. They would
Speaker 1: remount the spine and just relax the whole animal, and
Speaker 1: you get the same effect by when the electoral shock
Speaker 1: uh cattle doing the slaughter process. Little hit that thing
Speaker 1: in the head with a captive bolt gun and I
Speaker 1: can't remember if they then I watched them doing it
Speaker 1: in a couple different places. They bleed it and then
Speaker 1: shock it, and that shocking relaxes the animal. But you're
Speaker 1: getting at something with fish, like can you explain the process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll say it's not even just fish, it's also game
Speaker 1: to like. The way that I try to hunt is
Speaker 1: for pretty specific also, but I'll talk about fish first.
Speaker 1: So um uh, you know, it's it's it's basically just
Speaker 1: neural death. You're basically just ruining the nerves so that
Speaker 1: there's no reaction, continued reaction, right, So you basically, you know,
Speaker 1: let's say, let's take the turbot for instance. Every fish
Speaker 1: is a little different in the way you kill it,
Speaker 1: but but the goal is really the same, and you
Speaker 1: get brain death and neural death, right or neural destruction,
Speaker 1: I guess. And uh and so uh you know you
Speaker 1: you we we friends since you know, insert a knife
Speaker 1: right at the place where the head and uh, the
Speaker 1: spine meat and also the brain is and so it's
Speaker 1: basically just one one stroke, one kill, right, And then
Speaker 1: we make a little decision on the back of the
Speaker 1: tail through the spinal cord, you know, that's right, that's
Speaker 1: where he that's where John runs the wires the tail side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you grab the tail. It gives you a
Speaker 1: little handle basically, and grab the tail and you stick
Speaker 1: the wire on the neural cavity of the neural column.
Speaker 1: Basically that goes, you know, all the way through the
Speaker 1: spine of the fish, and you just run that up
Speaker 1: and down until it basically destroys the nerves and then
Speaker 1: the fish is limb and then preserves that. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it just presert goes completely limp, and that preserves that
Speaker 1: texture in the fish, and the taste is very it
Speaker 1: also to me, it also produced. It produces a really
Speaker 1: a super clean taste, right you don't you don't, um
Speaker 1: you know there's something about an animal running away or
Speaker 1: or struggling that produces a different taste, right releases Uh,
Speaker 1: whatever releases in the system, and that tastes to me
Speaker 1: is from right. Yeah, And you're gonna touch on hunting,
Speaker 1: and I wanted, like, I'm gonna preface what you're gonna
Speaker 1: say with and I'm not gonna like go after you
Speaker 1: about it or challenge about it. But what what this
Speaker 1: man is about to say is a controversial notion. But
Speaker 1: I'll let him. I'll let him speak to you talking
Speaker 1: about head shooting. Yeah, head shots. Yeah, yeah, your head
Speaker 1: shot man. Yeah, absolutely so. Cent of the time I
Speaker 1: count among my head shooting. Uh associates you and my
Speaker 1: friend Ron, Like, m M, no, I got another head shooter, buddy.
Speaker 1: Isn't Tony a head shooter? I don't know? But he's
Speaker 1: like a a marine corps Oh that Tony, Yes, he is.
Speaker 1: You're right, he is. Yeah, yeah, you like to you
Speaker 1: like to do neural what do you call it? Neural death.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing. I mean, it's the same principle, really,
Speaker 1: but you gotta you gotta let me preface that with like,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're not gonna put several thousand rounds
Speaker 1: through you know each each you know shot and in
Speaker 1: every way you can possibly practice, he probably shouldn't try
Speaker 1: shoot for a head, right, but because you're robbing yourself
Speaker 1: of your margin for error right well, into me. Even
Speaker 1: worse is that you're gonna injure it and it's gonna
Speaker 1: run away. Yeah, that's what that's the worst part, you know.
Speaker 1: I don't mean that. Yeah, I'm not worried about if
Speaker 1: it was like if every shot was either instant death
Speaker 1: or a myths, there's no shot I would ever pass up.
Speaker 1: It's the trouble is, you know, the trouble is in
Speaker 1: those ones that that fall in the gray area between
Speaker 1: those two extremes, Like when someone shooting at shooting at
Speaker 1: an elk with a bow and trying to hit it
Speaker 1: in the heart and they spine it and it drops
Speaker 1: and they're all excited. You could be like, well, I
Speaker 1: would temper your excitement with the fact that you were
Speaker 1: like eighteen inches off, And if you had moved that
Speaker 1: eighteen inches off in other directions, you would have had
Speaker 1: a very different outcome. Yeah, but you happen to be
Speaker 1: eighteen off in exactly the right spot, you know, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess my opinion is if you can't,
Speaker 1: if you if you don't feel confident with the shot,
Speaker 1: don't take it. I mean, that's that's like, if you
Speaker 1: if you don't feel like you're guaranteeing yourself, you know
Speaker 1: that you're gonna you're gonna your point of impact is
Speaker 1: gonna be exactly where you think it's gonna be. Just
Speaker 1: don't shoot. Yeah, I'm with you. That's what people like,
Speaker 1: we've we've been asked many times like what's the what's
Speaker 1: the um what's an ethical shot an unethical shot? And
Speaker 1: after wringing my hands about that question a long time,
Speaker 1: I was like, if you're surprised you got its ethical shot,
Speaker 1: if you want to be like, holy shit, I can't
Speaker 1: believe I got it that, I was like, you probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't have touched the trigger, but yeah, so so yeah,
Speaker 1: so we'll leave We'll leave that one there. But explain,
Speaker 1: like what you're after, so provided it all the provided
Speaker 1: all that, then um, you're you're really after the same
Speaker 1: thing after with the fish, you know, you're you're basically
Speaker 1: I'm shooting right behind the head where it meets the spine,
Speaker 1: and um and uh at that point it's going through
Speaker 1: and the thing drops us dead. You know, at least
Speaker 1: I think it's dead. Well, if that happened, would be
Speaker 1: pretty damn dead. Yeah, I mean it doesn't move afterwards,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. Do you have any thoughts on bleeding
Speaker 1: because I believe Ron doesn't say when he makes a
Speaker 1: good headshot he immediately runs up to it. And yeah,
Speaker 1: because the lung because it bleeds it. Because if you
Speaker 1: when you hit something through the lungs, you're like self
Speaker 1: bleeding it right. The blood's all gonna expel. There's no
Speaker 1: need to run up and then cut its throat because
Speaker 1: the bloods laying in the chest, cavity or all over
Speaker 1: the ground. I have a different opinion about blood and game.
Speaker 1: I think it's just hands. Well there there's so there's
Speaker 1: an old French method. Let me hold you up for aeman,
Speaker 1: because finish what you're saying about, like why you would
Speaker 1: bleed it after you hit in the head. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: because like you're saying, if you hit it in the
Speaker 1: long or this is ron's thinking, if we it's legit thinking.
Speaker 1: I mean livestock. It's how they slaughter livestock. It's how
Speaker 1: they slaughter cattle, right, so that you're I guess that
Speaker 1: your meat is not full of blood the flavor of blood,
Speaker 1: and cut its throat and beat it. Yeah. So like
Speaker 1: when when you're slaughtering cattle, they hit it with like
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, somehow this came up electric electric Using electricity,
Speaker 1: you hit in the head of a captive bolt gun
Speaker 1: or in the old days of twenty two, and then
Speaker 1: right away, while it's still kicking on the ground, hoisted
Speaker 1: up near by the back foot and cut his juggler
Speaker 1: to expel the blood. I think that has to do.
Speaker 1: It's also like shelf stability, yeah, and flavor issues. But
Speaker 1: go ahead, I mean, I'm I'm gonna i'll i'll like
Speaker 1: mostly defer to your judgment on the taste of it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's subjective. But there's a there's an old
Speaker 1: so you know about the there's an old French method
Speaker 1: where they suffocate like a bird like a pigeon for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so the taste wines up being um pretty good.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's different, but it's it's like, uh,
Speaker 1: it's bloody, it's spicy, but I like it. It's delicious.
Speaker 1: And so I mean you really think about it. You know, animals,
Speaker 1: the meat is full of blood, right, so so you're
Speaker 1: eating anyway, a little more blood's not gonna kill you,
Speaker 1: right so you know, I you don't you just take
Speaker 1: it as a given that blood has to get out, No,
Speaker 1: not at all, I don't think so. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: at least the fish, like the fish you killed that night,
Speaker 1: you believe, definitely say fish that's a different story because
Speaker 1: fish has this uh very kind of fish blood has
Speaker 1: its very irony, kind of metallic taste. They don't want
Speaker 1: it all. And I think you know, old blood has
Speaker 1: that to some degree. But a lot of animal blood,
Speaker 1: like duck blood. You know, there's think about you know,
Speaker 1: old French sauces like um, you know, duck blood in
Speaker 1: the sauce or or um in any any birds or
Speaker 1: uh um. I mean a lot of cultures across the
Speaker 1: world eat a lot of blood, right, blood. They don't
Speaker 1: waste the blood here for some reason, you catch the
Speaker 1: blood and make blood sauceage with it or so I
Speaker 1: like the blood personally, I think it's good. You just
Speaker 1: gotta you again, it's practices, right, it's it's handling and
Speaker 1: practice says. But but has a lot of things too
Speaker 1: where you use the rabbit blood. Yeah, sauce. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a good point. Yeah. So, um so anyway, what we're
Speaker 1: talking about headshots, Yeah, like what you're striving for the
Speaker 1: kids you may have, you know, wild game of kids
Speaker 1: you may essentially right now, that's that's what we're striving for.
Speaker 1: Were striving for that that instant death where it's basically
Speaker 1: there's zero suffering involved. And but even before that, one
Speaker 1: of the things that I've noticed is that if you
Speaker 1: go out there and you scare an animal and it's
Speaker 1: running away or maybe you injure it, which I have
Speaker 1: before and I always feel horrible about, but um it's
Speaker 1: running away and then and then you finally get it,
Speaker 1: it tastes different, the thing taste. It tastes totally different.
Speaker 1: So so for me, it's one of the things where
Speaker 1: you basically sneak up on something you know, you put
Speaker 1: in the word put it enough work to actually harvest
Speaker 1: in a way where has no idea. You're there, you know,
Speaker 1: it's eating some flowers, just like this bear that I
Speaker 1: just gone. You know it's it's sitting there eating dandelion
Speaker 1: flowers and the next thing is dead right shot, one kill, instant,
Speaker 1: It's done right. So to me, that's that's that's the
Speaker 1: way I like that. Do you feel like it could
Speaker 1: not only affect the flavor, um, like the difference between
Speaker 1: an animal that's you know, hurried or rush scared versus
Speaker 1: you know, completely unaware, and as well as the uh,
Speaker 1: the texture or sort of like the tenderness without a doubt, Yeah,
Speaker 1: without a doubt, if you I mean, it's it's the same.
Speaker 1: It's the same principle, like if you if that thing
Speaker 1: goes down right away and it's completely limped the second
Speaker 1: you know that bullet hits that, you know wherever, uh
Speaker 1: it's limp, right, it's already relaxed. There's no there's zero
Speaker 1: struggle involved in the process of the thing is left
Speaker 1: and the meat soft. Another reason I don't like that idea,
Speaker 1: it's because I have all kinds of animal skulls around
Speaker 1: my house, and yeah, I would I wouldn't have that anymore.
