Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 073: Advanced Wild Game Cooking

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Ep. 073: Advanced Wild Game Cooking · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case underwear listening hunt e podcast.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first light. Go farther,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: stay longer. You know, as as we get into talking
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: about different food I feel like it's an important thing
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: to clarify here is like, uh, last night, me and
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Janice eight dinner at Josh's restaurant, but we've also hung
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: out a bit and just socially and had some wild
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: game that Josh and friends you go mostly by Joshua
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: or Josh both. Yeah, that Josh has gotten from friends
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: or harvested themselves. So if when we're talking it sounds
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: like there's confusion ever between what we consumed in the
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: restaurant and what we consumed like for instance, in my
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: hotel room last night. UM, bear in mind that that
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: there's like important distinctions there between commercially produced meat that
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: can be sold in a restaurant and sport harvested meat
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: and fish that you can just get from yourself or
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: be gifted to you from a friend and share with
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: other other friends when there's no financial transaction going on.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: So just bear it in mind as we talk I'm
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: not gonna go in and clarify all this stuff all
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: the time. And it's an important distinction, and I just
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: want people to be aware of that as we march
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: through some of the foods. We're gonna be talking about
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Josh Gaines stays On restaurant. Does it annoy you? Does
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: it annoy you? When? When? If you if you look
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: at stays On online, there's two like things that people
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: will point out. Just a joy like a Joe Blow.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: If you went and typed in staves on San Francisco,
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: he's gonna find that you have three Michelin stars, which
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: is like a tremendous measure of success as a chef
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: and restaurateur. And there's gonna be another descriptor does that
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: descriptor annoy you? Then it comes off you haven't told
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: me what it is yet, because it's the it's the
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: if you take a national perspective, it's the second and
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: most blank. Yeah, you know, unfortunately, that's that's the Do
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: you hate it? Like kind of like a no, I,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: I you know, I don't. I don't hate it. I
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: mean I think that you know, there's a there's a
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: certain reality until can you tell people what it is
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: the second most one. Well it's it's the second most
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: expensive restaurant in America, apparently because reporters can't do math,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: but because I feel like it, Um, go ahead speak. Well,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: you know, we we started um putting. We we we
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: put the price you know, out front in the beginning, right,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: everything was included. And then if you look at you know,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: let's say another three star Michelin restaurant, you get a
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: basementu price. Then there's you know, four or five supplements,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: and you add all those things up and it's like
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: double the price of here. So you know you got
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: it just by coming out and saying here's what it
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: costs for all inclusive? Or how many courses does wind
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: up being? Uh, it just depends anywhere from eight to
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: you know, sixteen, So you're just laying it when you
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: lay it all out. I was trying to put it
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: all out there. I was trying to say, hey, guys,
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: here's math. This is so much. You'll be here for
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: a couple of hours, it's this much, and then it
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: then it positions you in that way where you have
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: all over online. Yeah, people like that expression. Yeah, how
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: many three Michelin star restaurants are in the US. I
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: think I think there's thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve or thirteen,
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: some twelve and four and some other other ones in
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: San Francisco. Uh yeah, there's one. So we were we
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: were the first, along with another place called Venue. Yeah.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: I think we should explain if we can just a
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: real general idea of what Michelin stars are, it would
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: be important because yeah, that's who's the chef. Who's the
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: chef that killed himself when he lost the Michelin Star.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: I mean which one? I think there's a few, but
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: the guy you're talking about, the famous guy his name
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: in France. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you're talking about.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: So yeah, explain, like the misslim Star thing. So Michelin,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: I guess is the you know, it's it's also the
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: tire company. But they started publishing a guide I think
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: it was in the thirties maybe, uh and uh it
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: was meant to uh you know, probably meant to sell tires,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: but uh, but it gave people, um, you know, a
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: guide to uh you know, destination were the restaurants and
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: so you know it was either one, two or three
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: and three is basically you know the nacle of the
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: cooking world or the restaurant world, and and and it
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: really means that it's worth a detour, you know, a
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: full trip to go to you know, restaurant and then
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: in your place you are you wear a camouflage hat.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: I noticed last night when I was dying in here,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: so you had that wasn't because you were here. Actually
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: it's just not so you. But that's the interesting thing
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: is that, um, you're like pretty open, Like you're very
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: open about the fact you like the hunt. Um, even
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: though you live in a town that's perceived by many
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: people who don't live here, like it's perceived by outside
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: as being like a place that would be a hostile
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: environment for hunters. Yeah, but then to be here's like
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: a person who is sort of at the pinnacle of
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the restaurant world, the pinnacle of the cooking world, in
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: this very space and just being like add out open
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: about it. Have you ever have you ever felt blowback
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: at all for just being like, this is what I
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: this is what I like to do. This informs my cooking,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: it's my it's a lifestyle I have. I mean, you
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: get you get blowback on you know, Instagram or something,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: but you don't, you know, in here. You know, it's
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: our purpose is just for quality, right, the quality of
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: the product. So you know, for me, the whole the
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: whole reason for for starting hunting again was uh good meat.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: It's you know, you you know, as a chef, you
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: start to chase uh quality and uh so you know
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: I was just looking for, you know, a better quality.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: And so you know, over the years it led me
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: to hunting because you can't really replace that uh you
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: know that that quality level, you know, provided that you
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: handle it in the right way, um as getting in
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: yourself so or at least seeing the whole process through right. Um,
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: so you know, whenever we're at the point just I
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: mean to speak to that like you're you were steaming,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: like you don't every fish that comes into your restaurant
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: you like to come in alive? Yeah exactly. Yeah, if
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: we if we can get the elk in a live
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: to it, we do that, but it might stress him
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: out a little bit and not tasted good. And you
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: have staff, you have like a staff fisherman. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: so we have we have fishermen, and these guys bring
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: us basically everything alive. So the whole purpose is that
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: we get all of our stuff alive because uh, you know,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: the reality is is like as soon as you you know,
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: you know, pull a trout out of the river, you know,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: it starts to go downhill. You either click it right there,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: and you know, you get to experience that kind of
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: perfect uh taste, right, and you know there's a small window.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: There's usually usually for all things, there's like a window.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: You get a window in the beginning and uh uh
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: you know that's what maybe thirty minutes after you harvest it,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: whether it's meat or or or fish or whatever it
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: may be, right, it's maybe an hour let's say an hour, right,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: and it's perfect. There's one particular taste you know, kind
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: of attached to that that period of time. And then
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: you know, as time goes by, rigor sets in. You know,
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: you can I see your question. I was gonna ask
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: about rigor. So if you actually do, say, you know,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: eat you're a piece of your elk in that first hour,
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: will you actually be able to eat it and enjoy
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: it before you have any sort of rigor? Exactly? Yeah,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: So it said you know there's two there's That's what
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: I'm saying. There's basically two particular you know, sets of
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: time before before rigor sets in, before uh, you know,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: any of those things really happened. There's that that taste
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: everybody's fromil you know, any hunters familiar with that taste.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: And then there's that I guess what we what we
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: call aging right where we age our meat to a
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: certain point to where you know, the enzymes start to
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: break down the meat and they start to make the
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: meat more delicious or the fish more delicious. And you know,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: really everything has its its sweet spot where it tastes
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: you know, perfect, right. So so our job is really
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: to find that timing and the products lifespan and then uh,
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: you know, choose the right point to cook it at.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: So you know, for an elk, for a big big
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: piece of meta, we could hang those primal cuts for
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: you know, a month, three months even and uh and
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: so you know, it's really all about just kind of
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: finding that that that right right moment when it tasts best.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: I want to get back into I want to spend
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: a bunch of time on aging, because you were telling
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: me some things like aging game that you found just
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: from your own personal stuff, and then you're working your restaurant.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: That's that's that's kind of up ended some of the
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: things that I thought were possible, some of the extremes
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: that I thought were possible on aging and what you
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: get on it. I also want to talk about your
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: fish killing method. What I call what I heard E
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: K G may But how do you properly say it?
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: I don't speak Japanese. I wouldn't know. I call it
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: a kids. You Yeah, I've just listened to the Japanese.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Did say it when I go down to the fish market.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: You know, you kid? You man? I think, but you, uh,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: you grew up in Florida, But you did you grow
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: up like in Florida. It's like the fisherman's paradise, right?
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Did you grow up a round fishing? Oh? Yeah, I
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: grew up fishing, you know, uh, you know kind of
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Jack's Barracuda's tarpan sharks. You know, you name it alligators? Um?
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: But but I um. I got out of there in
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: high school, and then I moved to Boston and then
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: went to school in New York and then finally came
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: out here. Like your your family's your whole family moved.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Are you just left on your own? No? I just left.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: I grew up around a bunch of people that grew
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: up in New York and and you know, they always
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: talked about the big city, big lights, and so I I,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: you always had a dream to get out of there
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: and go and moved to New York. You studied what there? Well,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: I went to so so I went to Boston. I
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: had some family there. Uh what plan? Don't actually going
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: to school in Boston then? Um? Uh didn't? And then
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: wind up going to culinary school New York in a
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: place called French Culinary Institute. Yeah, I gave which is
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: now I think it's called i SEC International Culinary. Yeah,
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: I gave them a beaver tail one time. Right, I
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: was messing around for for a period of time. I
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: was trying to mess around and finding out how the
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Mountain Men cook beaver you know, like, yeah, you know
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: what you're reading about the Mountain of Arts and they
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: love beaver tail, right, But you get the sense that
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: it's just from oral or you know, oral stuff that
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: was eventually transcribed into writing of people describing the Mountain
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Men's diet, but no one really got into how they
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: were actually cooking it or what they're doing with it.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: And so I started messling with it and and put
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: some stuff up online about messing around with beaver tail,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: and a guy at that at that school, I gave
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: him one and he had his students prep it out
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: and that it's pretty exciting stuff with beaver tail over there.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: I don't know if exciting comes to mind when you
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: give like a culinary school, you know, some rare ingredient,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: But but what what is the what's like the makeup
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: of the beaver tail. It's scales. It's scales over so
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: when you look at the beaver tail, you're just seen
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: the scally surface. Uh, that tail will be emaciated in
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: the spring to the point where you'll see you can
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: see the outline of the bone that runs the length
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: of it, just like the end of the you know,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: the end of the spine right runs into the tail um.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: But in the fall it gets so fat. I think
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: it gets like heavier and the fall when it builds
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: up fat and when you burn off the scales, you
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: just put it next to you, fire for a long
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: time and eventually start to bubble and burn and you
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: can scrape that skin away and underneath it is what
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: looks and tastes like grizzle and fat on a real
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: fatty ass grilled steak and you slice that thin and
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: you'd eat it and you'd be like, that tastes exactly
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: like grizzle. But you have to consider that the people
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: that were eating that, um, they were living on a
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: diet of very lean wild meat. And I think it
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: was just like it was a fat source. Basically top
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: the bottom just fat, and you slice it thin, put
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: some salt on it, and it's like surprising, because it's
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: surprising that that is what lives inside of a beaver's tail.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: So what about the meat? Do you eat the beaver meat?
