Join me, Kara Kroeger, and one of my favorite chefs and mentors, Jesse Griffiths, as we embark on a fascinating exploration of Central Texas' vibrant wild and domesticated meat scene with a man who knows it like no other. Our rich dialogue interweaves Jesse's commitment to utilizing and supporting his local food system at a level few other chefs achieve, with stories from Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club, to his educational wild game hunting and cooking pursuits at the New School of Traditional Cookery. Jesse's passion shines as we unravel his journey from chef to celebrity huntsman to James Beard award-winning author of The Hog Book.
Our conversation weaves through the cultural and ecological landscapes of ethical hunting and meat consumption, and the art of respecting the entire animal. We delve into stories from Jesse's hunting school, the management of Texas's feral hog populations, and the challenges of integrating truly wild game into restaurant menus.
This episode is a celebration of our many local food sources through the lens of a truly thoughtful chef, from the meticulous joys of preparing small game to the evolving appreciation of grass-fed beef among Texan diners. We also highlight the untapped potential of unique domesticated beef varieties and his commitment to cooking with natural fats and steering clear of seed oils to preserve our health.
The podcast peaks with a discussion of Jesse's upcoming book, called The Turkey Book. Join us for an episode that promises to nourish your curiosity and deepen your appreciation for the roots of what you eat.
Show Notes:
https://www.daidue.com
https://www.newschooloftraditionalcookery.com
https://www.thewildbooks.com
https://www.zeroacre.com/
Join me, Kara Kroeger, and one of my favorite chefs and mentors, Jesse Griffiths, as we embark on a fascinating exploration of Central Texas' vibrant wild and domesticated meat scene with a man who knows it like no other. Our rich dialogue interweaves Jesse's commitment to utilizing and supporting his local food system at a level few other chefs achieve, with stories from Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club, to his educational wild game hunting and cooking pursuits at the New School of Traditional Cookery. Jesse's passion shines as we unravel his journey from chef to celebrity huntsman to James Beard award-winning author of The Hog Book.
Our conversation weaves through the cultural and ecological landscapes of ethical hunting and meat consumption, and the art of respecting the entire animal. We delve into stories from Jesse's hunting school, the management of Texas's feral hog populations, and the challenges of integrating truly wild game into restaurant menus.
This episode is a celebration of our many local food sources through the lens of a truly thoughtful chef, from the meticulous joys of preparing small game to the evolving appreciation of grass-fed beef among Texan diners. We also highlight the untapped potential of unique domesticated beef varieties and his commitment to cooking with natural fats and steering clear of seed oils to preserve our health.
The podcast peaks with a discussion of Jesse's upcoming book, called The Turkey Book. Join us for an episode that promises to nourish your curiosity and deepen your appreciation for the roots of what you eat.
Show Notes:
https://www.daidue.com
https://www.newschooloftraditionalcookery.com
https://www.thewildbooks.com
https://www.zeroacre.com/
Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. I'm your host, kara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. With 25 years of combined experience, studying and coaching in regenerative agriculture, natural medicine, nutrition, cooking, mindfulness and cultivating abundance, I am thrilled to share the life-changing tools I've learned. By implementing these practices, you'll experience a regulated nervous system, a nourished body, ready to pursue your dreams with energy and vigor, the ability to collaborate with nature and a renewed sense of hope and purpose. I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started. Hello folks, this interview with Chef Jesse Griffith takes me back to a very exciting and fulfilling time in my life, when I began integrating the culinary arts into my repertoire of skills, and I am so thrilled to share it with you. My interviewee, jesse allowed me to join his Dai Duet supper club team as a budding chef, and he really gave me the opportunity to learn from one of the most unique and talented chefs out there. Jesse stands apart from others not only for how delicious and low-waste his cooking is, but because of how he thinks about food systems with each and every decision he makes regarding food and its preparation, and he's also been incredibly inspiring to many people in teaching them in a very hands-on way how to connect to their food systems. Jesse Griffith is the chef and co-owner of Dai Duet butcher shop and supper club in Austin, texas, along with his business partner, tamara Mayfield, and he is the creator and head instructor of the new School of Traditional Cookery, and Jesse created this highly immersive school to promote the responsible use of wild resources, and they offer butchery classes, roaming hunting and fishing schools and various cooking courses that are mostly devoted to meat and fish cookery. However, they use so many other local ingredients in these classes as well.
Speaker 1:In 2012, he authored A Field a chef's guide to preparing and cooking wild game and fish, and this book was nominated for a James Beard Award, and I had the pleasure of helping to prepare many of the dishes photographed for this book in a beautiful kitchen along a creek in Fredericksburg, texas. It was a wonderful week. He also authored and published the Hog Book in 2022, and this book did win the James Beard Award for a single subject book. And next month he has a new book coming out called the Turkey Book, a chef's journal of hunting and cooking America's bird. The latter two of these three books I just mentioned can be found at thewildbookscom.
Speaker 1:Jesse's books are wonderful, even if you don't have access to hunting wild game. His cooking knowledge and storytelling alone are well worth the purchase, and these books will definitely be a beautiful piece of Jesse's legacy, as I believe they will be used long into the future by many different generations. Be sure to check out the show notes for more links to connect with Jesse's offerings, and let's dive in and take a journey through the food systems of the Central Texas Hill Country and beyond with Jesse Griffiths. Well, hello, jesse, how are you? Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really glad to have you here. So I want to just kind of start off by kind of going back to the beginning, when Dai Duay started, and I want to give some context to our listeners who aren't familiar with your work. And so, before we get into talking about domesticated meat and wild game and hunting and cooking and serving this type of meat to your clients and also us using it at home, I'd like to really talk about the conceptualization of Dai Duay, the butcher shop and the supper club, and how it was that you and your business partner, tamara decided to go so uber local with the foods that you chose. So ultimately, you came into this.
Speaker 1:The food scene in Austin was just beginning to blossom and you had a super fierce dedication to using local foods, and you were very, very serious about it. You still are very serious about it, and, aside from flour and salt, when I worked with you as a chef, there were very few things that we used that were not local, and most of the time, even the flour was local, but on occasion not. So anybody in the industry knows that that is not the case, even when restaurants say that they are using local foods, and so I'd like to know what it was inside you that created that devotion and commitment to working so closely with farmers that were around you, and your idea of showcasing the bounty of what Central Texas the Hill Country and the coast and that type of thing is able to offer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and a little update. We're getting salt now.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 2:Not all of it now. Our finishing salts that we use now are coming from the hyper-sailing Laguna Madre down in South Texas, from there's a guy down there who just saw the salt operation, so I'll just use that as a segue, kind of an opener to how dedicated we are, because they are at the restaurant that you can get that are just a meat that's locally sourced, me like called a steak or a wild boar chop or some nil guy that's grilled over local post oak and then simply finished with some local salt. So I mean we are talking in a lot of context, 100%. I think what really kind of drove it for me was, at the same time, traveling and also just witnessing what the industrial avenue to getting food looks like and how distasteful I found it, even at a young age. I mean opening up a box of IBP beef, whatever cut that is, and seeing, you know, basically a cardboard box full of cuts that represented 80 cows, you know, and how you kind of lose that individuality or each one of those cows had something to offer and it's just lost. In a system where thousands and thousands of those boxes are being opened every day, I just I found something was deeply wrong with that, then, simultaneously, the ability to get out and travel a little bit.
