Speaker 1: If you listen to the Meat Eater podcast, and obviously
Speaker 1: you do because here you are listening to it, or
Speaker 1: watch the show Meat Eater on Netflix, you have seen
Speaker 1: and kind of met our buddy, Remy Warren, who is
Speaker 1: I'll say, I've said it before and I'll say it again,
Speaker 1: one of the most just skilled, accomplished hunters I've ever
Speaker 1: had the pleasure of spending time out in the woods with.
Speaker 1: We are launching a new podcast with Remy called Cutting
Speaker 1: the Distance and then Cutting the Distance is not like
Speaker 1: a conversational show. Cutting the Distance is an educational show
Speaker 1: where Remy walks you through situations and scenarios from his
Speaker 1: life and gives you like actionable, usable information, instruction, intelligence,
Speaker 1: inspiration about how to become a better hunter. And there's
Speaker 1: no one more suited to give you this information than
Speaker 1: Remy Warren. So go find it Cutting the Distance the
Speaker 1: same place as you can find the Meat Eater podcast.
Speaker 1: Give it a listen, give it a review. Caughting the
Speaker 1: Distance with Remy Warren. This is the me Eater podcast
Speaker 1: coming at you shirtless, severely, vote bitten in my case
Speaker 1: underwear listening hunt podcast. You can't predict anything presented by
Speaker 1: on x Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping
Speaker 1: system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes
Speaker 1: or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on
Speaker 1: x uh, Jesse Griffith, are you interested? Um? You okay?
Speaker 1: If we talked about death, death, dead folks for mint,
Speaker 1: Sure you don't mind starting out that way. That's it's nice,
Speaker 1: That's that's a good icebreaker. We're sitting here in your restaurant.
Speaker 1: Tell people where we are. We're in Uh, We're on
Speaker 1: the east side of Austin, Texas at die Do a
Speaker 1: uh early in the morning, just about to get ready
Speaker 1: for life service some to talk about death. Tell people
Speaker 1: about the name die is Uh. How you kind of
Speaker 1: regret it? Yeah, it's it's part of a spot on
Speaker 1: part of an Italian proverb that means from the two
Speaker 1: kingdoms of nature, choose food with caret. I saw it
Speaker 1: in a book along. That's good, though, man, just name
Speaker 1: the damn restaurant that the whole well in Italian, I
Speaker 1: should have just done the whole thing and insisted that
Speaker 1: everybody always say the entire name every time. Um No,
Speaker 1: I just doesn't done it In English? Oh tell me
Speaker 1: the title again from the two kingdoms of nature choose
Speaker 1: food with care. Oh it's good. Yeah, they mean plant
Speaker 1: animal that See that's contentious because that's what I would
Speaker 1: take it to me nowadays, could be land at sea,
Speaker 1: could be planting animal. It wasn't specified in the book.
Speaker 1: I mean, I like, I kind of like that ambiguity too. Um.
Speaker 1: When you stumble across that, oh years ago, you look
Speaker 1: real Italian? Yeah, thanks, yeah, yeah, it doesn't look remote
Speaker 1: with your town. No, no, it looked like a Scotsman, Welsh, Welsh, Welsh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a Welshman, a Welshman. Yeah. To be clear, I'm a
Speaker 1: Welshman that owns a restaurant with an Italian name that
Speaker 1: serves mostly Mexican in German, the old Mexican German. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: um so yeah that we came across that, and I
Speaker 1: really liked it and settled on that for the name
Speaker 1: of that hypothetical restaurant that I wanted to always own,
Speaker 1: and then I stuck to it. So we got corrected. Sure,
Speaker 1: everybody does politely here in the capital city of Texas.
Speaker 1: We mentioned to a press officer that isn't it who
Speaker 1: squared what we calling we're calling it? Died way. I guess,
Speaker 1: and he said, you say it again, I do a yeah,
Speaker 1: that slight. It was a slight correction. It's a slight correction.
Speaker 1: You pronounced it like my mom does to this day.
Speaker 1: Your mom doesn't know how to say it. She's gonna
Speaker 1: listen to this, so I'm gonna say she just says
Speaker 1: it her own way. Okate. On the sobering stories I
Speaker 1: was gonna tell you about we uh, just to bring
Speaker 1: up speed. I know you're busy, man. We did a
Speaker 1: podcast recently with our good friend Pat Durkin, and Pat
Speaker 1: Durkin is Ah. He's a great admirer of obituaries of hunters,
Speaker 1: and he was telling us about this obituary he read
Speaker 1: where a guy had died hunting and in the obituary
Speaker 1: that said that it was and otherwise successful hunt. But
Speaker 1: this guy wrote it was It's kind of this crazy
Speaker 1: story where he said his dad like this guy. He's
Speaker 1: in New York and he said his dad had always
Speaker 1: joked that if he can never get a ten point buck,
Speaker 1: he he knows he'll die like his death prophecy, he'll
Speaker 1: shoot a ten point and die. So one day he's
Speaker 1: hunting and shoots a buck and walks over there and
Speaker 1: counts and there's ten points and he stands up and
Speaker 1: he thinks himself, oh boy, now we'll come. But nothing happens,
Speaker 1: and he lives. And his kids an always joke when
Speaker 1: he made his prophecy that he would kill a ten
Speaker 1: point buck and die, his kids always joke that we're
Speaker 1: gonna drag the buck out of the woods and then
Speaker 1: we'll come back and get you. Eight years goes by
Speaker 1: from when he gets a ten point and they're all
Speaker 1: out hunt in the woods. Their mothers there, kids are there,
Speaker 1: dad's there, and they're checking in with dad on the radio.
Speaker 1: The dad shoots, um, they check in, you've got one.
Speaker 1: They're gonna check back in a little bit. And eventually
Speaker 1: keeps trying to get his dad on the radio, but
Speaker 1: he can't raise him. So eventually walks over and finds
Speaker 1: his dad land sitting against a tree, stone dead, just
Speaker 1: like heart attack just killed him. Calls the mom and brother,
Speaker 1: everybody comes over the tree and they have a big cry.
Speaker 1: Then they're trying to figure out because he did shoot,
Speaker 1: and they go fine, where he had shot a buck
Speaker 1: and it was an eight point buck and he shot
Speaker 1: at eight point buck, had dragged it a little ways
Speaker 1: had gutted it most not been feeling good, went back
Speaker 1: and sat against his tree and expired. And they called
Speaker 1: the medical you know, called and everything, and they came
Speaker 1: out and they were going to load him on this
Speaker 1: little gurney thing to carry him out of there. And
Speaker 1: the kids grabbed the buck and they said they had
Speaker 1: the buck back to the truck before Dad was it's
Speaker 1: a good story. It's a good story. You like that one.
Speaker 1: He left out that little detail about where he drug
Speaker 1: it from. You do that purposely? No, tell me about
Speaker 1: how it was on the neighbor. You know what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. Yeah, I read the email. He dropped it
Speaker 1: off the neighbors, remember that far So I sort of
Speaker 1: in my mind I was kept thinking like, it wasn't
Speaker 1: really like shooting the buck that did it. It was
Speaker 1: the fact that he had like shot on the neighbors
Speaker 1: just slightly. Because remember he goes, the sun goes and
Speaker 1: kind of backtracks because I think he ends up finding
Speaker 1: the heart and the liver maybe. Um. Anyways, he backtracks
Speaker 1: and he goes, oh, he shot it just onto the neighbors.
Speaker 1: Oh so you're confusing Another story. The same dude told
Speaker 1: I'm gonna come back to that story because it tells
Speaker 1: the character of his old man. Well, go ahead, No,
Speaker 1: I know, but that was a whole other story, right
Speaker 1: about the hearts and the livers. It was, But he
Speaker 1: still backtracks his dad's dying buck to the neighbors. And
Speaker 1: so I felt like it wasn't really necessarily just the
Speaker 1: killing the buck. It was the fact that, like it
Speaker 1: was on the neighbors and all of a sudden, there
Speaker 1: had to be this great this excitement and you know,
Speaker 1: exertion of quickly dragging it, you know, under over offence
Speaker 1: and you know, if you're not used to doing that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Back to head down the hill and
Speaker 1: find a blood trail. I take it to where I
Speaker 1: can see where the deer had fallen, about forty yards
Speaker 1: onto the neighboring property. I see where the buck had
Speaker 1: been dragged guts in up a steep hill to our
Speaker 1: side of the property line. There it was gutted. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing that speaks to the character of his old man.
Speaker 1: He says, he's out hunting with his old man and
Speaker 1: they're hunting just north of Syracuse and uh throughout the woods.
Speaker 1: He's twelve, even though he wasn't supposed to be hunting
Speaker 1: at that age, and he here's a shot behind him.
Speaker 1: His dad's sitting somewhere. He's sitting here, and the kid,
Speaker 1: the guy that's right in here's a shot, I am
Speaker 1: behind him and he gets cold and wants to wander around.
Speaker 1: So he goes back to investigate what happened at the
Speaker 1: shot and realized the guy had got it a deer
Speaker 1: um and left the heart and liver, So he takes
Speaker 1: the heart out of the gut pile and later winds
Speaker 1: up back at the truck to meet up with his dad,
Speaker 1: and his dad explains, you know, I found some gut
Speaker 1: pile and the guy only took the heart, so I
Speaker 1: grabbed the liver. That's a good one. Uh. The other
Speaker 1: dude rolled in. Let me check this one real quick.
Speaker 1: Here's not one about guys dying. This kid his uncle's
Speaker 1: got type one diabetes and dies some complications of type
Speaker 1: one diabetes, and he had had the lower part of
Speaker 1: his right leg amputated at the knee down. Did I
Speaker 1: make clearly this is his kid's uncle. There's a hunter.
Speaker 1: There's a dude. Okay, there's this mug who's a kid
Speaker 1: kidd ish his uncle dies. His uncle dies of complications
Speaker 1: from type one diabetes, and not only that, but in
Speaker 1: his struggles with the disease, had had his right leg
Speaker 1: removed from the knee down. He dies a few days
Speaker 1: before deer opener. They have the wake on the opener,
Speaker 1: so he can't go out hunting in the morning. Gets
Speaker 1: through the funeral deal, runs out to go hunting. Here
Speaker 1: comes a nice buck, shoots the buck, buck falls over,
Speaker 1: and he comes down and realizes that the buck is
Speaker 1: missing from the knee down of the leg. That's that's bizarre.
Speaker 1: I think that he speaks to Yann because Yanni believes
Speaker 1: in like summoning stuff and whatnot. I also believe it
Speaker 1: just amazing coincidence. You're comfortable with amazing coincidence? Yeah, we
Speaker 1: should we get into the corner cross. He thinks it's
Speaker 1: been started to be taking up all your time here, Jesse,
Speaker 1: right there, no more stories about death. I got more.
Speaker 1: But once you're sad, I'll tell you. We'll talk about court. No,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you the super sad one. It's just
Speaker 1: like it's it's like it's almost like you shouldn't even
Speaker 1: bring it up. Well, maybe you shouldn't really you want
Speaker 1: to hear a quick one where uh, no one dies.
Speaker 1: But it's an injury. Fine, it's not a bad injury.
Speaker 1: I was sharing a story about my brother in law.
Speaker 1: You're familire with barefoot skiing, you skier? How old are you?
Speaker 1: I'm not a skier. But you remember when people used
Speaker 1: to water ski a lot before they all start wakeboarding,
Speaker 1: and you are you familiar with barefoot skiing? No? But
Speaker 1: if I said, hey, man, we were out barefooting for
Speaker 1: the weekend, No, I have no idea what you're talking
Speaker 1: about skiing with no skis, just standing there barefoot. It's
Speaker 1: not something I ever learned how to do, nor tried.
Speaker 1: It's no skate, no man water skiing. So like my
Speaker 1: brother in law used to be into this. He you
Speaker 1: let you put a wet suit on, and you lay
Speaker 1: on your back in the water, and you got the
Speaker 1: rope and the ski handle rope handle in your hands,
Speaker 1: and you take your bare feet and imagine like you're
Speaker 1: stretched out feet towards the boat and you take your
Speaker 1: feet and and you're like holding a rope between your
Speaker 1: feet and you angle your toes like a little ramp
Speaker 1: and the boat just there. He goes takes off and
Speaker 1: you eventually get where you're skimming along the water surface.
Speaker 1: Then in a dramatic move, you spring up and then
Speaker 1: you're skiing with no skis, just toes curled up haul
Speaker 1: and asks, you gotta be going fast that kind of
Speaker 1: Am I mistaken that you gotta goal? Like, uh, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna know that speed or something like that. And
Speaker 1: people a lot of people ski at twenty five or
Speaker 1: some them either way, you're holding asked, well, my brother
Speaker 1: in law I was telling about on this here digital
Speaker 1: radio program. My brother in law what hits a sunning
Speaker 1: bluegill and drove the dorsal fin up into his foot
Speaker 1: and had to have surgically removed. Well, this guy is right.
Speaker 1: And then they used to have this big high dive.
Speaker 1: You see where this is going? What fish? Just I
Speaker 1: feel like you hit a yellow perch? Yeah, hit a
Speaker 1: yellow perch. Drove the dorsal fin up into his foot.
Speaker 1: Took him a while to figure out what happened. No, no,
Speaker 1: not his head, his head. He dove and at first
Speaker 1: he thought he had just opened up his hand. If
Speaker 1: I'm bringing up, why don't you bring up the damn stories?
Speaker 1: You know him so well? I told I just told you.
Speaker 1: They're all sitting in a stack. I'll print it out,
Speaker 1: highlighted and ship on my desk. But I didn't know
Speaker 1: that we were doing this thing at You're like Joe,
Speaker 1: story about tell the damn stories hits in his head.
Speaker 1: That's why he calls his His email is called the
Speaker 1: Bluegill Top fin story Topper. Maybe it's pretty good. It's good,
Speaker 1: but it's not as good as mine. His isn't as
Speaker 1: good as mine? Well, yes, because it happened to him.
Speaker 1: That helps Mine just happened to my brother in law
Speaker 1: and I wasn't even there. But mine's better. Something about
Speaker 1: barefoot skiing makes it better that or maybe they had
Speaker 1: to be surgically removed. This guy's dad, I think just
Speaker 1: got it out with a pair of pliers or something.
Speaker 1: You're right needing those players? What else we got? You
Speaker 1: got one more second? Yeah, let's see if I know this?
Speaker 1: Next one? You don't. You don't one last one? This
Speaker 1: is this is gonna be You ready for a touching one?
Speaker 1: Is it injury or death? No? Just do. Someone wants
Speaker 1: me to say hi to his kid. Oh yeah, we're
Speaker 1: saying how I do. A little kid name Mac McDonald
Speaker 1: mc McDonald mc McDonald nine years old likes to hunt deer. Okay, ready,
Speaker 1: tell people what you're going to do tonight. I'm going
Speaker 1: flanner gigging tonight. Talk about that for minutes. That's pretty interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's probably my favorite outdoor activity if I
Speaker 1: had to name one, because it's it's um, it's fish hunting.
Speaker 1: I think, go out and boat. It's got a big
Speaker 1: bank of lights on the front, and go out right
Speaker 1: at dark, get there when it's uh as just as
Speaker 1: the sun is going down, he put the lights out
Speaker 1: and you start cruising around and about sharing with people
Speaker 1: what state this occurs in Texas? Yeah, so we're gonna
Speaker 1: be in the rock Port area. A lot of flowner
Speaker 1: gigging happens on the middle coast kind of that rock Port, Um, Mexico.
Speaker 1: What's it's. Yeah, it's on the bay side and so
Speaker 1: there's it's on the bay side of the Barrier Islands. Uh,
Speaker 1: and there you you don't do it out in the
Speaker 1: Gulf per se, but like in the in the base
Speaker 1: and uh go out there and just cruise around to
Speaker 1: you see a flounder that's uh kind of buried itself.
Speaker 1: In the in the sand or in the oyster shell,
Speaker 1: and you just look for a flounder shape and after
Speaker 1: a while you get good at spotting it. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like spotting anything, like a moral or or BlackBerry.
Speaker 1: You know what. It takes you a minute to that's point.
Speaker 1: He was just writing some voiceover for a show about
Speaker 1: slight image and he's he's the moral example. Once you
Speaker 1: see one and you see more. Yeah, not the other day.