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: We just put that on top like a little it's
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: like a little toiret topping you could make. You could,
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: really you could cook the meat down and then put
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: this stuff on there, like make its own little fat
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: source on there. Alright, I'm gonna give you a recipe
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: for beaver tail after this already got it. I don't
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: want to know what you need. Yeah. Um, So yeah,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: that was that was my runn into that place. But
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: I had some other point I was gonna make about
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: beaver beaver tails. Yeah, I don't know. Did you know
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: by this point, like when you were going to school,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Like at what point growing up, did you know you
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: had a knack for cooking? And then also, at what
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: point did it be that you started to associate hunting
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: and fishing with your interest in cooking. Well, I don't
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: know if I ever I thought I had a knack
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: for cooking in the beginning. I think that You're like,
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: I had to I had to pay some bills, you know, yeah,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: and uh and so I got a you know, restaurant job.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Why Stually, my first restaurant job was in Florida. I
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: was dishwasher the Japanese restaurant. And um, and I just
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: always had restaurant jobs because they were easy to get.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: You know, back then, you can, you know, any any
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: you know, schmuck can get a restaurant job. So I
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: was just, you know, it was just what I had.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: And when you were back there scrubbing dishes, you were like,
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: some of a bitch man, this is what I'm I
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: do with my life? What you know? I I So
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: I grew up doing martial arts, and I started once
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: about five or so, and uh and so the organization
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: of actually dishwashing and and getting you know, a pile
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: of ship thrown at you, you know, play a bust
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: you know, bus tubs of uh of plates and cups,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: you know, and and and having and having to go
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: through the process of like rinsing them, washing them, getting
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: in there, getting out of dishwasher, getting put away, drying them, wax.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: It was like this movement, you know, smartial arts movement.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: So I was excited about it. Really, I like my
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: dishwashing job. So there was the fastest dishwasher in town. Man, right,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: a COVID of dishwasher. You know that it worked for
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: me when I was my short little stit in the
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: kitchen when we had new guys washing dishes and me,
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: and they'd be just crossing in the weeds and be
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: at the end of the night where not only do
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: they have all the cups and dishes and plates and
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: still we're coming at them, but the whole kitchen is
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: just breaking down. So now there's you know, pots was
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: you know, stuff stuck on them, and cheese melted everywhere,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: and all kinds of pans, and man, if you just
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: jumped in there a couple of nights and gave him
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: like an hour of your time and just busted but
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: with them, and then all of a sudden, it's like
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: your rapport with them was just golden forever. You know,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: they're just like, all right, man, I like you. I
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: like you forever. This dude can handle burned on cheese.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Then yeah, I don't want to I don't want to
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: like labor your bio, but I do want understand kind
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: of how you came to be who you are. Well,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: I think I think it was really random, you know,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: it was really just kind of happenstance in my opinion.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: You know, I I I was interested in certain things,
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: you know, cooking, you know, his physical act. And I
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: think you know, growing up doing martial arts, it was
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: you know, a relationship to crafts, right, I mean, you
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: know it's a craft and so but in fact, I
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: went back and forth on cooking and martial arts for
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: a long period of time when I first started, you know,
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: after I went to corner school. Like you were, like
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: you were doing competitive martial arts. Uh yeah, yeah, when
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: I was younger, I did I did I do Chinese
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: martial arts and and and so. Um, you know I
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: did some compete when I was younger, but um, but
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: I always went back and forth and because you know,
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: really practicing took up so much time. Uh and uh
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: and so cooking at that time was you know, distraction
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: from practicing. And so I went back and forth and
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: and finally around twenty you know, twenty or so, I
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: gave up and and just just you know, needed to
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: pay my bills, and you know, I started cooking full time.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: And uh and so and where were you then? I
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: was in Boston. I was in Boston. What kind of
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: food were you doing? Uh? Just like be stro food,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: you know, random bistro I worked out. I worked a
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: couple of restaurants in Boston that are well known. Um,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: but uh, but it was it was you know, it's
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: like I used to sneak in the bathroom, like read
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: my like martial arts book, you know, a little scrolls
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: and ship in the bathroom. I was like, oh, I
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: gotta breakdown. It's fifteen minute break and we go read
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: my scrolls in the bathroom. So so I was went
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: back and forth, um and uh. And it wasn't really
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: until I came out to San Francisco where I really
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: really like, uh started to Um. It was what thirteen
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: years ago I really started to, uh, you know, focus
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: wholly on cooking. So so working working, working in other
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: places at the time. Still, Yeah, So well, yeah, when
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: I came out here, I worked at a place in
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the South Bay called H T J. Little little, um,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: little restaurant that it's been around for maybe like twenty
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: five years, and I had a garden in the back.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: But but it allowed me to really refocus and really
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know, treated as a career and
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: um and uh, you know, it was a learning process.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: I came out here and there was all these incredible products,
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: you know, coming from the East Coast, where there's there's
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: just not the same you know, you know, convergence of
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: you know, all all these amazing things. There's like a
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: there's a cheese producing region here, there's a wine producing region.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: You know, you can you can you know, go outside
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: and and hunt. I guess you can do that anywhere.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: But um, but basically they have everything everything you would
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: want here as a chef to really produce good fit.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: You felt that, like you felt that the the ingredients
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: available to you and the products available to you was
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: just better here than it was in the East. I mean,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: go you know, you go to Whole Foods. I mean,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: I don't know about now, right, it's a little different now.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: But when I came here, Yeah, for sure. I mean
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: you can go to Whole Foods and you can look
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: at you know, three varieties of radish, whereas you know
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: the you know, uh that I was named that place
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: in the East Coast. I don't know if you got
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: a supermarket out there, and at that time it was
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: just just wasn't the same. Yeah, maybe it's because I
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: was dirt poor when I lived in the East Coast.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: You know what we were talking about yesterday driving around
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: here is, um, we're kind of in the last couple
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: of days. You've done kind of a tour where San
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: Jose down to Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz up to here.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: It was like where I you know, where I grew up,
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: where I've lived most of my life. When you are
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: in an agricultural area, you're usually looking at stuff that's
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: fed to stuff that will become food, right like where
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: groups like alfalfa and feed corn. When you're driving around California,
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: like be like, oh, ship, there's a field of cauliflower
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: or there's you know, there's like products you know where
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: you're like, you're you're able to in this climate in
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: this area grow the actual things that you eat. You know,
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: all the artichokes, tree nuts. It just kind of gives
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: you a different relationship to how stuff is after because
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: most people just look at are looking more at commodities
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: when they look at agricultural fields rather than looking at
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: like finished table ready items being grown unless you have
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: a garden. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Out here, you know,
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: it's got everything, but it's still you know, I mean,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: there's you know, all that stuff out here is still
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: most of the majority of it's still you know, kind
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: of monoculture and and um, you know, you know, cities
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: devoted to just artichokes, right, So it's still it still
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: has its issues out here. Right. So it's really all
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: the small it's it's it's it's all practices, right until
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: you really get into the smaller practices than it. Then
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: you know there's a there's a lot of issues with
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: with you know, agriculture in general. So when you when
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: you got there, I need to start your own. Is
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: this the first restaurant you started? Yeah? Did you at
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: the same time decide to be that You're gonna get
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: a restaurant and get a farm? Well, I mean I yeah,
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: I mean you need a farm to to really have
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: the best things. Like most restaurants don't have a goddamn farm.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Well that's true, but you know, if you're gonna make
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: good food, you gotta have farm. If you if you're
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: still good to be like that. That's as simple as that.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Like if you have a rest if I'm gonna have
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: a restaurant, a farm, need a fisherman, you know, need
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: to get need to get media, a certain place, you
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: need to find uh you know, uh, you know dry goods.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: So you know, as a chef, you gotta you gotta
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: go through, uh, you gotta audit your list of of
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: how are you really procure ingredients if you really want
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: to get to to a place where you're actually producing
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: good food in earnest, Right, So explain the farm that
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: goes with stays On. Is it called says On farm? Uh? Yeah, sure,
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: we'll call it that. It's just I saw it written
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: somewhere you got a duck hanging up somewhere, and I
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: saw it, said like, yeah, that's just in our internal language.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: We don't we just our farm, right, it's called the farm.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: But yeah, it's just you know, you gotta you have
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: to you know, you got you have a you have choices, right,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: you can pick up the phone as a chevy you
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: can call you know, your your purveyor, your wholesaler and say, hey, look,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: you know, uh, take six heads of lettuce today, right, Um.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: But you know that the whole process of of wholesaling
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: is you know, there's there's a middleman there, there's a
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: you know usually maybe another middleman, someone who actually sources
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: all this stuff out. Then there's the actual producer. So
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: you're separated and by the time it gets a restaurant,
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: you're five layers away from from getting the actual product.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: So you know, it goes to a whole, it goes
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: to you know, shipping, it goes through holding in the warehouse,
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: and then maybe you get it maybe three or four
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: or five, six, seven days later, right, So at that point,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't taste have any resemblance to really
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: what a great product really is anymore. You know, the
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: aroma was gone. That that that original taste when you
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: picked it has gone. And and most likely the product
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: itself is is you know, some from some seed that
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: was uh, you know, spliced and diced you know, seven
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: different ways to to have no resemblance of the the
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: original taste of that product. So we just wanted to
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: to you know, take it back to a time to
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: where everything had flavor, right, I mean really since what
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: World War one or two or where it was that
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: you know, everything has been you know, um, you kind
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: of bastardize our seeds, our seeds and you know all
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: the produce you know, I mean you really think about, um,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: you know how many people have eating a ripe tomato,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: you know, from a great seed off the vine when
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: it's when it's truly like right, it's very few. So
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: that was our purpose. We wanted to just you know,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: have great products. You know. That's the thing that comes
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: up a lot in conversations about food. I feel like
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: over the last two decades or whatever, is uh, the
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: I sit on both sides of what I'm gonna bring
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: up where people talk about the industrialization of food, Okay,
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: and we generally now sort of talk about it as
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: a negative because we have the luxury in this country,
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: We had the luxury of like eating very fine food.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: But to contextualize it a little bit, just to show
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: you that, just to demonstrate, like my how I sit
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: on both sizes contextualized a little bit. During World War two,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: we had estimates very but perhaps some millions of people
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: starved to death in Europe. We had rations in this
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: country on you know, there was like dairy rations, meat rations,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: major shortages, and coming out of that, it wasn't long
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: after that that we got used to this idea that
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: we might be in the very near future entering into
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: another major world conflict with the Soviet Union. And I
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: think at the time the most pressed thing issue was
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: how can we create a system where we have the
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: capability of throwing a switch and feeding Europe and fielding
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: this military. And so we just like, it wasn't that
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: we got lost our way. It's just that we had
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: a period where our priorities were completely different and we
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: and then some good things came out of it, like
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: that we would bank soil right, You'd have like farms
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: that were put out that when dairy prices dropped, rather
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: than having a dairy farmer go out of business, we
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: would subsidize them so that they could stay ready to
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: jump into action should the need occur. So now we
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: look at it. I feel like now we look at
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: were like we're getting away from that, We're getting away
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: from the industrialization. I feel like we always gonna keep
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: an open eye for the fact that it's just because
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: we have the luxury of doing that. But it wasn't
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: like evil people trying to do evil ship because just
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: people trying to get ready for a catastrophe which we
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: had just witnessed happened. No, it's true. And uh, you know,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: we we operate within a very narrow little hole, right,
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: so so so our you know, our ore are in
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: our little hole, you know, our little pond we were are.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: Our focus is purely tastes, right, it's tasting along with
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: taste comes from others saying anyway, saying that you're guilty.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Why I just claimed. But I think that there's like
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: there's a way that when when we lose I think
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: we lose sight of some of the motivations of how
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: stuff came to be and treated like it was just
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: bad decision making. Yeah, you like it's all just Monsanto
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: just trying to make next right, Yeah, but it's like
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: a lot of factors at play, right, Yeah, No, it's
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: not just the evil uncle right then that yeah, but
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: but you yeah, but now just to get back to
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: where we are, Yeah, now, we do have at this
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: moment in time the luxury to have like to pursue
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: perfection and absolute ripeness and food rather than just shelf stability. Well,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: there's also some really cool solutions too that you see
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: coming around, right especially with with the age of technology.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: There's there's a clue is loop agriculture systems that are
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: happening that produce you know, I think it's you know,
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: twenty x the volume of of product and in a
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: really small space, so you can put you know, one
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: of the most interesting ones is uh. You know, it's
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: completely closed loop. So what that means is really you've
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: got you know, a little pot, a little capsule, and
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: it's an artificial and growing environment, and you can fit
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: a ton of product in there. You can grow a
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: ton of product in a very small space. Um, you produce.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: You can produce uh. I don't remember what the numbers were,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: but I think it's roughly x uh the volume of
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: food out of this little small space. You can also
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: control the nutrient drink that goes in. You can control
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: the sun cycle, you know, all of those elements that
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: go into growing food. And since it's closed loop, you're
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: basically recycling you know, all of that taste and all
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: of the nutrient drink. So um, and it's all computerized. Uh,
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: and so you can basically, let's say you had uh,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: you know, an artichoke that was perfect in uh two
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: thousand one in you know, Salinas, when that was the
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: best arti shark you ever had in your life, you
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: could go you can go look up all of the
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: historical data or all the weather data, and you can
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: plug in those data points to this closed loop system
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: and you can basically replicate that exactly. So there's some
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: cool stuff coming out also, but that's in that would
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: have interesting implications for the wine world. Yeah, well see
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: the issue with that now. But the issue is that
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: you lose a little bit of what's called taroa right
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: you know, because you can still produce a delicious sweet plant.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: That's that's great, that's the way that you maybe like it.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: But you can ever replicate really truly the taste of nature, right,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: It doesn't just it's not possible you can. So so
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: that's the downside of that. Where uh, where in your
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: if we're in if we're checking back in on and
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: on your biography, and at this point we kind of
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: got you where you're here. You got a restaurant, you
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: got a farm, Um, where did like you're sort of
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: a where did your re awareness of hunting come in?