Speaker 2:I never went to cooking school, never went to college for that matter, and so I kind of took any resources I had and traveled around, and everything for me is obviously through the lens of food, and so what I saw other cultures doing really, really inspired. I saw that people created very, very unique, memorable, famous food cultures and food ways based entirely on their ingredients. You know, like the one that really inspired me was Italy Went to Italy, I landed there on January 1st the year 2000. And I saw you know, that's a famous food culture, everybody knows it. But then what I really saw there was how it had been driven by resources for centuries, how they had developed this great food, very simple food, extremely simple food, based on very pure resources that they treated with a lot of respect. And then they were proud of that.
Speaker 2:And so the idea to bring that back to Central Texas and say, hey, what can we do with our resources? In a similar vein, we can take an idea from anywhere in the world. I mean, we lived in the modern age and I think it's a bit of a detriment to not use ideas. But what if we only used our local resources? And then that the secondary value to using your local resources is supporting your local community? So you're only shopping with local farmers and ranchers and then amongst them you can really pick out who you like to support, who you really value, who you think has the best approach to the land, things like that and so kind of. It's a multi-tiered approach.
Speaker 2:For food, it's what's responsible, what's sustainable, what's good. You know, what honors the culture. You know, and here in Central Texas we have a real diversity of cultures that have settled here anywhere from. You know, just to be part of Mexico, lots of Germans and Czechs settled here. We have Cajun influences. There's all kinds of like really wonderful influences, and in modern times, you know, we've had, you know, since the late 70s, early 80s, a lot of Vietnamese influence here. So it's it's an amazing place to take ideas and then apply that to local products.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and basically two growing seasons more or less. So that is really really awesome. You know, moved to North Carolina now and living in a place where there's definitely a much shorter growing season, which is kind of sad really. But yeah, I just want to reflect on when I came to work for Daidue. I had been a nutritionist for, you know, I don't know, maybe about five or six years at that point and I decided that I wanted to start moving into the culinary realm just to bring some more creativity into my work, and I started going to the local community college to attend the culinary school that they had there and you know I was learning some good things. But day after day I'd walk into these giant you know boxes of Cisco foods and it was really the day that we made baked beans that I was like I have got to get out of here.
Speaker 1:I can't do this anymore. And you know just like, oh, the corn syrup and the this and the can to this and that, and we made these baked beans. And I was just like, okay, I've heard of this guy, jesse, and he's doing these classes on butchery and small animal butchery and I want to find out more about that. And you know, luckily you took me under your wing and I learned a lot from you. I learned the most of what I've learned about cooking from you, and I'm so thankful for that.
Speaker 1:So the other thing that I wanted to kind of reflect on, as we're talking about just culinary school and using local ingredients, one of the other things that was really interesting to me over the years is that you always hired females as your chefs, your chef, your executive chefs, and so I just wanted to ask you to reflect a little bit on that. I know that the majority of the things that you do are done with a lot of intention, and so I'm very curious about the choice of choosing to hire women and have women in the kitchen. It was definitely a place that I know me and all the other women who were working for you really appreciated having a place where we could not have to deal with the competitive jousting and the downright misogyny that can occur in a kitchen, and so I'm really curious about that. I don't think we've ever really chatted about that.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, first off, I think that I'm good at hiring, but also I'm hiring based on qualifications, attitudes mostly. I came up in a traditional kitchen atmosphere and I hated it. Just like you said, it's competitive, it's misogynistic in a lot of ways. I definitely work in kitchens like that.
Speaker 2:That's a distraction from the food and I feel that women not to generalize, but often put a lot of care into food.
Speaker 2:I mean, they are the original caregivers, being the ability to grow a child, things like that, and so and plus, I've always liked the kitchen demeanor when you have a balance to it. I don't want listeners to think that it was just me and only women, but in many kitchens women would probably be a distinct minority, whereas in our kitchen I think it was just a much better representation, and also in positions of authority sous chef, and to this day at the restaurant, the chef is a woman. I just appreciate the balance that it brings. Now, we, of course, hire everyone. We hire based on qualifications, but I always say you can train skills, but you can't train attitudes, and so that's the approach that I've always taken. I want people that are excited about food and that appreciate the hospitality and hospitality, that are there to cook wonderful food and make people happy. I mean, it's a nourishing atmosphere, and so that's just kind of the way it played out, and it's been my honor to work with so many very capable women throughout my career.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I appreciate it and I know that many other women who have worked with you appreciate it. Yes, and definitely there was a balance. There was not just women, but there was a lot of leadership through women and it was a really beautiful thing. And from the care and intention that is something that you know, having worked in a few other restaurants or hospitality jobs it was so powerful to experience the deep, deep intention that Dai Duet puts into its work, and so I just can't really emphasize that enough to the listeners. We're talking to a chef who is not doing things like everybody else, and it is incredibly focused work that Jesse has done over his past 30 years of doing this.
Speaker 1:So, jesse, you have a couple of different books. You have a field. You also have the hog book, and both of these are hunting books. The first one was kind of a broad range of looking at the different game of Texas and how to prepare them, and then you went with your second book and you did it specifically on hogs, and obviously many people are aware of feral hogs being an issue and you really wanted to look at this from the perspective of how can we utilize this really, really prolific source of meat, and so can you talk a little bit about.
Speaker 1:I wanna talk about wild game, but I also want to move into the realm of talking about domesticated animals as well, because you use both, and you use both in your restaurant, and particularly a lot of people aren't aware that when wild game is served in a restaurant, it is usually a cultivated or somewhat domesticated wild animal that is being served, whereas in the case of diduay, that is not what you are serving.
Speaker 1:You're serving something that has been usually either harvested in the field or a trapped wild animal that's then taken to a processor. So can you talk a little bit about the? And you also do a hunting school right, where you're taking people through the whole process of hunting, butchering, cooking, so you have just an amazing amount of experience in this realm. And, ultimately, can you talk a little bit about what you've learned from hunting these animals and teaching people how to hunt the animals and go through this process and the different types of prey, how different people relate to different hunts depending on what they're hunting. Can you just expand a little bit more about the depth of your knowledge in that arena?
Speaker 2:Certainly, I feel that game is an important aspect of our local food system here in central Texas. So you could take a restaurant like diduay that's very focused on serving local foods and put it somewhere else Just for context we'd say, let's say, the West Coast, like Northern California or Portland or something like that and what you'd see is probably more of a focus on agriculture, on seafood, on things like that. So I mean local doesn't just mean we're gonna serve the same thing that another restaurant serving across the country, but just sourced from farms near us. We're gonna serve different types of food, and in central Texas, especially in the Western parts, there's not a lot of agriculture, there's not a lot of topsoil, it's a very rocky place, but what it is is very, very full of game animals, and so also in a historical context, the game has been very important here. Hunting culture is huge in Texas and so addressing that in a responsible way was really important, and so to me I think that hunting is a very viable way of sourcing excellent food, akin to gardening, fishing, foraging it's all kind of the same. To me it all has a component. It is a component in a local food way. I love to hunt, I also. I mean I'd be lying if I was said it wasn't just like pretty fun and exciting and very enthralling to be outside and just in the elements, with being quiet outside. It's just, I think, a very wonderful thing. I went last night to a friend hunting last night. He got a deer also. It was great, it was a great night, awesome. So incorporating that into the restaurant was very important.