Speaker 1: There's your beer right there. You take a look at
Speaker 1: that school. Well how did you get to put back
Speaker 1: together again? And never I never shot the skull. I
Speaker 1: shot right there behind the skull, so it's right in
Speaker 1: the neck piece, right right where the basically and I
Speaker 1: basically and putting my eye right on the back of
Speaker 1: that skull, right behind the year right and that's where
Speaker 1: I'm looking. Yeah, all right, man, We'll leave it at that. Now,
Speaker 1: box crab, what the hell? Why is there? Why? Why
Speaker 1: is uh box crab? Not a thing? Let me let
Speaker 1: me go back one second. The other thing is is
Speaker 1: the other the other way that I will shoot too
Speaker 1: if if I know that I can't, if I if
Speaker 1: I really want to, you know, get that animal. And
Speaker 1: I know I can't make a perfect headshot as the
Speaker 1: eye shoulder right where the spine is, eye shoulder, the
Speaker 1: bullet splits apart, it shoots into everywhere and the same
Speaker 1: same thing basically, but it gets familiar with that one
Speaker 1: and and I've I've gone for that a couple of times.
Speaker 1: And right one uh right when monolithic bullets started to
Speaker 1: be very started to become more popular. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: solid copper bullets people. Yeah, and you should explain this
Speaker 1: because you follow this ship better than I do. Like
Speaker 1: the barn. Yeah, Like like monolithic bullets became more popular,
Speaker 1: you started hearing way more people talk about high shoulder shots.
Speaker 1: Things punched right through right right, So a lot of
Speaker 1: people are getting there, like the pencil effect when it
Speaker 1: would just go through the you know, if they missed
Speaker 1: the entering rib, you know, they weren't getting that expansion
Speaker 1: they were used to in a you know, lead core bullet,
Speaker 1: jacket bullet, and so it was getting that pencil effect,
Speaker 1: and the deer was running a little bit farther than
Speaker 1: they were used to, And so I think they were
Speaker 1: moving their shot placement to that high shoulder. Which I
Speaker 1: advocate that all the time because I think it's it's
Speaker 1: a pretty big uh target. Still, you know, you don't
Speaker 1: have to aim that close to the spine. The spine
Speaker 1: actually sort of dips down behind the shoulders, so it's
Speaker 1: not like you're aiming, you know, only three inches below
Speaker 1: the top of his uh or yeah, below the top
Speaker 1: of his back there. But there's also up in that
Speaker 1: areas what's called the void. Yeah, dude, I listen, it's
Speaker 1: hard to make predictions about the future. I will die.
Speaker 1: I will live out my life hopefully and get really old,
Speaker 1: and then I'll die. And on my deathbed, if you
Speaker 1: said to me, hey man, what's a perfect shot placement,
Speaker 1: I'm still good, I'll be like, really, that's what you
Speaker 1: want to talk about right now? And then I'll say
Speaker 1: but if if in fact, that is what you want
Speaker 1: to know, as I'm dying double lung, and I'll tell
Speaker 1: you why. The first time I shot ami with a
Speaker 1: monolithic bullet, well, I was hunting New Zealand and I
Speaker 1: shot a stag with a monolithic bullet and it was
Speaker 1: pretty far out there, but not ridiculously far out there,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, should I missed? Okay, because
Speaker 1: he's running around, running these high's, chasing them around. And
Speaker 1: then a while later he kind of got where he
Speaker 1: looked like he wasn't feeling well, but still was like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll keep chasing these highness. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: not feeling too well. And then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: got woozy and tipped over and it looked like someone
Speaker 1: had taken when I butchered it, it it looked like someone
Speaker 1: took a field tip arrow just an arrow with a
Speaker 1: practice point on it and jabbed it through the chest cavity.
Speaker 1: So I've had this with pigs before. While boors it
Speaker 1: was down and down in southern California. You have to
Speaker 1: shoot all copper right, you can't shootnything. It's not copper steel.
Speaker 1: There's no let allout. It's condor zone. And so no, right,
Speaker 1: not yet. I think it's next year. It's definitely coming. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um that's why I washed. Washington's real nice right now.
Speaker 1: But um, you know, I've I've shot pigs where you know.
Speaker 1: There was a group of them and I and I
Speaker 1: shot three at three different pigs, and uh, I thought
Speaker 1: I completely missed. I was like, well they ran away.
Speaker 1: I was like, they just gone. I was like, I
Speaker 1: don't usually miss because I don't usually take those shots.
Speaker 1: And I put in a lot of practice, and uh
Speaker 1: in any way, we uh we saw one running away.
Speaker 1: He ran up the hill, little one and then he
Speaker 1: dropped dead. And then so I was okay, I did miss.
Speaker 1: So then we started looking for the other two pigs.
Speaker 1: Found all three. But in the end it was the
Speaker 1: same thing, that little puncture that went straight through they
Speaker 1: were all they were all straight through the lungs right
Speaker 1: by the heart. They just keep going. It doesn't it
Speaker 1: doesn't have that terminal, uh, you know, damage right, No,
Speaker 1: And then I got onto the after that, I got
Speaker 1: into the whole high shoulder scene. But again I hit like,
Speaker 1: remember that when we're hunting musk cocks. M hm, dude,
Speaker 1: he didn't even give it ship to that. It's like,
Speaker 1: I just feel like it's imperfect. You could speak to it.
Speaker 1: I don't care. No, But you remember that you said
Speaker 1: you did pull forward just a little bit because I
Speaker 1: was worried about you about hitting another animal, and so
Speaker 1: you like you personally, you know, judge and put it forward.
Speaker 1: But I feel like with the long shot too, you
Speaker 1: can be off the lungs in the back and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you're you know, into the liver, which
Speaker 1: animals go a long way when they've got a bullet
Speaker 1: through their liver, and you go farther back and you've
Speaker 1: just gone, you know, straight through the paunch and good
Speaker 1: luck finding that. Well, look, at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: if you know for sure you're gonna make the shot,
Speaker 1: it's ethical. Yeah, all right. I want to be confident.
Speaker 1: I want to keep marching down things. I want to
Speaker 1: talk about some other stuff box crab. What okay, if
Speaker 1: you went out and asked Joe blow, Joe blow, dude
Speaker 1: who eats at Red Lobster or whatever? Uh, just as
Speaker 1: Red Lobster sttle business. I don't know, but I just
Speaker 1: read something about get somebody getting food poisoning there the
Speaker 1: other day when I was a kid, I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: what if you were going out to that was the
Speaker 1: pinnacle of a fancy dinner like on prom night, just
Speaker 1: like dudes would take to take your high school girlfriend
Speaker 1: down the Red Lobster and you were like tearing, you
Speaker 1: were set in the stage man and listen, guys out there,
Speaker 1: if that was that's your plan, or you just did that,
Speaker 1: took your lady out there like a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: ago and it was prom night. Uh, we're not We're
Speaker 1: not dogging. I'm not dogging it at all. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying I don't know if there's still I don't know
Speaker 1: how Red Lobs are still kicking as or not. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I think they're still around. Well just just let me
Speaker 1: let me also help with anybody out there may get
Speaker 1: food poison from Red Lobster. I got food poison one time.
Speaker 1: From some sort of bio disease and the and the
Speaker 1: oysters here in the Bay Area, and I was, I
Speaker 1: was like, I was really sick, man, I I ate.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many oysters I ate that day,
Speaker 1: but but they're contaminated with something and um and uh
Speaker 1: so I was. I was at the point where I
Speaker 1: was like sick for hours and I was dry heating.
Speaker 1: There's no liquids left in my body. Went to the hospital.
Speaker 1: They gave me this little ivy thing and a pill
Speaker 1: felt better than like ten minutes. Yeah, listen, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: fact it obsessed me that you even insinuate that I
Speaker 1: was dogging on Red Lobster, because if you were the
Speaker 1: number line out on a one to ten number line
Speaker 1: out on the quality, like if you took a week
Speaker 1: and be like, Okay, what quality of foods does this
Speaker 1: person consumed during a week? If I Red Lobsters, be
Speaker 1: like on the five mark not do you way? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I'm dog on a Red Lobster. I just
Speaker 1: haven't been following. I just haven't been following whatever the
Speaker 1: scene is over at Red Lobster right now. But box
Speaker 1: what else makes my damn point? People know that there's
Speaker 1: good crabs right, and they're like snow crab, dungeoness crab,
Speaker 1: blue crab, king crab. And there's a redundancy here like
Speaker 1: tanners or snows right. Tanner Tanner is another word check that.
Speaker 1: I think a tank. I think when you hear Tanner,
Speaker 1: it's a there's there's a redundancy. I'm not thinking clear
Speaker 1: right now. There's a redundancy in that list. But your
Speaker 1: favorite crab is a crab that doesn't fall on the
Speaker 1: list of super good crabs. That's because nobody knows about it.
Speaker 1: You think that's fishermen don't even really fish. When I
Speaker 1: came in and I looked at that tank of crabs,
Speaker 1: I thought you had a bunch of dungee bodies in there,
Speaker 1: legless dungee bodies because of the way they suck their
Speaker 1: legs in. Yeah, they box up, that's what you got
Speaker 1: the name. Basically, they basically pull in all their extremities
Speaker 1: and it forms like a perfect shape into the around
Speaker 1: their shell. They're not so they don't cost nearly what
Speaker 1: a They gotta be way cheaper than a dungeoness. Oh no,
Speaker 1: they're they're more expensive because nobody fishes them. I mean,
Speaker 1: you got it's it's a boutique fishery basically. So I've
Speaker 1: got a fisher men who have to pay you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, X amount of expenses to just to get
Speaker 1: you know, the stuff we want, right, so it winds
Speaker 1: up being a little more expensive. So how did you
Speaker 1: come to like prefer box crab and not be like
Speaker 1: helly man. Everybody knows that King Crab is the best
Speaker 1: crab in the world or Dungeoness is the best crab
Speaker 1: in the world, like you just don't see box crab
Speaker 1: around commercially. First of all, we we we try to
Speaker 1: just use everything just from right here. Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll take it all. It's it's West Coast because it
Speaker 1: makes sense for us in terms of taste. So everything
Speaker 1: you can pull from BC down to south of here, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: down to like Santa Barbara basically, and so that's all
Speaker 1: that's all relatively the same environment, right more or less.