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: Because you were like exposed to it in a way
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: in Florida and we're aware that it was the thing
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: people do. You'd like to run around out the wood, Yeah,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: you run around, you know, as a kid, you run
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: around and there's Alegan run around with spears. Yeah, you know,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: at least to try to hunt ut wild boars with spears.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Never successful, but you know it was waiting the tree
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: and try to throw a spear down. But it was
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: it was more of a you know, just just being
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: a kid, you know, trying to exactly you get some frogs.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: You know, we get frogs and we uh, you know,
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: eat some water moccasins and rattlesnakes and stuff. But but
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: you know, it can't it came around because of products.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: It's it's really taste. Right. At a certain point you
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: look at you start to dissect all of our practices,
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: you know, and all of our food practices, um and
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: at a certain point realize is a chef that that uh,
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: you know, grain fed beef doesn't taste good anymore? Right,
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: You start to notice, you know, it's a process. We
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: start to notice the fact that that beef, you know,
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: or or meat in general, everything tastes like corn, or
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: everything tastes like shitty wheat, you know, or whatever it
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: may taste like. So, so the whole purpose was was taste. Really,
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: that's our whole purposes really taste. Right now, do we
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: really you know, find a product that did is uh,
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: you know, like it once was or or or whatever
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: our reference points are for a particular product, right like,
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: what is what is the most delicious uh meat? What
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: is the most delicious lettuce? You know? And then so
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: your experience is wild game kind of started to shape
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: your impressions of what was possible and what could be
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: done and what things would taste like variations. Well, I've
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: been I've been getting uh, you know, we get we
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: get a lot of we get a lot of hunters
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: here that give us meat, you know, get u s
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: wild ducks or or deer or whatever and just kind
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: of donate it to me. And um, so been eating
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: it for a few years out here. Um surprising. There's
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: a lot of hunters in California, or at least a handful. Um.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: Some friends would pass long stuff you check out. They
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: just passed along meat I eat here and duck and
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: and um I got you interested. Well it just yeah,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: it just it. It really re sparked that or reignited
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: that spark, right, And uh, I mean wild ducks are
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: really delicious, right and wild meats you know, really good.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: We treat it the right way. So so at a
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: certain point, I just want to get it myself, you know,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: I just I just wanted to. I wanted to, you know,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: have all wild meat. So there's the thing that happens.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: Maybe you can explain this to me. When you're looking
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: at when you're reading about chefs and reading about great restaurants,
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: you're always seeing that that anyone can produce I shouldn't
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: say anyone, but yeah, let's just say anyone can produce
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: this great dish once, okay. But the true sign of expertise,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: so like mastering your craft is that you can do
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: it seventy times in a night or whatever number of
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: times in a night and have it be the same.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: And then you can do that for weeks, right, and
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: just like executed again and again and again. I don't
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: know if you use that measure of success, but yeah,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: you're familiar with That's the thing people bring up when
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: talking about being a great cook. But with wild game,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: you look at me like you've never heard I've never
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: heard of that, to be honest, Yeah, I was reading that.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: I was reading someone talking about that. No, I was
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: reading there a day someone saying I was reading a
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: profile of chef in the New Yorker. Makes sense, And
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: it was a guy saying like, yeah, um, perfection to
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: me is three eggs, like eggs benedict, without a mistake,
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: without one returned, without one customer return sure, like as
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: as the craft of cooking goes. Yeah, so I hear
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: that now and then. And on the other hand, with
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: wild game, you're opening yourself up to such a tremendous
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: amount of variability because they're not the same. You know,
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: if you if you identified, like if you have a
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: farm and you're identified. Man, this this dude at this
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: farm produces some goodass lamb because he's got some breed
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: of lamb that works well on the land where he
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: raises it. He's got a great irrigated pasture with like
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: the right blend of forbes and grasses, and his alfalfa
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: is beautiful, and he's able to run this thing. And
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: when I get a leg of land from him this year.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: It's great, I get a leg of land from him
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: next year. It's great. That ship isn't what wild game
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: is like. Well, because you shooting, you're shooting an animal.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: But you know, I don't know. I look, it looked
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: like a good animal. I shot it, but I got
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: over there and had recently crashed into a porcupine, so
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: its entire belly was full of quills and every one
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: of those injuries was full of post. It was emaciated.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: Or I shot it and wasn't the first guy that
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: shot it, because it's back leg on the side not
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: facing me had been injured by a it, and so
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: you know, it was packed with dirt and it was
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: a mass. Or I killed some big crazy buck that
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: had been rotting hard for two months and hasn't probably
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: eaten a liquor grass for two months, and tasted like ship.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: Or I shot a deer and it fell into a
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: big sinkhole and I couldn't get it out till a
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: couple of days later, with a rope and a buddy
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: holding my ankles. So I'm just saying that isn't like
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: this dude that produces these wonderful lambs time and time again,
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: it's like you can't there is like perfection is out there,
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: but perfection isn't always out there. Yeah, I think like
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: we we killed like whatever it was going on that
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: year in Idaho and we killed Yanni. We killed some
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: stomper bucks in Idaho. And I don't know what was
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: going on that year in Idaho, but that was like
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: it was the best mule deer meat ever. And I'm
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: eating a shipload of mule deer right and I don't know.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: It defied everything you're supposed because supposed to be like
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: big giant bucks on taste. These are big giant bucks
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: pre rut that had two which is of tallow on
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: their back. And we're great. So that's my question, Well,
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: how do you deal with all the lack how do
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: you deal with all the lack of consistency when you're
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: as a chef who's dealing with wild game and not
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: just commercially produced wild game, but on your own, you're
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: dealing with hunted wild game. Yeah, for us, For for us,
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: that's all. I mean, every product is like that, right,
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: I mean the whole for us. You know, it's so
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: specialized that you know, when we get a radish in
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: one day from the farm, it's not necessarily the same
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: as the next day from the farm, right, so you
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: can you can you know, uh, you know, take that
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: theory with with any product that you use. Could be
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: the rain, could be you know, the amount of sun
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: you get in one day, could be uh, you know,
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: their diet. But every product changes a little bit every day.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: So the way that we operate is we basically get
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: a product in the door, look at it, and then
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: decide what to do from there. Because even if you're
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: getting you know, that lamb, you know, maybe they forgot
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: to feed it one day. Who knows, maybe the lamb
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: is sick, you don't, you don't know, right, So so
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: everything changes just to touch, and even if it's just incrementally,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: it still changes every day. And so our focus is
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: really on kind of capturing that taste. So you know,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: if we get uh, if we get a buck in
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: it's very um um bucky, then you know, you've got
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: to decide what to do with it from there. So
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: do you grind it to maybe purge some of that
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: flavor out? You know, maybe you throak in and salt
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: water for salted water for a few days, just to
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: kind of purge it and have have a clean flavor.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's like that that mule deer you've got and
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: just throw it right and grill. You don't even age it.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: So it just depends. And so so our whole operating
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: system in the kitchen is based on really kind of
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: assessing what the product is and then deciding, you know,
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: what methods to go through for preservation and so that
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: that you know, select just selecting the right product is
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: is a huge part of it. But um, you know
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: you can either for us, we either especially sparticularly meat
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: and game. You know, you either choose either use it
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: right there or there's some sort of continuation and the
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: preservation process that happens. So whether it's aging or curing
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: or grinding into a sausage or whatever it may be.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: You know, it's just just like anything else. Can you
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: take this menu and do the many that you served
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: last night and do a sort of speed walkthrough? Uh yeah,
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: I got one over here. Well I want people to
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: get I want people to get a sense of of
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: what of what dishes you like to serve. Well, um,
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: let's see you had a fistfull caviar, start white sturge
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: and caviar. It's white surgeon caviar. It's farmed, right, it's
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: farm caviar. But we we but that is a fish
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: that that is a fish that a Felican fish for Yeah.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: In the Columbia drainage, they have like uh, you know
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: they have see they have uh open seasons and within
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: those seasons they have kill seasons. Were allowed to like
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: harvest sturgeon. We were making our own sturgeon caviare this
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: year with a very abundant sturgeon called shovel nose sturgeon.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: But it's material in the Yellowstone River. Yeah, you're about
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: ten a day shovel noses and you get them in
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: the spring. They're about you know, a big one to
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: be two and a half feet long. So, but they
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: have caviar inside. Yeah, but it's it's like painstaking the eggs. Yeah,
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: we're gonna put it through a little sieve. You gotta
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: just mess with it. No, there's nothing to save out.
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: So when you open them up, when you get a female,
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: you open them up and you know some fish have
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: like the skein, right, the sack that holds the eggs
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: like the most the easiest example of over egg to
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: clean would be salmon where you open up that skein
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: and you can just kind of like the eggs just
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: kind of fall away. On sturgeon, the skein and the
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: eggs are just like almost interwoven where each egg needs
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: to be kind of separated from the skein, and it's
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: it's painstaking, like you get it where you have a
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: ton of it, and then we just cleaned it for
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: a long time and they were like, dude, I can't
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: keep cleaning these eggs. And then we salt water the
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: eggs and just ate them. You've seen you've seen the
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: commercial process a cavy are right, I have never seen
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: how they do it. So they just take they take, uh,
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: I mean it's the same, right, Maybe it's more on
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: this like wild surge and shovel nose, but but on
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: you know, like a white sturge and you take the
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: caviar shack out, you throw it into a sieve and
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: the sieve is you know, the right side for the beads.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: But but they just rub it. They rubb it pretty hard,
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: and they rub it and then it breaks away all
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: the membrane and only the eggs based then they basically
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: drop it in in a salted water bath and then
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: a lot of that stuff will well, a lot of
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: the membrane will float. You just lift it off and
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: then the caviars left over, and they repeat that process
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: till it's clean. The shovel nosed sturgeon, uh there egg
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: is probably about this is this ballpark in it, but
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: their eggs probably about half the diameter of a white sturgeon.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: There's another you know, there's also another sturgeon or another
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: caviard that comes out of the Yellowstone is um paddlefish
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: caviar which people collect and that's bigger and that's a
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: high grade caviar. And then we used to get caviar
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: out of uh you know, and there's even a commercial
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: market for for white Great lakes. Whitefish have a pretty
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: good caviar and that's the thing that people you know,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: it's rod and real angers can catch. The reason I
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: bring that up is not just like as you walk
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: through this, I want to just establish what these things
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: even though you're dealing with a commercially caught version or
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: you're dealing with uh, you know, something that's in the
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: commercial chain, right that can be legally purchased and soul
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: in the restaurant that so much of what you're dealing
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: with would also be identified as a type of wild
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: game because, especially in the ocean, pretty much anything you're
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: buying for restaurants things that people can go catch on
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: their own on sport fishing tackle. Right, So sturgeon, Uh
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: though most people don't do it, most fishermen don't do it.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: Um producing caveat is something that just like anybody could
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: go do from a wide variety of fish. Yeah, they
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: got they did. They got a surgeon fishing out here. Yeah,
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: and there's some kill seasons. Wasn't Scott Peterson when he
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: cut up his wife and dumped her in San Francisco Bay.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: Part of his defense was that he was sturgeon fishing
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: When they asked him why he was out in the
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: boat that day, did you know that? I have no idea.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: He did. And me and my fake uncle Donn used
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: to troll stripers in San Francisco Bay and we would
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: go right, it was baiting the sturgeon. So yeah, as
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: he was doing a chum line. Um. Yeah, me, my
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: fake uncle don used to uh do some trolling for
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: stripe bass out here in San Francisco Bay back in
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: two thousand four, and we would just troll right in
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: front of the jail. We're they we're Scott Peterson is
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: housed the prison him. Yeah, what's it called. It's not
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: a San San Quentin. San Quentin. Yeah, yeah, they got
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: they got like watch towers. You we would, I'm not
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: shooting you. We would be trolling by. You'd wave at
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: dudes and watched towers. I feel like there's some sort
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: of environmental issues over there, maybe some waste or something.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: I was describing to be honest, that we would that
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: I would say that those for for toxic fish, they
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: were delicious. So out of the next one turbot, Yeah,
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: with diamond turbo. So diamond turbots is just a just
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: a local, local species of turbo and a little it's
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: smaller for the most part, um but you can fish it. Yeah,
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: and you brought that fish too. You showed me the
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: fish one of your guys that the fish was alive
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: on a plate, like alive, alive and in it wasn't
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: how how many minutes went by? Five six, and I
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: was presented with so one minute, the fish is there
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: on my plate alive. I grabbed its jaw and it
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: was very flexible, and in a couple minutes later, I
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: had the liver two ways, well different his liver and
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: a different fishes liver two ways. You had made chitlands, right,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: explain that. So you got so you you basically like
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: you know, on especially a fish like turbo, you've got,
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, you could use almost the whole thing, right,
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: every everything is good about it as long as you're
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: you know, especially when it's alive a few minutes before.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: But um, the the guts, uh, the heart, the livers
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: and and and essentially the chiplands are the the intestines,
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: the intestinal track and the stomach are all delicious. You
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: just had to clean it properly. So we boil it
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: in salted water a few times, scrape it out, boil it,
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: scrape it out, boil it. Uh, and then once you
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: chill it down, it's got this little you know, crunchy texture. Um.
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: But it was it was shocking to have that, Like
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: how good it was? The delicious right? Yeah, the little
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: on sauce on there, we've got we've got the sauce
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: called sas on sauce. It's a it's our it's our
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: seasoning elixir. And it's like it's basically a brew uh
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: made of seaweeds, local seaweeds, local little silver fish, all
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: of the excess bones and trim and anything that we
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: get from our fish. And then it's grilled or barbecued
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: or and then it's mixed together and it's basically inoculated
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: with a with a bacteria, and then it's allowed to
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: culture and ferment and it turns into this kind of
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: a lixir that's like the savory almost crossed between white
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: soy and fish sauce. And so we season a lot
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: of things with that. You'll bathe that'll fish, you'll bathe
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: the fish and testines in that stuff. Yeah, but season
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: a little bit in that season yeah. Yeah. And then
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: the livers we the livers are are are basically salted
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: or rinsed in salted water like a brine, right, because
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: you've got to purge the liver um and uh, and
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: then you you salt the liver a little bit. And
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: then and then we um either poaching salted water, we
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: grill it or we we you know, the version you
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: had was basically halted for about a week ranch and
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: then put in uh a seasoning paste which is like
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: stays on seasoning past. It's kind of like a misa
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: it's basically the same thing as a misa um. So
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: you had one version that was poached in one version
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: that was salted and seasoned in our seasoning paste. And
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: then the ribs slab explain what you do with the
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: fish ribs or how the fish rib has become like
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: a little serving tray grilled little rib yeah, yeah, uh so,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: uh yeah, I guess really the reason for that was
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: because you know, the bones still have meat on it, right,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: they have they have flavor, they have taste, so and
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: and typically all the little tail pieces anything you might
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: feel might be tough. You know, the connective tissue of
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: the um. You know the skirts, the little a little
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: skirt around the outside of the fin, right basically the
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: ship that nine percent of fishermen throwing the garbage. Yeah,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: it's and you know that stuff is full of flavor,
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: like a lot a lot of those little little sweet
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: bits or you know that that's the sweetmeat to me
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: because it's full of flavor. It's the stuff that gets
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: a lot of use. Um and that's all gets chopped
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: up and then basically mixed into this chopped seasoned mixture.
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: And then and then put back on the bone and
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: then brushed with a sauce and then grilled, and so
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: it's like a little riblet. Do you know that? In
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: and I see I'm sitting right next to one of
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: the scopier's books. That's how a scopia would handle carp.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: Ye know, in a lot of other countries, carper like
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: a very popular food fish. And in fact they were
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: introduced into the Great Lakes when when the Great Lakes
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: fisheries were declining at like catastrophic rates. Um a fish
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: cultural has had the idea that they would put common
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: carp into the Great Lakes to make up for the
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: loss of food fish from environmental destruction in the Great Lakes.
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: But it is obviously never caught out with Americans. Like
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: Americans don't like the generally speaking, Americans don't like to
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: eat carp. But scopiers carp recipes would basically be that
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: you poach to fish whatever you're gonna do to it
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: to be able to strip all meat off the bone.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: Then he would mix that with all kinds of good
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: ship to eat. Right like you said, you're a little
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: you're a little chopped up combination you put on there.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: But he would mix it with butter cream truffles, and
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: then lay the carp's tail and head down where they belong,
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: and reform the fish's body out of this concoction that
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: he would make, and then putting new scales back on
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: it and serve that as carp. And once you go
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: through all that, that carp becomes pretty damn good. But
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: it doesn't have a whole lot to do with carpet anymore.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: He just Yeah, it's like it tastes like a truffle. Yeah, exactly,
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: a creamy a creamy truffle kind of moose. Well, back then,
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of a lot of um masking,
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: right because you guys, handling was a little different back then, right,
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: And now we've got we have so much information that
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: we can we can uh, you know, we've learned from
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: other other you know, cultures that like like Japan is
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: a great example of handling, right where everything's just handled
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: so well that the taste winds up being clean and
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: kind of pure, right, like it the records. Yeah, it's like,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: I guess that's the way of putting it is. The
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: way you're handling stuff that's so fresh, is you're just
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: trying like showcasing what the thing is. You're not using
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: it to make some other thing out of it. Yeah, exactly,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: you're not doing like a radical transformation. What's good. It's
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: good enough to where you you don't need to write,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: there's no there's no need to you know, stuff it
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: full of troubles and cream because it already tastes the lessous.