Speaker 2:Yes, and so we do source very actual wild game in the context of feral hogs, no guy, antelope, awdad, which is a Barbary, sheep, axis, venison, red deer, all of these and all these are introduced species to Texas in one way or the other, feral hogs being the most established and oldest of those species. The rest of them brought in fairly recently for hunting opportunities and they've gone feral and escaped and now they've got these small nativeized populations. But feral hogs being the elephant in the room, like the one that's really expanded, I want to say they're in every county in Texas. They're expanding into other states. There's a downward migration of feral hogs right now out of Canada into the United States. California's got a bad problem, the entire Southeast has a problem and you start to see them popping up in random places all over the country.
Speaker 2:So feral hog is definitely the key species that we try to serve, because they're the most invasive and the most destructive. And so taking a feral hog or let's put it in the context of like one pound of feral hog out of you know, like putting that into the food system, is serving many, many duties there, like it's, you know, removing invasive species, removing a destructive species, removing a competitive species with native wildlife you know, namely a white tail deer or turkeys. And then also you're using this meat where normally maybe somebody would be relying on industrialized, modern meat system to attain meat, you know. So it'd be beef, perhaps from a confined animal feeding operation or something else, and so you were substituting that in, and so I think it has tremendous value.
Speaker 2:And I think that, you know, utilizing feral hogs was sometimes difficult because there's a lot of myth and mythology, misinformation out there about them, about their edibility, and so I've chosen to address that in a couple of different ways, and first it was through the hunting school, where we would take people hunting for feral hogs and most white tail deer that's the prime species that we chase and that was very successful. We are currently in the middle of our 14th season. I just got back a couple of days ago from a class, had six people down and it's a wonderful experience for me. Still after 14 years, I love taking people out in the educational aspect it's just, it's wonderful.
Speaker 2:We mostly get deer, but on this last trip I think we got maybe like five hogs. It was a very good trip. We were very successful, but it's great just being able to train people in that, show them that it can be utilized over the years. You know also just the number of questions that we would hear around feral hogs and a lot of these myths. These, like people will tell you. These things about feral hogs are just ludicrous, mostly about their edibility. Well, first off, they're not edible, not true, edible, totally edible and so Very edible.
Speaker 1:Very delicious, very delicious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, compiling those questions eventually led to writing a book about it, and so that's kind of where the hog book came from and it became just kind of almost an encyclopedia. It's a very large book because there was a lot of questions. Evidently I didn't set out to write a big book, but by the time I'd covered everybody's questions, like all the information that we'd kind of compiled about hogs over the years, I was like there's over 400 pages here. That's kind of crazy. So in a, I think, very lucid, easy approach to addressing feral hogs by size and weight and sex, things like that, just a standardized approach so that people can go out there and actually do it.
Speaker 2:It's not a book written, you know, just for fancy food photography. It's a book meant to be utilized. I'd like to see dirt and blood on the pages, some tears. You know I want it to be, I want to get beaten up a little bit, and so that's kind of where the book came from and it's just a sinus-haze approach. You know, in the restaurant we serve feral hog, we teach people how to hunt and also provide basically a textbook to get out there and do that, and then it all just wraps back up into that I think that game is a very viable part of our food system.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, particularly in Texas. And just to speak to fancy food photography for a minute, you've collaborated on these books with a good friend, a longtime friend of yours. Jodi's been working with you since the beginning. So Jodi Horton does the photography for these books and another good friend, Lair Richardson, does the design work. So these books are really, you know, three artists coming together. I mean more than that, because there's a lot of knowledge and art that comes from all levels, I'm sure. But you know, between Jodi Blair and Jesse, these books are really, really extraordinary.
Speaker 1:And I had the wonderful opportunity of doing a week and in Fredericksburg, in this beautiful home, as we were doing the actual dish photography for the first book, A Field, and we prepared all the dishes and I have this really memorable experience of cooking squirrel and we were making a squirrel with parpelle dish and basically it was my job to get all the bones out of the braised squirrel and it was oh my gosh, so many bones, but it was an absolutely phenomenal dish, but it was a little bit of work, yeah so yeah, and just to speak to you know the hog situation as well.
Speaker 1:One of the things that's also really important is, you know, these feral hogs have a huge impact on agricultural crop production, right? So as we take hogs out of the system, we're also helping with a lot of the grain production, corn production. Other cropping systems are often destroyed by these large, what do you call of herd of pigs.
Speaker 2:A sounder.
Speaker 1:A sounder. That's right. Yeah, so a sounder of pigs coming through can be incredibly damaging, and so it can be really helpful in that arena. I also recently read I think it was in a National Geographic article, possibly on hogs. They said that more people die from encounters with wild hogs than from shark attacks in the ocean, and I thought that that was very interesting. I think that the probability of encountering a hog and startling it and just having some type of an accident was what they were talking about, but I thought that that was really interesting.
Speaker 2:I think that's actually probably very rare. As someone that had come toe to toe with them a lot, I would bet anything that that statistic involves car accidents. I would think that that is probably a huge part of it. They built a new toll road out here probably about eight years ago and in the first few weeks of it the number of collisions with feral hogs because they built it through a very southeast of Austin, so very soft soils, very brushy, lots of creeks, riparian areas, so basically just like hog heaven down there, and they built this mega highway right through it and there was hundreds of collisions with pigs. They're low to the ground, they're generally black and if you're driving a small car, yeah, you're going to total that thing when you hit a big bore. So perhaps that had something to do with that statistic.
Speaker 1:I think you're right. I think you're probably right. Anyway, let's go back to the hunting school. I'm really curious what are some of the biggest transformations you've seen occur in people who go through the process of this, whether it's a novice hunter or an experienced hunter? Have you had to deal with some intense visceral experiences that people feel as they're moving through learning this type of thing? And I think one of the things that we talked about in our prep call for this was how people interact with different prey differently as they're hunting. So is there anything that stands out that you think is a significant experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that we probably get. If you look at the overall numbers, it's probably almost a 50-50 mix of people that are brand new to hunting and people that are experienced. The people that are brand new are there, obviously, to learn everything, and then some of our experienced hunters are there mainly to experience the food aspect. So just incorporating food, butchery, cooking, preservation, packaging and just more focus on that in this class sets it apart from most hunting experiences, which would be like going with an outfit or going to a lodge where you're going to hunt deer but then they're going to feed you a rib eye and so you're totally dissociated from that process, purposely so in some cases, and so our clientele, I think, just because of that, because their intentions are so focused that it really makes it a great experience for everyone, because the people that we get through there are there for a very clear reason and they're generally very excited to be there. I'd say that your new hunters. A lot of times they're very, very excited to get out in the field. I mean, you'll see adults that are just almost giddy about it, and then there's some trepidation too. There's some people that think that the process is going to be too intense and they're not going to be able to handle it. And I'd say to that that almost universally they can handle it, they do a very good job and they're probably a lot calmer about it than they thought. And I think that there's just a natural instinct to hunting. I mean, it's one of our oldest vocations, if not the oldest. I mean it kept us alive thousands of generations ago. It was the difference between life and death for our ancestors. And so I think that there's no way that that's not that hasn't been impregnated on our brains. And so I think that people have a natural affinity for it, our natural ability for it to digest the process, experience.
Speaker 2:Hunters love the cooking, the butchery, like learning things. We myth bust a lot. There's like oh, I've heard, you can't name it, you can't eat an odd out, you can't eat a big boar, you can't use this cut, you have to soak the meat in ice, you have to do this or that. And there's so much bad information out there and I call it generational misinformation because it's just kicked down, down and down.