Speaker 1: I mean there's obviously some variation, but but um, northerly
Speaker 1: northerly Pacific waters, yeah exactly. Um, but you know, we
Speaker 1: we just get we get random stuff from our guys,
Speaker 1: whether it's our gatherer or our you know, which gathers
Speaker 1: our forger and um. Whether it's our fishermen or whatever
Speaker 1: it is, they bring us a bunch of stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: all the time, random things and um. And so we're
Speaker 1: constantly kind of exploring, you know, what are these Uh,
Speaker 1: what can we grow? What can we find? Uh? There's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff out there, especially in fisheries that
Speaker 1: aren't fish, because everybody is so focused on one kind
Speaker 1: of commodity, you know, a good that that everybody's gonna
Speaker 1: you know, basically pilfer you know, the entire salmon population,
Speaker 1: you know, until there's no more left because they get
Speaker 1: a higher price. But then there's twenty other species out
Speaker 1: there that are actually really delicious. They're underutilized and completely underutilized. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like another dish. And this is the thing I've been
Speaker 1: harpened on for people to live you know, in the
Speaker 1: Pacific waters is what I what I feel it's gonna
Speaker 1: be like the most underutilized. Now that being underutilized is
Speaker 1: a bad thing, but the sea cucumber being a thing
Speaker 1: that's just like like in my mind underutilized, Well, it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's like I feel like it's a
Speaker 1: like a challenging thing for people to to get past
Speaker 1: because it's you know, it's it's slimy. It looks anasty
Speaker 1: to some people, and and but you know it's it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of a hidden treasure. In my opinion, it's
Speaker 1: delicious once you treat it the right. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: did you guys like that, you caucumber last? It's great,
Speaker 1: Man's delicious. It's not the way we do them. I know,
Speaker 1: you don't fry anything. You fry anything. We grill fry.
Speaker 1: So our whole our you know, our whole um kind
Speaker 1: of ethos is all fire cooking. So if you noticed,
Speaker 1: you know, every single thing you had was cooked over
Speaker 1: the fire in some way, some manner, and so all
Speaker 1: of the methods that we used to use for regular cooking,
Speaker 1: we've now created a way to cook it over the
Speaker 1: fire in the same way. So when we fry something,
Speaker 1: what it's called grill fry. And so let's say you
Speaker 1: have a flower and we'll coat this flower the like
Speaker 1: a like a floral flower, right, and uh, we'll code
Speaker 1: it in a batter, it was a specific batter, and
Speaker 1: we will let it dry a little bit, and then
Speaker 1: we have perforated pants. They're just like sautee pants, and
Speaker 1: so we'll we'll we'll then take the dried the code
Speaker 1: dried semi dried rather or at least the batter's fried flour,
Speaker 1: and then we'll we'll brush the pan with the oil
Speaker 1: and then brush the flower with the oil and then
Speaker 1: throw it on the grill. So it's basically ceiling that
Speaker 1: batter around the outside. And so you wind up with
Speaker 1: what we call grill fry. Do you call that your
Speaker 1: heart over there? Yeah? Yeah, okay, So we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a we'll take a picture just to put it up
Speaker 1: in the show notes so you can go check it out. Um,
Speaker 1: you got a horror thalnel was like six ft wide,
Speaker 1: it's eight ft plus um six ft yeah, and different sections.
Speaker 1: You gotta fire going in there and what and what
Speaker 1: would you you know, you said you'll burn some almond, almond, uh.
Speaker 1: Fruit woods of different kinds depending on the season. So
Speaker 1: if you have, you know, for instance, fake season right now,
Speaker 1: So we'll take fig wood and we'll grill a thig
Speaker 1: dish over the fake wood. And so we use that
Speaker 1: kind of layering method for different fruits. Could be apple,
Speaker 1: could be quinns, could be pair whatever it is. And
Speaker 1: when I came in here this morning. You about a
Speaker 1: rick of wood stacked outside of your front doorway and
Speaker 1: to come inside. So they got a fire, they got
Speaker 1: like a rip, like a camp fire burning in your kitchen.
Speaker 1: And as I was eating, I was looking over there
Speaker 1: and imagining that I would walk over and be like
Speaker 1: this giant grill set up with a big gas fire
Speaker 1: and a grill way over it. But what the guys
Speaker 1: are doing is there's a camp fire burning, and they're
Speaker 1: shoveling out little like little shovel piles of amber. Feel
Speaker 1: like you're miss setting the camp fire, because right, there's
Speaker 1: more not a camp fer. There's no one camping. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's not, it's not. How is it different than
Speaker 1: the fire you build if you built a fire anywhere?
Speaker 1: Tell us so it's the fire, non relatively, I think.
Speaker 1: So now we're just burning down a bed of ambers,
Speaker 1: basically that the fire is devoted. Yeah, okay, Yanni's tin camp. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, I'll tell my version. You tell your version,
Speaker 1: all right, you gotta damn fire. Would burning in a
Speaker 1: fire that was remarkably similar to how one might think
Speaker 1: of as a camp fire, right, it's not in a
Speaker 1: It's just burning in the corner. Right, my wrong, m
Speaker 1: my right right, And you're your cooks who are working this.
Speaker 1: Take what it looks like the kind of shovel if
Speaker 1: you had a fireplace and you had like a little
Speaker 1: shovel to shovel out ash out of your fireplace periodically.
Speaker 1: They have one of those, and they scoop out a
Speaker 1: pile of embers, it's not even a court of embers
Speaker 1: and make a little ember bed bed and have little
Speaker 1: grates that they have sitting over that ember bed, and
Speaker 1: that's what they're working on, or any any utensil. So
Speaker 1: we have perforated pans, we've got grades, we've got uh, skewers,
Speaker 1: a variety of different tools that we used to cook
Speaker 1: over the ambers. And the amber bed is not more
Speaker 1: than two inches deep and probably not that and maybe
Speaker 1: a square foot, yeah, depending on what you're cook depending
Speaker 1: on what you're doing. So there's a lot of I
Speaker 1: mean basically the majority of the cooking is done near
Speaker 1: the fire and over the ambers. And then you got
Speaker 1: your racks way the hell above the fire, right where
Speaker 1: you just got all kinds of ship stacked up there.
Speaker 1: And give an example of like uh, you know, like
Speaker 1: uh so we you dehydration, right, dehydrate u um whatever.
Speaker 1: So for us let's give me for instance, let's use
Speaker 1: there's a dish that's well known that we do that's
Speaker 1: called brasicas. And so it's a bunch of Braska leaves.
Speaker 1: Things in Nebraska family could mustards, you know, cabbages, whatever,
Speaker 1: broccolia and uh so you take the leaves and we
Speaker 1: basically lay it out flat and maybe brush a little
Speaker 1: light amount of oil on there and then lay it
Speaker 1: out flat on a rack and then we'll put it
Speaker 1: over almost imperceptible heat, just a really a scattering of
Speaker 1: ambers where it's probably over for it's probably over or
Speaker 1: four ft above that. Well, that's that's a different thing.
Speaker 1: That's that's what we call fire in the sky. So
Speaker 1: that's a different method. It's like a different different type
Speaker 1: of dehydration where it's where slowly getting smoked, but it's
Speaker 1: a similar it's a similar thing, um different outcome. And
Speaker 1: so this is just you know, above a little bed
Speaker 1: maybe three inches above. It's on a rack, a bunch
Speaker 1: of leaves and it just slowly kind of absorbs the
Speaker 1: flavor of the fire and it gets dehydrated. So that's
Speaker 1: one example of and it's like a chip and you
Speaker 1: can just eat it like potato chips after but it's
Speaker 1: also has that like beautiful sweet smoke from the fire.
Speaker 1: So that's one example like really low cooking. And then
Speaker 1: and then you know, for meat, for instance, what we'll
Speaker 1: do is we'll temper we'll we'll get a chunk of
Speaker 1: meat out right, and we'll we'll temper it near the fire.
Speaker 1: So it's already slowly starting to accept the heat, right,
Speaker 1: and it's and it's, uh, you know, we pulled out
Speaker 1: of the out of the aging room, let it come
Speaker 1: to room temperature, put it near the fire, okay, and
Speaker 1: it's so it's slowly already starting to accept the heat
Speaker 1: a little bit, right, and it's softening and it's developing
Speaker 1: more flavor, right. Uh. And then we'll throw it on
Speaker 1: a bed of ambers, which is, you know, however big
Speaker 1: the product is, and the height of the bed depends
Speaker 1: on the heat that we want, and then the distance
Speaker 1: from the top of the ambers to the bottom of
Speaker 1: the product is also depending on how long we want
Speaker 1: to cook it for, how much you know heat be want,
Speaker 1: or how hard we want to sear it or whatever. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so okay, talk about those quail. How long do you
Speaker 1: so you gotta plucked quail? How long do you age
Speaker 1: a plucked quail for six days? At forty five degrees
Speaker 1: in a room with a lot of circulation, a lot
Speaker 1: of air circulations, the keys that you've gotta have. You've
Speaker 1: gotta have air circulation all the way around these meats,
Speaker 1: so that you're starting you're starting to dry it, but
Speaker 1: you want the humidity to also be high enough to
Speaker 1: where it doesn't dry out too much. Right, So that's
Speaker 1: about the perfect room. Perfect room. It's forty five or
Speaker 1: so degrees in six days, and that coil sits there plucked,
Speaker 1: just gutted and plucked for six days. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: you grilled the quail. And I've grilled like a mess
Speaker 1: of quail. And I was telling you that when I
Speaker 1: grill a quail, I grilled that quail for not ten minutes.
Speaker 1: You grill your quail for two hours. Yeah, really really
Speaker 1: low heat in and out of the heat, right in
Speaker 1: and out. So you're basically that's you know, it's an
Speaker 1: in and out method of of roasting meat to where
Speaker 1: you're basically exposing the meat to uh. Depending on how
Speaker 1: much fat content is meat, um let's say for this quail,
Speaker 1: for instance, you know, medium heat for just a very
Speaker 1: brief period time, and you take it off the heat
Speaker 1: and you let it rest out its residual. You know,
Speaker 1: heat really has the opportunity to spread throughout the entire
Speaker 1: piece of meat. And then once it comes down to
Speaker 1: basically tep it or room temperature where there's no more
Speaker 1: cooking happen, than you repeat that process over and over
Speaker 1: again and you wind up. What I have never said
Speaker 1: this is, this is the most surprising thing that that
Speaker 1: you cook. Is it you wind up with? It's like
Speaker 1: the texture that you can tear the bird apart. Okay,
Speaker 1: it breaks apart like it breaks apart, like how bird
Speaker 1: should break apart. It's cooked. But the texture is you
Speaker 1: achieve a texture that's more like raw coail but not
Speaker 1: flabby though, no, but it still has a translucent to it. Right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't turn into like it doesn't turn into your
Speaker 1: classic like white stringy. Yeah. Yeah, it's still it's translucent
Speaker 1: down to the bone and definitely not raw, but has
Speaker 1: like almost like a cired quality to it. Well, here's
Speaker 1: what we're doing. Basically, you're basically you're you're you're not
Speaker 1: only allowing it to age. Those those oils start to Uh.
Speaker 1: First of all, some of the moisture comes out of
Speaker 1: the bird, right, And then when you're going back and
Speaker 1: forth on the heat like that, you're getting all that
Speaker 1: moisture to move around a little bit, but you're not
Speaker 1: putting on so high of the heat that you're forcing
Speaker 1: it out, right, So that stuff is just moving around
Speaker 1: and there gently, and eventually it just rests out and
Speaker 1: rests over to where it's that it's cooked, but it's
Speaker 1: not overcooked. Yeah, oh yeah, I forgot. We're gonna come
Speaker 1: back to you know, you're gonna offer the more accurate
Speaker 1: version of the damn fire. I'm curious about this. Actually, well,
Speaker 1: when I saw the fire that when I saw two
Speaker 1: things that I was gonna ask about. Actually one the
Speaker 1: campfire that Steve was referring to, I went, I doubled
Speaker 1: around and said, it's not the camp art's fire if
Speaker 1: he's referring to that was in the right back corner, right.