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: You just can't, you know, you can't screw it up.
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: So the rib slabs, then you cook the tail. Yeah,
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: yet you had the head, you had the tail. The
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: rib slabs and the head and the tail are basically
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: just just purged and salted water. Uh. And then we
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: we poached them and then we grill them. So he's
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: poaching for a few minutes at the low temperature I
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: think it's like sixty degrees just to set the head. Yeah.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: And so it basically cooks the head, you know, evenly
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: all the way through and um and and loosens up
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: all the all the good bits like the little the
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: lips and the connective tissue and the cart lit or
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: whatever whatever is and whatever the makeup of the fishes.
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: But it loosens all that stuff up. Um. And then
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: we grill it. And then you you just pull it
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: all apart, right, so the whole thing falls apart basically,
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: and then all of that good stuff on the inside,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: which is really one of my favorite pieces or my
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: favorite bits, is you know, easily easy to get at.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: So on the like on the fish were eating last night,
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: we ate the head, the tail, the trim, the guts.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: The hell do you guys do with the the flame
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: the meat? Well that's what you ate in the little
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: bull with the flowers. So that's just served raw. Yeah,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: that's just wrong. And then when you kill a fish.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: I learned this from my friend Helen Chow because I
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: was out fishing with Helen Chow and her boyfriend John Um.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: We're at this one time dicking around on a on
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: a fish and charter and the fish they would catch,
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: they would John would kind of sever the spine and
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: then run a hunkle wire down the interior of the
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: spinal cord to relax the fish. And I was explaining
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: to you last night that in South America, I watched
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: amor Indians do that with big turtles that they would catch.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: Because if he was ever caught a snap turtle and
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: you cut snap turtle's head off the heads very much.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: We call it it's not alive in any kind of
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: sense of the word of being cognizant, but it's full
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: of activity. The body is clenched up, and the body
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: stays absolutely clenched up, and not like rigor mortis, for
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: just like a nervous system clenched up for hours up
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: to eight hours before I think finally relaxes and you
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: can skin it. And they would do that practice e
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: K G. May. I'm sure that's not the word they
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: used down there, but they would say differently. They would
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: remount the spine and just relax the whole animal, and
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: you get the same effect by when the electoral shock
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: uh cattle doing the slaughter process. Little hit that thing
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: in the head with a captive bolt gun and I
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: can't remember if they then I watched them doing it
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: in a couple different places. They bleed it and then
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: shock it, and that shocking relaxes the animal. But you're
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: getting at something with fish, like can you explain the process. Yeah,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: we'll say it's not even just fish, it's also game
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: to like. The way that I try to hunt is
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: for pretty specific also, but I'll talk about fish first.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: So um uh, you know, it's it's it's basically just
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: neural death. You're basically just ruining the nerves so that
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: there's no reaction, continued reaction, right, So you basically, you know,
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: let's say, let's take the turbot for instance. Every fish
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: is a little different in the way you kill it,
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: but but the goal is really the same, and you
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: get brain death and neural death, right or neural destruction,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: I guess. And uh and so uh you know you
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: you we we friends since you know, insert a knife
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: right at the place where the head and uh, the
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: spine meat and also the brain is and so it's
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: basically just one one stroke, one kill, right, And then
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: we make a little decision on the back of the
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: tail through the spinal cord, you know, that's right, that's
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: where he that's where John runs the wires the tail side. Yeah,
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: and so you grab the tail. It gives you a
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: little handle basically, and grab the tail and you stick
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: the wire on the neural cavity of the neural column.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: Basically that goes, you know, all the way through the
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: spine of the fish, and you just run that up
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: and down until it basically destroys the nerves and then
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: the fish is limb and then preserves that. Yeah, and
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: it just presert goes completely limp, and that preserves that
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: texture in the fish, and the taste is very it
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: also to me, it also produced. It produces a really
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: a super clean taste, right you don't you don't, um
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: you know there's something about an animal running away or
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: or struggling that produces a different taste, right releases Uh,
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: whatever releases in the system, and that tastes to me
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: is from right. Yeah, And you're gonna touch on hunting,
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: and I wanted, like, I'm gonna preface what you're gonna
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: say with and I'm not gonna like go after you
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: about it or challenge about it. But what what this
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: man is about to say is a controversial notion. But
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: I'll let him. I'll let him speak to you talking
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: about head shooting. Yeah, head shots. Yeah, yeah, your head
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: shot man. Yeah, absolutely so. Cent of the time I
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: count among my head shooting. Uh associates you and my
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: friend Ron, Like, m M, no, I got another head shooter, buddy.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: Isn't Tony a head shooter? I don't know? But he's
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: like a a marine corps Oh that Tony, Yes, he is.
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: You're right, he is. Yeah, yeah, you like to you
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: like to do neural what do you call it? Neural death.
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: It's the same thing. I mean, it's the same principle, really,
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: but you gotta you gotta let me preface that with like,
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: if you're if you're not gonna put several thousand rounds
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: through you know each each you know shot and in
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: every way you can possibly practice, he probably shouldn't try
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: shoot for a head, right, but because you're robbing yourself
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: of your margin for error right well, into me. Even
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: worse is that you're gonna injure it and it's gonna
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: run away. Yeah, that's what that's the worst part, you know.
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: I don't mean that. Yeah, I'm not worried about if
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: it was like if every shot was either instant death
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: or a myths, there's no shot I would ever pass up.
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: It's the trouble is, you know, the trouble is in
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: those ones that that fall in the gray area between
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: those two extremes, Like when someone shooting at shooting at
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: an elk with a bow and trying to hit it
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: in the heart and they spine it and it drops
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: and they're all excited. You could be like, well, I
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: would temper your excitement with the fact that you were
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: like eighteen inches off, And if you had moved that
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: eighteen inches off in other directions, you would have had
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: a very different outcome. Yeah, but you happen to be
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: eighteen off in exactly the right spot, you know, well,
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, I guess my opinion is if you can't,
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: if you if you don't feel confident with the shot,
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: don't take it. I mean, that's that's like, if you
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: if you don't feel like you're guaranteeing yourself, you know
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: that you're gonna you're gonna your point of impact is
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: gonna be exactly where you think it's gonna be. Just
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: don't shoot. Yeah, I'm with you. That's what people like,
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: we've we've been asked many times like what's the what's
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: the um what's an ethical shot an unethical shot? And
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: after wringing my hands about that question a long time,
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: I was like, if you're surprised you got its ethical shot,
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: if you want to be like, holy shit, I can't
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: believe I got it that, I was like, you probably
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: shouldn't have touched the trigger, but yeah, so so yeah,
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: so we'll leave We'll leave that one there. But explain,
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: like what you're after, so provided it all the provided
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: all that, then um, you're you're really after the same
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: thing after with the fish, you know, you're you're basically
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: I'm shooting right behind the head where it meets the spine,
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: and um and uh at that point it's going through
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: and the thing drops us dead. You know, at least
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: I think it's dead. Well, if that happened, would be
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: pretty damn dead. Yeah, I mean it doesn't move afterwards,
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: that's for sure. Do you have any thoughts on bleeding
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: because I believe Ron doesn't say when he makes a
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: good headshot he immediately runs up to it. And yeah,
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: because the lung because it bleeds it. Because if you
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: when you hit something through the lungs, you're like self
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: bleeding it right. The blood's all gonna expel. There's no
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: need to run up and then cut its throat because
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: the bloods laying in the chest, cavity or all over
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: the ground. I have a different opinion about blood and game.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: I think it's just hands. Well there there's so there's
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: an old French method. Let me hold you up for aeman,
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: because finish what you're saying about, like why you would
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: bleed it after you hit in the head. Yeah, right,
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: because like you're saying, if you hit it in the
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: long or this is ron's thinking, if we it's legit thinking.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: I mean livestock. It's how they slaughter livestock. It's how
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: they slaughter cattle, right, so that you're I guess that
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: your meat is not full of blood the flavor of blood,
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: and cut its throat and beat it. Yeah. So like
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: when when you're slaughtering cattle, they hit it with like
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, somehow this came up electric electric Using electricity,
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: you hit in the head of a captive bolt gun
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: or in the old days of twenty two, and then
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: right away, while it's still kicking on the ground, hoisted
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: up near by the back foot and cut his juggler
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: to expel the blood. I think that has to do.
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: It's also like shelf stability, yeah, and flavor issues. But
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: go ahead, I mean, I'm I'm gonna i'll i'll like
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: mostly defer to your judgment on the taste of it.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: You know, it's subjective. But there's a there's an old
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: so you know about the there's an old French method
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: where they suffocate like a bird like a pigeon for that. Yeah,
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: and so the taste wines up being um pretty good.
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: You know, it's it's different, but it's it's like, uh,
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: it's bloody, it's spicy, but I like it. It's delicious.
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: And so I mean you really think about it. You know, animals,
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: the meat is full of blood, right, so so you're
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: eating anyway, a little more blood's not gonna kill you,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: right so you know, I you don't you just take
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: it as a given that blood has to get out, No,
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: not at all, I don't think so. I mean, you know,
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: at least the fish, like the fish you killed that night,
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: you believe, definitely say fish that's a different story because
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: fish has this uh very kind of fish blood has
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: its very irony, kind of metallic taste. They don't want
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: it all. And I think you know, old blood has
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: that to some degree. But a lot of animal blood,
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: like duck blood. You know, there's think about you know,
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: old French sauces like um, you know, duck blood in
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: the sauce or or um in any any birds or
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: uh um. I mean a lot of cultures across the
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: world eat a lot of blood, right, blood. They don't
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: waste the blood here for some reason, you catch the
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: blood and make blood sauceage with it or so I
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: like the blood personally, I think it's good. You just
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: gotta you again, it's practices, right, it's it's handling and
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: practice says. But but has a lot of things too
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: where you use the rabbit blood. Yeah, sauce. Yeah, that's
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: a good point. Yeah. So, um so anyway, what we're
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: talking about headshots, Yeah, like what you're striving for the
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: kids you may have, you know, wild game of kids
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: you may essentially right now, that's that's what we're striving for.
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: Were striving for that that instant death where it's basically
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: there's zero suffering involved. And but even before that, one
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: of the things that I've noticed is that if you
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: go out there and you scare an animal and it's
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: running away or maybe you injure it, which I have
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: before and I always feel horrible about, but um it's
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: running away and then and then you finally get it,
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: it tastes different, the thing taste. It tastes totally different.
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: So so for me, it's one of the things where
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: you basically sneak up on something you know, you put
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: in the word put it enough work to actually harvest
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: in a way where has no idea. You're there, you know,
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: it's eating some flowers, just like this bear that I
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: just gone. You know it's it's sitting there eating dandelion
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: flowers and the next thing is dead right shot, one kill, instant,
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: It's done right. So to me, that's that's that's the
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: way I like that. Do you feel like it could
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: not only affect the flavor, um, like the difference between
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: an animal that's you know, hurried or rush scared versus
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: you know, completely unaware, and as well as the uh,
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: the texture or sort of like the tenderness without a doubt, Yeah,
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: without a doubt, if you I mean, it's it's the same.