Speaker 1: The other day I saw one, wham, and then I
Speaker 1: never find the second one. Man, there's always the second one. Huh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going on. Well, I mean you it's the same thing.
Speaker 1: You just you're looking for that shape, um and just
Speaker 1: some false alarms and sometimes they're really buried in there.
Speaker 1: But then you have a airboat. Yeah, you're in an airboat.
Speaker 1: The only the only downside of the whole thing that
Speaker 1: the only thing that I don't really enjoy is the
Speaker 1: noise from the air but drives me nuts. Man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you wear earpro right. No, it's not that it's just
Speaker 1: an it's an annoyance. But it's so beautiful with the
Speaker 1: I mean the clear water and you see all the
Speaker 1: sea life. You see there's blue crabs and stingrays and
Speaker 1: redfish and drum and cheep's head and mullet and you
Speaker 1: know there's certain months that you can't um. I have um,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm pretty sure the Statute of Limitations is up
Speaker 1: on that one. So big. I was just fishing down
Speaker 1: out of rock cord for redfish. Yeah, there's some big
Speaker 1: mullet down there's some freaking giant mullet. Word to the
Speaker 1: point where I would see him up ahead and think
Speaker 1: I was looking at the red fish coming our way. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's some big throwing awake and ship, you know. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I stuck a mullet and we uh and we we
Speaker 1: filate it and smoked it. It's actually pretty good because
Speaker 1: most of the that's one of the trash fish Ley'll
Speaker 1: tell you can't eat. We also start like white mullet.
Speaker 1: Is that you jumping mullet? Yeah? Yeah, me my brother
Speaker 1: Danny's when we when we used to backpack in Mexico
Speaker 1: fishing a lot. We would catch them just to eat them,
Speaker 1: cook him out of campfire, you know. Yeah, they're fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're fine, and guard too well. When we've gigged up
Speaker 1: in the way into the Colorado River, from the bay
Speaker 1: up into the river and you'll see a lot of
Speaker 1: car up there. And we've gig does as well. I
Speaker 1: want to talk more about the flounder gig. And but
Speaker 1: why why why do some guys use why don't people
Speaker 1: use bow rigs? Bow fishing rigs? You can't absolutely as
Speaker 1: a gig more effective, I think it is. I mean,
Speaker 1: the guys probably prefer that. I mean, that's just been
Speaker 1: less time chasing arrows and ship you know what they do.
Speaker 1: And because when you're moving in an airboat, what we
Speaker 1: found with bows is you shoot and then you immediately
Speaker 1: go over the and then your things, your arrows stuck
Speaker 1: in the bottom of the damn lake. The boats fifty
Speaker 1: yards down on the are not that far boat, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: moving pretty slow in this boat. And uh he he
Speaker 1: carries the captain carries a gig with him up in
Speaker 1: the front of the boat. When he sees a flynder,
Speaker 1: he jabs it into the ground and stops that boat.
Speaker 1: And that's real quick and just I mean you just
Speaker 1: come to an immediate and harsh stop and then he
Speaker 1: points and you gig. Sometimes you can't see it and
Speaker 1: he's just like it's right there, like where and uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, and then you and it'll just like it'll
Speaker 1: it'll just appear, um, and then you dig it and
Speaker 1: you have like a real kind of graceful swooping motion
Speaker 1: to get it back into the boat, into a big
Speaker 1: metal box, and then get the gig off and then
Speaker 1: keep going after him. And it's just it's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. I mean, it's a limit of five fish,
Speaker 1: five for a Person's a big one is I mean,
Speaker 1: I think a big flounder is over sixteen inches. I
Speaker 1: mean people might disagree with that, but that's I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a sizeable flounder. Um, A really big one is
Speaker 1: you know, three or four pounds pushing, you know, twenty
Speaker 1: plus and shoes. And the biggest one I've ever gig
Speaker 1: was eight and a half pounds and it was I
Speaker 1: don't remember the length, but probably in the twenties six
Speaker 1: and strange was a monster. Are you reluctant to share
Speaker 1: the name of the guy you like to go with
Speaker 1: for fear that he will become overbooked and you will
Speaker 1: have a hard time getting a slot? Generous? Are you
Speaker 1: so generous? I'm generous, but I've named him before, and
Speaker 1: I'm not telling you I don't. I don't want you
Speaker 1: to name because I might go with him. I getting mixed.
Speaker 1: I'm getting mixed signals here. You know, Ni is the
Speaker 1: fairest person I know. Ask Johnny what about this? I
Speaker 1: have a suggestion, Johnny is the most reasonable, fairest person
Speaker 1: I've ever met. What if? Wow? Thanks, we go flounder
Speaker 1: gigging with said captain, and then after that you released
Speaker 1: the name of this captain. I like, you mean like
Speaker 1: we as in the people here at this table, I
Speaker 1: mean you and your daughter tonight. Yeah, it's being my
Speaker 1: daughter to night. He's not gonna he's not gonna like,
Speaker 1: nothing's gonna change the next tonight. He's not going to
Speaker 1: cancel you to take some other hoser. He wants to
Speaker 1: know that I'm thinking into the future. I am. I mean,
Speaker 1: but he's he has booked solid and he also does
Speaker 1: late trip. It sounds like he couldn't be any busier anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but what are you going to do he catches wind?
Speaker 1: What if he catches wind that you did not were
Speaker 1: presented with an opportunity to plug his business and declined.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not only getting mixed signals now, I'm starting
Speaker 1: to feel trapped. Well, what I would do is I
Speaker 1: would say this. I would say, uh, you should say this.
Speaker 1: Say over the years of ficiing with this gentleman, I've
Speaker 1: developed a deep love for him and concerned for him.
Speaker 1: And since I can't vet and control the kind of
Speaker 1: riff raff that might come and book a trip with
Speaker 1: him and potentially put him in a compromising situation, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to do this because what I'd rather do
Speaker 1: is spend time hand picking alliance that I send his
Speaker 1: way who I know are good tippers. Uh, he'll if
Speaker 1: he heard that, he'd know as full as ship. So
Speaker 1: you're not gonna stay. You're not just gonna say that.
Speaker 1: Let's not name him because I want to go. It's
Speaker 1: just about name because the name of his charter service
Speaker 1: is so good. It's a Captain David Duke Nick with
Speaker 1: surrender at sunrise out of Ransa's past. Surrender at sunrise.
Speaker 1: Surrender at sunrise. I don't think you should have done that. Man,
Speaker 1: Come on, I think it's Jesse. He was just telling me, Man,
Speaker 1: the guy only takes off, only doesn't work in November,
Speaker 1: and that's because gig and seasons closed. He works every
Speaker 1: other day of the year. So and he takes two
Speaker 1: trips to night. He'll take a late trip tonight, Like
Speaker 1: when we get back. He has people on call and
Speaker 1: they'll show up at midnight and go back out and
Speaker 1: he'll take two trips. He's a mania. But here's the deal.
Speaker 1: When you me go down there to go do this,
Speaker 1: which we're gonna do. Um, is he gonna give whoever
Speaker 1: he's got lined up? Is he gonna boot him? No?
Speaker 1: To make room for us? Well, I mean, I actually
Speaker 1: I can't speak for him, but I doubt that we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to. Let's just we're gonna have to book
Speaker 1: a little further in advance now, even though he's gonna
Speaker 1: know what, we sent a ton of business his way.
Speaker 1: It's the right thing to do. Johnny was right. Uh,
Speaker 1: he always gets his limit. Yes, he doesn't like to
Speaker 1: go home. No, No, he doesn't like to go surrender
Speaker 1: at sunrise. Yeah, he doesn't like to go home until
Speaker 1: he gets his limit. And he's adamant about it, and
Speaker 1: he's he is good at it. I call him the
Speaker 1: human egret, a man fish in the mud. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: fet to your left and you're standing to his left.
Speaker 1: It's it's uncanny and that big flounder that I that
Speaker 1: I gigged. I'm not gonna say I saw. He said
Speaker 1: it was so buried in the saying that all he saw.
Speaker 1: And this was in a this was in December during
Speaker 1: the cold front, and we were in deep water, probably
Speaker 1: two to three ft of water, um, and it was windy,
Speaker 1: and he said all he could see where the eyes,
Speaker 1: and he could tell from how far apart those eyes
Speaker 1: where that was a big flounder. But he he told
Speaker 1: me that, I mean, so it's it's it's real. He said,
Speaker 1: that is a big flounder. And I looked down. All
Speaker 1: I saw was white sand and waves. And he just
Speaker 1: grabbed the gig and said, push down here. I mean,
Speaker 1: my my big trophy. Flownder was more of just like
Speaker 1: me um applying gravity to a pole. And that's what
Speaker 1: we laugh about with guides and clients. It's like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of there's a lot of guide clients situations
Speaker 1: where the guy would have honestly done a lot better,
Speaker 1: had the client like, oh my god, you're adding nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're detracting. It was like a contracting joe. Remember someone
Speaker 1: said once is Um in describing a bad employee, he said,
Speaker 1: having that guy here is losing too good. Guys remember
Speaker 1: that one. Oh, I'm sure that probably comes up right now.
Speaker 1: And then the kitchen so that, um, did you feel
Speaker 1: you were described that way when you went back when
Speaker 1: you were Long tang Yanni used to be a man. No, No,
Speaker 1: I feel like I did a good job. He was hustle,
Speaker 1: he was a kitchen man and he uh they called
Speaker 1: him long tang Yanni because he had apparently long tongues
Speaker 1: that he used while working the grill. Well, that's you're
Speaker 1: working smarter. Why would you get your hands all hot
Speaker 1: and burned? You know, He's like, yeah, he's he's a
Speaker 1: longer tongue. I mean, it's not like ridiculously long, just
Speaker 1: like you're you're I'm trying to say, what's the standard.
Speaker 1: It's probably like an eight inch tongue, right, maybe twelve,
Speaker 1: and you're probably talking about this eighteen inch yea long yeah,
Speaker 1: Because that grill was deep and it was tall. It
Speaker 1: had like the slider is underneath it, you know, so
Speaker 1: even with my height, you know, when you'd reach over it,
Speaker 1: you know, I had no hair on, not that I
Speaker 1: have much now on the on the side of my forearm,
Speaker 1: but I had none on my forearms, and then yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing to prove just by burning your arms. You ever
Speaker 1: think about just being just being in the kitchen here
Speaker 1: and seeing all this kitchen activity in the course of
Speaker 1: three years. I came in there not knowing almost anything.
Speaker 1: I had some kitchen experience, but really almost none. And
Speaker 1: we started off at how do you say garment, Yeah,
Speaker 1: salad station, basically running the fryer, doing salads, maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit of dessert work, and then work through. We
Speaker 1: had like a fake wood fired pizza of him, so
Speaker 1: there was fake there's logs burning, but there's like a
Speaker 1: big gas element in the back, you know, shooting. Are
Speaker 1: you kidding me? No? I mean I think that's pretty
Speaker 1: common really. Um. And then uh, we did all kinds
Speaker 1: of apps out of that station, and then you come
Speaker 1: back over to the main line, and uh, I think
Speaker 1: I went to Saute and then I ended up at Grill,
Speaker 1: and then maybe for a little bit I did some
Speaker 1: expediting right there. At the end, we're basically you're you're
Speaker 1: just kind of helping everybody out, and you're just calling
Speaker 1: tickets and and just making sure that all the food
Speaker 1: that is on one ticket is going to be coming
Speaker 1: out together. Like you look down the state saute guy
Speaker 1: and you're like, hey, dude, I need you know to
Speaker 1: Linguini's in the Capellini and Orechietti coming up in two.
Speaker 1: And then you look at the grill guy and you're like,
Speaker 1: you've got those two hanger steaks coming right yep. And
Speaker 1: then on down the line and just make sure that
Speaker 1: it's all coming together and you're working with the front
Speaker 1: of the house expeditor that's then kind of doing that
Speaker 1: and making sure that their waiter is there to then
Speaker 1: move that food out to work. So as a true
Speaker 1: restaurant man, Jesse, when you hear him saying that, you
Speaker 1: are you thinking like this guy knows what's up that
Speaker 1: spot on spot. Absolutely. I mean that's a bigger restaurant
Speaker 1: than ours. I mean that's he's got an inside Expo
Speaker 1: and outside Expo. And you on a really busy night
Speaker 1: we sat I think just over a hundred and I
Speaker 1: think on a really busy night we could we would
Speaker 1: really busy we do fo. Yeah, you need you need
Speaker 1: all that that, or there's people organizing to get food
Speaker 1: out on either side of it. Are you getting nostalgic
Speaker 1: sitting in a restaurant here and like the clanking and
Speaker 1: clacking and whatnot when we we gotta say a little
Speaker 1: tour last night through the restaurant. When we walked down
Speaker 1: the line, I said, just automatically went behind some people
Speaker 1: and just said behind you. You know, at that moment
Speaker 1: I felt a little nostalgia. You did. Yeah, one day
Speaker 1: I was I think I might have talked about this,
Speaker 1: But one day I was with Yahni. We were pulling
Speaker 1: out of a coffee shop and a guy drives by,
Speaker 1: pulling a drift boat, like a youngster pulling a drift boat,
Speaker 1: and it was clearly like a guide headed out in
Speaker 1: the morning. And yeah, I was like, oh, here he is,
Speaker 1: you know, heading out for a day of the client.
Speaker 1: And I asked, Johnny, I said, does that make you
Speaker 1: nostalgic for your guiding days? Thinking that it did, He's like, no,
Speaker 1: taking some other asshole out for flowing the same stretcher
Speaker 1: ever you've floated for the last two days. I mustn't
Speaker 1: feeling a little better that morning. So the guide the
Speaker 1: human egret talk about I want you to cover the
Speaker 1: regulatory structure, and I want you to talk about how
Speaker 1: he's also a commercial gigger. And what that all means. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean flounder is a pretty interesting topic, I think too,
Speaker 1: because there was a real problem with their populations. A
Speaker 1: few years ago, Parks and Wildlife went in and implemented
Speaker 1: a November moratorium on gigging um during their main spawning
Speaker 1: run um and run. That implies a movement. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: they supposedly run from the shallow bay and a flounder
Speaker 1: I mean, if you if you're familiar with this, this
Speaker 1: is the Southern Flownder, the Southern Flownder, if you're familiar with,
Speaker 1: I mean the way it's it's structured, it's it's a
Speaker 1: very flat fish. It can I've I've gigged him in
Speaker 1: probably three or four inches of water before. But so
Speaker 1: they're in really shallow, marshy bays maybe five or six
Speaker 1: ft deep at the most, and then they run out
Speaker 1: into the gulf to spawn in really deep water. So
Speaker 1: why are they vulnerable out spawning in deep water because
Speaker 1: they go in as far as I know, really deep
Speaker 1: water and they're hardly ever fished for in the actual bay. Um.
Speaker 1: You'll hear about people catching them off of jetties and
Speaker 1: piers a little bit, especially ones that are are a
Speaker 1: jetty that leads out into the bay. They'll have to
Speaker 1: run through there to get into the gulf. But they
Speaker 1: spawn supposedly in very deep water, and they're just not
Speaker 1: really fished for out there. You know, the vast majority
Speaker 1: of the fishing happens in the bay for them. But
Speaker 1: people hit them hard when they're moving them hard in
Speaker 1: November during the run with Rod and Reel and also
Speaker 1: with UH with gigging, and they're migrating out right, and
Speaker 1: they're they're just more active and they're they're in big
Speaker 1: numbers and you can target them at passes, so like
Speaker 1: where they're there's water moving out into the gulf, and
Speaker 1: so there was so they become vulnerable that way. So
Speaker 1: they closed down gigging and they took the I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: the recreational limit down to two for rod and reel
Speaker 1: for the month of November, and then there's a lower
Speaker 1: limit in the first two weeks of December as well,
Speaker 1: but gigging opens back up. For those two weeks, we
Speaker 1: can only gig two flounder. So Captain David offers, he
Speaker 1: offers discounted trips during that two weeks, and that's a
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, it's a really good time to go. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it's a horrible time, right, Yeah, it's a horrible time
Speaker 1: to go. Yeah, it's windy and cold, and the flounder
Speaker 1: a really small charges a lot more charges a ton, yeah,
Speaker 1: charges that December rate. Uh. But it appears that the
Speaker 1: Parks and Wildlife moratorium has worked. I mean, at least
Speaker 1: that's from my perspective. You know, I'm not a biologists
Speaker 1: and I'm not a flounder guide, but the stocks seem
Speaker 1: to be up there seemed to be a lot more
Speaker 1: flounder now. Uh so kind of a success story as
Speaker 1: far as that goes. Um And I think that the
Speaker 1: the gigging guides down there, they do all right without
Speaker 1: having November, you know out there. I mean they can
Speaker 1: also go out and if they have their commercial licenses,
Speaker 1: they can go and get uh flounder to sell it
Speaker 1: into the wholesale markets, and they I believe the boat
Speaker 1: limit is thirty flounder day and they can also gig
Speaker 1: sheep's head and black drum, and so they go down
Speaker 1: there and and uh, they'll they filled boats with that
Speaker 1: and that. You know, we we buy some of that,
Speaker 1: not necessarily from Captain David, but we buy some gigs
Speaker 1: flounder here and there, but it goes into fish markets
Speaker 1: and along the coast. Uh. What do you do with
Speaker 1: the How do you like to fix the ones you
Speaker 1: get flounder? My favorite way is to stuff them, scale them.