Speaker 2:I had a gentleman at the last class and he told me, in the case of Barbary sheep, our oddad, which Texas has a very decent population of. He said, oh, you can't eat those. And I was like, have you tried them? And he said no. And I was like, so somebody told you that? And he said yes. And I was like, have you ever told anybody that? And he said yes, and I was like, well, here we go. And I can almost guarantee you the person that told you that you couldn't do that has never tried it either.
Speaker 2:And then, quite the opposite is the fact, and he was dumbfounded. When I told him, I was like no, it's actually quite delicious, and the difference between the two of us is I'm the one that's tried it, and so I think that there is a lot of myth around there. It's a subculture and so it develops its storylines about what you can and can't do, and then it's passed down. So I enjoy just breaking those things apart, just saying like, hey, no, this isn't true, you actually can use this resource or you can use this resource in a different way. So we see a lot of that. So I'd say people having new experiences as far as hunting, and also people having new experiences or having their eyes open to different methodologies in the butchery part and the cooking and utilization, just how much we respect the animals in every part of them too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's wonderful. I mean I have probably taken about four deer myself and I very much appreciate the process of breaking down the animal myself for one, because I know how that hunt went. And how the hunt goes is very much going to affect what the taste of that meat is like. What kind of space was that animal in at the time of the kill and was it stressed or was it able to be relaxed in its environment and grazing calmly? Because if not, it can really cause a much different flavor profile in the meat. But additionally, it's always amazing to me that people take their deer to be processed when they will most likely not get the same deer back that they took from their hunt. Oftentimes it's just who knows what you're getting back.
Speaker 1:The other thing is and I'm not really sure if this is specific to Texas or if this is something that's happening a lot in other places in the United States but when I was growing up hunting with my father when I was younger, a big part of the culture was pull out the backstrap, maybe take a little bit of the back quarters for ground meat, but so much of the animal was tossed or just not utilized or there was so much that was put in the decomposition pile, and one of the things that I learned from you that was just a wonderful thing to learn was using the neck right, like making Osobuko out of the neck of a deer, like so many people just don't even, they just move on. Or in the past I feel like that's changing, but there's been a real culture to only taking certain parts of the animal and leaving the rest behind. And so in your classes have you heard many stories of the same thing? And yeah, and it's sad, it's really sad, it's such a disregard.
Speaker 1:And the more and more time that I spend in nature, the more and more I begin to look at things as literal parts of me, right Like the turkeys the 10 turkeys telling Jesse that this morning I woke up and heard footsteps underneath my window and I looked outside and there was a flock of 10 turkeys right under my window and as I watched them I had to be very, very quiet because I couldn't really get a good picture inside. So I had to be very, very quiet to get outside and take a little video to send to Jesse, because I thought it was very interesting that they were here on the morning of this conversation that I was gonna have with Jesse about hunting and turkeys and hogs and all these things, and so I had to go outside and be very quiet and be very still so I could approach and watch them, and I spent about 30 minutes doing that and we are connected. We are connected to these things.
Speaker 1:We are not independent and we are all operating in unison together as an ecosystem, and so, ultimately, I think that it's really valuable to learn to hunt and to learn to use the animal and learn to break it down yourself and experience all those pieces that come from that process.
Speaker 1:It's just a really beautiful thing and I'm super thankful to you, jesse, for being such a leader and giving that gift to people to learn that in a way that feels safe, especially for women, that's. Another thing is, when I moved back to Texas, I had hunted with my father, and when I came and started working with you, I wanted to get back into it. Unfortunately, I never did one of the cookery schools, but I found ways to learn to hunt on my own, and it's hard to find a place to go hunt as a woman in a very feminine way, in a way that's, with a lot of regard and a lot of respect and really thinking about the process, and so I think it's really awesome that you've made it a safe place for both men and women to come and taken out the kind of approach of just getting drunk and shooting at things.
Speaker 2:Right and I think that that's an excellent point. And over the years what I've kind of realized to that is that it's kind of a misalignment of time and we regard the shot as the last part of it, the last fun part of it. Put that in some more immediate context, like last night after my friend he shot a deer and I took him out to a place that I had access to and I really wanted him to get a deer for his freezer. I mean, he feeds his family with it and it's like a very legitimate hunt for him. Like it's like he's like I need a doe and I'm like, well, let's go do this. We got it down, we got it back to the truck and I was like, hey, do you want to do? You want to clean this deer? And he's like it looks like you do, it looks like you. And I was like I kind of do and I mean it wasn't because I'm fast at it. And in the middle of it he's like you look really happy right now. And I'm like I am really happy.
Speaker 2:I love cleaning deer, I love that process, I love packaging them. I like you know, like you know, just skinning and gutting, getting that down and getting just watching the steam come off the carcass as it starts to cool. It's kind of that, that, the road to food. Right there I said it's like it's going from warm to cold and you know I'm like that's just, that's a very, very integral step. And then breaking it down, butchering it into back straps and shanks and cutting the neck into big, thick slices that you can braise and all the trim and saving the sinew for stock and making stock out of the bones and so forth, I really I love that. And I realized that so many people don't love that. They don't love the cleaning part, and it's really just a mindset. They've determined that they don't like it because it's gross or it's dirty or you know, it's a little smelly or things like that. And if you can conquer that mindset and approach hunting from a start to finish in a way where you regard the shot like the animal, finding the animal, laying your hands on it for the first time is kind of the midway point. You know there was all the preparation for the hunt, the drive out there, the conversations, the anticipation, whatever. And then after that there's the skinning and the gutting and the cooling and a few days later you come back to it and you butcher it and then you package it and goes into the freezer and then you start pulling those packages back out. I regard the entire process with kind of an equal anticipation. I love it. It's very exciting and I think that trying to convey that is our best bet in getting people to appreciate not only the animals more but the entirety of the animal more.
Speaker 2:And then you know again, we were dealing with generational misinformation about the edibility of a venison neck or a venison tongue, a venison heart, the bones, the silver skin, things like that. These all have been addressed in a very negative way and, to be completely honest, they're mostly addressed in that way because people don't want to do the work. Well, if you tell somebody that you can't eat a pig over 120 pounds or 100 pounds or 130 pounds I've heard every number that's the delineation, the top end of how big a pig, a feral hog, can be and still be edible. If you've been told that it's 120 pounds is the max and then you shoot 140 pounder, then you don't have any work to do. You can just kind of drag it off to the side of the road and then continue on with your night and have the hunting fun, and so it's kind of a justification game at that point. You know, in the context of feral hogs, I get it, they're destructive and if you've got a farm and you need to get rid of 30 of them just to make it operational, then I'm not criticizing that. But I think a lot of times too, people will take the easy road and I think they take the easy road just not knowing how fun the other road can be and how enjoyable it is. And so you know, at this point in the game I have had enough conversations with people to know to start to really identify what it is. It's more of this overarching high end mentality of convincing people that it is worth the time and that time can be fun.