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: It's the same principle, like if you if that thing
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: goes down right away and it's completely limped the second
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: you know that bullet hits that, you know wherever, uh
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: it's limp, right, it's already relaxed. There's no there's zero
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: struggle involved in the process of the thing is left
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: and the meat soft. Another reason I don't like that idea,
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: it's because I have all kinds of animal skulls around
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: my house, and yeah, I would I wouldn't have that anymore.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: There's your beer right there. You take a look at
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: that school. Well how did you get to put back
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: together again? And never I never shot the skull. I
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: shot right there behind the skull, so it's right in
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: the neck piece, right right where the basically and I
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: basically and putting my eye right on the back of
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: that skull, right behind the year right and that's where
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: I'm looking. Yeah, all right, man, We'll leave it at that. Now,
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: box crab, what the hell? Why is there? Why? Why
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: is uh box crab? Not a thing? Let me let
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: me go back one second. The other thing is is
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: the other the other way that I will shoot too
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: if if I know that I can't, if I if
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: I really want to, you know, get that animal. And
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: I know I can't make a perfect headshot as the
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: eye shoulder right where the spine is, eye shoulder, the
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: bullet splits apart, it shoots into everywhere and the same
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: same thing basically, but it gets familiar with that one
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: and and I've I've gone for that a couple of times.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: And right one uh right when monolithic bullets started to
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: be very started to become more popular. Um, you know,
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: solid copper bullets people. Yeah, and you should explain this
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: because you follow this ship better than I do. Like
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: the barn. Yeah, Like like monolithic bullets became more popular,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: you started hearing way more people talk about high shoulder shots.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: Things punched right through right right, So a lot of
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: people are getting there, like the pencil effect when it
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: would just go through the you know, if they missed
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: the entering rib, you know, they weren't getting that expansion
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: they were used to in a you know, lead core bullet,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: jacket bullet, and so it was getting that pencil effect,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: and the deer was running a little bit farther than
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: they were used to, And so I think they were
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: moving their shot placement to that high shoulder. Which I
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: advocate that all the time because I think it's it's
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: a pretty big uh target. Still, you know, you don't
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: have to aim that close to the spine. The spine
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: actually sort of dips down behind the shoulders, so it's
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: not like you're aiming, you know, only three inches below
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: the top of his uh or yeah, below the top
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: of his back there. But there's also up in that
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: areas what's called the void. Yeah, dude, I listen, it's
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: hard to make predictions about the future. I will die.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: I will live out my life hopefully and get really old,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: and then I'll die. And on my deathbed, if you
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: said to me, hey man, what's a perfect shot placement,
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: I'm still good, I'll be like, really, that's what you
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: want to talk about right now? And then I'll say
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: but if if in fact, that is what you want
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: to know, as I'm dying double lung, and I'll tell
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: you why. The first time I shot ami with a
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: monolithic bullet, well, I was hunting New Zealand and I
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: shot a stag with a monolithic bullet and it was
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: pretty far out there, but not ridiculously far out there,
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, should I missed? Okay, because
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: he's running around, running these high's, chasing them around. And
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: then a while later he kind of got where he
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: looked like he wasn't feeling well, but still was like,
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: you know, I'll keep chasing these highness. You know, I'm
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: not feeling too well. And then all of a sudden
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: got woozy and tipped over and it looked like someone
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: had taken when I butchered it, it it looked like someone
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: took a field tip arrow just an arrow with a
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: practice point on it and jabbed it through the chest cavity.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: So I've had this with pigs before. While boors it
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: was down and down in southern California. You have to
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: shoot all copper right, you can't shootnything. It's not copper steel.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: There's no let allout. It's condor zone. And so no, right,
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: not yet. I think it's next year. It's definitely coming. Yeah.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: Um that's why I washed. Washington's real nice right now.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: But um, you know, I've I've shot pigs where you know.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: There was a group of them and I and I
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: shot three at three different pigs, and uh, I thought
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: I completely missed. I was like, well they ran away.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: I was like, they just gone. I was like, I
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: don't usually miss because I don't usually take those shots.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: And I put in a lot of practice, and uh
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: in any way, we uh we saw one running away.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: He ran up the hill, little one and then he
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: dropped dead. And then so I was okay, I did miss.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: So then we started looking for the other two pigs.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: Found all three. But in the end it was the
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: same thing, that little puncture that went straight through they
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: were all they were all straight through the lungs right
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: by the heart. They just keep going. It doesn't it
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: doesn't have that terminal, uh, you know, damage right, No,
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: And then I got onto the after that, I got
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: into the whole high shoulder scene. But again I hit like,
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: remember that when we're hunting musk cocks. M hm, dude,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: he didn't even give it ship to that. It's like,
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: I just feel like it's imperfect. You could speak to it.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: I don't care. No, But you remember that you said
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: you did pull forward just a little bit because I
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: was worried about you about hitting another animal, and so
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: you like you personally, you know, judge and put it forward.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: But I feel like with the long shot too, you
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: can be off the lungs in the back and all
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: of a sudden you're you know, into the liver, which
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: animals go a long way when they've got a bullet
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: through their liver, and you go farther back and you've
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: just gone, you know, straight through the paunch and good
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: luck finding that. Well, look, at the end of the day,
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: if you know for sure you're gonna make the shot,
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: it's ethical. Yeah, all right. I want to be confident.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: I want to keep marching down things. I want to
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: talk about some other stuff box crab. What okay, if
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: you went out and asked Joe blow, Joe blow, dude
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: who eats at Red Lobster or whatever? Uh, just as
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: Red Lobster sttle business. I don't know, but I just
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: read something about get somebody getting food poisoning there the
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: other day when I was a kid, I'm telling you,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: what if you were going out to that was the
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: pinnacle of a fancy dinner like on prom night, just
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: like dudes would take to take your high school girlfriend
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: down the Red Lobster and you were like tearing, you
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: were set in the stage man and listen, guys out there,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: if that was that's your plan, or you just did that,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: took your lady out there like a couple of weeks
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: ago and it was prom night. Uh, we're not We're
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: not dogging. I'm not dogging it at all. I'm just
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: saying I don't know if there's still I don't know
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: how Red Lobs are still kicking as or not. Yeah, no,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: I think they're still around. Well just just let me
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: let me also help with anybody out there may get
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: food poison from Red Lobster. I got food poison one time.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: From some sort of bio disease and the and the
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: oysters here in the Bay Area, and I was, I
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: was like, I was really sick, man, I I ate.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: I don't know how many oysters I ate that day,
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: but but they're contaminated with something and um and uh
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: so I was. I was at the point where I
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: was like sick for hours and I was dry heating.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: There's no liquids left in my body. Went to the hospital.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: They gave me this little ivy thing and a pill
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: felt better than like ten minutes. Yeah, listen, Yeah, the
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: fact it obsessed me that you even insinuate that I
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: was dogging on Red Lobster, because if you were the
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: number line out on a one to ten number line
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: out on the quality, like if you took a week
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: and be like, Okay, what quality of foods does this
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: person consumed during a week? If I Red Lobsters, be
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: like on the five mark not do you way? Yeah,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: I think I'm dog on a Red Lobster. I just
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: haven't been following. I just haven't been following whatever the
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: scene is over at Red Lobster right now. But box
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: what else makes my damn point? People know that there's
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: good crabs right, and they're like snow crab, dungeoness crab,
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: blue crab, king crab. And there's a redundancy here like
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: tanners or snows right. Tanner Tanner is another word check that.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: I think a tank. I think when you hear Tanner,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: it's a there's there's a redundancy. I'm not thinking clear
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: right now. There's a redundancy in that list. But your
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: favorite crab is a crab that doesn't fall on the
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: list of super good crabs. That's because nobody knows about it.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: You think that's fishermen don't even really fish. When I
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: came in and I looked at that tank of crabs,
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: I thought you had a bunch of dungee bodies in there,
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: legless dungee bodies because of the way they suck their
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: legs in. Yeah, they box up, that's what you got
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: the name. Basically, they basically pull in all their extremities
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: and it forms like a perfect shape into the around
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: their shell. They're not so they don't cost nearly what
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: a They gotta be way cheaper than a dungeoness. Oh no,
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: they're they're more expensive because nobody fishes them. I mean,
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: you got it's it's a boutique fishery basically. So I've
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: got a fisher men who have to pay you know, uh,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: you know, X amount of expenses to just to get
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: you know, the stuff we want, right, so it winds
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: up being a little more expensive. So how did you
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: come to like prefer box crab and not be like
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: helly man. Everybody knows that King Crab is the best
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: crab in the world or Dungeoness is the best crab
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: in the world, like you just don't see box crab
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: around commercially. First of all, we we we try to
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: just use everything just from right here. Okay, you know,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: we'll take it all. It's it's West Coast because it
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: makes sense for us in terms of taste. So everything
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: you can pull from BC down to south of here, yeah, exactly,
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: down to like Santa Barbara basically, and so that's all
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: that's all relatively the same environment, right more or less.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: I mean there's obviously some variation, but but um, northerly
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: northerly Pacific waters, yeah exactly. Um, but you know, we
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: we just get we get random stuff from our guys,
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: whether it's our gatherer or our you know, which gathers
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: our forger and um. Whether it's our fishermen or whatever
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: it is, they bring us a bunch of stuff, you know,
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: all the time, random things and um. And so we're
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: constantly kind of exploring, you know, what are these Uh,
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: what can we grow? What can we find? Uh? There's
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: a lot of stuff out there, especially in fisheries that
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: aren't fish, because everybody is so focused on one kind
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: of commodity, you know, a good that that everybody's gonna
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: you know, basically pilfer you know, the entire salmon population,
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: you know, until there's no more left because they get
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: a higher price. But then there's twenty other species out
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: there that are actually really delicious. They're underutilized and completely underutilized. Yeah,
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: like another dish. And this is the thing I've been
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: harpened on for people to live you know, in the
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: Pacific waters is what I what I feel it's gonna
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: be like the most underutilized. Now that being underutilized is
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: a bad thing, but the sea cucumber being a thing
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: that's just like like in my mind underutilized, Well, it's
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: you know, it's it's like I feel like it's a
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: like a challenging thing for people to to get past
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: because it's you know, it's it's slimy. It looks anasty
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: to some people, and and but you know it's it's
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: it's kind of a hidden treasure. In my opinion, it's
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: delicious once you treat it the right. Yeah, it's just
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: did you guys like that, you caucumber last? It's great,
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: Man's delicious. It's not the way we do them. I know,
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: you don't fry anything. You fry anything. We grill fry.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: So our whole our you know, our whole um kind
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: of ethos is all fire cooking. So if you noticed,
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: you know, every single thing you had was cooked over
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: the fire in some way, some manner, and so all
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: of the methods that we used to use for regular cooking,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: we've now created a way to cook it over the
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: fire in the same way. So when we fry something,
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: what it's called grill fry. And so let's say you
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: have a flower and we'll coat this flower the like
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: a like a floral flower, right, and uh, we'll code
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: it in a batter, it was a specific batter, and
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: we will let it dry a little bit, and then
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: we have perforated pants. They're just like sautee pants, and
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: so we'll we'll we'll then take the dried the code
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: dried semi dried rather or at least the batter's fried flour,
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: and then we'll we'll brush the pan with the oil
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: and then brush the flower with the oil and then
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: throw it on the grill. So it's basically ceiling that
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: batter around the outside. And so you wind up with
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: what we call grill fry. Do you call that your
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: heart over there? Yeah? Yeah, okay, So we're gonna take
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: a we'll take a picture just to put it up
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: in the show notes so you can go check it out. Um,
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: you got a horror thalnel was like six ft wide,
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: it's eight ft plus um six ft yeah, and different sections.
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: You gotta fire going in there and what and what
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: would you you know, you said you'll burn some almond, almond, uh.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: Fruit woods of different kinds depending on the season. So
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: if you have, you know, for instance, fake season right now,
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: So we'll take fig wood and we'll grill a thig
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: dish over the fake wood. And so we use that
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: kind of layering method for different fruits. Could be apple,
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: could be quinns, could be pair whatever it is. And
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: when I came in here this morning. You about a
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: rick of wood stacked outside of your front doorway and
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: to come inside. So they got a fire, they got
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: like a rip, like a camp fire burning in your kitchen.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: And as I was eating, I was looking over there
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: and imagining that I would walk over and be like
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: this giant grill set up with a big gas fire
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: and a grill way over it. But what the guys
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: are doing is there's a camp fire burning, and they're
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: shoveling out little like little shovel piles of amber. Feel
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: like you're miss setting the camp fire, because right, there's
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: more not a camp fer. There's no one camping. Yeah,
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: but it's not, it's not. How is it different than
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: the fire you build if you built a fire anywhere?
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: Tell us so it's the fire, non relatively, I think.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: So now we're just burning down a bed of ambers,
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: basically that the fire is devoted. Yeah, okay, Yanni's tin camp. Okay,
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: all right, I'll tell my version. You tell your version,
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: all right, you gotta damn fire. Would burning in a
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: fire that was remarkably similar to how one might think
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: of as a camp fire, right, it's not in a
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: It's just burning in the corner. Right, my wrong, m
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: my right right, And you're your cooks who are working this.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: Take what it looks like the kind of shovel if
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: you had a fireplace and you had like a little
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: shovel to shovel out ash out of your fireplace periodically.
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: They have one of those, and they scoop out a
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: pile of embers, it's not even a court of embers
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: and make a little ember bed bed and have little
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: grates that they have sitting over that ember bed, and
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: that's what they're working on, or any any utensil. So
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: we have perforated pans, we've got grades, we've got uh, skewers,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: a variety of different tools that we used to cook
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: over the ambers. And the amber bed is not more
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: than two inches deep and probably not that and maybe
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: a square foot, yeah, depending on what you're cook depending
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: on what you're doing. So there's a lot of I
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: mean basically the majority of the cooking is done near
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: the fire and over the ambers. And then you got
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: your racks way the hell above the fire, right where
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: you just got all kinds of ship stacked up there.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: And give an example of like uh, you know, like
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: uh so we you dehydration, right, dehydrate u um whatever.
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: So for us let's give me for instance, let's use
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: there's a dish that's well known that we do that's
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: called brasicas. And so it's a bunch of Braska leaves.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: Things in Nebraska family could mustards, you know, cabbages, whatever,
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: broccolia and uh so you take the leaves and we
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: basically lay it out flat and maybe brush a little
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: light amount of oil on there and then lay it
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: out flat on a rack and then we'll put it
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: over almost imperceptible heat, just a really a scattering of
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: ambers where it's probably over for it's probably over or
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: four ft above that. Well, that's that's a different thing.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: That's that's what we call fire in the sky. So
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: that's a different method. It's like a different different type
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: of dehydration where it's where slowly getting smoked, but it's
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: a similar it's a similar thing, um different outcome. And
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: so this is just you know, above a little bed
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: maybe three inches above. It's on a rack, a bunch
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: of leaves and it just slowly kind of absorbs the
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: flavor of the fire and it gets dehydrated. So that's
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: one example of and it's like a chip and you
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: can just eat it like potato chips after but it's
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: also has that like beautiful sweet smoke from the fire.
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: So that's one example like really low cooking. And then
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: and then you know, for meat, for instance, what we'll
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: do is we'll temper we'll we'll get a chunk of
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: meat out right, and we'll we'll temper it near the fire.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: So it's already slowly starting to accept the heat, right,
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: and it's and it's, uh, you know, we pulled out
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: of the out of the aging room, let it come
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: to room temperature, put it near the fire, okay, and
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: it's so it's slowly already starting to accept the heat
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: a little bit, right, and it's softening and it's developing
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: more flavor, right. Uh. And then we'll throw it on
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: a bed of ambers, which is, you know, however big
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: the product is, and the height of the bed depends
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: on the heat that we want, and then the distance
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: from the top of the ambers to the bottom of
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: the product is also depending on how long we want
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: to cook it for, how much you know heat be want,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: or how hard we want to sear it or whatever. Right, Yeah,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: so okay, talk about those quail. How long do you
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: so you gotta plucked quail? How long do you age
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: a plucked quail for six days? At forty five degrees
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: in a room with a lot of circulation, a lot
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: of air circulations, the keys that you've gotta have. You've
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: gotta have air circulation all the way around these meats,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: so that you're starting you're starting to dry it, but
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: you want the humidity to also be high enough to
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: where it doesn't dry out too much. Right, So that's
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: about the perfect room. Perfect room. It's forty five or
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: so degrees in six days, and that coil sits there plucked,
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: just gutted and plucked for six days. Yeah, and then
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: you grilled the quail. And I've grilled like a mess
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: of quail. And I was telling you that when I
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: grill a quail, I grilled that quail for not ten minutes.