Speaker 1: Captain David showed me the best trick. But and this,
Speaker 1: this is an amazing trick for scaling any fish. Is
Speaker 1: he uses what's called a curry coming from I was
Speaker 1: told I was told to ask you about this and
Speaker 1: had it in my notes. I had in my head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he uses a curry comb, which just Miles Nolt. He
Speaker 1: was telling me to ask you about this, But I said,
Speaker 1: a curry comb. He's like, not just any curry comb. Huh.
Speaker 1: I'm not familiar with the varieties. But explained to me
Speaker 1: what it is because I don't know. Doesn't horse. It's
Speaker 1: got those jaggedy it's got those jad It looks like
Speaker 1: a souped up hack saw blade kind of bent four
Speaker 1: of him stacked on top of each other in a
Speaker 1: half circle, kind of concentric circles with a handle on it.
Speaker 1: Um and that that'll take the scales off of a
Speaker 1: fish with so much speed. It's incredible. And any any
Speaker 1: fish that scaled like spiral. Yeah, that's the one firl
Speaker 1: steel horse curry. Yeah yeah, well, Miles Nulty, much as
Speaker 1: I love him, that's just the regular Joe blow curry comb.
Speaker 1: He was he thought up some job. Curry comb like
Speaker 1: an artisn't only made hand craps. So he likes to
Speaker 1: scale fish with that. Absolutely, it's incredible. Probably a little
Speaker 1: bit too big to just run that on a hand fish. No,
Speaker 1: you could do it. No, I've done it. Of those
Speaker 1: young use your company card. You got to use one
Speaker 1: of those gloves as cheap like fish cleaning gloves, you
Speaker 1: know that are kind of like cut gloves. I used
Speaker 1: just for gripping fish because they you know, any slimy
Speaker 1: fish or just being able to grip. But if you
Speaker 1: were using the curry com it's really nice to have
Speaker 1: that glove in case you miss, because I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not gonna hurt you, but we will scratch your hand out.
Speaker 1: So he likes to scale a Southern flounder for well,
Speaker 1: you asked me how I like him. I don't like
Speaker 1: to stuff him, but when you scale him, he's they
Speaker 1: got like little mini MENI scales densely packed. But you don't.
Speaker 1: I mean you gotta take those off. Always skin them. Oh,
Speaker 1: we used to catch them. We used to catch them, uh,
Speaker 1: just fishing the Gulf coast of Florida. We would catch
Speaker 1: them kind of in a mixed bag with all this off,
Speaker 1: just casting out in the troughs between the beach and
Speaker 1: the first sandbar. Just lay bait out there. We'd catch,
Speaker 1: you know, now and then you catch southern flounder. But
Speaker 1: I never did anything but skin them. You cut them
Speaker 1: off in quarters. Oh no, just talk about how you
Speaker 1: do it. Just scale the fish. I mean, I like,
Speaker 1: I just I got it. I like to leave the
Speaker 1: heads on um because when you cut the head off,
Speaker 1: you expose the tops of the filets too. I think,
Speaker 1: too much dry heat, And so I just prefer to
Speaker 1: leave the head on. You pull the gills out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: gil and got this easiest fish in the world to get.
Speaker 1: They have just tiny intestinal cavagies. It's for for how
Speaker 1: big that fish is. It's remarkable how small their digestive
Speaker 1: system is. Because you just go in there and got him,
Speaker 1: gill him, scale him, and then you just run your
Speaker 1: knife along the um, the lateral line which is on
Speaker 1: the top the kind of the dark side of the
Speaker 1: dark dark side of fish. And then come in with
Speaker 1: a file at knife and just run along the rib
Speaker 1: bones that run. This is a this is a exercize
Speaker 1: and like manual riding along the rib bones that run,
Speaker 1: you know, parallel to the cutting surface, almost almost to
Speaker 1: the fins on either side, and just open up a
Speaker 1: big pocket in it. I leave the bones in. I
Speaker 1: know some people will try to will pull the bones
Speaker 1: out and make it kind of bonus and then just
Speaker 1: stuff that which uh usually crab, blue crab, and lay
Speaker 1: it back on there. Lay lay so sorry that you're
Speaker 1: stuffing between ribs and top fil a or ribs. I
Speaker 1: got an idea for the listeners. For the listeners which
Speaker 1: put your hands together, or they could buy my book
Speaker 1: and look at the pictures. Let's do that. There you go,
Speaker 1: plug your book. Man. Yeah, it's the everything I just described.
Speaker 1: I just realized, I got I got pretty picture. You've
Speaker 1: already written it out with captions. Yeah, bok a field
Speaker 1: it came out in two thousand and twelve, came out
Speaker 1: a long time ago. Uh and uh A Field a
Speaker 1: chef's guide to uh Preparing and cooking wild game and
Speaker 1: fish and so flounder is covered along with blue crab
Speaker 1: and and uh to be cleared. Captain David is mentioned
Speaker 1: by name in that book as well. Okay, so there
Speaker 1: you go. Um but yeah, and there's pictures of him,
Speaker 1: but looking like you are. You stuff in the belly
Speaker 1: side to when the top side and then you just
Speaker 1: leave it in any oil a pant so it doesn't
Speaker 1: stick to the pan. Oil the fish, season it and
Speaker 1: stuff it with you know, just tons of butter. I
Speaker 1: like to put fresh herbs in there in the time,
Speaker 1: crab meat Bay, all the crab meat you can afford
Speaker 1: or catch and uh, and then just roast it in
Speaker 1: a hot oven. It's incredible, or filet it and you
Speaker 1: get the four filets off of it. And uh, I
Speaker 1: mean fried. I'm sorry, but you know, when if you
Speaker 1: ask me what the pinnacle for most fish, like the
Speaker 1: best recipe is gonna be fried. I'm sorry, it's just
Speaker 1: it doesn't apogize. Yeah, I love fried fish with a passion.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I'm hardly ever inspired to you, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna fry that, dude. I'm so like. One
Speaker 1: of the things that just like pains me about the
Speaker 1: world is this sort of idea that that there's something
Speaker 1: sort of wrong or that needs to be apologized about
Speaker 1: in certain circles. About frying fish, Uh, tell us about
Speaker 1: the your breading, because I think that's you know, it
Speaker 1: varies a lot. It's gonna depend on the fish. Now
Speaker 1: are you moving on to frying? Oh? Well? Can I
Speaker 1: ask him one last quick? Do you think it would
Speaker 1: work to take your strategy? Have you handled hell abit much?
Speaker 1: I'm sure you have to arrest that man. Yes, I have.
Speaker 1: It's been it's been years. Could you take a ten
Speaker 1: pound halib it, say, and do some big, super dramatic
Speaker 1: version or would you never get that thing to roast throughly?
Speaker 1: You can? In fact, it's been done. There's a really
Speaker 1: beautiful cookbook by Francis Maman called Moman on Fire and
Speaker 1: he stuffs uh all of it, probably about a ten
Speaker 1: pound halibut with I believe it's peppers and onions cuts
Speaker 1: the same way you're talking about. Absolutely, then wires it
Speaker 1: shut and then roasted over a fire. So I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like phenomenal preparation. You could you could completely do that,
Speaker 1: and you should. But on your stuff, flounder, you're probably
Speaker 1: gonna end up eating the scaled skin. Yeah right, we're
Speaker 1: on that a little sticky, but I mean I like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good way of describing it. Yeah, it's sticky,
Speaker 1: it's like yeah, a little bit thicker. Yeah, it's it
Speaker 1: doesn't really get crispy um. But I'd like to leave
Speaker 1: it on as an insulation. And I like the way
Speaker 1: it tastes, and I like, you know, I like chicken
Speaker 1: feet and things like that a lot, So like that.
Speaker 1: Sticky textures is fine for me. You like sticky bones, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's that's different, a little bit different. But on the
Speaker 1: pound halib it, you probably wouldn't be chewing through that skin.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing. I'm not sure you know what you can
Speaker 1: do with that skin, and I've done it. I stole
Speaker 1: this from Jack Peppen jes Pepine because he does it
Speaker 1: with some other fish. But Jack pepping hes he like
Speaker 1: makes little crispies. So you take the halbut skin and
Speaker 1: just cut it and you start to do a flounder skin.
Speaker 1: Basically you're making Uh that's the word I'm looking for. Man. No,
Speaker 1: there's like a there's like a snack product that I'm
Speaker 1: trying to think of. It's the dimensions. No, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to get the dimension of the cut quarter inch wide
Speaker 1: strips two three inches long. You can see. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can season them. You can season them and fry them
Speaker 1: and put them on salads. Uh, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: little strip of fried fish. Uh No, no, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: it's like it comes in a container that comes in
Speaker 1: a container like uh is it? It's not like shoestring fries. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter, but it's nicely to do with the skin.
Speaker 1: Like you know, if you if you, let's say you
Speaker 1: broil a salmon file a on the skin and a
Speaker 1: lot of people when they go to serve themselves they
Speaker 1: just sort of remove their piece of fish and leave
Speaker 1: the skin. And so when it's all done, you got
Speaker 1: a piece of foil or whatever with the whole damn
Speaker 1: skin from a broiled fish stuck to it. You can
Speaker 1: take that off, put it on your cutting board and
Speaker 1: just cut it into quarter inch strips and then cut
Speaker 1: those down to two three inches or whatever and just
Speaker 1: throw them in hot season them, salt them and just
Speaker 1: throwing hot oil and they curl up and turn into
Speaker 1: a little chip. That's a pretty good little chip. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you know what I'm talking about. I mean, like
Speaker 1: kind of pig would be a cheacher owner or crackling. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: but you don't understand. You understand everything I'm saying except this,
Speaker 1: there's a snack product that is the dimensions of what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. Nothing to do with the taste or appearance.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if I don't know if it is
Speaker 1: actually sold as like a salad garnish, or if it's
Speaker 1: just sold as like a potato child be kind of
Speaker 1: a thing. Yeah, you don't also be exactly that long.
Speaker 1: It's got like a little wave to it. I can't
Speaker 1: even tell you what the hell it's made out of.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter potato or corn. I described it so clearly.
Speaker 1: Yeah we get it. I got it. Okay, ask your
Speaker 1: stuff about Bryan Breading. I mean it's gonna it's really
Speaker 1: gonna depend on the fish like catfish, um, a lot
Speaker 1: of fresh water fish, like crappy white mass and specifically catfish.
Speaker 1: I do a mustard batter where I'll take a batter well,
Speaker 1: I mean not about it. Well, it's it's mustard and
Speaker 1: buttermilk and dip it in that and then dredge that
Speaker 1: in corn meal. So technically I guess it would be
Speaker 1: a dredge. Okay, so home and back up. No here here,
Speaker 1: I am. I got a dead catfish laying here. Let's
Speaker 1: just get serre is there's a dead catfish? Yeah, flopping
Speaker 1: around still not even dead. Come on, we can't even
Speaker 1: skip can't skip ahead to I got a catfish flay?
Speaker 1: Here we go. Do you trim them nice? I will.
Speaker 1: If it's big, I'll take a fat and bloodline out
Speaker 1: of it. But if it's small, I won't. And I
Speaker 1: love the bellies. Like if catfish is bigger than two
Speaker 1: or three pounds, I do what I call like a
Speaker 1: three filet method, where I pull off the filets off
Speaker 1: the sides and I flip it over and I take
Speaker 1: basically everything from the throat to the to the anus
Speaker 1: skin that on both sides because it's got that crazy
Speaker 1: silver on the top side. Um. And then you'll get
Speaker 1: two really nice big chunks off of that that I
Speaker 1: think I have the best texture on them. And if
Speaker 1: you if you get a flathead, absolutely like chicken tender
Speaker 1: sex of fish flathead belts, it's amazing. I think Parker
Speaker 1: described as white gold, not not like chicken tenders had
Speaker 1: sex of fish. It's white gold well either either way
Speaker 1: you should. You should attempt it. And uh so catfish, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so mustard, buttermilk, hot sauce if you want, and then
Speaker 1: straight in to find corn meal from there. And then
Speaker 1: because you're making a little like, uh, you're combining your
Speaker 1: hot sauce. Yeah, like I'm a child. Okay, Um, the
Speaker 1: hot sauce and about equal parts buttermilk and yellow mustard,
Speaker 1: um in a bag in a bowl whatever, and you
Speaker 1: take your prepared mustard not powder correct? Yeah? Um? And
Speaker 1: I like catfish too, I cut into strips. I don't
Speaker 1: like to do whole filets. I like a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of crispy, like a thin layer of crispy
Speaker 1: breading to them. But I don't I don't prefer to
Speaker 1: do whole filet's. Cut that into strips, go into the buttermilk,
Speaker 1: mustard potentially hot sauce mixture. And what's your hot sauce?
Speaker 1: You like the one that we make here, also the
Speaker 1: mustard we make here. But um, you I don't know,
Speaker 1: you could use anything you want. I think, what is
Speaker 1: that crystal that Louisiana That that hot sauce out of
Speaker 1: Louisiana is really good? What do you think about Frank's yeah, fine, Frank's.
Speaker 1: It's good on chicken wings. But I'm saying, like, is that.
Speaker 1: Let's say a guy was just down at at at
Speaker 1: the local rural grocery store, Frank's and Frenches all the way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Frank's and Frenching. I'm trying to cover for that feller. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and he's like, ship, they don't have butter milk here,
Speaker 1: Just just use some milk, man, Just like, use some
Speaker 1: milk to thin it out. You're fine. Just he got
Speaker 1: some Francs, some Frenches, his kids milk. Yeah, equal parts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: season your fish with a little bit of salt, toss
Speaker 1: him into the mustard buttermilk mix, and then you it's
Speaker 1: really imperative that you have fine corn meal because because
Speaker 1: coarse corn meal is not gonna stick very well, it's
Speaker 1: gonna come off. And that's that's let me let me
Speaker 1: tell you the real problem with coarse corn meal that
Speaker 1: turns black and is bitter. Yes, yes, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: up being like you get little pieces in your mouth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good for I guess some corn breads and things
Speaker 1: like that where you want that texture and you're adding
Speaker 1: a lot of moisture and fat into it. But no,
Speaker 1: no good for frying. But you know what also works
Speaker 1: really well is massa like massa arena, which is dried
Speaker 1: uh massa that is then turned into a flower and
Speaker 1: it is by nature very very fine and it's I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's a corn meal product that's been next
Speaker 1: to mealized, so it's a slightly different flavor, but it's
Speaker 1: very good. And sometimes we'll do a mix of fine
Speaker 1: corn meal and massa. Um. But if you're in a
Speaker 1: pinch and you're in a place that sells Massa arena
Speaker 1: and you can't find fine corn meal, get that you're
Speaker 1: familiar with that brand Red Mill, Yeah, Bob's Red Mill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they sell a fine corn Yeah. That's say, if you're
Speaker 1: in your grocery store and you see like a little
Speaker 1: they'll kind of always keep it all together. But he's
Speaker 1: that combany is like the company that has all the
Speaker 1: crazy flower. Yeah. Yeah. Another one I like to use
Speaker 1: that used for the squid is uh rice is a
Speaker 1: nice breading, super light and airy. It compliments that squid nicely.