Speaker 2:And I would say, you know people make fun of me for plucking doves. You know it's a tiny bird and usually they just flip the bird and like pull the breast out, and then they're done and I get laughed at, teased, mocked, made fun of whatever for plucking a bird and for me it takes about three minutes to pluck a dove and I'm always like say what, check, check, check. How many hours did you drive to get to this dove hunt and they're like ah, I live five hours from here and I'm like right on Five hours. You drove for five hours to get here. But you know, all told, I'm going to spend an extra 22 minutes plucking doves and I'm the one that's not making sense here. It's just silly to me. But you know, somebody's like all you have to do is breast the dove out. Don't bother plucking. People will oftentimes take that route because they don't value the time spent plucking doves. I'm not plucking doves in a dark corner. I'm plucking doves with my friends and we're drinking beer.
Speaker 1:You know, it's like there's nothing and you're hanging out in a beautiful foothold.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the sun is going down in a field in West Texas and I'm like this is all good here. You know, I'm just happy to have something in my hands too that I'm plucking. You know, it's like it's just a real lineman of expectations, I think.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And not to mention when you have that whole bird. I believe it was you who taught me to make a marinade with honey and put it on the bird, the whole bird, right, and then you get that nice caramelization. So when you put it on the grill, you get the tips of those wings and the little legs, you know, with that honey in it, and the crisp and the crunch, and like the whole bird and, yeah, again, you are going to have a lot more sensual eating experience when you're eating that bird, because you're literally picking up the leg and pulling the meat off the bone with your teeth and just getting to taste all the different portions. There's a lot of minerality in birds, right, but you know, the breast is just one piece, right, that has a certain type of minerality. And then you move to and this is a tiny little bird, right, tiny little bird. But there's so many different ways of experiencing that meat when you use the whole bird and then you can make stock out of all those bones.
Speaker 2:And also it's like just because of something is small doesn't mean doesn't deserve all the respect. You know it's hard to regard a limit of doves. Look at 15 doves and sit there and acknowledge each one of those as an individual dove. I'm not trying to be too woo-woo here about it, but I mean it's good to look at it and just kind of be like thanks y'all. You know like I get it. You know all these birds wish they were alive, you know, but I'm going to eat them all. And you know, the same thing with one big deer, you know, but I try to. You know it's a respect deal when you can kind of give each one some individual acknowledgement and attention.
Speaker 1:Indeed indeed. Yeah, I would much rather do the breaking down and processing of the animal than the hunt itself. I mean, the hunt is OK, but it's way more exciting. I'm not that good of a shot, so it stresses me out. I accidentally killed two deer with one shot once.
Speaker 2:And it was an accident. Watch that backdrop. What's behind it? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So that was a big surprise and way more work than I had expected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's his much honest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh man, do you have anything else you want to share about that? I'd like to move on to talking about beef and domesticated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1:So when you began with the brick and mortar restaurant at Diedouay, you put grass fed beef on the menu. Right you were. You were serving, I didn't you have a steak night. Wasn't that one of the things?
Speaker 2:that you were doing.
Speaker 1:And basically you were using grass fed beef and I remember having a conversation where you just you were like really frustrated and you said I don't know care, I just I just can't keep using the grass fed beef. The customers are complaining, you know, have to do so much education around what this is and why it's different. And you were like I think I'm going to look into getting some, you know, pasture fed, grain fed animals, and so I just want to. This is also, you know, when grass fed beef has come a long way in the past 30 years.
Speaker 1:You know I'd say around the mid 90s is when a lot of grass fed beef started being produced. There began to be a market for grass fed beef in the mid 90s but it took a while right for the breeds to develop and for Texan ranchers to figure out which animals were going to work well with the terror of the you know, of the terrain, to create a good terror and the meat. And I know that you've focused a lot on this with different producers that you've bought meat from and then also collaborated with on different things. So tell us a little bit more about your journey, serving that in the restaurants and where you are now, and when you choose to serve grass fed and when you choose to serve some pasture grain fed and all of that good stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how much time do we have?
Speaker 1:Let's talk about it.
Speaker 2:I'm really into it right now. Like you said, when we first started I was pretty adamant about getting grass fed beef on the menu and every trick that we tried with aging and so forth. That really couldn't convince the customer and let's put this in the context of this is the 2014 customer. We could not convince them that that was a good steak, because if there's anything that Texans are and every Texan is an expert on its beef you know, they know what beef tastes like. Now. It was interesting too because you said the grass fed beef really had a like.
Speaker 2:The market really kind of started to open up in the 90s and it's like, yeah, and then I mean, if you looked on the entire span of grass fed beef, you would have several thousand years of grass fed beef, a couple decades of grain fed beef and then, like, in a resurgence, of grass fed beef. So to call the grain fed conventional, you know, just is pretty funny. You're stating exactly what the commercial or the customer mentality is, in that the palate has been developed in beef so much that when you serve them beef, the people are like this isn't beef. It's a hard place to be. When we first open, yeah, we were serving grass fed beef and we were not having a very good time of it. We had a lot of steaks sent back which was devastating financially and that you know one and three, one and four steaks. They're just like I don't like this, I don't like the flavor of this. This isn't prime Angus and you're like no, we told you it wasn't, but still it's. You know they did not enjoy it and so at some point, you know, we just had to make a decision to get away from that and try to find something, a compromise, and we found it a wonderful compromise. I hate calling it a compromise too.
Speaker 2:We found a wonderful source for it and there's a ranch in South Texas, mariana Peeler, and she raises Wagyu cattle on pasture and supplements them with grain, and they have free choice grain and they're also, but they're on pasture and they go from there to the processing plant, which I believe is seven or seven or nine miles away. So they get on the trailer, they go immediately there. There's no time spent in feedlot, they're not fattened up from there. So we get a very robust animal. Yes, it's been fed grain, but it's also been fed a lot of grass, but it also has a lot of the attributes of Wagyu and so that really kind of saved us in the B from and something that I could be very happy with the source, the way the animal lived, the way the animal died. The purveyor, ariana, she's wonderful, you know, and she's worked with us and we've got a wonderful product and the customers just absolutely love it.
Speaker 2:But since then, in the past probably year or so, I've decided that I'd like to revisit like true grass fed, and mostly stemmed from a trip to Spain where eight a couple stakes pretty much every night started just as like wait, what is this? This is amazing. And then you know I'd kind of played around with bringing in older animals. We'd purchased a few retired dairy cows over the years and I mean I was familiar with aged beef and by that I mean older animals. But then you know it's in San Sebastian and see on the menu and it says chuletón de vacavieja, which means like big chop of old cow, and I was like bring me that as soon as you can and had it and I was like this is fantastic. And it was not very marbled. I mean there was some marbling, not wagyu marbling, but like a real amount of marbling, a natural amount of marbling great exterior, fat, incredible flavor, incredible tenderness. And it was just served with salt, you know, the typical side of fried peppers in Spain, which is just like the perfect meal for me. And then it got back and was very, very excited by the prospects.
Speaker 2:I mean, we don't have a shortage of beef here. You know there's cows everywhere. A lot of people, you know, run a few cows just to get an agricultural exemption here, and so I know a lot of people that have cattle and just started up some conversations about how can we approach this from a totally different way. And so in Spain in particular, they like to source older animals. You know we're talking five years plus up to 10, maybe 14 years old, typically steers. And then they age that meat. It's aged for maybe 60 days, maybe six months. I mean some of like very extreme aging.