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: You grill your quail for two hours. Yeah, really really
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: low heat in and out of the heat, right in
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: and out. So you're basically that's you know, it's an
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: in and out method of of roasting meat to where
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: you're basically exposing the meat to uh. Depending on how
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: much fat content is meat, um let's say for this quail,
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: for instance, you know, medium heat for just a very
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: brief period time, and you take it off the heat
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: and you let it rest out its residual. You know,
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: heat really has the opportunity to spread throughout the entire
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: piece of meat. And then once it comes down to
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: basically tep it or room temperature where there's no more
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: cooking happen, than you repeat that process over and over
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: again and you wind up. What I have never said
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: this is, this is the most surprising thing that that
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: you cook. Is it you wind up with? It's like
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: the texture that you can tear the bird apart. Okay,
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: it breaks apart like it breaks apart, like how bird
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: should break apart. It's cooked. But the texture is you
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: achieve a texture that's more like raw coail but not
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: flabby though, no, but it still has a translucent to it. Right,
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: it doesn't turn into like it doesn't turn into your
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: classic like white stringy. Yeah. Yeah, it's still it's translucent
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: down to the bone and definitely not raw, but has
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: like almost like a cired quality to it. Well, here's
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: what we're doing. Basically, you're basically you're you're you're not
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: only allowing it to age. Those those oils start to Uh.
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: First of all, some of the moisture comes out of
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: the bird, right, And then when you're going back and
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: forth on the heat like that, you're getting all that
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: moisture to move around a little bit, but you're not
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: putting on so high of the heat that you're forcing
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: it out, right, So that stuff is just moving around
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: and there gently, and eventually it just rests out and
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: rests over to where it's that it's cooked, but it's
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: not overcooked. Yeah, oh yeah, I forgot. We're gonna come
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: back to you know, you're gonna offer the more accurate
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: version of the damn fire. I'm curious about this. Actually, well,
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: when I saw the fire that when I saw two
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: things that I was gonna ask about. Actually one the
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: campfire that Steve was referring to, I went, I doubled
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: around and said, it's not the camp art's fire if
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: he's referring to that was in the right back corner, right.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: I just felt like there was an intense management of
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: that fire. That and you're saying campers don't manage their fire, sure,
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: we just how just imagine the fires just like this,
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: like pile of wood that's on fire, and there may
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: or may not be a bunch of members or whatever,
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: but this was like two or three pieces of wood
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: were being very carefully managed to extract those embers. Yeah,
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: here's the difference. But yeah, you're right, and um, yeah,
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: that's something I don't even notice that really, I don't
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: even think about that consciously. But basically, you know, you're camping,
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: you want the flame. You're out there, you want to
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: flame you when you heat from the flame. For us,
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: we want the ambers. So we're we're basically positioning the
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: way to where it's all piled on top of each
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: other so that you can stick a shovel in there
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: and harvest the ambers when you need it. And you're
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: pulling out you're pulling out, are you? Are you guys
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: crushing the embers a little bit, but that's pulling out
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: like centimeter like square centimeter embers. Yeah. So that's why
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: we chose almond wood because it burns down almost perfectly.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: But a lot of wood does too. If you just
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: if you just manage the fire like you're like you
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: just talking about, so you have you know, we've got
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: that little fire of you know, under the amber pile.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: Let's say, imagine, is I don't know, four to six
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: pieces of wood all burnt down, and then you've got
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: another maybe two or three on top to just regulate
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: that bed of ambers, so it keeps it glowing hot
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: the whole time. So I've got some flame going on.
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: So you're not you're not like you're not grading out
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: the embers, like how the embers all looks so perfect.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: That's just the quality of how the fire is being managed.
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: And what kind of would you're burnt? Yeah, I mean
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: you could, I mean pretty much any would you can
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: accomplish the same thing with. But it's really the management
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: of the pile of uh flame, flaming logs on top
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: of the bed of the ambers to keep it hot.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: And I'm guessing there's also some sort of it looked
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: like there was just like the perfect draw, like the
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: perfect air moving across that fire, right Like it was
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: just like it seemed like you could put your hand
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: three ft above where that fire was and you would
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: burn your hand just because of the way that air
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: is moving across it providing oxygen you know too, So
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: it's burning super hot. Yeah, this is a design of
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: the fireplace, right, So it's got that you know, it's
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: got that suction and basically like the way that this
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: this has a little lip over the like the hood
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: has a lip over the fireplace. That basically UH draws
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: the air in the fireplace up around and then out
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: the flu So it's just good fireplaces time. Yeah. Yeah,
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: it's really surprising to me, like how much you guys
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: are cooking over fire everything, even dessert. Yeah it tastes better. Man.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: Did you have to dick around a lot to get
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: the uh to get your hearth or fireplace right with circulation?
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: Well no, I mean I had a really talented designer
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: who designed the draw of the fireplace got um abaloni.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: So those small Because you can die for abalone in California,
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: you can die for abaloni Alaska. There's like regulations on it.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: I know that, Like for instance, um at our place
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: in Alaska. Because I'm not a resident of Alaska, I'm
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: not able to dive for abaloni. My brother is, he's
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: a resident of Alaska. He's allowed a couple of abaloni
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: the day. There's much smaller than down here. They got
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: a size limit on him. So you serve some small
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: those must be out of an aquaculture facility. Yeah, exactly
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: what got you. And then you had some giant abaloni
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: shells and those are probably like wild wild shells. Those
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: those are the ones I ate. Just use it as
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: a plate. Now do you die for him? You never
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: die for him? No, yeah, no, ever since, ever since,
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: I alred story about my buddy, Well, this guy that
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: I know, and I'm a buddy, but the guy that
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: I know that dives for a blowing around here it's
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: like a sea forger. And uh. He was telling the
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: story about how they went up I think it's around
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: Eureka or Fort Bragg or something like that. A lot
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: of blowing up there, and him and his friend were
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: they got in the water and uh and uh there's
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: there's a bunch of seals in the water, and which
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: is a good sign there's no shark, right basically, or
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: it's a good sign that there might be one soon. Well, so,
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: uh so they're diving and he comes up and I
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: guess the boat is off in the disk the hundred
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: yards maybe, and uh then he realizes there's zero seals
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: in the water, right, All the seals are on the rocks,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: and so you know, obviously he's freaking out a little
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: bit in his head and swims to the boat. Uh,
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: takes his gear off, takes his flippers off, throws in
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: the boat. You know. Uh, it goes to push up
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: into the boat, sits down, turns around, and there's a
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: great white right below him with his mouth oak him
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: maybe a few feet. It just takes it takes a
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: pass by. That's that's terrifying. I feel that they surfers
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: get a lot of mileage out of their dealings with
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: white sharks. But there's a lot more surfers in there
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: are Abaloni divers, and I think that the Abaloni divers
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: are more in the mix. Have you have you read
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: Canny Roll by John Steinbeck? Um. We talked about it
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: a couple times yesterday because it's you know, takes place
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: in Monterey Bay, and um, they do a lot of
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: even back then. So Steinbeck was writing, you know, in
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: the during the Great Depression, right or writing about that era,
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: and there in that book, those boys are always illegally
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: harvesting avalone's back then. It's been like a tightly regulated
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: industry for a long time. We also talked about Canny
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: Roll because in the book, Um, one of them works
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: at a bar and when he whenever he whenever a
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: client leaves, he just takes whatever was left in their
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: glass and dumps it into a bucket. And that's how
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: him and that's what him and his friends all drink.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: That's their alcohol source. Wait what I missed that? What
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: was it? What do they drink? So the guy that
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: works in the bar, anytime a client leaves anything left
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: in his drink in his glass, beer, wine, liquor whatever
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: it is, it just goes into a bucket. They just
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: dump it into a bucket and they drink that at
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: the end of the night. And that's what That's what
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: the crew, that's what the crew in Cannary row. That's
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: their alcohol source is just the dregs from everyone's drinks.
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: But they're also avid, avid abalone poachers. Uh monkey faced eel.
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: I've fished for those before. That's not a that's not
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: a popular commercial fish. Nope. But they just I think
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: they just um allowed commercial fistory on it now Yeah yeah, um, well,
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: I mean I think I don't think ellen in general
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: is very popular, right for a lot of people, unless
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: it's like you know, nagi, but it's delicious. It's very similar, right,
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: if you if you were to cook it exactly same
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: way as a nag you come out, you'd wind up
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: with a very simular so it's less fatty, but other
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: than that, it's very similar. Yeah, you know what, the
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: unagi um More and more they're turning to American eels
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: because of how depleted eels are. The eels that the
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: that the Japanese are traditionally using are so depleted that
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: they're turning out to American eels. And there's a lot
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: of controversy right now because guys, what guys are doing
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: is harvesting glass eels, which is uh a little baby
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: a baby eel because you know, like anagramous fish, right,
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: A nagmus fish live in the ocean and run up
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: river to spawn. A catagronous fish lives in a river
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: and goes out to the ocean to spawn. And eels
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: are cattagroniusts. So they're in the in in American rivers
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: and they go out and they just keep going out
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: in the Atlantic and they keep us going to deeper
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: and deeper and deeper water, and that eventually leads into
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: a place called the Sargasso Sea, and they spawn in
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: the Sargasso Sea, and then the larva does free flow
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: on the currents, and eventually the larva develops into what's
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: called a glass eel, which is just a little teeny
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: thing that looks like a looks like a translucent piece
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: of a noodle or just like a little almost like
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: a little piece of seaweed that you can see through.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: And they start migrating up rivers, and now there's a
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: big market for guys that go out and harvest glass eels,
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: you know, which are worth thousands and thousands and thousands
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: of dollars per pound, to sell glass eels into aquaculture
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: facilities because you obviously can't breed them in captivity. When
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: you you can, you can raise them in captivity, but
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: they can't be bread and captivity. So we're in a
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: situation now where the US Fish and Wildlife Services more
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: aggressively trying to get a get a grip like asses.
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: Demand for glass eels is growing, to try to get
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: a grip on where these things are coming from, where
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: they're going and if we're gonna wind up doing to
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: our own eels what aided their eels and completely deplete
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: them out. So have you had a full, full grown
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: glass siel. Oh yeah, yeah, we smoke them. Yeah, I
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: used to. Like I lived for a while. I had
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: an old girlfriend that was doing a writing fellowship in
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: Rhode Island, and we rented a house. She rented a
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: house that sat on the tideline and Rhode Island, and
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: I would trim deer steaks at night, whatever were and
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: I would just take like whatever I trimmed off silver
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: skin and stuff, and I put it on a hook
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: and I could cast it off my deck. I oughtn't
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: do a little bay, and I would open the bail
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: on my rod and lay it in front of the
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: couch when we're watching movies at night, and I would
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: take a little piece of mask and tape that was
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: white and just pinched that mask and tape on the
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: line at my rod tip and we'd be watching the
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: movie and pretty soon you'd see that mask and tape
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: moving across the living room rug. Then I could just
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: grab my rod, open a slide door and i'd pull
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: eel up over the deck rail. And you can get
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: some freaking giants, man, and I would just gut them.
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: That is a brilliant way to lazy fishing. I would
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: just leave the head on gut them and brine them
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: and smoke them. And what I the way I would
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: produce him is there's a guy, Uh, there's a guy
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: named Ray Turner on the Delaware River who runs the
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: eel weird. And when you're doing eel weirds, they just
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: build rock wall rock wall funnels for commercial harvest and
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: their harvest instead of like they're harvesting the run, right,
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: the eel run, But the eel run is going down river.
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: Everyone thinks of like a fish run going up river,
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: but they harvest them one the eels are migrating to
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: spawn headed down river. And so I was writing about
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: him in my first book, and he kind of turned
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: me on to how he likes to cook his eels.
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: And he runs a place called Delaware Delicacies and sells
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: eel and sells American eels, smoke them. He runs a
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: smoke house, so he smells a variety, he sells a
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: variety of smoke products. But his his his like main
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: offering that he sells in the restaurants and things, is
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: that his main offering is a smoked deal. Well, these guys,
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: these guys are you know what they're they're basically in
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: rock holes right, monkey face. That's how my uncle Don
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: taught me how to catch them, is just dipping bait
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: down into cracks in the rocks. Yeah, yeah, they have
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: out here. They have this little like upside down poll.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: It's like a stick basically with a little leader on it.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: I guess, a little hook and bait. He just it's
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: almost like jigging for him. Yeah, you only have you
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: only have like six inches of wire off the end
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: of your rod because you want to be able to cram.
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: You want to be able to cram the stick back
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: into things. Then you're pretty you'll feel and they're big,
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: you know, you'll feel them in. They're bucking around and
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: you drag them out. But it's like a six inch
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: leader in de bait on the end of a you know,
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: like a you know, eight foot long car antenna. That's
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: an interesting way to fish. So there's no line, Well
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: all there's a leader. Yeah, you got a poken pole.