Speaker 1: I just felt like there was an intense management of
Speaker 1: that fire. That and you're saying campers don't manage their fire, sure,
Speaker 1: we just how just imagine the fires just like this,
Speaker 1: like pile of wood that's on fire, and there may
Speaker 1: or may not be a bunch of members or whatever,
Speaker 1: but this was like two or three pieces of wood
Speaker 1: were being very carefully managed to extract those embers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's the difference. But yeah, you're right, and um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's something I don't even notice that really, I don't
Speaker 1: even think about that consciously. But basically, you know, you're camping,
Speaker 1: you want the flame. You're out there, you want to
Speaker 1: flame you when you heat from the flame. For us,
Speaker 1: we want the ambers. So we're we're basically positioning the
Speaker 1: way to where it's all piled on top of each
Speaker 1: other so that you can stick a shovel in there
Speaker 1: and harvest the ambers when you need it. And you're
Speaker 1: pulling out you're pulling out, are you? Are you guys
Speaker 1: crushing the embers a little bit, but that's pulling out
Speaker 1: like centimeter like square centimeter embers. Yeah. So that's why
Speaker 1: we chose almond wood because it burns down almost perfectly.
Speaker 1: But a lot of wood does too. If you just
Speaker 1: if you just manage the fire like you're like you
Speaker 1: just talking about, so you have you know, we've got
Speaker 1: that little fire of you know, under the amber pile.
Speaker 1: Let's say, imagine, is I don't know, four to six
Speaker 1: pieces of wood all burnt down, and then you've got
Speaker 1: another maybe two or three on top to just regulate
Speaker 1: that bed of ambers, so it keeps it glowing hot
Speaker 1: the whole time. So I've got some flame going on.
Speaker 1: So you're not you're not like you're not grading out
Speaker 1: the embers, like how the embers all looks so perfect.
Speaker 1: That's just the quality of how the fire is being managed.
Speaker 1: And what kind of would you're burnt? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you could, I mean pretty much any would you can
Speaker 1: accomplish the same thing with. But it's really the management
Speaker 1: of the pile of uh flame, flaming logs on top
Speaker 1: of the bed of the ambers to keep it hot.
Speaker 1: And I'm guessing there's also some sort of it looked
Speaker 1: like there was just like the perfect draw, like the
Speaker 1: perfect air moving across that fire, right Like it was
Speaker 1: just like it seemed like you could put your hand
Speaker 1: three ft above where that fire was and you would
Speaker 1: burn your hand just because of the way that air
Speaker 1: is moving across it providing oxygen you know too, So
Speaker 1: it's burning super hot. Yeah, this is a design of
Speaker 1: the fireplace, right, So it's got that you know, it's
Speaker 1: got that suction and basically like the way that this
Speaker 1: this has a little lip over the like the hood
Speaker 1: has a lip over the fireplace. That basically UH draws
Speaker 1: the air in the fireplace up around and then out
Speaker 1: the flu So it's just good fireplaces time. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really surprising to me, like how much you guys
Speaker 1: are cooking over fire everything, even dessert. Yeah it tastes better. Man.
Speaker 1: Did you have to dick around a lot to get
Speaker 1: the uh to get your hearth or fireplace right with circulation?
Speaker 1: Well no, I mean I had a really talented designer
Speaker 1: who designed the draw of the fireplace got um abaloni.
Speaker 1: So those small Because you can die for abalone in California,
Speaker 1: you can die for abaloni Alaska. There's like regulations on it.
Speaker 1: I know that, Like for instance, um at our place
Speaker 1: in Alaska. Because I'm not a resident of Alaska, I'm
Speaker 1: not able to dive for abaloni. My brother is, he's
Speaker 1: a resident of Alaska. He's allowed a couple of abaloni
Speaker 1: the day. There's much smaller than down here. They got
Speaker 1: a size limit on him. So you serve some small
Speaker 1: those must be out of an aquaculture facility. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: what got you. And then you had some giant abaloni
Speaker 1: shells and those are probably like wild wild shells. Those
Speaker 1: those are the ones I ate. Just use it as
Speaker 1: a plate. Now do you die for him? You never
Speaker 1: die for him? No, yeah, no, ever since, ever since,
Speaker 1: I alred story about my buddy, Well, this guy that
Speaker 1: I know, and I'm a buddy, but the guy that
Speaker 1: I know that dives for a blowing around here it's
Speaker 1: like a sea forger. And uh. He was telling the
Speaker 1: story about how they went up I think it's around
Speaker 1: Eureka or Fort Bragg or something like that. A lot
Speaker 1: of blowing up there, and him and his friend were
Speaker 1: they got in the water and uh and uh there's
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of seals in the water, and which
Speaker 1: is a good sign there's no shark, right basically, or
Speaker 1: it's a good sign that there might be one soon. Well, so,
Speaker 1: uh so they're diving and he comes up and I
Speaker 1: guess the boat is off in the disk the hundred
Speaker 1: yards maybe, and uh then he realizes there's zero seals
Speaker 1: in the water, right, All the seals are on the rocks,
Speaker 1: and so you know, obviously he's freaking out a little
Speaker 1: bit in his head and swims to the boat. Uh,
Speaker 1: takes his gear off, takes his flippers off, throws in
Speaker 1: the boat. You know. Uh, it goes to push up
Speaker 1: into the boat, sits down, turns around, and there's a
Speaker 1: great white right below him with his mouth oak him
Speaker 1: maybe a few feet. It just takes it takes a
Speaker 1: pass by. That's that's terrifying. I feel that they surfers
Speaker 1: get a lot of mileage out of their dealings with
Speaker 1: white sharks. But there's a lot more surfers in there
Speaker 1: are Abaloni divers, and I think that the Abaloni divers
Speaker 1: are more in the mix. Have you have you read
Speaker 1: Canny Roll by John Steinbeck? Um. We talked about it
Speaker 1: a couple times yesterday because it's you know, takes place
Speaker 1: in Monterey Bay, and um, they do a lot of
Speaker 1: even back then. So Steinbeck was writing, you know, in
Speaker 1: the during the Great Depression, right or writing about that era,
Speaker 1: and there in that book, those boys are always illegally
Speaker 1: harvesting avalone's back then. It's been like a tightly regulated
Speaker 1: industry for a long time. We also talked about Canny
Speaker 1: Roll because in the book, Um, one of them works
Speaker 1: at a bar and when he whenever he whenever a
Speaker 1: client leaves, he just takes whatever was left in their
Speaker 1: glass and dumps it into a bucket. And that's how
Speaker 1: him and that's what him and his friends all drink.
Speaker 1: That's their alcohol source. Wait what I missed that? What
Speaker 1: was it? What do they drink? So the guy that
Speaker 1: works in the bar, anytime a client leaves anything left
Speaker 1: in his drink in his glass, beer, wine, liquor whatever
Speaker 1: it is, it just goes into a bucket. They just
Speaker 1: dump it into a bucket and they drink that at
Speaker 1: the end of the night. And that's what That's what
Speaker 1: the crew, that's what the crew in Cannary row. That's
Speaker 1: their alcohol source is just the dregs from everyone's drinks.
Speaker 1: But they're also avid, avid abalone poachers. Uh monkey faced eel.
Speaker 1: I've fished for those before. That's not a that's not
Speaker 1: a popular commercial fish. Nope. But they just I think
Speaker 1: they just um allowed commercial fistory on it now Yeah yeah, um, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I think I don't think ellen in general
Speaker 1: is very popular, right for a lot of people, unless
Speaker 1: it's like you know, nagi, but it's delicious. It's very similar, right,
Speaker 1: if you if you were to cook it exactly same
Speaker 1: way as a nag you come out, you'd wind up
Speaker 1: with a very simular so it's less fatty, but other
Speaker 1: than that, it's very similar. Yeah, you know what, the
Speaker 1: unagi um More and more they're turning to American eels
Speaker 1: because of how depleted eels are. The eels that the
Speaker 1: that the Japanese are traditionally using are so depleted that
Speaker 1: they're turning out to American eels. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of controversy right now because guys, what guys are doing
Speaker 1: is harvesting glass eels, which is uh a little baby
Speaker 1: a baby eel because you know, like anagramous fish, right,
Speaker 1: A nagmus fish live in the ocean and run up
Speaker 1: river to spawn. A catagronous fish lives in a river
Speaker 1: and goes out to the ocean to spawn. And eels
Speaker 1: are cattagroniusts. So they're in the in in American rivers
Speaker 1: and they go out and they just keep going out
Speaker 1: in the Atlantic and they keep us going to deeper
Speaker 1: and deeper and deeper water, and that eventually leads into
Speaker 1: a place called the Sargasso Sea, and they spawn in
Speaker 1: the Sargasso Sea, and then the larva does free flow
Speaker 1: on the currents, and eventually the larva develops into what's
Speaker 1: called a glass eel, which is just a little teeny
Speaker 1: thing that looks like a looks like a translucent piece
Speaker 1: of a noodle or just like a little almost like
Speaker 1: a little piece of seaweed that you can see through.
Speaker 1: And they start migrating up rivers, and now there's a
Speaker 1: big market for guys that go out and harvest glass eels,
Speaker 1: you know, which are worth thousands and thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of dollars per pound, to sell glass eels into aquaculture
Speaker 1: facilities because you obviously can't breed them in captivity. When
Speaker 1: you you can, you can raise them in captivity, but
Speaker 1: they can't be bread and captivity. So we're in a
Speaker 1: situation now where the US Fish and Wildlife Services more
Speaker 1: aggressively trying to get a get a grip like asses.
Speaker 1: Demand for glass eels is growing, to try to get
Speaker 1: a grip on where these things are coming from, where
Speaker 1: they're going and if we're gonna wind up doing to
Speaker 1: our own eels what aided their eels and completely deplete
Speaker 1: them out. So have you had a full, full grown
Speaker 1: glass siel. Oh yeah, yeah, we smoke them. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: used to. Like I lived for a while. I had
Speaker 1: an old girlfriend that was doing a writing fellowship in
Speaker 1: Rhode Island, and we rented a house. She rented a
Speaker 1: house that sat on the tideline and Rhode Island, and
Speaker 1: I would trim deer steaks at night, whatever were and
Speaker 1: I would just take like whatever I trimmed off silver
Speaker 1: skin and stuff, and I put it on a hook
Speaker 1: and I could cast it off my deck. I oughtn't
Speaker 1: do a little bay, and I would open the bail
Speaker 1: on my rod and lay it in front of the
Speaker 1: couch when we're watching movies at night, and I would
Speaker 1: take a little piece of mask and tape that was
Speaker 1: white and just pinched that mask and tape on the
Speaker 1: line at my rod tip and we'd be watching the
Speaker 1: movie and pretty soon you'd see that mask and tape
Speaker 1: moving across the living room rug. Then I could just
Speaker 1: grab my rod, open a slide door and i'd pull
Speaker 1: eel up over the deck rail. And you can get
Speaker 1: some freaking giants, man, and I would just gut them.