Speaker 1: But I still feel like even with them, it's like
Speaker 1: they always have the course in the medium, but finding
Speaker 1: that fine ground, I don't know what the deal is
Speaker 1: I have to I ask and just have them like
Speaker 1: order in six bags and buy it. When I see it,
Speaker 1: I buy a bunch. And there's actually there's a there's
Speaker 1: a grocery store here in town that has very fine
Speaker 1: corn meal and bulk, and so I go there and
Speaker 1: bolt and I'd buy big bags of it. And then
Speaker 1: if I can't find it like that, then I would
Speaker 1: check around and see who carried that Bob's red mill,
Speaker 1: because he's got medium man fine yea um, but regular
Speaker 1: run of the mill corn meal is not great for
Speaker 1: frying fish. So there we are. We got our little
Speaker 1: mustard hot sauce. What about this tone I got off
Speaker 1: you about the batter? Is something wrong with the batter?
Speaker 1: It's not a big batter, guy, man, all battery and
Speaker 1: then like like it holds so much oil and then
Speaker 1: the batter comes off and there you are just like
Speaker 1: a naked hunk of fish because the batter fell off.
Speaker 1: I mean, it just makes me feel like I'm at
Speaker 1: Long John Silver's. But can Long John Silver's you get
Speaker 1: through all that bad and realize it's not a fish
Speaker 1: in there. They just they like bad or batter they
Speaker 1: like get up driving a batter and batter that and
Speaker 1: then fry that and you open it up and it
Speaker 1: looks like like a fried pancake. That's just yeah. I
Speaker 1: like it sometimes. I think I kind of really like
Speaker 1: fluffy white fish, you know, like what the big old greasy.
Speaker 1: I think it has to be done right now. I
Speaker 1: mean about it. When you make a batter, it has
Speaker 1: to be a little thinner than you than you think
Speaker 1: it needs to be. It needs to be ice cold
Speaker 1: before it goes into the fryer. The batter has to
Speaker 1: be super cold, and the fryer has to be super hot.
Speaker 1: What's hot in your mind? I would say pushing three,
Speaker 1: like really hot and cut your piece of fish. Do
Speaker 1: you think that's really hot? That's my that's my goal
Speaker 1: to town. Yeah that's hot. Yeah, I mean yeah, because man,
Speaker 1: make you they're they're nice like perch flats everything like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a small I mean it's a smaller you get
Speaker 1: it's like yeah crispy you open it up, is still
Speaker 1: like nice on the inside. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get
Speaker 1: like a minute in the fryer. You can't go. You
Speaker 1: can't go like wander off and do something else. I
Speaker 1: mean you're standing there staring at it. Sure, yeah, but
Speaker 1: I think you have a good batter. And I mean
Speaker 1: we make ours here with just I mean beer and
Speaker 1: choose a good flavorful beer, flour and baking powder. And
Speaker 1: the baking powder makes it expand and it helps with
Speaker 1: the crunch a lot on too. You gotta fry it hot,
Speaker 1: and you gotta fry it long enough and then it
Speaker 1: will you'll get it. I mean, you'll get a good
Speaker 1: textual experience out of it if it's done just right.
Speaker 1: But that said, I totally prefer my corn meal. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I will bread fish with flour, eggwash and breadcrumbs
Speaker 1: and do it that way, especially if I'm gonna serve
Speaker 1: them sauce, like put a sauce on top of the fish,
Speaker 1: like when I served it, Like one of my favorite
Speaker 1: dishes is a very cruise on a sauce, so like
Speaker 1: a tomato, olive, pepper, some chilies, garlic, um cilantro, parsley sauce.
Speaker 1: And I love to do fried fish that's been breaded
Speaker 1: and bread crumbs and then it's got that sauce on
Speaker 1: top of it. It holds up really well when you
Speaker 1: can use panco or dried bread or whatever you want.
Speaker 1: But Uh, there was. There's sometimes where I will like
Speaker 1: what we call standard bread and caceedar of fish or
Speaker 1: flour egg and then bread crumbs that's good too well,
Speaker 1: or flour egg, then corn meal because if we're doing
Speaker 1: like calfish sandwiches, like where it's a big flame because
Speaker 1: see when you cut it, like if I had had
Speaker 1: to do it one way, I'd always cut them up
Speaker 1: small pieces and then cut at that angle. Mhm on
Speaker 1: a bias. Is that what I'm trying to say, to
Speaker 1: create edges, right, so they crisp up nice, But when
Speaker 1: you're doing a whole piece, you have less surface area
Speaker 1: and so you feel like you're not getting the the
Speaker 1: amount of breading you deserve because the service areas bigger.
Speaker 1: So then we're doing like big chunks of catfish to
Speaker 1: make a sandwich. Then season the flay egg I'm sorry, flour,
Speaker 1: and then you have some for the egg to stick to,
Speaker 1: then the corn meal and then fry and then you
Speaker 1: get a hardy crisp to help because it's such a
Speaker 1: big piece like a shell. That's a good way of
Speaker 1: putting it. And then you put some pickles and shipped
Speaker 1: on that sandwich. Yeah, well we make a little tartars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically chopped up pickles, make them make it like tartar
Speaker 1: and it but put more pickles on it and tomatoes
Speaker 1: on it. Had some francs. I'm in the fish sandwiches.
Speaker 1: I love fish sandwiches a lot. So yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: got my attention. Fried catfish sandwich. When when you're doing
Speaker 1: your cor meal to fry fish, do you like to
Speaker 1: put some paprika stuff there to make it look nice?
Speaker 1: I usually don't. If I anything, I'll put black pepper
Speaker 1: in there. I do like a good amount of black
Speaker 1: pepper in the season the flare, season the mix. That's
Speaker 1: a great question. You season anything that you're gonna fry?
Speaker 1: This is this is a pet pever mind is your
Speaker 1: seasoned the thing you're going to fry? You don't season
Speaker 1: the powder that you're going to then dust onto it.
Speaker 1: Get some approximation of seasoning on it, Like well, I mean,
Speaker 1: how much how much if you put a handful of
Speaker 1: flour into our handful of sault in a couple into
Speaker 1: a couple of cups of flour, how much salt is
Speaker 1: going on in the flay? You have no idea? Why
Speaker 1: don't you just season the damn thing you're gonna fry
Speaker 1: like it. Yeah, just just put the salt on there
Speaker 1: and then put the flower on it, and you then
Speaker 1: you're done. That's it, and that's it's a good way
Speaker 1: to make me angry. Here. Another fella point out too
Speaker 1: is too if you do that method where you have
Speaker 1: your branding seasoned, is that the seasoning is bigger pieces
Speaker 1: than the flower, right, And so when it's just sitting
Speaker 1: in a bowl or a bag, it's naturally like the
Speaker 1: bigger stuff, heavier stuff is kind of going to the bottom.
Speaker 1: So your earlier filets are getting less seasoning, and then
Speaker 1: as you get through your breading ship getting stronger and stronger,
Speaker 1: and salt here and salt here gravity Parker Hall, you
Speaker 1: want to talk about killing some pigs? Is that a question?
Speaker 1: But I don't know. Do you ever just yes? Uh?
Speaker 1: Do you ever just go fish like seasoned and then
Speaker 1: corn meal into the fryar like that? Simple? No? Never? No,
Speaker 1: I have trouble making the corn meal stick appropriately. Um,
Speaker 1: I've seen that. I just think having that little light
Speaker 1: coating of mustard and that mustard brings acidity and that's
Speaker 1: just nice. Was fried fried food? You want something to
Speaker 1: cut that and you're you're just you're starting with a
Speaker 1: with a little thin layer of acidity, and just it
Speaker 1: just gives the filet itself a lot more like a
Speaker 1: spectrum of flavor. I'm having Saturday night fish fry tomorrow
Speaker 1: night when I'm home, I can tell you I was
Speaker 1: some fish to fry. I got a lot of you
Speaker 1: more miles man, we just brought a bunch back from Michigan.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, my wife has brought something back from I
Speaker 1: got bluegills, channels, what else I got? And flats, old flats,
Speaker 1: but fresh channels and bluegills. Uh. While we're on one
Speaker 1: huge freaking small mouth. That's a good fish to eat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not like his trash. He calls him the large mouth.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Small mouth is legit eating fish. See,
Speaker 1: I've never really eaten him until I was in Canada
Speaker 1: and we were on like her on and started catching
Speaker 1: his big small mouth and out of state nonresident I
Speaker 1: could keep I think too a day and uh we're
Speaker 1: all I was catching was that and pike. And I
Speaker 1: was blown away by how good a small mouth was.
Speaker 1: Bike too. I mean they're painting the ask to clean,
Speaker 1: but they're really good. But also I mean that's cold water.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can talk about the trashy large mouth,
Speaker 1: but I think it's just I'm just joking about large
Speaker 1: I think in Michigan that we're fantastic. Yeah, they we
Speaker 1: we used to eat them. I mean we we just
Speaker 1: it was just like you didn't throw them back. But
Speaker 1: I feel there's a weed we used to have in
Speaker 1: the lake where I grew up on when we had
Speaker 1: a lot of large mouths off we had three species
Speaker 1: of weed seaweed. Uh, you know it's not the sea
Speaker 1: lake weed, milfoil, which is an invasive a weed that
Speaker 1: I don't know the name of. My brother and I,
Speaker 1: who knows the name of every damn thing in the world,
Speaker 1: he didn't even know the name of it. And we
Speaker 1: made a note to find the name of it. We
Speaker 1: still haven't gotten around to it. And the third weed
Speaker 1: was skunk weed. And skunk weed would be like almost girls,
Speaker 1: like a carpet, like a grass. Once you get out
Speaker 1: too deep for the other weeds, there's not enough sun
Speaker 1: light than there's a skunk weed to grow down there.
Speaker 1: And when you ate those large mouths, and skunk weed
Speaker 1: smells like a skulk, unmistakable. And when you eating large mouths.
Speaker 1: There's some part of me like I can taste when
Speaker 1: I eat large mouths, I get an aftertaste of skunk weed,
Speaker 1: even if it hasn't lived around skunk weat. It's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's like psychosomatic now, but a
Speaker 1: small mouth it might as well be a walleye. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree with that. Small mouth is good. It's also
Speaker 1: just titilating to talk about eating large mouth bass in
Speaker 1: Texas because it's so people get so upset about it.
Speaker 1: You use that word titilating often. No, Well, I mean
Speaker 1: I think that favorite words. Using the word titilating to
Speaker 1: describe eating large mouth bass is like exponentially upsetting to
Speaker 1: two people that they don't like to eat large Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they don't like eating large moth bad. They don't
Speaker 1: like to hear that we don't like that word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't think. They don't think anybody should use throw around. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's like when I'm watching the bass Masters, no one
Speaker 1: says titilating. No, no, no commentators never. I think I
Speaker 1: might just like publish a recipe like titillating fried bass.
Speaker 1: What else on fish? Have we covered everything we want
Speaker 1: to call around fish before we get out of frying.
Speaker 1: Really interested. Uh, how how do you how would you
Speaker 1: treat a shrimp shrimp that's gonna make it go to
Speaker 1: the fryer fried shrimp. Um. Yeah, as far as the
Speaker 1: breading process, you can I mean batter, not really, I
Speaker 1: don't prefer about it. I think, uh, breadcrumb like flower
Speaker 1: egg bread crumb is probably my favorite. Butterfloer egg bread
Speaker 1: crumb shrump. Yeah. Um. You can also do the mustard
Speaker 1: butter milk not to be you know, it's like a
Speaker 1: two trick pony. But that's that's also very good on trump.
Speaker 1: I like to butterfly them that. I think that extra
Speaker 1: surface area it's really good fry. I'm super hot man.
Speaker 1: It's like it looks like you double your yield when
Speaker 1: you do that. Yeah, I love fried Trump. My daughter
Speaker 1: also it's a big fried shrimp fan. Do you look
Speaker 1: down on people who make coconut trimp? Oh, I've had
Speaker 1: it before. It's fine. Um, I love that stuff. It's good.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's it's it's I love coconut though,
Speaker 1: so yeah, it's kind of cheesy, cheesy. Yeah. I've worked
Speaker 1: at a in a place on a place called the
Speaker 1: Idler river Boat. You're ago there South Haven, Michigan. I
Speaker 1: was in South Haven, but I was spitting distance in
Speaker 1: South Haven last week. Yeah, I bet that thing is
Speaker 1: still floating. It's a really cool don't know about barge,
Speaker 1: Vincent Price you stole in. It wasn't like the nineteen
Speaker 1: o four World's Trade to Price. Yeah. Do you know
Speaker 1: what's weird story? Man? There's this guy that uh was
Speaker 1: up in southeast Alaska and looted a bunch of told
Speaker 1: him poles long time ago people would go up in
Speaker 1: the twenties and stuff, and loot told him poles. Um.
Speaker 1: I remember they like really tried to track down one
Speaker 1: of these told them poles. They realized was just outright
Speaker 1: stolen and it want to be in the possession of
Speaker 1: Vincent Price. Of course mentioned him, but go on, um,
Speaker 1: I think they We felt like we had a fairly
Speaker 1: sophisticated menu for South Haven, Michigan at the time, and
Speaker 1: this was probably like nineties four ish, um and that
Speaker 1: coconut shrimp man, it was like a top seller. It
Speaker 1: wasn't an appetized It was like it was an entree
Speaker 1: that we had there at the time. And we sold
Speaker 1: the ship out of it. People loved it, so you
Speaker 1: look down at it? I can tell no, No, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna order it. I'm gonna take just a
Speaker 1: regular you know, standard dreaded shrimp over that probably, But
Speaker 1: I mean a little coconut Shrimplet's that some kind of sweet, sour,
Speaker 1: hot little sauce, some kind of like chunky jelly. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get it. I would. I would eat it, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I'd eat it, and I don't look down on it.
Speaker 1: I got one more fry question for you. Are you
Speaker 1: like a peanut oil man? Well, okay, it kind of
Speaker 1: depends on where I'm at now. For years here we
Speaker 1: fried everything in pure beef fat, and I am I'm
Speaker 1: a big fan of, if not all beef fat in
Speaker 1: the fryer, at least some for flavor and texture. It's like,
Speaker 1: I can't really describe what what texture that import? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: frank donuts, we would do them in beef fat. Now.
Speaker 1: Once that cool. If you get a little bit of that,
Speaker 1: you know that wax just similar to like what you
Speaker 1: get off of deer fat. Are you buying that volume
Speaker 1: of beef fat? Uh? We get it from our beef producer.
Speaker 1: Just there's no other place for them to sell. It
Speaker 1: renders that you render it. We render it. It smells amazing,
Speaker 1: No it doesn't. So you're buying, you're buying rendering it out,
Speaker 1: and then megan rendering out gallons of be fat. Yeah
Speaker 1: we still yeah, we still do. And pork fat, but
Speaker 1: I mean pork fat, beef fat, and then some kind
Speaker 1: of high temperature oil. Any of those works. Like if
Speaker 1: I'm how hot can you get be fat? Not that hot?
Speaker 1: Not not I mean three seventy five is really pushing it.
Speaker 1: It'll darken it. Yeah. Yeah, So peanut oil I think
Speaker 1: is is great for frying. Expensive, man, it is expensive. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then for frying here these days we use a
Speaker 1: non GMO canola oil, which works pretty well, less expensive.
Speaker 1: The peanut well, we have to consider peanut allergies. So
Speaker 1: you know, even if it's just a one person in thousand,
Speaker 1: it can they can kill them dead. You know, many
Speaker 1: restaurants won't won't use peanut oil. That's interesting, just the
Speaker 1: the tenacity of that allergy. What's the when you're using
Speaker 1: bee fat, Like if someone fills up there deep frier
Speaker 1: with beef fat. Deep sorry, they fill their deep frier
Speaker 1: with bee fat and he cook some fish for their
Speaker 1: buddies and then they put it on a shelf somewhere.