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: The technical the tentnacle term be a poken pole with
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: a leader like a wire on the end with a hook,
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: and you're just trying to deliver that bait by cramming
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: it into cavities under rocks. Any kind of cave thing
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: and you'll hook him. Sometimes what you gotta be careful about.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: You gotta think ahead, like are you gonna be able
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: to drag a big gass deal out of there? Because
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: he might have come in some other route, Like let's
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: say he's got something you don't even know about where
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: he's coming in some hole and then he winds up
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: in the spot and you cram through some little crack
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: to get him, and then you get him where he's on,
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: but you can't get him out how you came in.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: So you gotta make sure you're aways fishing or crack.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: It's gonna be big enough to pull like an average
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: monkey faced fell back out of the hole. And it's
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: a dangerous fishing because you're out and ship that's just
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: getting battered by waves. So it's fun, man, but it's
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: like a high it's like a high risk angling. So
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: all right, we talked about c q can is writing,
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: which is kind of my I'm like way into sea
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: cucumbers right now. But we gotta touch on that again
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: because the sea cucumbers were talking about the eel skin
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: yet no, and that's another crazy thing. Yeah, so well
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: so so for these eels, it's just they're basically grilled,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: Like the flesh is grilled, but um, there's a sauce
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: that's brust on with made with all of the like
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: all the grilled bits that the bones, the trim, all
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: that stuff from the eel and it's it's put into
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: the sauce and allowed to basically create a glaze more
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: or less, and it's brushed on the eel flesh and
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: it's grilled. Right. But the skin, you know, like they
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: in Japan they do uh what's called uh food goo
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: the blowfish. So they that's the one that has a
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: toxic part. Right, Yeah, so if you don't cut it
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: the right way, it'll kill you. Um. But but anyway,
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: they take the skin and they make like a cold
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: skin kind of like salad or something or you eat
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: it with the flesh. And so it's basically boiled skin
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: like cleaned and then boiled skin and then chilled and
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: then it's just like uh five minutes. It just depends,
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: uh you know in monkey face deal, it's pretty quick.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: So you scrape all the slime off, clean it, purge it,
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: rubbing a little salt, rinse it in some water, uh,
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: and get all the meat off and then you can
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: basically just boil it on pot if you want. For us,
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: we we put it intide inside a cry back back
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: and it's basically you know, compressed in the cry back
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: back so it's flat, it never curls up. And then
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: we just steam it when it's in the cry back
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: back until it's tender and you can just push through it.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: You can just put your fingers through the skin. Then
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: once that's tender, you take it out, throw a nice
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: path and it's it's ready, got ready. You can steam
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: it in the cry it's not in the water. It's
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: in the water because it's in a cry evac Well,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: we just place the skin directly in the bag. You
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: don't have to and just and just seal it and
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: compress it and steel and then put it in your
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: your like su vie water. Yeah, you can do that,
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: or you can just steam it just holding it over,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: just put it, throw it inside a steamer. Okay, yeah yeah.
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: And then and then you either put it in the
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: water or you can just steam it right. Um and uh,
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: and then what's extend or just chill it? And how long? Uh?
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: Just a couple of minutes. Every fish is different, but
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: in this particular case, it's like three minutes and then
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: you like slice it so it looks like Julian carrots
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: accepted with the texture of like cold noodles, you know,
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: and then you put a sauce on ad or toss
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: it and something. Yeah, there's like a little vinegar made
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: from the monkey face steal bones and some herbs, and
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: then you start it with the flesh. Yeah, that was
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: a very surprising dish the kid. Yeah, because that's the thing.
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: That's kind of thing that impressed me most about what
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: you're doing is you put more attention into the more
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: love and care into the ship that everybody throws away.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: It's good stuff, man, that's the sweetmeat. That's that's the good.
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: Like a lot of this stuff is like the you know,
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: the chip lands or the skin or you know, and
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: there's so many alternative textures or you know, other textures
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: or flavors that we don't use. We, in my opinion,
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: we have a very wasteful, you know, kind of culture
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: in the way that we are, at least right now,
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: because in our food practices are so like, oh, let's
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: just take the you know, let's just take the tender
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: loin and throw the rest away, or let's just you know,
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: because we don't know what to do with it. So
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: really a lot of it is just you know, you know, uh,
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: it's gonna reassess some of these things. Yeah, that's the
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: thing I think that needs to happen in in game
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: management is a lot of states are aggressive about uh,
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: salvage requirements, okay, um, about curbing want and waste. And
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: I think that it's not even like it's not even
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: like a lefty righty thing, right where you have like
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: some like politically very conservative states Alaska, Montana that are
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: really strict about salvage requirements. So if you think about that,
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: you're like, like, the goal of you know, a goal
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: of conservatism would be that you're alleviating people from regulation. Right,
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: you're not telling your like the goals and not tell
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: people what to do, not mandate to them how to
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: behave or what to do. But here you have like
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: really conservative states who are also saying, no, dude, you're
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: gonna retain the usable portions of your animals, to the
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: point where my brother hunts a moose unit in Alaska
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: where they mandate do you retain the liver? That's the
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: only case I can think of where a state has
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: come out and said you're not gonna waste that moose's
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: livery and that in that particular unit, but some states
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: are still like really lax about it. I remember being down.
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: I remember going down in South Carolina with a friend
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: of mine down to his local butcher. And when they
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: gutt a deer, part of their dear gutting process is
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: two saws all the way the ribs, and saws all
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: the way the shanks, and that all goes into a dumpster.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: Because even they're a commercial process that they have the
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: salvage require start in place, and then the commercial process
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: there's not even even attempting to deal with it. Ribs
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: and shanks. My own two eyes, every shank and every
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: rib off those deer was into a dumpster. That's crazy
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: to me. You to think about think about it from
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: just like a like a you know, sustainability perspective, like
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: you got if you're if you're a hunter and you're
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: out there and you're thrown away, half of these things
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: it could be turned into Ian think about it. You
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: could make soup for a week, two weeks, three weeks.
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: You can braise the you know, shanks and make stew
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: for your whole family for you know, another week. Uh
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: you know you there's just there's so much that's uh um.
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: I don't know how it got like this crazy though,
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: So there's so much on this. We live in abundance.
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: Many we live in abundance. Yeah, I'd say in most states,
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: you don't have to keep the neck. No, No, I
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: don't know about most No. I would say, yeah, probably
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: most states you don't need to keep the neck. But
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: it's like it's like, over the course of over the
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: course of my hunting life, I always learned more and
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: more stuff. Like I remember we used to always bone
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: out our shanks and just grind them for burger and
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: I was like, oh, Ship, you can make all kinds
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: of good stuff with shanks. And then I remember the
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: first time I ever tried to mess It was my
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: third year of college. We started trying to mess with
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: cooking deer tongues and we couldn't really figure it out,
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: but eventually got it figured out. I'm like, oh, no, Ship,
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: you can cook tongue. And then on down the line,
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: right and anything. You get to a point where you're like, man,
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: I'm getting new point where I'm really utilizing a lot
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: of stuff. But then last night I eat with you
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, I haven't even scratched the surface.
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: I'm still like, recently we discovered collars on fish. Okay,
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: so the meat surrounding the meat surrounding the um behind
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: the gill cover like the throat of the fish. Okay.
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: Uh still discovered that. I was like, no, ship, I
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: can't believe how many pounds of this stuff we have.
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: How many pounds of this stuff we're thrown away? You know?
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: Another thing like, uh like on the waste thing, man,
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: is black bears? You really like you did? You really
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: were hunting bears the spring and BC. Yeah, um, I've
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: never like, I'm never eating organs on bears, even though
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: obviously they'd be fine. I can't think of ever eating
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: a bear heart because I feel like, uh, you know, man,
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, for lack of a better word, I feel
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: like there's like a lot of weird uh almost like
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: a spirit like for lack of a better word, like
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: a spirituality thing, man, or like a bear heart. Like
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: it's just like as I can't look at it as
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: an appetizing thing for some reason. But you were saying
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: there's a tradition in Scotland that you cut an X. Yeah,
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: there's an all. Yeah, the tip of the heart. I
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: feel you on that. I understand what you mean by
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: that and obviously not the first person to think it
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: because of what you told me that when we're talking
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: about heart. No, I mean it took me a while
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: to get to the point to be able to even
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: one a hunt of bear. In fact, some of it
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: came from just actually watching your show too. But yeah,
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: there's an old tradition where you basically make an X
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: in the bottom of the heart and they say it's
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: supposed to release the soul, right, so it's basically allows
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: you to you know, consume this thing freely. Yeah. And
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: then so I never a bare heart. I never a
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: bare tongue for another illogical reason because when I used
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: to send bears and to get them tested for trickin nosis, um,
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: they want the tongue because apparently it's a great there's
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: a lot of larva getting the tongue and that's stuck
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: in my head. Um, you know, sorry to that just
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: brings up a question for me. Is Steve and I
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: both carriers of did you have a sore tongue when
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: you had sore back muscles, eggs. My tongue never got sore.
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: You got a sore tongue. No, So you're saying that
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: it never goes away completely, Well, they only know from
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: animals that they've It's hard for them to really map
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: uh when it goes away because you have to you'd
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: have to have an infected animal. No, I mean, I
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: mean you're you know, as a consumer of at least yeah,
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: you stay infected at least ten years. You can't get sick.
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: You have to take medicine because you can't. You can't
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: unless you ate your own arm. You can't get sick. Again,
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: you're a carrier, and when something scavenges your carcass, they'll
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: get sick. But you can't get sick from your own
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: infected meat. It's out of your digestive track and the
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: larva living calcified cysts in your muscle. So the bear
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: that we got sick from head I think it was
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: eight hundred and sixty eight larva per graham. So if
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: you ate a pound of that bear, you ate a
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: half million larva and they die at hundred sixty five degrees.
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: So what do you what do you like? How do
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: you get rid? Of it. What do you You gotta
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: take pills unless you catch it right away, like if
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: you ate I gather, if if you ate infected meat,
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: like let's say you ate some raw meat you found
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: in your buddy's fridge, and then your buddies like that
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: day or the next day, your bodies like, dude, that
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: was bear meat. You're bucked. If you tend took the
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: d worming pills, you'll head some of it off. But
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: once they get along in their life cycle enough and
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: you start getting like the muscle eggs and it's just
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: a month later. You missed your chance because you don't
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: get sick for a for a month. In a month,
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: you get muscle pain. And what that muscle pain is?
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: I mean you might have some gastro intestinal upset that
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: you would just pass off as any number of things.
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: The muscle ache is so peculiar and intense that then
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: you're like, something ain't right. But by then the pills
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: like do any good. But even then, that's nine in
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: ten cases in the in our country are misdiagnosed for
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: a fever. Yeah, be is you know when you get
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: the flu and you get muscle ages. It took me
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: the only reason I would have never put it together
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: if three of the guys I worked with weren't all
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: complaining about the same thing and we hadn't been together
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: for a month. I wonder, if I have trickin nosis,
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: you might you'll be all right from the past. Yeah,
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: if you got you had a similar bounce, A lot
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: of stuff sounds very familiar. You'd be like, dude, Yeah,
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: you might be like dude, I just like been feeling
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: like shit, I got wicked muscle pains, I got some
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: kind of something. Yeah, I mean I felt like I
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: had run a marathon ten days later. Yeah, I kept
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: thinking I had a weightlifting injury across my entire body.
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: So and then you'll hang out and then like ten, eleven, twelve,
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: fourteen days later, you're just back to normal and you
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: got through it, but you're infected. Now. To say, like
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: how long you're infected for it, you'd have to know.
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: This is let me give it. Let me give an
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: ex ample. When I was at the Mountain House factory
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: mountain House freeze dried food, I was like, Hey, what's
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: the shelf stability of Mountain House freeze dried food? And
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: they're like, well, we don't really know. I mean, we
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: know what we'll say like a defendable position. But a
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: peculiarity of it is that we have some from a
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: long time ago that we've kept in a controlled space
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: and it's still good. But we can only tell like that.
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: We don't know the far end of it. We only
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: know like what the oldest sample we have is. And
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: to really map out like how long you stay infected,
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: you'd have to have animal that you knew got infected
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: and when it got infected, and then watch it for
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: twenty years and then butcher it's meat and see if
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: the sisters are still good. And since no one's really
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: done that, they can't say for certain how long something
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: can stay infected for. It would be interesting. I should donate.
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: I might donate my body to science when I die,
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: because I thought they could just take a chunk a
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: flesh and do a biops. Yeah, but I don't want
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: to go through that, so so yeah I could. I could.
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: I should wait a decade. I should wait a decade
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: from infection, which should be I don't know what year
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: was it. Okay, So in I'm gonna go down to
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: the c d C and I'm going to offer a
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: biopsy of my arm. Then they will be able to
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: test if the cysts are still good. I'm throwing us
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: out there right now to the CDC. They'll be able
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: to test if those cysts are still alive. They'll know
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: that you stay infected for ten years, and I will
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: every ten years commit two testing to find out how
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: long you stay, how long the cists are good for.
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: But they're good. I know, it's like at least ten years.
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: But the only thing that can liberate that, The only
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: thing that can liberate the larva from its calcified cyst
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: is stomach acid. So you're making notes, can you can you?
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: Can you eat bear freely? Now? Can you eat infect
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: an animal and not be sick? You bring that up.
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: I'll let the honest feel that one. Yeah. I don't
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: know what got me back onto the U. S d
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: A website. I think I was researching something else, but
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: I saw a something about tricken elysis and I was like,
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: I'll read up a little bit, and uh, it's said
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: that they that they think they believe, through some research
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: that have been done, that that animals do develop an
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: immunity um after they've been infected. Yeah, but it's not not.
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: And also not all bears have trick an elysis. You don't.