Speaker 2:And then I started looking at the differences that we have here. We're dealing with a lot of the same cattle breeds in Texas as we are in Spain, and we're dealing with the same environment, you know, arid, hot, not a lot of forage, naturally, but breeds that can go out there and figure it out. You know you have Galician cattle and then here in Central Texas you have the derivative of the Galician cow, or the Spanish cow is the longhorn, which is widely regarded and up until recently, by myself regarded as a very poor food source, until I had it done a different way, and then we experimented with bringing in an older animal, a five year old steer, and then we aged it for about 42 days before we started cutting into it, and the results were phenomenal. And what that told me was it's not the environment, it's not the animals, it's not the ranchers, it's the approach of everybody in the system. So, instead of what's normally done with grass fed, they're killed fairly young, about 24 months. They don't have an opportunity to put on a lot of marbling fat, maybe some extra muscular fat. They're taken to a small processor and they're killed, and then that processor, by the nature of being a small processor with very limited space, ages the animal for five days, seven days, 14 days, depending on if it's deer season he just doesn't have the room in the cooler and then that animal is cut on a bandsaw. In my opinion, the stakes are cut to thin. It's all back sealed and it's frozen, and so I think there's a disconnect between this excellent beef that we have on the hoof and then what enters the food system.
Speaker 2:I always point this out in Austin that if you want a true grass fed beef product like, and you want it on Tuesday at 1pm, where are you going to go find that? And the answer is the health food store. That's where you're going to go and find it. There's a freezer there and it's full of grass finished beef at the health food store because that's where we're at. So we have these cattle in Spain that are, you know, in a very similar environment to the beef here Similar breeds, similar forage. They are in a restaurant being served in restaurants. You know, name goes one notable restaurant called El Capricho and that's regarded as the best beef in the world.
Speaker 2:Versus going to the health food store here and buying some beef and honestly no offense it's not that great. It's been frozen, it's underaged, it's a little chewy, it doesn't have the marbling that it could have. And so my question is what can we do differently? I mean, we're talking about an animal that is basically living completely on its own foraging. It requires very minimal inputs, definitely no corn, no feedlot. It's out there just foraging on mesquite beans and blue stem and whatever it can out there and managing to put on some fat if you give it enough time, if you give it four, three, four, five, six years. And then what we did is we put age on it afterwards and it really hit its peak at about 60 days of dry age. After we had the subprimals, we aged them for 60 days and that's when it went from amazing to glorious.
Speaker 1:Were you aging that in your own freezer there, or were you doing that in a processor facility?
Speaker 2:The processor put a couple weeks on it for us we have a very good relationship with him and then he brought it to us and then we aged it in our we have a dry aging case and we aged it in the restaurant. For the remainder of that time they just kind of watched it, you know, and just watched the tender and watched the flavor develop and it was really fun. What was extra fun for me was and I don't know if it's our ability to convey verbally to community, to communicate with the customer the difference in what GrassFedish was. But this round, you know, 10 years after our first attempt at serving GrassFed, I think we were better at talking about it too. We got people excited. The servers would approach the table and be like this is not prime Angus, like what you're getting is not that, but what you're also getting is an experience that no one else is having right now. But we promise you that it's going to be good. And we had universal raves about this beef and these are people that love beef.
Speaker 2:We sold a lot of steaks. We were selling five pound steaks. Obviously this is a large party format item. That's the whole cut. You know we're cutting these giant vertebrae slices out of them, that has the sirloin, the tenderloin and the strip loin on there, and just these beautiful cuts, cooking them over oak and salting them with the salt from South Texas. And we had really good response to it.
Speaker 2:We switched from doing a venison tartare to beef tartare and people were loving that as well. The texture, the fat content, the flavor, the developed flavor of it. It went exceptionally well and it made me very excited about it because you know we're sitting in one of the most cattle rich parts of the world. We have the ability to realign what we think of as beef and stop making apologies for grass fed beef Like no, no, no, no. This is like steakhouse and above quality. This is yeah, you've got your A5 Wagyu. Yeah, you've got your prime, your feedlot stuff, your 90 day on corn, whatever, super sweet, fatty beef. But then, if you're a true connoisseur, we also have this, which is objectively a wonderful steak.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the other thing to think about is these different cattle breeds. Let's face it, things are changing. You know, one of the reasons why I left Texas is because I wanted to come to a place where I could see what raising livestock was like in a non brittle environment a K, a place where it rains, and, you know, have that experience of understanding how it differs from a meat perspective and from a production, a management perspective. And when we're talking about Longhorn cattle, these cattle are much more drought tolerant than a lot of the other species that are being raised. The only thing that is a bit of a challenge when we're talking about these long aging processes with this type of animal is that processors are filled to the max. There's not enough processing facilities for the amount of farmers and ranchers who want to do direct sales and have these types of relationships with their customers and the chefs and things like that. There's a lack of storage for aging. So you're lucky in that you have a place that you can do some of that dry aging. I mean, one of the best pieces of meat that I've ever had was a similar situation to what you were just saying. It came from the shooty ranch, which is in Dehanis, texas, and they were doing a longhorn debon blend. He started doing this blend back in the 90s as one of the first purveyors of grass-fed beef that was being sold to Whole Foods Market. And this beef is phenomenal, the flavor is unbelievable.
Speaker 1:But my friend Skye decided to age it in her fridge. She just kind of put it down in the crisper below, she wrapped it up with a towel and aged it. We cooked this beef and we took the fond from the pan, poured a little stock in there and then we grated dark chocolate and mandarin juice into it and then served it with fresh mandarins. And so it was a chocolate, mandarin, orange, aju, longhorn, red debon, grass-fed cut of meat. But it was literally. I mean, I'll never forget it. I remember we looked at each other, our eyes got really big and we were just like holy mackerel. What did we just do? It was such an amazing experience. So, yeah, these longer-aged, older animals can be just phenomenal. But what do you think the viability of creating, obviously not like a mass-produced product, but what do you think the viability is of that becoming a more common thing in the food system?
Speaker 2:It's marketing. You know it's always going to come down to marketing. It's like, you know, that's what happened at the table. I didn't prep our servers well enough in 2014 with how to discuss it, not to mention. I mean, the product just wasn't as good as what we're serving now, and then we came out yeah, and if we can create a product which literally only takes time, like that's, all we really need is we need the rancher to allow the animals to get a little older and then we need to age them, we can create a product that I think your steakhouse beef connoisseur is going to seek out.
Speaker 2:It's, you know, like heirloom pork 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when it became like oh, is this a derock or is this red waddle or is this a mangalitza? We might be able to do something like that, you know, and I think it will be a cross with the longhorn. These were crossed, and so I do think that we can get into. It'll be like a wine, you know it's like well, this region is great for growing timperineo. Well, this region is great for growing longhorn Devin crosses. You know the longhorn for its ability to, just like you know, chew on a cactus for six months and still be perfectly healthy. Plus, you know the Devin for some fat and some stature.
Speaker 2:So I think that if we can convey that you know, that the elevator speech that we give at the table or otherwise and we could probably make this a little more mainstream, like I was telling Juan Cito, who is the rancher, that we got this from us like we need to this needs to be on the menu next to the A5, next to the prime, next to the Texas grown Wagyu, and needs to be a category that people seek out and somebody you know they're going to be like well. Well, we want that, you know, and they want that, not as a gimmick, because it is so very good and it is a truer expression of beef than I think any of those others. You know it's not just a hyper fat animal that's been fed on GMO corn, but it is beef and it tastes like it. I mean, if you can get that tenderness and these other flavors down, then people are going to really want it.
Speaker 1:So I want to mention that you don't use any seed oils at the restaurant, which I think is awesome. Right, it is. I mean, where can you go out to eat where you're not getting any seed oils? It is a very, very rare, rare thing, and so the main fat that you use is beef tallow. Am I correct in that?