Speaker 1: That is a brilliant way to lazy fishing. I would
Speaker 1: just leave the head on gut them and brine them
Speaker 1: and smoke them. And what I the way I would
Speaker 1: produce him is there's a guy, Uh, there's a guy
Speaker 1: named Ray Turner on the Delaware River who runs the
Speaker 1: eel weird. And when you're doing eel weirds, they just
Speaker 1: build rock wall rock wall funnels for commercial harvest and
Speaker 1: their harvest instead of like they're harvesting the run, right,
Speaker 1: the eel run, But the eel run is going down river.
Speaker 1: Everyone thinks of like a fish run going up river,
Speaker 1: but they harvest them one the eels are migrating to
Speaker 1: spawn headed down river. And so I was writing about
Speaker 1: him in my first book, and he kind of turned
Speaker 1: me on to how he likes to cook his eels.
Speaker 1: And he runs a place called Delaware Delicacies and sells
Speaker 1: eel and sells American eels, smoke them. He runs a
Speaker 1: smoke house, so he smells a variety, he sells a
Speaker 1: variety of smoke products. But his his his like main
Speaker 1: offering that he sells in the restaurants and things, is
Speaker 1: that his main offering is a smoked deal. Well, these guys,
Speaker 1: these guys are you know what they're they're basically in
Speaker 1: rock holes right, monkey face. That's how my uncle Don
Speaker 1: taught me how to catch them, is just dipping bait
Speaker 1: down into cracks in the rocks. Yeah, yeah, they have
Speaker 1: out here. They have this little like upside down poll.
Speaker 1: It's like a stick basically with a little leader on it.
Speaker 1: I guess, a little hook and bait. He just it's
Speaker 1: almost like jigging for him. Yeah, you only have you
Speaker 1: only have like six inches of wire off the end
Speaker 1: of your rod because you want to be able to cram.
Speaker 1: You want to be able to cram the stick back
Speaker 1: into things. Then you're pretty you'll feel and they're big,
Speaker 1: you know, you'll feel them in. They're bucking around and
Speaker 1: you drag them out. But it's like a six inch
Speaker 1: leader in de bait on the end of a you know,
Speaker 1: like a you know, eight foot long car antenna. That's
Speaker 1: an interesting way to fish. So there's no line, Well
Speaker 1: all there's a leader. Yeah, you got a poken pole.
Speaker 1: The technical the tentnacle term be a poken pole with
Speaker 1: a leader like a wire on the end with a hook,
Speaker 1: and you're just trying to deliver that bait by cramming
Speaker 1: it into cavities under rocks. Any kind of cave thing
Speaker 1: and you'll hook him. Sometimes what you gotta be careful about.
Speaker 1: You gotta think ahead, like are you gonna be able
Speaker 1: to drag a big gass deal out of there? Because
Speaker 1: he might have come in some other route, Like let's
Speaker 1: say he's got something you don't even know about where
Speaker 1: he's coming in some hole and then he winds up
Speaker 1: in the spot and you cram through some little crack
Speaker 1: to get him, and then you get him where he's on,
Speaker 1: but you can't get him out how you came in.
Speaker 1: So you gotta make sure you're aways fishing or crack.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be big enough to pull like an average
Speaker 1: monkey faced fell back out of the hole. And it's
Speaker 1: a dangerous fishing because you're out and ship that's just
Speaker 1: getting battered by waves. So it's fun, man, but it's
Speaker 1: like a high it's like a high risk angling. So
Speaker 1: all right, we talked about c q can is writing,
Speaker 1: which is kind of my I'm like way into sea
Speaker 1: cucumbers right now. But we gotta touch on that again
Speaker 1: because the sea cucumbers were talking about the eel skin
Speaker 1: yet no, and that's another crazy thing. Yeah, so well
Speaker 1: so so for these eels, it's just they're basically grilled,
Speaker 1: Like the flesh is grilled, but um, there's a sauce
Speaker 1: that's brust on with made with all of the like
Speaker 1: all the grilled bits that the bones, the trim, all
Speaker 1: that stuff from the eel and it's it's put into
Speaker 1: the sauce and allowed to basically create a glaze more
Speaker 1: or less, and it's brushed on the eel flesh and
Speaker 1: it's grilled. Right. But the skin, you know, like they
Speaker 1: in Japan they do uh what's called uh food goo
Speaker 1: the blowfish. So they that's the one that has a
Speaker 1: toxic part. Right, Yeah, so if you don't cut it
Speaker 1: the right way, it'll kill you. Um. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: they take the skin and they make like a cold
Speaker 1: skin kind of like salad or something or you eat
Speaker 1: it with the flesh. And so it's basically boiled skin
Speaker 1: like cleaned and then boiled skin and then chilled and
Speaker 1: then it's just like uh five minutes. It just depends,
Speaker 1: uh you know in monkey face deal, it's pretty quick.
Speaker 1: So you scrape all the slime off, clean it, purge it,
Speaker 1: rubbing a little salt, rinse it in some water, uh,
Speaker 1: and get all the meat off and then you can
Speaker 1: basically just boil it on pot if you want. For us,
Speaker 1: we we put it intide inside a cry back back
Speaker 1: and it's basically you know, compressed in the cry back
Speaker 1: back so it's flat, it never curls up. And then
Speaker 1: we just steam it when it's in the cry back
Speaker 1: back until it's tender and you can just push through it.
Speaker 1: You can just put your fingers through the skin. Then
Speaker 1: once that's tender, you take it out, throw a nice
Speaker 1: path and it's it's ready, got ready. You can steam
Speaker 1: it in the cry it's not in the water. It's
Speaker 1: in the water because it's in a cry evac Well,
Speaker 1: we just place the skin directly in the bag. You
Speaker 1: don't have to and just and just seal it and
Speaker 1: compress it and steel and then put it in your
Speaker 1: your like su vie water. Yeah, you can do that,
Speaker 1: or you can just steam it just holding it over,
Speaker 1: just put it, throw it inside a steamer. Okay, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And then and then you either put it in the
Speaker 1: water or you can just steam it right. Um and uh,
Speaker 1: and then what's extend or just chill it? And how long? Uh?
Speaker 1: Just a couple of minutes. Every fish is different, but
Speaker 1: in this particular case, it's like three minutes and then
Speaker 1: you like slice it so it looks like Julian carrots
Speaker 1: accepted with the texture of like cold noodles, you know,
Speaker 1: and then you put a sauce on ad or toss
Speaker 1: it and something. Yeah, there's like a little vinegar made
Speaker 1: from the monkey face steal bones and some herbs, and
Speaker 1: then you start it with the flesh. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: a very surprising dish the kid. Yeah, because that's the thing.
Speaker 1: That's kind of thing that impressed me most about what
Speaker 1: you're doing is you put more attention into the more
Speaker 1: love and care into the ship that everybody throws away.
Speaker 1: It's good stuff, man, that's the sweetmeat. That's that's the good.
Speaker 1: Like a lot of this stuff is like the you know,
Speaker 1: the chip lands or the skin or you know, and
Speaker 1: there's so many alternative textures or you know, other textures
Speaker 1: or flavors that we don't use. We, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: we have a very wasteful, you know, kind of culture
Speaker 1: in the way that we are, at least right now,
Speaker 1: because in our food practices are so like, oh, let's
Speaker 1: just take the you know, let's just take the tender
Speaker 1: loin and throw the rest away, or let's just you know,
Speaker 1: because we don't know what to do with it. So
Speaker 1: really a lot of it is just you know, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna reassess some of these things. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: thing I think that needs to happen in in game
Speaker 1: management is a lot of states are aggressive about uh,
Speaker 1: salvage requirements, okay, um, about curbing want and waste. And
Speaker 1: I think that it's not even like it's not even
Speaker 1: like a lefty righty thing, right where you have like
Speaker 1: some like politically very conservative states Alaska, Montana that are
Speaker 1: really strict about salvage requirements. So if you think about that,
Speaker 1: you're like, like, the goal of you know, a goal
Speaker 1: of conservatism would be that you're alleviating people from regulation. Right,
Speaker 1: you're not telling your like the goals and not tell
Speaker 1: people what to do, not mandate to them how to
Speaker 1: behave or what to do. But here you have like
Speaker 1: really conservative states who are also saying, no, dude, you're
Speaker 1: gonna retain the usable portions of your animals, to the
Speaker 1: point where my brother hunts a moose unit in Alaska
Speaker 1: where they mandate do you retain the liver? That's the
Speaker 1: only case I can think of where a state has
Speaker 1: come out and said you're not gonna waste that moose's
Speaker 1: livery and that in that particular unit, but some states
Speaker 1: are still like really lax about it. I remember being down.
Speaker 1: I remember going down in South Carolina with a friend
Speaker 1: of mine down to his local butcher. And when they
Speaker 1: gutt a deer, part of their dear gutting process is
Speaker 1: two saws all the way the ribs, and saws all
Speaker 1: the way the shanks, and that all goes into a dumpster.
Speaker 1: Because even they're a commercial process that they have the
Speaker 1: salvage require start in place, and then the commercial process
Speaker 1: there's not even even attempting to deal with it. Ribs
Speaker 1: and shanks. My own two eyes, every shank and every
Speaker 1: rib off those deer was into a dumpster. That's crazy
Speaker 1: to me. You to think about think about it from
Speaker 1: just like a like a you know, sustainability perspective, like
Speaker 1: you got if you're if you're a hunter and you're
Speaker 1: out there and you're thrown away, half of these things
Speaker 1: it could be turned into Ian think about it. You
Speaker 1: could make soup for a week, two weeks, three weeks.
Speaker 1: You can braise the you know, shanks and make stew
Speaker 1: for your whole family for you know, another week. Uh
Speaker 1: you know you there's just there's so much that's uh um.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it got like this crazy though,
Speaker 1: So there's so much on this. We live in abundance.
Speaker 1: Many we live in abundance. Yeah, I'd say in most states,
Speaker 1: you don't have to keep the neck. No, No, I
Speaker 1: don't know about most No. I would say, yeah, probably
Speaker 1: most states you don't need to keep the neck. But
Speaker 1: it's like it's like, over the course of over the
Speaker 1: course of my hunting life, I always learned more and
Speaker 1: more stuff. Like I remember we used to always bone
Speaker 1: out our shanks and just grind them for burger and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, Ship, you can make all kinds
Speaker 1: of good stuff with shanks. And then I remember the
Speaker 1: first time I ever tried to mess It was my
Speaker 1: third year of college. We started trying to mess with
Speaker 1: cooking deer tongues and we couldn't really figure it out,
Speaker 1: but eventually got it figured out. I'm like, oh, no, Ship,
Speaker 1: you can cook tongue. And then on down the line,
Speaker 1: right and anything. You get to a point where you're like, man,
Speaker 1: I'm getting new point where I'm really utilizing a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff. But then last night I eat with you
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, I haven't even scratched the surface.
Speaker 1: I'm still like, recently we discovered collars on fish. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the meat surrounding the meat surrounding the um behind
Speaker 1: the gill cover like the throat of the fish. Okay.
Speaker 1: Uh still discovered that. I was like, no, ship, I
Speaker 1: can't believe how many pounds of this stuff we have.
Speaker 1: How many pounds of this stuff we're thrown away? You know?