Speaker 1: It's kind of it's if you fried a lot of fish,
Speaker 1: it's cash. It's volatile. Yeah, it's just like peanut oil
Speaker 1: where you can strain it and then store it away
Speaker 1: and cook more fish next week. Definitely one of the
Speaker 1: downsides to that. I mean you can strain it and
Speaker 1: use it a little bit, but a lot of the
Speaker 1: time for frying fish specifically, I will use a mix
Speaker 1: of beef fat and at home if I'm trying to
Speaker 1: be fat, and peanut oil, which I like a lot.
Speaker 1: And then how hot can you get the bee fat?
Speaker 1: Pretty much like seventy five because the peanut oil really
Speaker 1: helps bring that that smoke point up on the bee fat.
Speaker 1: So it works for a while, right for may your
Speaker 1: gear change? Yeah, how we were talking last night when
Speaker 1: we're eating in this restaurant. Um, First off, tell people
Speaker 1: what we ate last night in this restaurant. Um. Let's see,
Speaker 1: we had a it's it's beginning of summer, so we
Speaker 1: were we started off with some tomatoes. We had a
Speaker 1: tomato salad with avocado with the venison machicado, which is
Speaker 1: a dried venison. Uh, with access finished and shanks that
Speaker 1: have been shredded and then dried are salted and dried,
Speaker 1: and some chilies, mint and cilantro and lime. We had
Speaker 1: the cork cheese with the grilled mushrooms and bread and
Speaker 1: a little ginger marmalade. And we had the bread to
Speaker 1: the mosquite sour dough which is made with ground mesquite flour,
Speaker 1: sour dough and pecans and served with whipped large domestic
Speaker 1: pork fat with orange zest in it. Um. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to remember now. One. Uh, there's some rhubarb and something.
Speaker 1: I'm sure I don't remember that. Yeah, there was some
Speaker 1: rue barb and the whip lard. Oh that was with
Speaker 1: the bread. Yeah, I think you just covered all the
Speaker 1: apps though. So the parissa, we had the raw the
Speaker 1: raw axes with the fresh chilies, lime, onion, and cheddar.
Speaker 1: That's all. It's ground and then kind of mixed up
Speaker 1: and served with the buttercrackers. And uh. That's that's a
Speaker 1: real Central Texas dish, right. There is a raw meat.
Speaker 1: Usually it's beef, but I love it with with venison.
Speaker 1: Your menu has my favorite sentence of all time on
Speaker 1: the menu where it says everything is from around here.
Speaker 1: Talk about that. Well, O our sourcing here and is
Speaker 1: it's pretty strict. And I think these days you hear
Speaker 1: a lot about local foods and sustainable and this and that.
Speaker 1: And we, since we've been in business, which was thirteen years,
Speaker 1: sourced entirely. I mean, we could say locally, but I'll
Speaker 1: say within the boundaries of Texas, much of it coming
Speaker 1: from much much closer than that. So all of our
Speaker 1: even all ofs allives, olive oil, all the dairy, the
Speaker 1: butter um, Texas wine to all Texas wine list um,
Speaker 1: and all the Texas wines are made with Texas grapes,
Speaker 1: which is an issue here. There's a lot of wineries
Speaker 1: here that use grapes from somewhere else, which I don't
Speaker 1: consider to be a Texas wine. M Our beers are
Speaker 1: all made here. Um. All the meat um, and we're
Speaker 1: very selective about where we get meat, whether it's domestic
Speaker 1: or wild. UM. And then seafood comes from the Gulf
Speaker 1: or some fresh water when we have access to the
Speaker 1: you know, the very rare wholesale catfish trot liners you
Speaker 1: know there they don't have websites. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: really hard to get ahold of wild caught freshwater fish anymore.
Speaker 1: There's a few fisheries I think up north and you
Speaker 1: know where you can still get crappie and walleye and
Speaker 1: yellow perchons. It's not like that. Um so freshwater fish
Speaker 1: is tricky, but you know, trimp and blue crab and
Speaker 1: and goldfish is widely available. And then all of our
Speaker 1: fruits and vegetables are whatever is in season or whatever
Speaker 1: we've been able to preserve. And uh so, like we
Speaker 1: won't have lemons or onions certain times of the year
Speaker 1: and we just deal with it. But it's fun. It's
Speaker 1: a really fun way to ride them innu and a
Speaker 1: really fun way to serve food. And it just makes
Speaker 1: it simple. And we uh talked about this before, but
Speaker 1: it's confusing to people when you say that you serve
Speaker 1: wild game because people know that, for the most part,
Speaker 1: you can't sell wild game. But Texas has so many
Speaker 1: feral has so many non natives. Yeah, so talk about
Speaker 1: like the path of how a deer would wind up
Speaker 1: here in this restaurant and access deer or um guy
Speaker 1: or whatever. Yeah, and I think you know, I mean
Speaker 1: to speak a little more to that, is that these
Speaker 1: are invasives, and I think that these are great things
Speaker 1: to eat as when whenever you eat a Ferrell hogg
Speaker 1: er and access, you're not you're not contributing at all
Speaker 1: to anything that had to be fenced in or have
Speaker 1: a vet bill or anything like that, or or be
Speaker 1: fed corn or anything like that. It's just you're you're
Speaker 1: just using something that's that's detrimental to our environment or
Speaker 1: you know, our region right here. And so the way
Speaker 1: we get the hogs, I'll start with those is they
Speaker 1: have to be trapped live and then they're brought into
Speaker 1: our processor live. An inspector sees them, sees that they're healthy,
Speaker 1: they're killed, he does another inspection liver, kidney um inside
Speaker 1: of the rib cage, the membrane there, he looks for
Speaker 1: spotting things like that. And at that point, uh, they
Speaker 1: get a blue stamp and their stayed inspected. And so
Speaker 1: at that point they are just a swine carcass and
Speaker 1: we can buy that and then sell it and so
Speaker 1: we get uh three or four hundred hogs equivalent of
Speaker 1: about three or four hundred hogs a year between the
Speaker 1: two restaurants. Let let me stop you on adamant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you remember the name of the episode we did where
Speaker 1: we hung out with the Texas hog trapper. He does
Speaker 1: commercial hog trapping the podcast or the TV show Lone
Speaker 1: Star Pork. This is the title. It's on Netflix. Let
Speaker 1: me check this, Yeah, just to see that process of
Speaker 1: trapping hogs. We ate all of ours, but he sells
Speaker 1: them to go on. So that's how that's a hogs
Speaker 1: path to the restaurant. And you buy it. When you
Speaker 1: buy it, uh, give me a ballpark, like on the
Speaker 1: carcass if someone wants to buy a wild pig meat,
Speaker 1: what's the what's the value that stuff? It's expensive? I
Speaker 1: mean you're paying the same rate that we pay for
Speaker 1: heritage hogs, like really well raised bargain basement ship. I
Speaker 1: wish it was, I really do. And and ironic that
Speaker 1: it's not that somebody goes up in a helicopter kills
Speaker 1: sixty and lets them lay in a field, and then
Speaker 1: we're paying a premium price for the ones that have
Speaker 1: entered the food system. But I get it. I mean
Speaker 1: there's people got you know, they got gas money to
Speaker 1: get out there and check the traps and and do
Speaker 1: all that. So there's a there's a pretty inefficient system
Speaker 1: out there to get these hogs out. But I mean,
Speaker 1: one of my goals is to like come up with
Speaker 1: a more vertically integrated system where we can you know,
Speaker 1: trap pigs, process pigs, and turn them into food that's
Speaker 1: more readily available to people. And he could feed a
Speaker 1: lot of people with the three million hogs that we
Speaker 1: have here in Texas, especially since we're supposed to kill
Speaker 1: two million o from every year to keep their population static,
Speaker 1: of which we're not doing um And so I think
Speaker 1: there'd be there's a there's a lot of conversations that
Speaker 1: can happen about that. The deer um that that's really cool,
Speaker 1: and that there was a very a pioneering company called
Speaker 1: Broken Arrow Ranch and they started years ago by taking
Speaker 1: an inspector with them and they had two shooters shooting
Speaker 1: suppressed rifles. I believe now they do most of their
Speaker 1: shooting at night, and they have a refrigerated trailer with
Speaker 1: the guy that follows them, and they go out into
Speaker 1: the field and shoot these animals inspectors right there. They
Speaker 1: do this crazy electro stimulation where they basically hook him
Speaker 1: up to a car battery. I've got one of those machines.
Speaker 1: Man ever opened it bleeds them out really quick, and
Speaker 1: then the inspectors there for the whole processing and then
Speaker 1: they chill it down. They have X amount of time
Speaker 1: to get it back to their their big processing hub
Speaker 1: outside of Kerville, which is west of here, and uh,
Speaker 1: and then it's sold all over the country from there.
Speaker 1: And there's another business now and the shooting no guy,
Speaker 1: the shoot access. There's also a psycha follow any of
Speaker 1: the any of the invasive, any of the exotic species.
Speaker 1: No white tail. To be clear. I mean sometimes some
Speaker 1: of you will come in here and be like, you
Speaker 1: can't serve venison. That's illegal, and I'm like, it's not
Speaker 1: a white tail, and it's perfectly legal. Trust me. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I haven't been flying under the radar for for their
Speaker 1: teen years on this one. You know, there's I'm sure
Speaker 1: in game Woard would love to nail my ass if
Speaker 1: if I was selling white tail, then I am not, sir.
Speaker 1: So it's uh, it is all exotics and invasives, which
Speaker 1: is uh, which is great. I think, you know, I
Speaker 1: think it's like you, what you're also getting is a
Speaker 1: really natural protein. I mean, these animals are out there
Speaker 1: living and on these big properties and in the case
Speaker 1: of Access and nil Guy. These are mostly free ranging.
Speaker 1: These are not sequestered beneath are but behind a high fence,
Speaker 1: even a huge ranch. Most of these are because they're
Speaker 1: all over the place now it's spreading. Um And and
Speaker 1: the nil guy live a very natural life. They don't.
Speaker 1: They don't eat corn out of feeders or anything like that.
Speaker 1: They're grazing just like they should. And uh, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a really good pro protein and we're able to
Speaker 1: get quite a bit of it. You know. The big
Speaker 1: animals too, Yeah, a big one, a really big bull,
Speaker 1: and they're monsters. They're so I was eating some of
Speaker 1: that the other days, some body's mind. I was over
Speaker 1: at the first light and they had a little wild
Speaker 1: game deal. Um and one of those boys have just
Speaker 1: been down to Texas and had some some Neil guy meat.
Speaker 1: It's good, man, it's really good. And even the big ones.
Speaker 1: It doesn't you don't see a real drastic difference between
Speaker 1: a mature cow and a mature bolt. Don't that mean?
Speaker 1: The things? I mean, they're like, you'd be just as
Speaker 1: happy to have that as elk. Yeah, you know, no,
Speaker 1: I think it's I mean up there with Elk Elk
Speaker 1: Access and nil guy, But I think access being is
Speaker 1: the best that I've had. I really like it. Um.
Speaker 1: There big body deer for this area. Um, I mean
Speaker 1: they're way bigger than the hill country deer. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so you get a lot of meat off of them.
Speaker 1: And there they tend to be pretty fat, and they're
Speaker 1: just they're so just naturally tender and delicious, very mild.
Speaker 1: They're also really good for restaurant applications and that your
Speaker 1: general customer is not gonna be put off by the
Speaker 1: flavor of an axis. It's very approachable. Do you have
Speaker 1: you had seka deer? Yeah? Or sick? Yeah? Yeah? You
Speaker 1: like those? Yeah, I think it pretty good man. I
Speaker 1: mean follow um pare David's dear, don't know what that is.
Speaker 1: It looks like a big goofy white tail, like a monster. Uh.
Speaker 1: We got all kinds, you know. Our our guy in
Speaker 1: Fredericksburg just call us and be like, hey, I've got
Speaker 1: this carcass hanging. And sometimes even elk, you know, they'll
Speaker 1: they'll be an overpopulation of elk in an area and
Speaker 1: they'll go out there and trap a few and and
Speaker 1: bring him in until we were able to serve olk.
Speaker 1: We're a native here one. Yeah, we just had a
Speaker 1: big conversation about it'll be on this Uh you can
Speaker 1: listen to that episode with the Texas Parks and Wildlife
Speaker 1: director Carter Smith. We talked about the controversy around how
Speaker 1: Texas manages and handles ELK, which is legitimately, in my mind, controversial.
Speaker 1: I don't know much about it. There's, uh, here's one
Speaker 1: for you. We talked about this. What is Texas cuisine? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, that's a good one. And I think,
Speaker 1: I mean, you get different answers from different people. Of course, Um,
Speaker 1: I think that you know, we we cook with all
Speaker 1: Texas ingredients, And I mean most other cuisines in the
Speaker 1: world have been defined by their ingredients. So like if
Speaker 1: you're in an example, well in southern France, like let's
Speaker 1: you you're gonna eat duck, Um, you're gonna cook with
Speaker 1: duck fat or walnut oil. Um, You're gonna have some pigs,
Speaker 1: you can have some freshwater fish. You're gonna eat beans, um, onions, herbs,
Speaker 1: things like that. So I mean the cuisine is very
Speaker 1: defined by that. And just to put that into contrasts,
Speaker 1: let's go to let's go to Vietnam and there you're
Speaker 1: gonna have a lot of fish, a lot of rice,
Speaker 1: a lot of herbs, a lot of vegetables that grow
Speaker 1: in a hot climate, and a lot of fermented and
Speaker 1: preserved things because it said hot climate. And so that
Speaker 1: really influences the cuisine there. It's it's spicy, it's pungent,
Speaker 1: it's very bright, it's very flavorful, versus something in in France,
Speaker 1: which is going to be a little more austere but
Speaker 1: equally delicious. But the place really is influenced by what's
Speaker 1: available there. So in this country, are you know, in Texas,
Speaker 1: I think we went at it in reverse. And you know,
Speaker 1: for the past hundred years we've been able to get
Speaker 1: whatever we wanted, so we could we cooked with whatever
Speaker 1: we wanted, and so we lacked a super definitive cuisine
Speaker 1: and that our ingredients never forced us into anything. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's like defining our cuisine here and there. That's
Speaker 1: not to say that we don't have things like barbecue
Speaker 1: or more importantly, the in the influences of immigrant cuisines here,
Speaker 1: which I think are the most important thing about what
Speaker 1: our food is. So in Central Texas specifically, where I
Speaker 1: mean we're in Austin right now, and so that's almost
Speaker 1: kind of dead center and the mass of Texas. UM,
Speaker 1: there's strong influences from German UH culture, Czech culture, because
Speaker 1: there's a lot a lot of immigrants from Germany and
Speaker 1: Czechoslovakia came here in the eighteen hundreds. UM, and then
Speaker 1: really Mexican, you know, Mexico being three and a half
Speaker 1: hours to our south, uh a huge influence also as
Speaker 1: far as just the weather and what we can grow here.
Speaker 1: You know, the peppers, the tomatoes, onions, things like that
Speaker 1: thrive here. So we we used to be part of Mexico,
Speaker 1: I mean it was we were, I mean until Texas independence,
Speaker 1: you know, in thirty six, you know, we were part
Speaker 1: of Mexico and then became a state nine years later.
Speaker 1: And it's that that influence is very, very profound, which
Speaker 1: is why I was joking earlier that we're a text
Speaker 1: Mexican and German restaurant. You know, it's kind of just
Speaker 1: vacillates between the two, but I think it's good to,
Speaker 1: you know, give respect to both of those. And if
Speaker 1: you go south of here an hour and a half
Speaker 1: to San Antonio and then it's your you really feel
Speaker 1: that influence a lot more and it's beautiful. It's in
Speaker 1: the architecture, it's in the food, it's in it's in
Speaker 1: every aspect of the culture. But there's also German beer houses,
Speaker 1: our beer gardens down there, and like uh Men's choirs,
Speaker 1: which is a thing in German community. It's like you'll
Speaker 1: you'll see the ancient buildings that you know, men still
Speaker 1: get together and saying and there's a bar something like that.