Speaker 2:Yes. And our fire is full of beef tallow. I mean, we still have French fries, we still make, we still don't, you know yes, you do some really good ones.
Speaker 2:Quite good. Yeah, we don't use seed oils. We've just been able to make. That's been a goal for years and we just made the switch months back with the advent of fermented sugarcane oil and that is used very, in very small amounts and that's just for making mayonnaise and mayonnaise based sauces. But before that we were entirely seed oil free. Use olive oil, butter, pork, lard and beef tallow and it shows. I mean, I feel like you can eat at the restaurant and feel differently than you can, especially if you're eating something fried. You know just, it's just different. My role is, if I don't feed it to my kid, I don't serve it in my restaurant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So tell me a little bit more about the fermented sugarcane oil. I am not familiar with this product and where you're getting it and how do they make it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the company's called Zero Acres and they came to us. I would be doing a disservice if I try to describe the entire process, but it is a grocery cane fermented and there's this oil extraction that happens from that and, long story short, it's like the healthfulness of it is. It's very similar to an olive oil and it's yeah, it's not a seed based oil, not canola, it's not an industrialized process. We've added it pretty well, I was on a few calls. I just sometimes the science just goes right over my head. I'm like oh, okay, okay, you know, but they're really making a lot of moves right now. Then you're starting to see more restaurants replace seed oils, namely they're empowered with this particular oil. And then it seems to be pretty exciting.
Speaker 2:Like I said, we use it, but the only need that we had was for stable mayonnaise type sauces and dressings and things. So, on the overall scope of it, like we're using a little bit of that, a lot of Texas olive oil, butter and then mostly lard and beef fat, because that is a byproduct of our butchering process and we spend a day every week just rendering beef for the friars and it's also for me. It's also a lot of flavor in there. I very much prefer frying a donut, frying some beer, battered fish French fries name it in beef fat over anything else, just because it is so damn good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's phenomenal. If you're in Austin, texas, and you can go check out Dai Duet, it is an amazing restaurant to eat at. It's a beautiful place. You can also go in and buy sausages and cuts of meat and they also have some local good products there. Sometimes you can even buy some local produce and random things that you know persimmons, texas persimmons, things like that. Jesse really focuses on making unique seasonal things that you just are never going to find anywhere else, like a persimmon soda or a amazing pancake with some type of random other fruit that he might have found.
Speaker 2:briefly, an agarita berry, or that's what the menu reads, pancake with random other fruit. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is fun. I mean I couldn't even tell you what's on the pancake right now because it's just like it changes so much. And yeah, I like, I appreciate that, thank you. It's a fun place to cook and, you know, create food and a lot of it's very simple. A lot of it's very recognizable too, and I think it's always important to put things in context, you know, especially if you're trying to convince somebody to eat something that's a little might be perceived as exotic to them, it's like put it in a familiar format first and then let them try it like that and then we can move on. But yeah, it's a fun place and it's always changing.
Speaker 2:You know we're at a fun season right now. We're in the middle of citrus and then we're also at that very awkward two week strawberry season. That happens right around the New Year. You know, it's like this, very like out of nowhere strawberries just pop up like strawberry plants, put on fruit for a couple weeks and they're going to go dormant for probably two and a half months after that. So we see them for a minute and we'll have them on the menu and then they'll be gone and then they'll come in really strong for the spring season.
Speaker 2:And it's like when the pastry chef did the day. She's like there's strawberries right now. It's like, oh, I know, like every year it happens, I forgot that it was going to happen. But now that you say that it's like yeah, it's time, it's time for that to happen and I'm like, go ahead and get as much as I know. Like are they good? She's like, yeah, they're really good. Get as much as you can, because they're going away. Trust me, we're not coasting on these strawberries till March. So if you're tired of cooking with citrus, like you need to jump on these strawberries right now because it will be kind of a one track deal until they come back.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I know how excited you get about the citrus coming in Well, particularly the lemons and the limes, right, the oranges and the grapefruit are very prolific, but the lemons and the limes come in in smaller amounts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean good lemon here. We had some bad freezes for the past couple of years and the citrus has been founded and we had a good lemon here and a good lime here. So yeah, you're right, I do. I'm very excited about that.
Speaker 1:So excited, yes, wonderful. So you have another project that's in the works. That's very exciting and you are working on another book focused on hunting turkey and processing turkey and making delicious meals out of turkey, and that's why I was so excited to have these turkeys under my doorstep this morning. Tell us a little bit about that project. You know it's very different from the hog book, right? Because the hog book is all about this one species that has a bad rap and very tasty but lots of mythology around it. And then now you're coming into this book that is focused around a very American icon animal Particularly.
Speaker 1:You know well, all of America, just American general, right From Mexico to Canada right, the turkeys are prolific and utilized, and so tell us a little bit about that book and what you are excited about, what you learned from it, and yeah, yeah, I mean there are.
Speaker 2:Turkeys are in 49 states, everywhere except for Alaska. Right, there's a ton of them in Hawaii. I think it is notable in exactly what you said about how different it is from hogs. I think that the way I see food here in central Texas is there's so many different avenues. You have agriculture, you have wild game, you have seafood, you have ranching, you have foraging, and also one really key component to that is conservation, and I think that when you compare a turkey to a hog, there's a very distinct difference in how we have to treat those two species. The hog probably needs to just be eradicated, as much as it pains me to say that, because I have a couple of businesses based on them and I can't really just wish them out of existence, although that won't work. Just the wishing part. But a turkey is such a drastically different thing than a hog in that they have to be treated with great care, and by that I mean the populations of them. They were almost decimated in the past 100 years and they've made a great rebound, mostly due to organizations like NWTF National Wild Turkey Federation but just repopulating and reestablishing environments for turkeys to thrive, and so when you see turkeys. It's a special thing, and so for me to go writing a book about hogs to turkeys, it's a big leap, also because I'm very, very familiar with hogs, hunting hogs, and I'm relatively new to hunting turkeys, and so this book was written from the perspective of someone that this by no means an expert and very new to it, but also very excited by it.
Speaker 2:Turkeys are a fascinating bird. They can be very difficult to hunt, except when they're not, it's like it can be remarkably easy, but most of the time it's quite difficult to hunt them in the spring season when they're playing the whole game, when they're mating and they're gobbling and there's all these verbal things that are going on. I've always regarded turkey as possibly my favorite game meat and my favorite thing to eat. They're also a big bird, so your typical turkey will yield about probably you know nine to 12 pounds of viable meat off of it, which is quite a bit, and it's exceedingly delicious, very, very good. So I've always been excited by that, and then I just decided to tackle this project. I didn't really know how to go about it and I realized it's just like like hey, I'm an amateur at this, let's just go write a book about kind of a journey and so we just took one season and it was actually this year the spring and traveled part of in Texas and hunted turkeys here. And then traveled to Georgia which is kind of the epicenter of turkey hunting culture, the Southeast's where all the best turkey hunters, the turkey collars and kind of this classic turkey hunting environment, the tall longleaf pines and palmettos and this thing it's kind of a thing there. And then traveled from there to the Pacific Northwest and we hunted in Eastern Oregon and it was three feet of snow on the ground and we came from Swat and Mosquitoes in Texas and Georgia to 18 degree mornings in Oregon. And then we went from there to Connecticut and Connecticut whatever, but we were 20 miles from a little town called Plymouth. So it's like that kind of illuminated to the historical weight that turkeys have in this country, from our first famous meal, which notably turkey was probably not served at. It's pretty much regarded that the first Thanksgiving they consumed venison and waterfowl and probably oysters and a lot of other things, but maybe not turkey. But that's when we think of turkey we think of Thanksgiving. So it was a fun trip to go to all these places.