Speaker 1: Another thing like, uh like on the waste thing, man,
Speaker 1: is black bears? You really like you did? You really
Speaker 1: were hunting bears the spring and BC. Yeah, um, I've
Speaker 1: never like, I'm never eating organs on bears, even though
Speaker 1: obviously they'd be fine. I can't think of ever eating
Speaker 1: a bear heart because I feel like, uh, you know, man,
Speaker 1: I mean, for lack of a better word, I feel
Speaker 1: like there's like a lot of weird uh almost like
Speaker 1: a spirit like for lack of a better word, like
Speaker 1: a spirituality thing, man, or like a bear heart. Like
Speaker 1: it's just like as I can't look at it as
Speaker 1: an appetizing thing for some reason. But you were saying
Speaker 1: there's a tradition in Scotland that you cut an X. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's an all. Yeah, the tip of the heart. I
Speaker 1: feel you on that. I understand what you mean by
Speaker 1: that and obviously not the first person to think it
Speaker 1: because of what you told me that when we're talking
Speaker 1: about heart. No, I mean it took me a while
Speaker 1: to get to the point to be able to even
Speaker 1: one a hunt of bear. In fact, some of it
Speaker 1: came from just actually watching your show too. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there's an old tradition where you basically make an X
Speaker 1: in the bottom of the heart and they say it's
Speaker 1: supposed to release the soul, right, so it's basically allows
Speaker 1: you to you know, consume this thing freely. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then so I never a bare heart. I never a
Speaker 1: bare tongue for another illogical reason because when I used
Speaker 1: to send bears and to get them tested for trickin nosis, um,
Speaker 1: they want the tongue because apparently it's a great there's
Speaker 1: a lot of larva getting the tongue and that's stuck
Speaker 1: in my head. Um, you know, sorry to that just
Speaker 1: brings up a question for me. Is Steve and I
Speaker 1: both carriers of did you have a sore tongue when
Speaker 1: you had sore back muscles, eggs. My tongue never got sore.
Speaker 1: You got a sore tongue. No, So you're saying that
Speaker 1: it never goes away completely, Well, they only know from
Speaker 1: animals that they've It's hard for them to really map
Speaker 1: uh when it goes away because you have to you'd
Speaker 1: have to have an infected animal. No, I mean, I
Speaker 1: mean you're you know, as a consumer of at least yeah,
Speaker 1: you stay infected at least ten years. You can't get sick.
Speaker 1: You have to take medicine because you can't. You can't
Speaker 1: unless you ate your own arm. You can't get sick. Again,
Speaker 1: you're a carrier, and when something scavenges your carcass, they'll
Speaker 1: get sick. But you can't get sick from your own
Speaker 1: infected meat. It's out of your digestive track and the
Speaker 1: larva living calcified cysts in your muscle. So the bear
Speaker 1: that we got sick from head I think it was
Speaker 1: eight hundred and sixty eight larva per graham. So if
Speaker 1: you ate a pound of that bear, you ate a
Speaker 1: half million larva and they die at hundred sixty five degrees.
Speaker 1: So what do you what do you like? How do
Speaker 1: you get rid? Of it. What do you You gotta
Speaker 1: take pills unless you catch it right away, like if
Speaker 1: you ate I gather, if if you ate infected meat,
Speaker 1: like let's say you ate some raw meat you found
Speaker 1: in your buddy's fridge, and then your buddies like that
Speaker 1: day or the next day, your bodies like, dude, that
Speaker 1: was bear meat. You're bucked. If you tend took the
Speaker 1: d worming pills, you'll head some of it off. But
Speaker 1: once they get along in their life cycle enough and
Speaker 1: you start getting like the muscle eggs and it's just
Speaker 1: a month later. You missed your chance because you don't
Speaker 1: get sick for a for a month. In a month,
Speaker 1: you get muscle pain. And what that muscle pain is?
Speaker 1: I mean you might have some gastro intestinal upset that
Speaker 1: you would just pass off as any number of things.
Speaker 1: The muscle ache is so peculiar and intense that then
Speaker 1: you're like, something ain't right. But by then the pills
Speaker 1: like do any good. But even then, that's nine in
Speaker 1: ten cases in the in our country are misdiagnosed for
Speaker 1: a fever. Yeah, be is you know when you get
Speaker 1: the flu and you get muscle ages. It took me
Speaker 1: the only reason I would have never put it together
Speaker 1: if three of the guys I worked with weren't all
Speaker 1: complaining about the same thing and we hadn't been together
Speaker 1: for a month. I wonder, if I have trickin nosis,
Speaker 1: you might you'll be all right from the past. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you got you had a similar bounce, A lot
Speaker 1: of stuff sounds very familiar. You'd be like, dude, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you might be like dude, I just like been feeling
Speaker 1: like shit, I got wicked muscle pains, I got some
Speaker 1: kind of something. Yeah, I mean I felt like I
Speaker 1: had run a marathon ten days later. Yeah, I kept
Speaker 1: thinking I had a weightlifting injury across my entire body.
Speaker 1: So and then you'll hang out and then like ten, eleven, twelve,
Speaker 1: fourteen days later, you're just back to normal and you
Speaker 1: got through it, but you're infected. Now. To say, like
Speaker 1: how long you're infected for it, you'd have to know.
Speaker 1: This is let me give it. Let me give an
Speaker 1: ex ample. When I was at the Mountain House factory
Speaker 1: mountain House freeze dried food, I was like, Hey, what's
Speaker 1: the shelf stability of Mountain House freeze dried food? And
Speaker 1: they're like, well, we don't really know. I mean, we
Speaker 1: know what we'll say like a defendable position. But a
Speaker 1: peculiarity of it is that we have some from a
Speaker 1: long time ago that we've kept in a controlled space
Speaker 1: and it's still good. But we can only tell like that.
Speaker 1: We don't know the far end of it. We only
Speaker 1: know like what the oldest sample we have is. And
Speaker 1: to really map out like how long you stay infected,
Speaker 1: you'd have to have animal that you knew got infected
Speaker 1: and when it got infected, and then watch it for
Speaker 1: twenty years and then butcher it's meat and see if
Speaker 1: the sisters are still good. And since no one's really
Speaker 1: done that, they can't say for certain how long something
Speaker 1: can stay infected for. It would be interesting. I should donate.
Speaker 1: I might donate my body to science when I die,
Speaker 1: because I thought they could just take a chunk a
Speaker 1: flesh and do a biops. Yeah, but I don't want
Speaker 1: to go through that, so so yeah I could. I could.
Speaker 1: I should wait a decade. I should wait a decade
Speaker 1: from infection, which should be I don't know what year
Speaker 1: was it. Okay, So in I'm gonna go down to
Speaker 1: the c d C and I'm going to offer a
Speaker 1: biopsy of my arm. Then they will be able to
Speaker 1: test if the cysts are still good. I'm throwing us
Speaker 1: out there right now to the CDC. They'll be able
Speaker 1: to test if those cysts are still alive. They'll know
Speaker 1: that you stay infected for ten years, and I will
Speaker 1: every ten years commit two testing to find out how
Speaker 1: long you stay, how long the cists are good for.
Speaker 1: But they're good. I know, it's like at least ten years.
Speaker 1: But the only thing that can liberate that, The only
Speaker 1: thing that can liberate the larva from its calcified cyst
Speaker 1: is stomach acid. So you're making notes, can you can you?
Speaker 1: Can you eat bear freely? Now? Can you eat infect
Speaker 1: an animal and not be sick? You bring that up.
Speaker 1: I'll let the honest feel that one. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: know what got me back onto the U. S d
Speaker 1: A website. I think I was researching something else, but
Speaker 1: I saw a something about tricken elysis and I was like,
Speaker 1: I'll read up a little bit, and uh, it's said
Speaker 1: that they that they think they believe, through some research
Speaker 1: that have been done, that that animals do develop an
Speaker 1: immunity um after they've been infected. Yeah, but it's not not.
Speaker 1: And also not all bears have trick an elysis. You don't.
Speaker 1: It's something that each individual needs to acquire through the
Speaker 1: consumption of infected meat. So uh, yeah, you could kill
Speaker 1: a young bear and depending on what he's been up to,
Speaker 1: he might not have ever encountered infected meat. But there
Speaker 1: is some evidence that over time, as a bear gets
Speaker 1: older and older and older, it's the likelihood of it
Speaker 1: having encountered infected me and probably particularly when they get
Speaker 1: big enough that they're regularly eating other bears, right, the
Speaker 1: chances of that bear becoming infected go up. But yeah,
Speaker 1: not all like, by no means are all bears in
Speaker 1: fact of the trick an olsis. I've I've had them
Speaker 1: tested and had them test negative, and I had them
Speaker 1: tested and had them test positive. You know, in Japan
Speaker 1: they eat a lot of bear that is undercooked or
Speaker 1: raw or made out raw but undercooked. They might have
Speaker 1: a lot of tricking nosis. I was starting to someone
Speaker 1: from the someone from I can't. I think they were
Speaker 1: from doctors without Borders, and they were saying, when they're
Speaker 1: working in areas of like Equatorial Africa where there's a
Speaker 1: lot of bush meat consumption, Um, they roll in and
Speaker 1: just as a gent, like when they come in and
Speaker 1: do vaccinations and stuff in villages, they roll in and
Speaker 1: just do de worming under the assumption they're saying that
Speaker 1: are our operating assumption is that everyone's a trickolsis everyone's
Speaker 1: suffering trick noosis. So bush meat you know, like not
Speaker 1: not already dead, but but hunted bush animals, right yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah yeah. And Africa, it's just like they like
Speaker 1: what we call wild we call wild game, but you're
Speaker 1: like like bush meat would be that um people hunting
Speaker 1: wild game and selling wild game. They just say the
Speaker 1: bush meat trade, you know where where people are actively
Speaker 1: out hunting in the jungle, um for sale, it's just
Speaker 1: turn bush meat. It's like yeah, they're they're version of
Speaker 1: wild game. Um, so yeah, they're operating under the they
Speaker 1: operated on the assumption that people are eating carnivorous animals
Speaker 1: or omnivorous animals and just getting infected and getting reinfected
Speaker 1: and infected and reinfected. They're going to treat people with
Speaker 1: d worming pills. When I bought a de worming pill
Speaker 1: for trick and L since it was my insurance paid
Speaker 1: half of it, uh, I bought it in. The pharmacist said,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna tell you what to do with this information,
Speaker 1: but I can tell you that that pill is seven
Speaker 1: bucks when you give it to a dog. But she said,
Speaker 1: I don't know about the doulstages. I'm just like throwing
Speaker 1: it out there. And I took it. I didn't get
Speaker 1: better any quicker than anybody else. Ye didn't took it.
Speaker 1: He wasn't gonna spend his money on something. So you
Speaker 1: guys got better at the same time, and you didn't
Speaker 1: too late, but we were we had already been sick
Speaker 1: for five weeks. Yeah. One of the biggest reason I
Speaker 1: didn't take it because when I spoke, we were interviewed. Um,
Speaker 1: everybody was just about interviewed by like their local UH,
Speaker 1: state and county health department. We all got calls from
Speaker 1: the Alaska State epidemiologists because it doesn't happen a lot,
Speaker 1: and the CDC because it's like mandatory reportable disease they
Speaker 1: have to do they have to do a case on it.