Speaker 1: I've done a lot of it. Yeah, it's it's amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's amazing to be there. And then next
Speaker 1: door is a mariachi band. That's what I think Texas is,
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's not to Negate and the other
Speaker 1: cultures that have come here. Also, you know, Vietnamese cultures
Speaker 1: is really strong. Um there's you know, just like with
Speaker 1: any metropolitan area, you get people from all over the world,
Speaker 1: and I think that's really important to embrace that. And
Speaker 1: then what we do here is we just use the
Speaker 1: ingredients that we have and then take any idea from
Speaker 1: anywhere else, because I think that's like that's open source
Speaker 1: right there. We we we can use any idea that
Speaker 1: anybody ever had about food and just apply it to
Speaker 1: the ingredients we have. Because those are our resources. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not at all trying to imply that we
Speaker 1: define Texas food. But I think that since we are,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better term, such a melting pot
Speaker 1: at this point, that it's it's nice to just give
Speaker 1: in and say that's what Texas food is. Now. You know,
Speaker 1: we've got some distinct dishes like chicken fried steak um,
Speaker 1: which is basically a schnitzel. You know, I'm sure that's
Speaker 1: where that came from. Barbecue things like that, um. Crawfish
Speaker 1: boils you know, come from a little east to here.
Speaker 1: You know, that's Cajun, but it's a big thing here.
Speaker 1: Fried fish um game, I mean cooking game. I think
Speaker 1: it's also a really key ingredient to that. But you
Speaker 1: mentioned in schnitzel reminded me of something I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention earlier and forgot to mention. When we're talking about
Speaker 1: seasoning meet for you before you fry it. We're making
Speaker 1: turkey schnitzel um for Bo Jackson, the athlete who's a
Speaker 1: he likes to cook. He's a very opinionated cook, and
Speaker 1: I made him a piece of turkey schnitzel uh and
Speaker 1: he ate it. That's would you like some more? And
Speaker 1: he said that he would, and I go to make
Speaker 1: some more, and he goes, but here's what I would
Speaker 1: like you to do. And one of the things he
Speaker 1: wanted me he noted that I had salted his schnitzel
Speaker 1: after it was prepared. And one of his three requests
Speaker 1: was that I assaulted before. And he had some other things.
Speaker 1: What were the other things? I gotta know now? Because
Speaker 1: number one was valid that he felt that the oil
Speaker 1: is a little too hot, which which we know from
Speaker 1: the last hour of talking that Steve likes to run
Speaker 1: hot oil. He thought that I can't. I can't remember
Speaker 1: what the third one was. You gotta remember the third one.
Speaker 1: This is pretty fascinating. I really can't remember, man, I
Speaker 1: can't remember what the third thing was. But he had
Speaker 1: like several suggestions that the to the turn turned the
Speaker 1: burner down slightly, salt his first But it was like
Speaker 1: just unusual, um to be cooking someone something I usually
Speaker 1: am watching and when I see something I don't like,
Speaker 1: I just keep in the back of my head. Unless
Speaker 1: it's someone I know very well. Then I would say, like,
Speaker 1: you know what, y'all, You know, fella could try I
Speaker 1: appreciate how forward he was and what I'm knowledgeable about
Speaker 1: schnitzel he was. I had no IDEA very opinionated cook
Speaker 1: knows how to cook. The next morning I missed the
Speaker 1: inner because I was out hunting. Still um, but the
Speaker 1: next morning he whipped us up some scrambled eggs, man,
Speaker 1: and scrambled egg is one of those things where a
Speaker 1: lot of people can really butcher them. You end up
Speaker 1: with some dry you know, and uh bowmates, some nice
Speaker 1: silky you know, like proper moisture level you know eggs.
Speaker 1: Did you know that I make the best scrambled eggs ever?
Speaker 1: Didn't know that. I didn't know that either low and
Speaker 1: slow and slow the best ever, not for everyone, the best,
Speaker 1: but the best ever. Yeah. Do you stir constantly? Or
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I learned it from the greatest scopier. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's what I said, French style. Yeah, that's exactly
Speaker 1: like that. It's almost like a lightly cooked egg custard.
Speaker 1: We just keep it moving. Yeah. Um. You gotta have
Speaker 1: a rubber spatulor that conforms, that easily conforms to the
Speaker 1: contours of one's pan, because you can't be having it
Speaker 1: and you gotta have a good hand. Yeah, I my
Speaker 1: main eggpan I hide from my family. I keep it
Speaker 1: with the I keep it and then they're not that ambitious.
Speaker 1: I keep it in the Dutch oven section of the
Speaker 1: cupboard where no one they just don't go. Well, why
Speaker 1: would they ever need to go in that area? Just not.
Speaker 1: You know, my wife hates to cook, so she's never
Speaker 1: gonna wander over to the cupboard that has like Dutch
Speaker 1: of any stuff in it. So I keep it there
Speaker 1: because when she carelessly scavenges around for a pan, she
Speaker 1: naturally goes over to where the pans are and then
Speaker 1: ruins those pans um by like cutting stuff in them
Speaker 1: and whatnot. And I keep my scrambled eggpan secret. Tell
Speaker 1: us about this scrambled eggpan. You know Diamond, I've heard
Speaker 1: of company Diamond. It's a good pan. Expensive, that's why
Speaker 1: you gotta hide it from people. Can't be having What
Speaker 1: do you think of Scoffier used I don't know for
Speaker 1: a pan. I don't know, not that because yeah, he's
Speaker 1: not a rubber bachelor. You know what, here's the weird thing.
Speaker 1: You know, the opera singer um Bernhardt I think Sarah
Speaker 1: Bernhard's her name. Oh turn of the century, turn of
Speaker 1: the last century. She didn't believe in eating garlic brightening no, no,
Speaker 1: um damnit, yeah any one sec Yeah. Bernhardt was a
Speaker 1: French stage actress. Oh, stage actress. He had probably had
Speaker 1: an affair with her. He was married, but maybe he
Speaker 1: had an affair with her. She wouldn't eat garlic. People
Speaker 1: had like a garlic phobia. And the Scofier was a
Speaker 1: proponent of eating garlic. And he kept secret from her
Speaker 1: that he would pierces, uh, take a big clove of
Speaker 1: garlic and put it on the end of a fork
Speaker 1: and stir her scrambled eggs using a garlic tipped fork
Speaker 1: as a spatula. That's amazing. And she would love his
Speaker 1: scrambled eggs. And he would never tell her that he
Speaker 1: used a garlic clove to move it around the pan.
Speaker 1: Think of that deceptive. But yeah, what's your favorite animal protein?
Speaker 1: And why? Uh, it's either well, I guess I have
Speaker 1: to have a favorite. You don't have an opinion on this, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm I've got a top two that I'm
Speaker 1: trying to determine right now. I'm gonna have to say,
Speaker 1: what are your two favorite animal proteins? Appreciate M. Farrell hogs,
Speaker 1: and but everyone knows Farrell hogs no good. You can't
Speaker 1: eat the Biggins. They're all right, Yeah, I feel like
Speaker 1: you're baiting me. Uh, you can absolutely eat the big ones.
Speaker 1: One of the best ones I ever had was three pounder. Uh.
Speaker 1: The reason that people think you can't eat the big
Speaker 1: ones just because nobody tries them. It's it's funny how
Speaker 1: how that works. How when you just announced that if
Speaker 1: they get over a hundred pounds or whatever, this arbitrary number,
Speaker 1: this line in the stand that you've drawn with Farrell
Speaker 1: hawks eyes, once they get over that, then you don't
Speaker 1: try them, and then you tell other people that they're
Speaker 1: no good to eat. In all wild games, there could
Speaker 1: be multiple generations that haven't tried to hog over a
Speaker 1: hundred pounds because somebody back there said that ones are
Speaker 1: over a hundred no good, and so their sons and
Speaker 1: daughters didn't do it, and then that information was passed on.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that's something that we battle. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: people have a brand and the people that are trying
Speaker 1: to like explain ship is that we're just battling, like, uh,
Speaker 1: what do you call that? Um? Misinformation? And I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but bullshit. That's like like cultural Yeah, been with us
Speaker 1: for generations. Yeah, it's because people are inherently lazy, so
Speaker 1: if you tell them a thing, it allows them to
Speaker 1: be lazy. We resually heard about a antelope guide, the
Speaker 1: American prong Hard Okay antelope guide Wyoming, who guides about
Speaker 1: a hundred antelope hunters a year, and they're wine to
Speaker 1: people is that it's not good. And I can't remember
Speaker 1: the number, but I think close to one hundred of
Speaker 1: these clients food bank it. Don't use it themselves because
Speaker 1: the outfitter doesn't want to deal with it and just
Speaker 1: tells him it's no good, and they accept that it's
Speaker 1: no good. The fact it's one of the finest things
Speaker 1: running around. I mean, like I think tons of stuff
Speaker 1: is good. Anything with the hoof on is pretty damn good.
Speaker 1: It's like a good hooved animal that tastes like a
Speaker 1: hooked animal. It just means that they don't have to
Speaker 1: take it home and pull it out of their freezer
Speaker 1: in a year and a half after it's been freezer
Speaker 1: burned and throw it away. Yes, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that's what happens to a lot, a lot a lot
Speaker 1: of fish too. That's when guys, there's a guy who's
Speaker 1: actively trying to like establish the value of the wild
Speaker 1: game economy. Um uh, and look at the resource, like
Speaker 1: the resource of wild game in Canada and wild game
Speaker 1: in America and what it does the food system and
Speaker 1: how valuable it is. And I keep wanting to ask
Speaker 1: him if he's throwing in all of the all of
Speaker 1: the lazy sons of bitches who bring it home, don't
Speaker 1: take care of it, knowing they're eventually going to throw
Speaker 1: it away, and then throw it away because it's now
Speaker 1: quote freezer burned, right, which is a little bit of
Speaker 1: to you, which is also a myth. But because you
Speaker 1: can say or well, instead of calling a freezer burn,
Speaker 1: we could say that one it's not or two you
Speaker 1: didn't wrap it right, right. But not to steer it
Speaker 1: back to hogs. But when when people were here to
Speaker 1: talk about when people are given open season on something,
Speaker 1: and when you're when they're told that killing them is
Speaker 1: a good thing, you know, it's it's an altruistic act
Speaker 1: at this point here in Texas to kill a hog,
Speaker 1: And so they become I don't know, they're like they're
Speaker 1: like zombies and Nazis, Like it's you have, you know,
Speaker 1: all the go ahead that you can possibly get to,
Speaker 1: just like Ben says, man, you have permission to take
Speaker 1: the gloves off. Yeah and so, and at that point
Speaker 1: it's it's just become it's it's fun to go out
Speaker 1: and kill them, and and a big bore and if
Speaker 1: the slightest justification not to physically lifted after you've killed, it's,
Speaker 1: you know, it's great. Oh, I just I just did
Speaker 1: some good, not like I went down to the homeless
Speaker 1: shelter and cooked for everybody today. Good, but you know
Speaker 1: I I still did I did my part today. And
Speaker 1: that's the only really laugh about it is like dudes
Speaker 1: who uh go prairie dog hunting, like, well man, you know,
Speaker 1: you know I do it for the you know, do
Speaker 1: it for the ranchers. And like if you went and
Speaker 1: asked the rancher, if he said, hey, man, um, I'm here,
Speaker 1: what do you need done today? Fix that fency that's
Speaker 1: gonna be slow on the list of yours. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: you don't see that, don't see that, barnkie clean that
Speaker 1: all out? Yeah, shoot, A ninth of a percent of
Speaker 1: the prairie dog population on my on my land or
Speaker 1: clean my house. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a thing, and
Speaker 1: I mean it bugs me to no end, you know.
Speaker 1: And I understand that all hogs can't be kept. You
Speaker 1: can't retain all of them. Uh, if you're going up
Speaker 1: and you're controlling them from a helicopter, absolutely there's no way.
Speaker 1: But um, but if you're if you're gonna tell me
Speaker 1: that you're not eating because they don't taste good, then
Speaker 1: I mean, I've got a lot of anecdotal evidence to
Speaker 1: the contrary. But you've got a restaurant to the contrary. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's something you can do with them, and
Speaker 1: we and it just so happens that we shoot I
Speaker 1: mean most I mean mostly boys. Like I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think of the past few hogs that I've killed personally,
Speaker 1: they've all been boars. You know. It's just it's I'm
Speaker 1: selecting for boars. No, absolutely not. I'll select a sow
Speaker 1: every time if but you know, those solo boars just
Speaker 1: tend to move around a lot more. If we're hunting
Speaker 1: at night, we see boars. If one pig comes into
Speaker 1: a field, that's a boar. Um, it's gonna be rare
Speaker 1: that a sow is going to be on our own. Um.
Speaker 1: But if if there's a group that comes in, absolutely
Speaker 1: I'm picking out a sow, And absolutely I'm picking out
Speaker 1: a pregnant sow because they have the most fat on
Speaker 1: them and they tend to be the best. You know,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. You hear people say a wet sow.
Speaker 1: But man, uh I got one one time, and there's
Speaker 1: two problems with it. Two problems happened to me. Uh.
Speaker 1: One was social, and that I was with a friend
Speaker 1: of mine and she wasn't big hunter, hadn't been around
Speaker 1: it much. And here I am gotten it and it's
Speaker 1: getting kind of dark out and I'm gotten it and
Speaker 1: I'm getting into it and I'm kind of like, nothing
Speaker 1: to see here, right, Oh, look over that way, because
Speaker 1: that could be unsettling someone. The second problem is that
Speaker 1: this thing must have gotten into it. Like I was
Speaker 1: all excited because I knew this thing, like a wet
Speaker 1: soile was good, right, this thing must have been eating
Speaker 1: something dead. I found it tasted, you know, like sometimes
Speaker 1: you get you get black bears, like and when we're
Speaker 1: hunting black bears on the coast, you'll get black bears
Speaker 1: that they have so much they eat so much rotten salmon.
Speaker 1: I have no references. Yeah, I imagine it's it's like
Speaker 1: you'll eat it and it's taste like fish. Yeah, to
Speaker 1: the point where you smoked hamd that one time. Remember
Speaker 1: that told of thousand times. I'll tell one more. I'm
Speaker 1: smoking a bear him at my cabin in Alaska, and
Speaker 1: I go to and I we shot it like it
Speaker 1: was early June. We shot and so salmon run, sam
Speaker 1: run hadn't happened yet, right, so not this year salmon.
Speaker 1: We get a bear and uh. And I go to
Speaker 1: my neighbor to borrow a smoker and smoked the bear
Speaker 1: ham in his smoker. When I return the smoker, I said, man,
Speaker 1: you need to clean the clean that smoker. It's got
Speaker 1: so much like old salmon oil in it that it
Speaker 1: made my bar him taste like like rotten fish. He said,
Speaker 1: I've never smoked a fish in that smoker. There's never
Speaker 1: a fish has never been in there. And that was
Speaker 1: the first time I had that experience of a bear
Speaker 1: that has tastes like fish, which a little bit has
Speaker 1: gradually turned me off a coastal black bears. But anyhow,
Speaker 1: this thing tastes like he had been eaten, like I
Speaker 1: feel like he had gotten into something, you know, and
Speaker 1: it does. It definitely happens, and I'm not I'm not.
Speaker 1: I would never say that all hogs are are delicious,
Speaker 1: but that's the only one I had that ever had
Speaker 1: any problem. I find it to be very rare, and
Speaker 1: like I said, you know, we're we're going through hundreds
Speaker 1: a year, and it's it's pretty it's it's very infrequent
Speaker 1: that you find one that you would pacify as inedible.
Speaker 1: I tell the story a lot about snaring a sow
Speaker 1: one time, um and simultaneously, while while that snare was running,
Speaker 1: we we shot one of the same exact size I
Speaker 1: could have come out of the same litter one was there.
Speaker 1: They're probably about eighty pounds, both styles, same fat content
Speaker 1: and everything, and we butchered them both. Ate the shot
Speaker 1: one the next day, took home the snared one and
Speaker 1: ate some of that the next day. And the one
Speaker 1: out of the snare it was inedible and just had
Speaker 1: to be stressed. Yeah, I was gonna suggest that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was definitely and I think that affects him a
Speaker 1: lot as well. But when you're snaring him, are you
Speaker 1: buying snares are making your own out of garage cable.
Speaker 1: I won't snare him anymore after Yeah, it was you know,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't need to um and I just
Speaker 1: it wasn't for me. I just didn't like she. She
Speaker 1: was just like so tired and worn out when I
Speaker 1: got up to it, and I was just like, you know,
Speaker 1: we did it because we needed a hog on the ground.