Speaker 2:My home state, the cultural genesis of turkey hunting in the Southeast, the mountain states, and then kind of the historical established place for what we think of turkeys and just kind of documented it. And I traveled and hunted with a lot of chefs and also a lot of turkey hunters that are just kind of passionate about eating them and conservation. And the book is more of a journal. It's kind of a conversation about the spring and all the different things that happened, like there's a lot of weird things, a lot of funny things, a lot of strange things and it's just been documented and then recipes throughout as we're working our way through these turkeys, as we're in camp and cooking. Everything is kind of just documented and then photography to go along with it. So again I set out to write kind of a shorter book and failed miserably and it turned out to be pretty long again, like the hog book. It's a little bit shorter than the hog book but pretty full of recipes. I think I counted 114 recipes in there for turkey.
Speaker 2:But I'm very excited about it. I like that. It represents just a new thing. It's a food source that you could easily abuse, not like the hogs One person probably couldn't go out there and kill too many hogs, but one person could certainly be very detrimental to the turkey population. In a small area Like you have to be very careful with them, and I think it's just to me.
Speaker 2:It's exciting exploring all these different conversations around our connection to food, be it something that needs to be eradicated or something that needs to be enjoyed but respected. And I think that it's proven that hunters commit more money to conservation than any other group. And the duality of the turkey and people are like wait, you love turkeys and you want to preserve turkeys, but you kill turkeys. And it's like, absolutely, I care more about turkeys than most people and I want to see these populations remain healthy and the same, but I still think that we're able to consume them if we monitor what that consumption is, and so it's a really interesting conversation to me, and I think all these conversations beef, turkeys, seafood, foraging, fruit, citrus, all of it they all are just very similar in a lot of ways. As long as we're cognizant of what we're doing when we consume these things, when you have a connection to food, ie hunting it does very much teach you that every time you eat a lime or you're lucky enough to get a lemon after two hard freezes. How tenuous everything is and how much it all should be respected.
Speaker 2:The turkey book, if everything goes right, will be available for pre-order in late January. We expect to have it here in late February, right before turkey season. So hopefully, like late February, early March, we'll start shipping it out and right when everybody's excited about it. So it's easy to remember it's called the turkey book and the other book about hogs is called the hog book. I'm not good. I can write in thousands of words and then somebody's like come up with a title and I'm like I don't know about that and that's the idea. That's available online. It's pretty easy to find. And if you're interested in classes and stuff like that, that's a new school of traditional cookery and that's on the Didoay website.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and all of these links for learning more about each of Jessie's endeavors is in the show notes, so you can always go to the show notes to find those links. And the new school of traditional cookery is the hunting schools, basically, and Jessie only opens up registration one time per year, so you need to get on the mailing list and you need to be quick on the draw, because they usually sell out in about four minutes. So I highly recommend that you get in front of your computer and do some serious magic to try to get into one, but it's an amazing experience and I highly recommend trying. So, jessie, I just want to. You've got this book coming out, which is exciting, but what is in your quiver? Where do you see yourself heading after this book? Are you going to give yourself a little break, or do you have some ideas about other projects that you're excited about? And, yeah, where can we look for you in the future?
Speaker 2:Yeah, after I got the book kind of shipped off to the printer, got a little break from that in the depths of hunting season, though, so we're still doing classes right now. I just got back from one. I'll head back out in January. For me it's just, it's really getting down to education. I love education and just everything. Every topic we talked about today is something that I love talking about, and especially tying it all together, which this is a very unique opportunity to do that, because usually everybody's just like hey, let's just talk about hunting, and then the other one's like, hey, let's just talk about hunting, let's just talk about pigs. Yeah, pigs especially. It's like, as much as I love talking about feral hogs and the utilization bit, typecast, we can talk about something else now. I love lemons, for example. Berries, I love foraging berries, not just hogs. Honestly, I don't remember the last one.
Speaker 1:We didn't even talk about fish, and really I know that's your first love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, all that. I love the connection with people I love. You know, just got back from this class and everybody there was just so great. We had six clients out. I hate calling them clients, it sounds so sterile. I'm just like new friends. But it was great, it was really great.
Speaker 2:I just I love you know, in the last day they seem really happy, overwhelmed. You know, it's kind of I'm shooting for that too, like, just like, whoa, that was a lot. I'm like, yeah, try to make it a lot, try to make it very valuable. That's really my focus. I like that personal connection and just talking about food and showing people how to do it. I don't know what direction it's going to go in per se, like right now in a good space for just doing all kinds of things, but really for me it's not really so much the day-to-day restaurant side of it that's as exciting anymore as engagements and conversations around any food topic. So that was a really vague answer. Maybe I'll be a politician, but I don't want to be a politician, but pretty much that. Yeah, just talking about food.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exciting. Well, and if any of the listeners are interested in hearing more from Jesse, there is a number of podcasts done with Steven Rinella from the Meat Eater. Did I pronounce?
Speaker 2:his name right, rinella.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so from the Meat Eater podcast there was an interview with Joe Rogan as well, and a number of other podcasts on iTunes. If you just type in Jesse Griffiths, many podcasts will come up and you can hear all about more about the hunting and many other things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. Awesome, jesse. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, I just.
Speaker 1:I was reflecting on some stories this morning in my mind, just about being in the kitchen with you and I remember one time we had gotten in a bunch of fish and we were breaking down the fish and I think there was like two or three and these were big fish. I can't remember what they were, but they were big. I remember there was like maybe two or possibly three that had row inside of them and we were able to take the row out of the fish and use it in one of the dishes. You know, at this point, when I was working with Jesse, we were doing the supper club, and so these were big six to 10 course dinners for 80 to 100 people out in the middle of a field. Okay, so, in the middle of a ranch, in the middle of a field, we would take the whole kitchen, the whole table, all the chairs, all the dining gear, all of the ways to wash the dishes. We were using plates. You know, real plates, real glasses, real silverware. I mean, we were much younger than.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that was fun. That is no longer fun. It's like moving.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, it was so fun. It was so much fun. It was such an amazing era of time and I just really think about doing that now and I'm like hell, no, but at least not at that level, right. But yeah, always using really unique things and taking those fish eggs seeing Jesse's face light up, you know just like get so excited when he saw those eggs and then be like, okay, what are we going to do? You know, let's make caviar, even though it wasn't caviar. So anyway, yeah, really, really fun having this conversation with you, jesse. Thanks so much for taking the time and, like I said, if y'all want to find Jesse, you can go to the show notes and check it out. So good luck with your book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. I appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 1:Well, my friends, there you have it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Land Food Life podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show and gained some true gems of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit landfoodlifecom to explore my virtual and in-person coaching programs. You can also join my mailing list at landfoodlifecom to receive exclusive perks and discounts for email subscribers only. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and others in your network. You can post a screenshot of the podcast thumbnail, tag it on social media and rate the show on your preferred podcast platform. I am very much looking forward to our next chat in two weeks. Same time, same place. Bye for now.