Speaker 1: And the Atlastic guy, I was like, look, man, that
Speaker 1: steroid that you'll take to you know, that that you
Speaker 1: take as a pill is so strong and severe that
Speaker 1: in my opinion, you might be doing more uh damage
Speaker 1: to your body by taking that pill than what is
Speaker 1: going on. Can't you just like chug a bottle of
Speaker 1: whiskey purge that out? And and this comes up a
Speaker 1: lot because it's just fun to talk about, right, And like,
Speaker 1: no one got hurt in any kind of long term way,
Speaker 1: So it's just fun and funny to talk about. And
Speaker 1: I talked about it often and with great relish. But um,
Speaker 1: the point was I gonna make about it. Well we
Speaker 1: got we got here by talking. We're talking about tongues
Speaker 1: because we ate tongues. Oh yeah, So that's always like stuck,
Speaker 1: you know, when you get like little things stuck in
Speaker 1: your head. Right, I remember getting real sick off Canadian
Speaker 1: Hunter whiskey and then not being able to drink uh
Speaker 1: Canadian Hunter because just like the association. So I got
Speaker 1: stuck in my head about bear tongue. You got the
Speaker 1: image of like little maggots. Yeah, and so it turned
Speaker 1: me off. But you uh, from your bear, you got
Speaker 1: the spring. You know, you're very generous. You only get
Speaker 1: one tongue out of a bear, and you shared with
Speaker 1: me some bare tongue. The base of the tongue. You
Speaker 1: pointed out what you like the fatty party, and that's
Speaker 1: like cooking tongue. But you also did something that I've
Speaker 1: always heard about with um illegal wildlife trafficking in Asia,
Speaker 1: which is bare paw. Talk about how you handled bear paw,
Speaker 1: which I am guilty of having never that was in
Speaker 1: my discard pile skin the pause to save the hide,
Speaker 1: but never using my paws because they were like, I
Speaker 1: just didn't think about it. I had no idea. Well,
Speaker 1: if you really think through like the ananoity of a paul, right,
Speaker 1: if you got you start at the top, You've got
Speaker 1: you know, the skin, and then the pad, and then
Speaker 1: all of that connective tissue and tendons and deliciousness underneath that.
Speaker 1: Then the meat around the knuckles, the cartilage and all
Speaker 1: that stuff. So there's a lot of layers of flavor
Speaker 1: in there, right, and uh for those who like maybe
Speaker 1: chicken feet or you know, something along those lines. But
Speaker 1: but basically we we just uh we just blanch off
Speaker 1: the that outer skin and the hair and then you
Speaker 1: can raise it just like you would anybraise, like a shank. Right,
Speaker 1: you can throw it in some fats meromatics. You're just
Speaker 1: throwing a little broth that does raise it and then
Speaker 1: we grill it afterwards. So but it's got all those layers,
Speaker 1: got all those layers of flavor. It's used so much
Speaker 1: that has you know, a ton of flavor already. It's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite things. I'm just trying to think
Speaker 1: of something to equate it too, but I can't think
Speaker 1: of something to equate it too, because it was Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the parallel I mean on the I mean you've
Speaker 1: got that You've got that collagen on the outside. Right,
Speaker 1: it's like a like chicken feet almost right. That's what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to describe, is that collagen that you could, um,
Speaker 1: it would be hard to cut it with a fork,
Speaker 1: choose up nice, and it's like the it's like the
Speaker 1: texture and consistency of raw abalone. I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: like a little crunch to it. Yeah, it's got a
Speaker 1: little crunch to it, and you can keep cooking and
Speaker 1: it'll get really soft like if you wanted to. But
Speaker 1: we've decided to leave a little twosome ryan to get
Speaker 1: a little texture in there. I'm telling you what, man,
Speaker 1: if you took a bear paw like that and laid
Speaker 1: it out in front of those people, and so I'll
Speaker 1: give you ten guesses what the hell that is? No
Speaker 1: one is gonna guess. You know, Actually it's not like
Speaker 1: the freaking claw on there. Yeah. Yeah. The writer Jim
Speaker 1: Harrison Um, who was an avid hunter and fisherman, he
Speaker 1: always said that he can't he saw a skinned out
Speaker 1: bear and could never eat bear because it was like
Speaker 1: he was looking at a skinned out human. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's shockingly similar, right, like it's it's definitely I knew
Speaker 1: that going into it. This is the first bear I
Speaker 1: ever got. Yeah, it's better not to have if you
Speaker 1: have that problem, if that problem would trip you up,
Speaker 1: don't hang it, skin it up. I've never met a
Speaker 1: person that's been involved with a bear that didn't say
Speaker 1: that about it. I don't get it like I thought.
Speaker 1: I don't get it. It just I don't look at
Speaker 1: and be like, oh my god, it's a dude. Oh no,
Speaker 1: it's just a bear like I've never had. I don't
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. Because the back legs,
Speaker 1: we just don't. Don't hang it by the neck and
Speaker 1: leave the fingers on. That's what he that's what he saw.
Speaker 1: I gathered he saw one hanging. It was like not
Speaker 1: going near that. Um, all right, the last thing I
Speaker 1: want to talk about, uh, last question. You you have
Speaker 1: hung in your life. You have hung game meat for
Speaker 1: a year, right over a year? Talk about that ship.
Speaker 1: We get a million questions about We get a million
Speaker 1: questions about what's up with the age and dear me,
Speaker 1: and let me let me tea this off a little
Speaker 1: bit but kind of like what the questions come, what
Speaker 1: my personal experiences with it, and kind of just generly
Speaker 1: how I feel about it, and then I want you
Speaker 1: to go. But we get a lot of questions like
Speaker 1: can you age, dear me? And I'm always like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: if you have the proper facility, right, the proper kind
Speaker 1: of space, you can age, dear me. I found it's
Speaker 1: just like a dude with a house and a kitchen
Speaker 1: in it, and that I hunt a lot of like
Speaker 1: pretty remote areas. It often just doesn't come up for me, right, Like, Um,
Speaker 1: you're dealing in imperfect situations where the way to ensure
Speaker 1: that animal is gonna be like ready for many future
Speaker 1: meals is to get the thing caught up and putting
Speaker 1: your freezer where it's stable because you gotta have climate control. Environment.
Speaker 1: Another thing I'll say to people, is what I often
Speaker 1: do for aging on on like a daily basis, is
Speaker 1: I'll thaw blocks the meat out a thaw roast out,
Speaker 1: and before cooking them, I'll let them be on a
Speaker 1: rack in my fridge for a week, ten days, two
Speaker 1: weeks sometimes and it dries a little bit on the outside,
Speaker 1: but I'll clean it up and cook that and I
Speaker 1: feel that that meat is different than what I thought out,
Speaker 1: like there's some transformation going on there. It's tender izing. Um.
Speaker 1: I used to take ducks and just gut them and
Speaker 1: put them in paper grocery bags and put them in
Speaker 1: my fridge for ten days, and they were better than
Speaker 1: ducks that you didn't do that with. But my general
Speaker 1: feeling about it is it's like you gotta have the
Speaker 1: right space. I've never had the right space. Now you
Speaker 1: run with it because you've rigged up spaces to do this, Like,
Speaker 1: how in the world are you able to do that?
Speaker 1: And I also like we like to hear um, like
Speaker 1: if you think there is something that they got home
Speaker 1: without the special space rigged up, you know, well, I
Speaker 1: mean just to I think about Priscuto, right, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: it's you know those old methods of proscuto or you know,
Speaker 1: you rub the socket um and then you rubbed the
Speaker 1: ball joined the ball yeah yeah, sorry, the ball joined
Speaker 1: around the you know, like the femur. I guess it
Speaker 1: is um. And then you throw it on the counter
Speaker 1: by your fireplace and you just let us sit there
Speaker 1: for a couple of days and you massage it every day,
Speaker 1: right if you're not like you're bearing the thing in
Speaker 1: salt at all. Right, and these things get left out
Speaker 1: at room temperature. So so it's not really that, it's
Speaker 1: just it's just a different view point for us, especially
Speaker 1: in America. Right, But you've got to have I guess
Speaker 1: you know, at home, you've got to have just the
Speaker 1: right air circulation. You gotta have the right humidity level,
Speaker 1: but more importantly just air circulation. So all you're doing
Speaker 1: is kind of mitigating the um, you know, service moisture
Speaker 1: and and the air circulation. So if you dry it
Speaker 1: off and you you put it near a fan, like
Speaker 1: physically dry it off with towels, yes, so before it
Speaker 1: goes in there, you know, it's got to be in
Speaker 1: a good state. Like if you dropped your leg in
Speaker 1: the dirt or something like that and you know you
Speaker 1: you had to rinse it off a lot, and and um,
Speaker 1: you know it's contaminated. I wouldn't recommend it right so, um,
Speaker 1: but you know, if you have a good you have
Speaker 1: a good simple you know, dear leg thrown fridge, fridge,
Speaker 1: skin it out, dry it off, hanging in the fridge.
Speaker 1: You gotta have circulation all the way around. Um And
Speaker 1: and the reality is is that the microbes in the
Speaker 1: air do the rest of the work. For as long
Speaker 1: as you manage the process from the original surface moisture
Speaker 1: and continue to dry it off every day and have
Speaker 1: a lot of air circulation around, it's really super easy
Speaker 1: to do. There's zero things wrong with with a deer
Speaker 1: that's been in the fridge for two weeks. Um, you
Speaker 1: need it, you know, rare, and it's perfectly fine as
Speaker 1: long as you don't mess it up in between, right,
Speaker 1: And you don't like is it for for safety's sake?
Speaker 1: If you're going to try age in something your fridge,
Speaker 1: you're saying you don't necessarily like not necessarily you don't
Speaker 1: need to rub that thing down with salt or you
Speaker 1: hear people about rubbing it down with black pepper, which
Speaker 1: has some anti microbial quality. You don't have to know,
Speaker 1: you don't have to, but but you know there's a
Speaker 1: lot of like ifs, right, like like if if inside
Speaker 1: you know there's some sort of bullet damage or shrapping
Speaker 1: or something from that bullet spread apart and maybe hit
Speaker 1: like a little membrane and then you know how and
Speaker 1: some animals you'll have like um, all that moisture in
Speaker 1: the fascia in between like muscle layers. So that's also
Speaker 1: an issue because that stuff starts to seep out as
Speaker 1: you age. Got you so as longways just a good condition,
Speaker 1: then you're you're good. So talk about what it looks
Speaker 1: like after you've had it. If you've pun something for
Speaker 1: a year, it has a lot of mold on it,
Speaker 1: that's like salami. It's got that white pisia on the outside. Um,
Speaker 1: So that how do you know a safe mold from
Speaker 1: a shitty mold? Usually shitty mold is that safe mold
Speaker 1: is that really fine textured, smooth, salami looking mold that's white,
Speaker 1: uh and and kind of silky. A bad mold is green, black,
Speaker 1: big hairs, big spores of hair that are growing off
Speaker 1: the moisture of the wet areas. I definitely don't want
Speaker 1: to eat that. I don't I don't know what it is,
Speaker 1: but you definitely don't want to eat that. And what
Speaker 1: do you when you age? Let's just let's just focus
Speaker 1: on venison for a minute, or antler, antler and horned game?