Speaker 1: We were filming something and had to absolutely get a
Speaker 1: pig down, and we were just heading our beds with
Speaker 1: the snares. But I wouldn't do it again. I met
Speaker 1: someone in Hawaii who snares wild cattle. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's legal or not snare cattle. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: heavy cable. I made sausage out of a South Texas
Speaker 1: ferrell cow one time custom water. This guy came in.
Speaker 1: He had his doctor told him he couldn't need any
Speaker 1: fat or salt, and he brought me these grocery bags
Speaker 1: full of frozen bit to like bone and meat from
Speaker 1: a feral cow in South Texas and asked if I
Speaker 1: could make sausage for him but no fat and no salt,
Speaker 1: which the answer would be no. Well, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I mean, I was like, I'm gonna just
Speaker 1: be up front and tell you the sausage isn't gonna
Speaker 1: be good. This guy is just he was so desperate
Speaker 1: for anything. He's just like I don't care. I just
Speaker 1: want sausage. I mean, I can't eat anything now. And
Speaker 1: I was like, all right, I made it for him,
Speaker 1: and it was it was awful. What did you cut
Speaker 1: into it? We just put his men like spices and
Speaker 1: he didn't try to put some kind of like substitute
Speaker 1: for fat or binder in there. We just we just
Speaker 1: made a round ground meat sausage dry. The flavor can
Speaker 1: be good, but the texture and the dryness gets tough.
Speaker 1: Flavor flavor might have been good with a little salt, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was none of that in there either. So wet
Speaker 1: sow that's the right word, right, pregnant sow wan they
Speaker 1: call him wet? Is wet not nursing? Oh no, okay,
Speaker 1: then what's what's the word for one? Because what I've
Speaker 1: heard is you want them before they start nursing. I
Speaker 1: was calling them a wet sou. That screws my whole
Speaker 1: story of pregnant, damn South pregnant. Yeah yeah, yeah, Like
Speaker 1: like if I see a sounder and there's a there's
Speaker 1: a a nursing sound that's obviously trailing some some little pigs.
Speaker 1: Then and there's a pregnant one also, which there's typically
Speaker 1: gonna be one or the other or both. I mean
Speaker 1: there there there's only twenty three days between when they
Speaker 1: give birth and when they go back into their extracycle,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna get bread. I mean, if there's a
Speaker 1: population of them around, they're gonna get bread almost immediately.
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like, I mean it's kind of bad.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just like what a life. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the I mean, the break that you have with
Speaker 1: piglets is twenty three days before your bread again, and
Speaker 1: then a little less than four months later you're giving
Speaker 1: birth again. And those first ones are just you're weaning
Speaker 1: those first uh pigs off too. So but I'll pick
Speaker 1: a pregnant one. I mean, it sounds, it's it's harsh,
Speaker 1: but they have better fat and I just think they
Speaker 1: eat a lot better. So number two next to pigs
Speaker 1: access access, Dear, I think that you know, again from
Speaker 1: a invasive perspective, they're they're the best thing to eat
Speaker 1: around here. There we've seen a real explosion in their
Speaker 1: populations in the last year or two here. And I mean,
Speaker 1: to really put that into a perspective is the fact
Speaker 1: that I get invited to shoot access. Now I've had
Speaker 1: a couple of people be like, hey, there's just so
Speaker 1: many of them on our property, we come out and
Speaker 1: shoot one, Whereas if you go back five years, it
Speaker 1: would be like eight, you want to come shooting access?
Speaker 1: It's OK. But also, I mean that's where how we
Speaker 1: got into this problem is the vast amount of private
Speaker 1: land that we have here in Texas. And then when
Speaker 1: people either stocked access on their land or the access
Speaker 1: showed up one day, it was very valuable commodity to
Speaker 1: the point where they didn't hunt them down into a
Speaker 1: manageable size population. And then one day it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: we should have been shooting a lot more of these
Speaker 1: and maybe not charging as much. This obviously my perspective
Speaker 1: on it. But now we're I mean, we've gone from
Speaker 1: charging to inviting. And if you drive west of here,
Speaker 1: there's one highway that goes out to kind of the
Speaker 1: epicenter of where they were initially brought and you'll see
Speaker 1: two or three road killed. Um, just in a in
Speaker 1: a thirty forty mile stretch of highway there there, and
Speaker 1: you'll see big herds of them and they they they
Speaker 1: can be in huge groups and they outcompete the white tails,
Speaker 1: and they're starting to spread south and west, and so
Speaker 1: I think it's definitely time to get in front of
Speaker 1: those two. I mean, they're never gonna, never gonna have
Speaker 1: the impact of a hog. But I think that it's like,
Speaker 1: should I shoot a white tail or should I shoot
Speaker 1: an access? Uh? If I'm gonna be out there, you know,
Speaker 1: getting meat for myself, it's like, think it access is
Speaker 1: the answer right now for your own personal Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: what do you like when it comes to butcher and
Speaker 1: what do you like working with the most? Um? Hogs
Speaker 1: are fun because they're all they're all different. I like
Speaker 1: that because you know, I'm my second book is almost complete,
Speaker 1: right and and we're it's all about Farrell hogs. And
Speaker 1: the approach that we've taken on it is how to
Speaker 1: what do you do with the hog that you've got
Speaker 1: on the ground, you know, without overcomplicating it because you can't.
Speaker 1: There's no recipe for Farrell hogs. It's like, well, how
Speaker 1: big is that? Pigs that eight pounds, there's you know,
Speaker 1: there's a huge difference in that, and applying the same
Speaker 1: concepts to every size hog or are the different fat
Speaker 1: contents that they can have, is gonna lead to mishaps
Speaker 1: in the kitchen and then you're gonna be less app
Speaker 1: to eat them in the future. So I think like
Speaker 1: clarifying how to eat pigs, it's really important, and I
Speaker 1: think that's also a lot of the fun of it.
Speaker 1: What I really enjoy is that when you know, you
Speaker 1: get a pig, whether you've shot it or they are
Speaker 1: or they've brought it in here, you don't know what
Speaker 1: it's gonna look like. It could be a hundred pounds
Speaker 1: and lean, or it could be a hundred pounds and
Speaker 1: have two inches of pure acorn fat on it. And
Speaker 1: how that hog looks is going to inform the decisions
Speaker 1: you make and cutting. Are you gonna cut chops off
Speaker 1: of it? Are you gonna throw the whole thing in
Speaker 1: the grinder? Uh? Never get bacon off them? You can
Speaker 1: really uh you know, this is a very common question
Speaker 1: in my in my the Ferrell hog butchery classes that
Speaker 1: we do, is that can you get bacon off And
Speaker 1: the answers yes, But I've probably seen less than ten
Speaker 1: hogs ever that I'd say you could get legitimate slicing
Speaker 1: bacon off of to be clear, like bacon that you
Speaker 1: could cut into a strip and fry and serve with
Speaker 1: eggs um if you want bacon flavored product than even
Speaker 1: a smaller thin belly. If it's only an inch thick
Speaker 1: or three quarters of an inch stick, you can take
Speaker 1: that off and still cure and smoke that, and then
Speaker 1: you can have bacon bits absolutely if it's got enough
Speaker 1: fat on it. But if you want like a legitimate
Speaker 1: slice a strip of bacon to wrap around a dove
Speaker 1: breast or whatever, then it's going to require a very
Speaker 1: very large, very fat pig. And so that's typically gonna
Speaker 1: be a sow. And you don't see sows in the Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, live weight you probably two fifty plus, I
Speaker 1: think before you start to get bacon that's gonna be
Speaker 1: worth it. And so it's kind of rare to see
Speaker 1: a sow that size, although they are out there. For sure.
Speaker 1: You came in to hunt. You were into food first
Speaker 1: and then hunting second, So like food brought you into hunting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I always fish to be always fish going up. Yea
Speaker 1: and for me like hunting brought me into food, right,
Speaker 1: what h what are your feelings about the intersection of
Speaker 1: those two things. Well, I mean, I'm I'm really excited
Speaker 1: about where it is right now because I think that
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's come so far, and that people
Speaker 1: think about food when they're hunting and fishing a lot
Speaker 1: more than they did even three years ago. You can
Speaker 1: go back to him and it's I don't agree, but
Speaker 1: go on, Well, I I think I'm coming from a
Speaker 1: perspective of being here in Texas, where I mean, everything
Speaker 1: was treated in the same way, and Farrell Hoggs maybe eaten,
Speaker 1: doves maybe eaten, but they're only eaten one way. Venison
Speaker 1: backstraps are eaten cooked one way. M just from looking
Speaker 1: at the divergence of recipes alone, Okay, I'll agree with
Speaker 1: that variety, like the variety of preparations, but I think
Speaker 1: it's happening in a specific demographic certainly the variety of preparations.
Speaker 1: But but we go on. I'll talk about my view
Speaker 1: on it some day and you'll probably know a lot
Speaker 1: more about that specifically. Um, I feel like people are
Speaker 1: I feel like they're keeping more of their animals at
Speaker 1: least experimenting a little bit more, which it's great. Um
Speaker 1: I hope that you know the same thing applies to fish.
Speaker 1: But you also hear a lot about you know people,
Speaker 1: you know, you talk to guides and they don't think
Speaker 1: that their clients eat their fish either. They want a
Speaker 1: limit and then they don't eat fish. And I think
Speaker 1: that's you know, it's real shame not to eat eat
Speaker 1: fish as as much as you can while it's fresh,
Speaker 1: eat it it just just don't stop eating it until
Speaker 1: you have to freeze it, as you know my policy.
Speaker 1: So that's the intersection. Well, um, like, do you think
Speaker 1: the two like do you think the food sort of
Speaker 1: like the food community and the hunting community are in dialogue.
Speaker 1: I do. I think that there's I mean just think
Speaker 1: you guys come in here. Let me ask this. Do
Speaker 1: you guys come into your restaurant who are long hunters
Speaker 1: and they come in they just want to get a
Speaker 1: better sense of what can be done with the stuff
Speaker 1: they hunt. Is that like a client? Yes? Absolutely, doing research? Yeah,
Speaker 1: when we get people we I used to do a
Speaker 1: lot of different classes, you know, domestic park butchery, uh, seafood.
Speaker 1: Now I only do a ferrel hard butchery class just
Speaker 1: because it is the one, it's in such a more
Speaker 1: extreme high demand than anything. Absolutely, and we we sell
Speaker 1: about two a month here at the restaurant, and then
Speaker 1: we I travel around and do that same class um
Speaker 1: over and over. How many students come into each class
Speaker 1: here at the restaurant we have ten. Uh so you're
Speaker 1: running twenty people through a month on average and just
Speaker 1: just here. Really yeah, And it's and we sell that
Speaker 1: out no problem because that's I mean, it's elephant in
Speaker 1: the room. That's what everybody wants to know about. And
Speaker 1: uh they it's it's just cutting. Is it mostly hunters?
Speaker 1: Are mostly people who would like to go hunting? It's
Speaker 1: a d but I'm sorry, okay. Is it mostly people
Speaker 1: who are like, man, I've been hunting pigs my whole life.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go find out how to better handle them?
Speaker 1: Or is it mostly people who are thinking, I would
Speaker 1: like to go get a pig. Before I go get it,
Speaker 1: I want to learn how to handle it. I'll say
Speaker 1: that the people that come to the class are in
Speaker 1: one of those two categories, and then it's kind of
Speaker 1: a split between new hunters and then established and established hunters.
Speaker 1: I ask everybody at the beginning of class who here
Speaker 1: hunts or has access to be given Farrell hog, and
Speaker 1: nine out of ten people will raise their hand. It's
Speaker 1: very rare that somebody shows up just to watch a
Speaker 1: Farrell hog butchery. And then I ask where their land is,
Speaker 1: just because I like to know what kind of hogs
Speaker 1: we're talking about, and like, is it on the coast,
Speaker 1: is in South Texas? Is it in the congreves northwest
Speaker 1: to here? Um? To kind of get an idea of
Speaker 1: what you're dealing with. Um, And almost all of them have,
Speaker 1: you know, our hunting, and so I'd say it's a
Speaker 1: very high proportion of those people are hunters, and a
Speaker 1: very high proportion of those hunters have been hunting for
Speaker 1: a long time. Do you feel like with the restaurant
Speaker 1: and with the classes, is there, um the thing you're
Speaker 1: getting at, like if you die, they'll chisel something on
Speaker 1: your tombstone. Like this man taught demonstrate pigs. Man did
Speaker 1: he love pigs with? You know? This man would never
Speaker 1: shut the funk up about wild pigs? I think, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty you know, I think that's my The feral
Speaker 1: hogs are are really a cause of mine. You know,
Speaker 1: I really like to promote the eating of them, and
Speaker 1: I just see them as a resource and I it's
Speaker 1: a it's like it's a resource, and then the more
Speaker 1: we use of that, the less of another resource. We
Speaker 1: use less of someone else's source for use. And it's
Speaker 1: it's just a when when when you know, And it's like,
Speaker 1: I'd love to debate a vegetarian on the ethics of
Speaker 1: eating farreal hawks because I would like to hear the arguments,
Speaker 1: like we do we put them in a big farreal
Speaker 1: hog preserve. Well, yeah, that's what we do with wild horses.
Speaker 1: And they would argue that it's a that you're ending
Speaker 1: the life of a sentient being and causing it suffering,
Speaker 1: and that that sentient being shouldn't be blamed for the
Speaker 1: fact that we turned its ancestors loose on the land.
Speaker 1: Now you get here, there's a prep Yeah, so then
Speaker 1: that's where it gets tricky. But here we are, so
Speaker 1: we gotta reckon with this, and that's where people are, Um,
Speaker 1: that's what those arguments start to fall apart because they'll
Speaker 1: be like, well, yeah, because they're overpopulated, yeah, because they're
Speaker 1: non native, And you're like, well, what about the sentient part,
Speaker 1: because I don't think that you feel that way about
Speaker 1: grizzly bear hunting, right, And they're sentient too, and and
Speaker 1: so they're like, I'll end that sentient life because I
Speaker 1: don't like that one. Um. We're talking about eating crickets
Speaker 1: last night and the movement to eat more insects, and
Speaker 1: I was like, a bite of crickets, you're killing so
Speaker 1: many things at each bite. It's too much. Death has
Speaker 1: a lot of weight. Yeah, it's like all those little soul,
Speaker 1: hundreds of them, hundreds of them in one piece of cricket. Flower.
Speaker 1: What about caviare? Yeah, that's just death, death upon death.
Speaker 1: So plug plug, um, wrap it up. If you gotta
Speaker 1: leave to go fishing, plug, plug your double, plug your book,
Speaker 1: plug your restaurant, and plug your class. Yeah. Um, and
Speaker 1: then plug that guy again. No, don't plug him again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll see him. I'll see him soon enough. He's gonna
Speaker 1: be pretty excited about this just mentioned. Yeah, he's he's
Speaker 1: a really wonderful guy to um. He's one of my
Speaker 1: you know, if you are guides and they're just not
Speaker 1: they're not fun, you know, it's the worst. Uh, He's
Speaker 1: he's just generally nice. And he obviously loves what he does.
Speaker 1: So that's another plug for well, you'll have to hit
Speaker 1: rewind to hear the name of the guide's service. Uh,
Speaker 1: the book is a field like, like I said, we
Speaker 1: put that out best seven years ago that that came out,
Speaker 1: and you know, I look back on that as being
Speaker 1: you know, when you look back on anything, you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I would have done that differently. But what I like
Speaker 1: about that I was fairly new to it, and I
Speaker 1: think that having a perspective of being fairly new to
Speaker 1: something gives you, um a good deal of empathy to
Speaker 1: other new people that are new to it. Um. I'm
Speaker 1: really I'm I'm proud of it. And uh, the the
Speaker 1: next book, I think is is much more refined. We
Speaker 1: know a lot more about our audience with this one, um,
Speaker 1: and it's all ferreal hog um and we're you know,
Speaker 1: we're in the final kind of designed stages of that
Speaker 1: book and we're real proud of it. It's got a
Speaker 1: lot of recipes, it's got a lot of detailed butchering diagrams,
Speaker 1: and a lot of information about what to do with pigs.
Speaker 1: What are you gonna call it? It's called the hog Book.