Speaker 1: What are you after by a like? What is what
Speaker 1: are you trying to achieve by aging it? Well, the
Speaker 1: whole the whole point of it is that you basically
Speaker 1: you know, everything has a sweet spot, like we're talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, you know, and so like the fish being
Speaker 1: dead for two minutes or two minutes or being dead
Speaker 1: for one year exactly, it's and so there's there's Lego
Speaker 1: was saying, there's there's typically two sweet spots. There's right
Speaker 1: when you get it, and there's further on down the road.
Speaker 1: So you got to decide for every product which you
Speaker 1: know further down the road, which which point is best
Speaker 1: for each product? So, um, you know, as the animal
Speaker 1: sits in ages, basically the enzymes start to break down
Speaker 1: this animal, right, um, and they you know, the flavor
Speaker 1: becomes deeper, right, not game either or what we typically
Speaker 1: think of as as you know, kind of a nasty flavor,
Speaker 1: but it just deepens, it also becomes more tender, and
Speaker 1: so you know, at that point you can you can
Speaker 1: cut off you know, if you let something age for
Speaker 1: really like that olt dad leg right, I can cut
Speaker 1: off a stake of that out dead leg grill it
Speaker 1: serve it rare and you can bite right through it.
Speaker 1: We had one time, just perfect conditions where we had
Speaker 1: a calf elk. The the was hanging in a garage
Speaker 1: and at night to be down in the upper twenties,
Speaker 1: you know, in the day time and be up into
Speaker 1: the forties. But we ate the whole thing without ever
Speaker 1: freezing any of it. And I remember towards the end
Speaker 1: you could put you could put a finger into it.
Speaker 1: You could jab your finger into it. Once you're really delicious,
Speaker 1: once you cut the rihind away. And my old man
Speaker 1: used to tell stories of hanging deer until they had
Speaker 1: an inch of mold on them and cutting the mold
Speaker 1: away and then cutting that rind away and having just
Speaker 1: like perfect dear meat under there. But if a dude's
Speaker 1: doing it, okay, explain this, then what are you not
Speaker 1: wanting to not happen? Like? What are the things when
Speaker 1: you look and be like, oh, I need to figure
Speaker 1: something out because this is going south. It's it's all
Speaker 1: about moisture control. Moisture control, air circulation is long. It
Speaker 1: just look if you look at it and it's a
Speaker 1: it's like a soppy mess. I wouldn't need it. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't recommend it. What about what about older There should
Speaker 1: never be a foul order. No, there's never a foul order, right,
Speaker 1: so you should you should never have any kind of
Speaker 1: like nothing. You should be uh, you know, after the
Speaker 1: first few days, it's gonna dry and it's gonna drip
Speaker 1: Any blood will drain off, any moisture will basically drip off,
Speaker 1: and you're in you're diligent about and you just wipe
Speaker 1: it down every day. You keep a fan on it.
Speaker 1: Basically the easiest way to do it is just to
Speaker 1: keep a fan directly on the meat or you know,
Speaker 1: if you have a fridge, just put a little fan
Speaker 1: inside there, which isn't always the easiest thing to do,
Speaker 1: but you just cut a little hole and sticking aside um.
Speaker 1: But uh, that's it. That's really it. As as long
Speaker 1: as it doesn't smell bad and it doesn't look like
Speaker 1: it's completely coated and moisture, there's no like excess moisture
Speaker 1: inside the joints around the bones. You're fine. And another
Speaker 1: thing you talked about was you were dealing with lamb
Speaker 1: for your restaurant and you add taking kidney fat and
Speaker 1: kind of covered the that that ball joint area and
Speaker 1: with kidney fat so that it dried on there and
Speaker 1: form like a barrier. What are you doing when you
Speaker 1: do that? Well, So in that instance, we're basically preventing
Speaker 1: too much dry rying out too much meat loss. Right,
Speaker 1: So you know, the the the the outside of the
Speaker 1: meat ages really well, but where the meats cut ages
Speaker 1: not as well. So because you've introduced because in the
Speaker 1: butchering process, you've probably introduced some bacteria onto that. You
Speaker 1: probably introduced some bacteria onto that cut. Mostly I don't,
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but most of I mean, like
Speaker 1: definitely feels different. Like when you skin an animal, it's
Speaker 1: got that the fell or the fascion on the outside,
Speaker 1: and where you've cut, it's just different. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure of of why, but but um at
Speaker 1: least scientifically, but but you know, it just doesn't age
Speaker 1: the same, right, So you gotta you gotta protect it
Speaker 1: in some way or the other. And easiest thing to
Speaker 1: do is just to rub a little salt, you know,
Speaker 1: on there. You rub a little bit of salt and
Speaker 1: then let it hang. Then you're you're almost guaranteed that
Speaker 1: you're gonna be good as long as you drive down.
Speaker 1: So if a guy was gonna rig up let's say,
Speaker 1: let's say you were like, you're like the fridgerator. I
Speaker 1: don't have room in my fridge, um whatever, right, you know,
Speaker 1: you know you don't have room to hang up a
Speaker 1: whole damn deer's leg in your fridge. If you're going
Speaker 1: to rig up a space or a room to to
Speaker 1: do some long term aging, lay out kind of the
Speaker 1: parameters of what you're after. Well, I would get a
Speaker 1: fridge and throw it in, or you can you know
Speaker 1: you can do you can go to I mean let's
Speaker 1: just say that, um, you know, resources aren't an issue.
Speaker 1: Then you know you go get a commercial uh like
Speaker 1: a like like one of these things he's reach in.
Speaker 1: It's like a like a Stanley steel reach in refrigerator's
Speaker 1: got a lot of room around or just like I
Speaker 1: got a little room in the inside so you can
Speaker 1: get good air circulation around that meat. Then um, you
Speaker 1: know I would put a fan in there. Those typically
Speaker 1: already have a fan, you know, but I'm fine doing that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't need to get it. You don't need to
Speaker 1: get into like d I Y, like crazy ship that's
Speaker 1: gonna cost five bucks, like perfect World. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: you get you got a refrigerator box with a really
Speaker 1: high air circulation, and you throw a hook in there,
Speaker 1: and you put your meat inside and just and at
Speaker 1: a point you get to where you're not doing any
Speaker 1: maintenance on it. Right, so after you know that typically
Speaker 1: like after the first week or so, depending on the size,
Speaker 1: Like if you've got a whole elk leg in their
Speaker 1: real elk lay um, then that's gonna take a little
Speaker 1: longer to try out. Right, you gotta watch it carefully
Speaker 1: from long. You gotta tend to it. You gotta make
Speaker 1: sure nothing you know, it's not touching the side of
Speaker 1: the refrigerator so the moisture doesn't accumulate, or not touching
Speaker 1: other meat or or uh you know, it's got free
Speaker 1: air circulation all the way around. But that's really the
Speaker 1: only thing you need to worry about. And then the
Speaker 1: temperature you don't want to get you want to keep
Speaker 1: around probably perfect not much warmer than forty five degrees
Speaker 1: or so or yeah, I mean I would keep it
Speaker 1: at thirty six, keep it at thirty six, and then
Speaker 1: you're you're, you're, you know, all those things just helped
Speaker 1: to kind of mitigate any issues that you'll have and
Speaker 1: you wind up with a delicious, you know, age piece
Speaker 1: of meat. You know. The other thing that it does too,
Speaker 1: is it also it also uh you know, like I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people talk about gaminess, but really
Speaker 1: that's the beauty has no definition. Yeah it but that's
Speaker 1: the you know, it doesn't it's all subjective, but that's
Speaker 1: the beauty of wild meat to me. Is that gaminess, right,
Speaker 1: or rather the taste of wild meat. But you know,
Speaker 1: aging it for a long period of time actually decreases
Speaker 1: that aroma of gaminess that it makes it more savoring. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like a it's like a palatable savor nous that
Speaker 1: you get once it's once it's aged all the way.
Speaker 1: And when you're doing that, the end would be the
Speaker 1: end would be that the dryness on the outside marches
Speaker 1: in from each side and you'd eventually wind up like
Speaker 1: in this perfect situation, this perfect aging situation, like when
Speaker 1: you went too far would be that the part that
Speaker 1: you needed to trim away to get to the good stuff. Uh,
Speaker 1: that part grew and aid away what you were trying
Speaker 1: to say, what you were trying to hang onto in
Speaker 1: the middle. Do you just have like a piece it
Speaker 1: was like a solid rind. Yeah, I mean you got
Speaker 1: you you'll you'll trim off roughly maybe half an inch
Speaker 1: all the way around, basically skin rind around that. But
Speaker 1: that mark, but that slowly goes inward, right, I mean
Speaker 1: over time or does that? Does that? Does that? It
Speaker 1: does over time the head of time and then you
Speaker 1: know so that that's uh that barbary sheep, that al
Speaker 1: dad that have up there. You know you can you know,
Speaker 1: you have an inch that's wasted around you know, Ryan
Speaker 1: all the way around it's wasted, but on the inside
Speaker 1: it's still you know, it's over a year, so it's
Speaker 1: dried all the way. But you can cut off a
Speaker 1: slab of that like for shutto and eat it like that. No,
Speaker 1: ship man, man, that's like I gotta start getting more
Speaker 1: into that ship. Like I've done some I've done some
Speaker 1: of that stuff. Only like what because conditions were right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I'll say I'll send you you know what you
Speaker 1: do is we can. I can send you a spect
Speaker 1: later on, like the perfect the perfect environmental conditions for
Speaker 1: all that. Yeah, we'll put that in our shower notes. Man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, do you got Yanna Yanni like a final
Speaker 1: thing you want to ask about? Oh? I do, man,
Speaker 1: But I think we're at a time really well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're close. Yeah, my colu, you are throwing away if
Speaker 1: you hunting fish and handle your own stuff, you're throwing
Speaker 1: away a lot of good stuff. You don't it's not
Speaker 1: even that you're a dick, just you just don't know.
Speaker 1: You could be a dick too. But it's like you
Speaker 1: don't really good stuff because you just don't know how
Speaker 1: good it is. Yeah, someone's got to show you. You
Speaker 1: gotta talk to people who know more than you know.
Speaker 1: There's there's there's not enough information about it. Really. I
Speaker 1: think that, you know, we gotta look at our practices
Speaker 1: and reassess. But you know, you need you know, it's
Speaker 1: not like it's not that easy to use, you know,
Speaker 1: eel skin if you've never seen it done before, right,
Speaker 1: So we've got to have the information. It wouldn't Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't know that you're you don't know that you're
Speaker 1: not being smart until someone demonstrates it to you. All Right,
Speaker 1: you got any final things you want to add that
Speaker 1: That was the one dude. It's like we should do
Speaker 1: this like every little once in a while and just
Speaker 1: keep talking about it because yeah, I got it. Well
Speaker 1: it's never ending, really, right, it's never ending if you
Speaker 1: really start to look at every animal. Right, there's so
Speaker 1: many and everyone's a little different. And we haven't even
Speaker 1: gotten into how to slower grilled pineapple with clarified butter. Well,
Speaker 1: that's our butter. It's not even clarified butter. It's butter
Speaker 1: and rum our, butter and rum, butter and rum. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: next time. Next time it's all about pineapples. Alright, Uh,
Speaker 1: thanks again. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate you
Speaker 1: guys coming all right, man, don't forget the Meat Eator
Speaker 1: Live event, Ellen Theater, Bosa, Montana, August six pm. Still
Speaker 1: got a couple of tickets. Get him now,