Speaker 1: There you go, yeah, that's not the Wild Hog Book. No, well,
Speaker 1: a Chef's Guide to Hunting, Preparing, and Cooking wild Pigs
Speaker 1: because the subtitle so just trying to keep it simple.
Speaker 1: And you know, like I said, we've we've got the
Speaker 1: different categories of hogs that are going to be in
Speaker 1: there that you will come across, from a tiny pig
Speaker 1: to a big boar. What to do with all of that?
Speaker 1: How to combat the gaming nous um? Is it organized
Speaker 1: tiny pig, small pig, medium pig, large style, large boar? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is what I find to be, like the general
Speaker 1: categories that make it more approachable. So if you get
Speaker 1: a big style down, flip to that chapter and it's
Speaker 1: gonna go over what you need to are, what likely
Speaker 1: you'll you'll want to do with that hog? You ever
Speaker 1: here with dude Clayton Saunders. No, he's an interesting guy. Yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. Well, I mean I didn't know his name,
Speaker 1: but definitely they're a huge processors, say export processor for
Speaker 1: wild hog. Yeah, man, I do can cook a pork
Speaker 1: shoulder though, Man, holy ship, that stuff is good. Remember that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that is a clearinghouse for pigs. Sound Texas,
Speaker 1: We hung out with him. We brought we brought some
Speaker 1: of our own pigs there. We caught him up and
Speaker 1: then he cooked with some cooked the sow shoulder on
Speaker 1: his pit with a mop. We actually put his mop
Speaker 1: on our cook book, Clayton Saunders Divine Meat Mop. That
Speaker 1: was good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I mean they could
Speaker 1: be great. He knows a lot about pigs too. You
Speaker 1: should hang out with him someday. Yeah, I definitely want
Speaker 1: to connect with him. So you plug your book. It's
Speaker 1: like your next book. Tell people about your restaurants. Uh.
Speaker 1: In Austin's we've got the two places where we're sitting
Speaker 1: right now is Di Do, a butcher's shop and supper club.
Speaker 1: We've got a little meat counter here and then as
Speaker 1: we kind of discussed, like our our focus on local ingredients,
Speaker 1: menu changes daily. Here we're open for lunch and dinner.
Speaker 1: And then downtown we have a little tacorea uh like
Speaker 1: dead center downtown, kind of close to the river. It's
Speaker 1: in a food hall and it's a small little spot.
Speaker 1: It's got a little woodburning grill and we just serve
Speaker 1: a pretty small menu of tacos um and a couple
Speaker 1: of little sides. But access deer and Nil Guy and
Speaker 1: wild pig in there there. It's a Farrell Hog and
Speaker 1: Nil guy down there. We don't have any beef on
Speaker 1: the menu at all. It's uh, we do a venison taco.
Speaker 1: It's it's like I said, this tiny little menu. We've
Speaker 1: got some some good chicken on their shrimp mushroom to
Speaker 1: Farrell Hog tacos in Venison Taco and that's pretty much it.
Speaker 1: I do a taco area. Yeah. So the Italian word
Speaker 1: followed by a Mexican. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I've doug, I've
Speaker 1: made my bed. I gotta lie in it now. So
Speaker 1: uh yeah. Those are the two restaurants, and then we
Speaker 1: have are the third branch of the business is the
Speaker 1: New School of Traditional Cookery and that's mostly what I
Speaker 1: focus on, and that's classwork butchery demos um kind of
Speaker 1: like hunting cat camp catering services where we will come
Speaker 1: out for however long you want a couple of nights
Speaker 1: and we cook every meal. If you want to provide
Speaker 1: the venison to the hog or the turkey or the
Speaker 1: fish or whatever, we'll we'll just we're ready to improvise
Speaker 1: and do anything. And then we do classes during the
Speaker 1: day between hunts typically, you know, like what do you
Speaker 1: want to learn about, Well, we got you know, we
Speaker 1: caught eight bass out of the pond and somebody shot
Speaker 1: a turkey. Cool, bringing on, that's what's for dinner. And
Speaker 1: we'll sit there and do as much as we can.
Speaker 1: We have a van that's basically just a road show
Speaker 1: that's got anything that we'll need in it, and we
Speaker 1: can provides based on what you've got, and we'll just
Speaker 1: try to bring our perspectives and help people and improve
Speaker 1: their cooking and processing things like that. And so that
Speaker 1: sounds like a full day at work is the best.
Speaker 1: It is absolutely the best. And then we do some
Speaker 1: public stuff too, where people can just sign on and
Speaker 1: we'll take them to a ranch that's a partner and
Speaker 1: our guide out there. And so I mean that that's
Speaker 1: an amazing day. You get up, you guide somebody, maybe
Speaker 1: they shoot their first year, their first pig, and then
Speaker 1: you you cook them lunch, and then you do a
Speaker 1: class and then they sit down and eat with all
Speaker 1: the GUIDs and have a big dinner at the end
Speaker 1: of the day. You know, based on what we've got.
Speaker 1: It's a it's an amazing job. I'm very lucky. But
Speaker 1: that's primarily what I do now besides kind of bounce
Speaker 1: between the restaurants and um is organizing these things, and
Speaker 1: we go all over the state and probably next season
Speaker 1: even beyond. So it's a it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: How do people find that it's all on the did
Speaker 1: A website? Da I d u Uh? If you google that,
Speaker 1: it'll come up and all three of those businesses are
Speaker 1: on there and all the information and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: press and and different packages that we offer. Hit us
Speaker 1: with the proverb again, the Italian proverb from two kingdoms
Speaker 1: and from the two kingdoms of nature choose food with care?
Speaker 1: Like that got any final thoughts? So many? I don't
Speaker 1: have any organized. The final thought is we should induce
Speaker 1: Schneider been sitting here, yeah, patiently, Yeah, not saying a
Speaker 1: damn thing. I was trying to figure out, you know,
Speaker 1: the best way to slide in. Don't want what did
Speaker 1: you want me to do? Like a flat out intro
Speaker 1: early I just wanted to all of a sudden, have
Speaker 1: your voice come in and surprise people, like where there
Speaker 1: was an intruder Creends our new podcast producer. You know,
Speaker 1: We're going in all kinds of stuff, yeah, including what
Speaker 1: I now think is the Have you listened to Cal's
Speaker 1: weekend review. It's the best thing on the internet, all right.
Speaker 1: It's the best thing that a person could possibly get
Speaker 1: for free, and it's better than nine cent of the
Speaker 1: ship you could buy in this world. I will I
Speaker 1: will listen to it on my way to the All
Speaker 1: you need is you'll be able to burn through is
Speaker 1: twenty minutes long. I got three and a half hours
Speaker 1: to kill your daughter. Like, well, there's what seven episodes? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Twenty minutes long? Yeah? Or so it's the weekend review.
Speaker 1: My kids love it. I'm on it. It's my kid's
Speaker 1: favorite show because they like the sound effects. There are
Speaker 1: those who would have you believe that the sound effects
Speaker 1: are annoying, but they're not because it makes kids like it. Okay,
Speaker 1: Cal's weekend review, Col's weekend review. I'm gonna binge it.
Speaker 1: Best thing on the internet, all right. I did have
Speaker 1: one follow up question. We got enough time? It's like
Speaker 1: eleven right, now, what Tith, Now that you've been intro
Speaker 1: don't don't waste your time? Alright? Would you like your supper?
Speaker 1: The supper was exquisite. Do you use the word supper supper, Yeah,
Speaker 1: more likely dinner, but yeah, appropriately supper. Um. It was,
Speaker 1: it was incredible. It was like a whole explosion in
Speaker 1: my brain. I did I did she hit the table
Speaker 1: and use a dirty word. I did a little did
Speaker 1: a little happy dance. Um No. I mean I think
Speaker 1: what you're doing here, Jesse is incredible. It's like it's
Speaker 1: like a an artist's studio combined with the laboratory. And
Speaker 1: I mean, for me, it's just everything on the menu,
Speaker 1: or so many things on the menu. You know. I
Speaker 1: think the average person doesn't know you can you can
Speaker 1: eat that, and that's kind of what that exposure is.
Speaker 1: You know that it's not just the standard stuff in
Speaker 1: the grocery store. There's just so much more that is
Speaker 1: um edible and you know, delicious um. And it's just
Speaker 1: a whole kind of education. I think it's really inspiring.
Speaker 1: Should be inspiring for people to look around to see
Speaker 1: what more they can consume instead of you know, the
Speaker 1: standard Iceberg lettuce. Not to knock Iceberg lettuce, but I
Speaker 1: mean I really appreciate that and that is goal here
Speaker 1: for people to just realize what they've got around him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you have a root that grows around here
Speaker 1: that you said, is you know you make tea out
Speaker 1: of I mean, there's just they grow mangoes in Texas.
Speaker 1: I don't know if people knew that. I didn't know that,
Speaker 1: but holy sh it, get the mango sorbet. That's the
Speaker 1: whole all your mind. Well you got for concluders. Bring
Speaker 1: it back all the way back around. You're bringing it
Speaker 1: around to take in uh around, I'm going to because
Speaker 1: you know, I could be setting it up never down
Speaker 1: in my mind. Um talking about educating people and using
Speaker 1: more of the animal and bringing back around to you.
Speaker 1: In the beginning, we were talking about taking hearts and
Speaker 1: livers at a gut pile. Is there anything else that
Speaker 1: you take out of that animal? That's you know, forget
Speaker 1: about the shanks and meats and bones. Anything else is hard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then what do you do? What would you do
Speaker 1: with that? Call fat? For sure? I love call fat.
Speaker 1: In fact, we cooked a boned out Ferrell hog country
Speaker 1: rib yesterday. And then part of my interruption, have you
Speaker 1: also heard it called uh lace fat or leaf? No?
Speaker 1: Leaf is different? Leaf is different? Leaf is the is
Speaker 1: the waxy fat, the solid fat on the kidneys and
Speaker 1: stuff around the kidneys got it and that that's rendered
Speaker 1: into large We definitely if you get a big pig
Speaker 1: that stuffs pure gold. Um, and it's a it's a
Speaker 1: really useful softer fat. It's not waxy. Uh, the call
Speaker 1: fat sure and that I mean if if we can
Speaker 1: get it, if it doesn't tear, or if I need
Speaker 1: some them. And then sometimes the kidneys, we'll pull the
Speaker 1: kidneys out we make boot in. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: funny because like our almost our entire oval cooking game
Speaker 1: is it's sent around boodin. If you're familiar with that,
Speaker 1: like that spicy rice and oval sausage, it's that's from
Speaker 1: East to here, right, that's like a Cajun dish. It
Speaker 1: is um my director of operations, uh, for the for
Speaker 1: the school Morgan. She's from East Texas. She's from China, Texas,
Speaker 1: so they grow a lot of rice there and so
Speaker 1: the rice based sausages factors in pretty heavily. And she
Speaker 1: is the master at making really awesome boot in with
Speaker 1: any any liver guts whatever from from any animals. So
Speaker 1: we'll take the heart, the liver, kidneys, and then maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit of like fatty meat and boil that
Speaker 1: down and then grind that and add that into the
Speaker 1: rice and uh it. I love that part of the
Speaker 1: class because people are like, I'm not gonna eat that,
Speaker 1: and then they eat that like this is fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: kids will eat it, you know, if don't make it
Speaker 1: too spicy and so yeah, it's just funny. But like
Speaker 1: almost a percent of all the o fal that we
Speaker 1: we pull just goes into Buddha because it's it's just
Speaker 1: I think the best way to I gotta try that out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good. What about the call fat? I like it
Speaker 1: for wrapping stuff. In fact, my favorite way to use
Speaker 1: call fat is to cook something until it's tender, like
Speaker 1: a shank, uh, and then completely chill it down. Maybe
Speaker 1: rub that down with something that's delicious that's like sweet
Speaker 1: or sour or fatty or whatever, and then wrap that
Speaker 1: and call fat and then grill that until the call
Speaker 1: fat is crispy and so you've got free tender meat
Speaker 1: on the inside. I'm giving away one of the best
Speaker 1: recipes in the book right now to um, the one
Speaker 1: we tested yesterday. UM. And then you and you uh
Speaker 1: and you just cook that until it's nice and brown.
Speaker 1: But there's one secret step that you have to take
Speaker 1: otherwise it will be disastrous. See to make sure to
Speaker 1: not have a big sip of ice water after along
Speaker 1: those lines. Yeah, but yeah, it'll be included in the back.
Speaker 1: You have a secret to cut the waxenus No, I'm
Speaker 1: just full of ship. There's no secret. So you're just
Speaker 1: trying to lure people in. Oh, we found that with
Speaker 1: that call fat. You can definitely overdo it. You put
Speaker 1: too much on there and like you'll never get it
Speaker 1: to crispop, you'll never get to really cooked through. But
Speaker 1: you gotta but I mean you gotta cook and cook
Speaker 1: and cook and cook it. I mean it'll eventually kind
Speaker 1: of render out. But yeah, it's easy to over apply
Speaker 1: the call fat. And it's fun to wrap stuff or that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're doing two things right because you're sort of
Speaker 1: basting then the internal meat with that the jippings. Oh,
Speaker 1: it works like a charm. It was really good yesterday.
Speaker 1: You know that. That trick of it's not something a
Speaker 1: lot of people do is cook something one way, like
Speaker 1: braise something down until it's tender and then put it
Speaker 1: on a grill. Yeah, we do it all the time
Speaker 1: because like deer ribs like leave more leave the whole
Speaker 1: damn thing on the bone, caught it up with a
Speaker 1: haxaar or whatever, and then cook them, braids them till
Speaker 1: their tender, crack pot them till their tender, and then
Speaker 1: take them out, put a mop on them, and grill them.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's good my first book. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of work, right, people like, oh my god, you
Speaker 1: know it's not that much. It's nice too. I've realized
Speaker 1: you do it ahead of time. That happens with that
Speaker 1: method is that, um, if you'd like take them once
Speaker 1: they're done brazen, you take them out at liquid pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: A lot of tallow is being left behind, so then
Speaker 1: you're not dealing with that waxiness so much. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a recipe in my first book called Cheeta Ribs, where
Speaker 1: we just poach off Farrell hog ribs that are kind
Speaker 1: of lean and then grill them and mop them with
Speaker 1: called Cheeter ribs. Yeah. Uh, we start doing them the
Speaker 1: pressure cookers too. You get done quick, but you gotta
Speaker 1: be careful because if you like, if you go five
Speaker 1: minutes too long but fall a part of the girl, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you can't get them out. So I kind
Speaker 1: of like would rather take a little bit of time.
Speaker 1: My brother, man, he's got pretty dialed with this pressure cooker.
Speaker 1: But I'd take a little bit of time and get
Speaker 1: him at just right because a lot of times you
Speaker 1: sort of lifting them out with a slotted spoon and
Speaker 1: trying to grill them and ship because they just want
Speaker 1: to cool him off fall apart. Do it ahead of time,
Speaker 1: pull them out like whatever you're doing, and just cool
Speaker 1: them all the way down and then they get they
Speaker 1: get they get firm, and then you can just slap
Speaker 1: them on the ground handle them. That's a hot tip man.
Speaker 1: You know we're gonna do a hot tip off. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you know this. I didn't suser were dumb.
Speaker 1: We're gonna do a hot tip off. You should have
Speaker 1: saved that. I should have saved that for I bet
Speaker 1: you this has got one or two also because my
Speaker 1: curry come that we're gonna do a hot tip off
Speaker 1: and you already wasted all your hot tips. I'm a
Speaker 1: little there's no reason that you can't do these things
Speaker 1: in this hot tip off. These two items, they can
Speaker 1: appear twice. Sure, Okay, we'll do a hot tip off
Speaker 1: right now. They'll go on Instagram later and people will
Speaker 1: get to see, they'll scrawl back through the feed I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do, I'm gonna do a totally new one, and
Speaker 1: they'll get to see if you're like, if you're like
Speaker 1: a one trick pony, or now I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: crush you at the tip. Alright, thank that was unwind, Jesse,
Speaker 1: Jesse Griffiths, thank you for joining us. Thank you. If
Speaker 1: you liked hearing from Chef Jesse Griffith's on our podcast,
Speaker 1: you have an opportunity to watch him on our new
Speaker 1: fishing series on YouTube. It's called dos Boat. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for Jesse's episode of dos Boat on August twenty se