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: It's something that each individual needs to acquire through the
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: consumption of infected meat. So uh, yeah, you could kill
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: a young bear and depending on what he's been up to,
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: he might not have ever encountered infected meat. But there
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: is some evidence that over time, as a bear gets
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: older and older and older, it's the likelihood of it
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: having encountered infected me and probably particularly when they get
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: big enough that they're regularly eating other bears, right, the
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: chances of that bear becoming infected go up. But yeah,
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: not all like, by no means are all bears in
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: fact of the trick an olsis. I've I've had them
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: tested and had them test negative, and I had them
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: tested and had them test positive. You know, in Japan
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: they eat a lot of bear that is undercooked or
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: raw or made out raw but undercooked. They might have
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: a lot of tricking nosis. I was starting to someone
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: from the someone from I can't. I think they were
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: from doctors without Borders, and they were saying, when they're
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: working in areas of like Equatorial Africa where there's a
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: lot of bush meat consumption, Um, they roll in and
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: just as a gent, like when they come in and
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: do vaccinations and stuff in villages, they roll in and
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: just do de worming under the assumption they're saying that
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: are our operating assumption is that everyone's a trickolsis everyone's
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: suffering trick noosis. So bush meat you know, like not
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: not already dead, but but hunted bush animals, right yeah,
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: so yeah yeah. And Africa, it's just like they like
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: what we call wild we call wild game, but you're
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: like like bush meat would be that um people hunting
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: wild game and selling wild game. They just say the
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: bush meat trade, you know where where people are actively
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: out hunting in the jungle, um for sale, it's just
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: turn bush meat. It's like yeah, they're they're version of
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: wild game. Um, so yeah, they're operating under the they
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: operated on the assumption that people are eating carnivorous animals
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: or omnivorous animals and just getting infected and getting reinfected
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: and infected and reinfected. They're going to treat people with
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: d worming pills. When I bought a de worming pill
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: for trick and L since it was my insurance paid
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: half of it, uh, I bought it in. The pharmacist said,
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna tell you what to do with this information,
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: but I can tell you that that pill is seven
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: bucks when you give it to a dog. But she said,
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: I don't know about the doulstages. I'm just like throwing
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: it out there. And I took it. I didn't get
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: better any quicker than anybody else. Ye didn't took it.
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: He wasn't gonna spend his money on something. So you
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: guys got better at the same time, and you didn't
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: too late, but we were we had already been sick
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: for five weeks. Yeah. One of the biggest reason I
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: didn't take it because when I spoke, we were interviewed. Um,
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: everybody was just about interviewed by like their local UH,
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: state and county health department. We all got calls from
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: the Alaska State epidemiologists because it doesn't happen a lot,
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: and the CDC because it's like mandatory reportable disease they
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: have to do they have to do a case on it.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: And the Atlastic guy, I was like, look, man, that
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: steroid that you'll take to you know, that that you
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: take as a pill is so strong and severe that
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: in my opinion, you might be doing more uh damage
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: to your body by taking that pill than what is
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: going on. Can't you just like chug a bottle of
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: whiskey purge that out? And and this comes up a
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: lot because it's just fun to talk about, right, And like,
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: no one got hurt in any kind of long term way,
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: So it's just fun and funny to talk about. And
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: I talked about it often and with great relish. But um,
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: the point was I gonna make about it. Well we
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: got we got here by talking. We're talking about tongues
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: because we ate tongues. Oh yeah, So that's always like stuck,
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: you know, when you get like little things stuck in
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: your head. Right, I remember getting real sick off Canadian
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: Hunter whiskey and then not being able to drink uh
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: Canadian Hunter because just like the association. So I got
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: stuck in my head about bear tongue. You got the
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: image of like little maggots. Yeah, and so it turned
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: me off. But you uh, from your bear, you got
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: the spring. You know, you're very generous. You only get
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: one tongue out of a bear, and you shared with
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: me some bare tongue. The base of the tongue. You
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: pointed out what you like the fatty party, and that's
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: like cooking tongue. But you also did something that I've
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: always heard about with um illegal wildlife trafficking in Asia,
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: which is bare paw. Talk about how you handled bear paw,
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: which I am guilty of having never that was in
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: my discard pile skin the pause to save the hide,
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: but never using my paws because they were like, I
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 1: just didn't think about it. I had no idea. Well,
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: if you really think through like the ananoity of a paul, right,
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: if you got you start at the top, You've got
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: you know, the skin, and then the pad, and then
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: all of that connective tissue and tendons and deliciousness underneath that.
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: Then the meat around the knuckles, the cartilage and all
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: that stuff. So there's a lot of layers of flavor
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: in there, right, and uh for those who like maybe
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: chicken feet or you know, something along those lines. But
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: but basically we we just uh we just blanch off
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: the that outer skin and the hair and then you
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: can raise it just like you would anybraise, like a shank. Right,
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: you can throw it in some fats meromatics. You're just
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: throwing a little broth that does raise it and then
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: we grill it afterwards. So but it's got all those layers,
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: got all those layers of flavor. It's used so much
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: that has you know, a ton of flavor already. It's
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: one of my favorite things. I'm just trying to think
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: of something to equate it too, but I can't think
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: of something to equate it too, because it was Yeah,
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: what's the parallel I mean on the I mean you've
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: got that You've got that collagen on the outside. Right,
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: it's like a like chicken feet almost right. That's what
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to describe, is that collagen that you could, um,
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: it would be hard to cut it with a fork,
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: choose up nice, and it's like the it's like the
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: texture and consistency of raw abalone. I don't know, man,
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: like a little crunch to it. Yeah, it's got a
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: little crunch to it, and you can keep cooking and
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: it'll get really soft like if you wanted to. But
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: we've decided to leave a little twosome ryan to get
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 1: a little texture in there. I'm telling you what, man,
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: if you took a bear paw like that and laid
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: it out in front of those people, and so I'll
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: give you ten guesses what the hell that is? No
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: one is gonna guess. You know, Actually it's not like
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: the freaking claw on there. Yeah. Yeah. The writer Jim
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: Harrison Um, who was an avid hunter and fisherman, he
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: always said that he can't he saw a skinned out
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: bear and could never eat bear because it was like
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: he was looking at a skinned out human. I mean,
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: it's shockingly similar, right, like it's it's definitely I knew
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: that going into it. This is the first bear I
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: ever got. Yeah, it's better not to have if you
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: have that problem, if that problem would trip you up,
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: don't hang it, skin it up. I've never met a
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: person that's been involved with a bear that didn't say
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: that about it. I don't get it like I thought.
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: I don't get it. It just I don't look at
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: and be like, oh my god, it's a dude. Oh no,
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: it's just a bear like I've never had. I don't
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. Because the back legs,
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: we just don't. Don't hang it by the neck and
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: leave the fingers on. That's what he that's what he saw.
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: I gathered he saw one hanging. It was like not
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: going near that. Um, all right, the last thing I
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: want to talk about, uh, last question. You you have
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: hung in your life. You have hung game meat for
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: a year, right over a year? Talk about that ship.
• 1:54:23
  Speaker 1: We get a million questions about We get a million
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: questions about what's up with the age and dear me,
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: and let me let me tea this off a little
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: bit but kind of like what the questions come, what
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: my personal experiences with it, and kind of just generly
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 1: how I feel about it, and then I want you
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: to go. But we get a lot of questions like
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: can you age, dear me? And I'm always like, yeah, man,
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: if you have the proper facility, right, the proper kind
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: of space, you can age, dear me. I found it's
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: just like a dude with a house and a kitchen
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: in it, and that I hunt a lot of like
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: pretty remote areas. It often just doesn't come up for me, right, Like, Um,
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: you're dealing in imperfect situations where the way to ensure
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: that animal is gonna be like ready for many future
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: meals is to get the thing caught up and putting
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: your freezer where it's stable because you gotta have climate control. Environment.
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: Another thing I'll say to people, is what I often
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: do for aging on on like a daily basis, is
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: I'll thaw blocks the meat out a thaw roast out,
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: and before cooking them, I'll let them be on a
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: rack in my fridge for a week, ten days, two
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: weeks sometimes and it dries a little bit on the outside,
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: but I'll clean it up and cook that and I
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: feel that that meat is different than what I thought out,
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: like there's some transformation going on there. It's tender izing. Um.
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: I used to take ducks and just gut them and
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: put them in paper grocery bags and put them in
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: my fridge for ten days, and they were better than
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: ducks that you didn't do that with. But my general
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: feeling about it is it's like you gotta have the
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: right space. I've never had the right space. Now you
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: run with it because you've rigged up spaces to do this, Like,
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: how in the world are you able to do that?
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: And I also like we like to hear um, like
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: if you think there is something that they got home
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: without the special space rigged up, you know, well, I
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: mean just to I think about Priscuto, right, okay, all right,
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: it's you know those old methods of proscuto or you know,
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: you rub the socket um and then you rubbed the
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: ball joined the ball yeah yeah, sorry, the ball joined
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: around the you know, like the femur. I guess it
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: is um. And then you throw it on the counter
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: by your fireplace and you just let us sit there
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: for a couple of days and you massage it every day,
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: right if you're not like you're bearing the thing in
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: salt at all. Right, and these things get left out
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: at room temperature. So so it's not really that, it's
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: just it's just a different view point for us, especially
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: in America. Right, But you've got to have I guess
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: you know, at home, you've got to have just the
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: right air circulation. You gotta have the right humidity level,
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: but more importantly just air circulation. So all you're doing
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: is kind of mitigating the um, you know, service moisture
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: and and the air circulation. So if you dry it
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: off and you you put it near a fan, like
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: physically dry it off with towels, yes, so before it
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: goes in there, you know, it's got to be in
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: a good state. Like if you dropped your leg in
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: the dirt or something like that and you know you
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: you had to rinse it off a lot, and and um,
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: you know it's contaminated. I wouldn't recommend it right so, um,
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: but you know, if you have a good you have
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: a good simple you know, dear leg thrown fridge, fridge,
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: skin it out, dry it off, hanging in the fridge.
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: You gotta have circulation all the way around. Um And
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: and the reality is is that the microbes in the
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: air do the rest of the work. For as long
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: as you manage the process from the original surface moisture
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 1: and continue to dry it off every day and have
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: a lot of air circulation around, it's really super easy
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: to do. There's zero things wrong with with a deer
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: that's been in the fridge for two weeks. Um, you
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: need it, you know, rare, and it's perfectly fine as
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: long as you don't mess it up in between, right,
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: And you don't like is it for for safety's sake?
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: If you're going to try age in something your fridge,
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: you're saying you don't necessarily like not necessarily you don't
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: need to rub that thing down with salt or you
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: hear people about rubbing it down with black pepper, which
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: has some anti microbial quality. You don't have to know,
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: you don't have to, but but you know there's a
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: lot of like ifs, right, like like if if inside
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: you know there's some sort of bullet damage or shrapping
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: or something from that bullet spread apart and maybe hit
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: like a little membrane and then you know how and
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: some animals you'll have like um, all that moisture in
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: the fascia in between like muscle layers. So that's also
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: an issue because that stuff starts to seep out as
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: you age. Got you so as longways just a good condition,
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: then you're you're good. So talk about what it looks
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: like after you've had it. If you've pun something for
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: a year, it has a lot of mold on it,
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: that's like salami. It's got that white pisia on the outside. Um,
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: So that how do you know a safe mold from
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: a shitty mold? Usually shitty mold is that safe mold
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: is that really fine textured, smooth, salami looking mold that's white,
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: uh and and kind of silky. A bad mold is green, black,
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: big hairs, big spores of hair that are growing off
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: the moisture of the wet areas. I definitely don't want
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: to eat that. I don't I don't know what it is,
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: but you definitely don't want to eat that. And what
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: do you when you age? Let's just let's just focus
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: on venison for a minute, or antler, antler and horned game?
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: What are you after by a like? What is what
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: are you trying to achieve by aging it? Well, the
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: whole the whole point of it is that you basically
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: you know, everything has a sweet spot, like we're talking
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: about earlier, you know, and so like the fish being
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: dead for two minutes or two minutes or being dead
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: for one year exactly, it's and so there's there's Lego
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: was saying, there's there's typically two sweet spots. There's right
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: when you get it, and there's further on down the road.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: So you got to decide for every product which you
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: know further down the road, which which point is best
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: for each product? So, um, you know, as the animal
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: sits in ages, basically the enzymes start to break down
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: this animal, right, um, and they you know, the flavor
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: becomes deeper, right, not game either or what we typically
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: think of as as you know, kind of a nasty flavor,
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: but it just deepens, it also becomes more tender, and
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: so you know, at that point you can you can
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: cut off you know, if you let something age for
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: really like that olt dad leg right, I can cut
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: off a stake of that out dead leg grill it
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: serve it rare and you can bite right through it.
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: We had one time, just perfect conditions where we had
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: a calf elk. The the was hanging in a garage
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: and at night to be down in the upper twenties,
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: you know, in the day time and be up into
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: the forties. But we ate the whole thing without ever
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: freezing any of it. And I remember towards the end
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: you could put you could put a finger into it.
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: You could jab your finger into it. Once you're really delicious,
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: once you cut the rihind away. And my old man
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: used to tell stories of hanging deer until they had
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: an inch of mold on them and cutting the mold
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: away and then cutting that rind away and having just
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: like perfect dear meat under there. But if a dude's
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: doing it, okay, explain this, then what are you not
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: wanting to not happen? Like? What are the things when
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: you look and be like, oh, I need to figure
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: something out because this is going south. It's it's all
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: about moisture control. Moisture control, air circulation is long. It
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: just look if you look at it and it's a
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: it's like a soppy mess. I wouldn't need it. I
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: wouldn't recommend it. What about what about older There should
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: never be a foul order. No, there's never a foul order, right,
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: so you should you should never have any kind of
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 1: like nothing. You should be uh, you know, after the
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: first few days, it's gonna dry and it's gonna drip
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 1: Any blood will drain off, any moisture will basically drip off,
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: and you're in you're diligent about and you just wipe
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: it down every day. You keep a fan on it.
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: Basically the easiest way to do it is just to
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: keep a fan directly on the meat or you know,
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: if you have a fridge, just put a little fan
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: inside there, which isn't always the easiest thing to do,
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: but you just cut a little hole and sticking aside um.
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 1: But uh, that's it. That's really it. As as long
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 1: as it doesn't smell bad and it doesn't look like
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: it's completely coated and moisture, there's no like excess moisture
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: inside the joints around the bones. You're fine. And another
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: thing you talked about was you were dealing with lamb
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: for your restaurant and you add taking kidney fat and
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: kind of covered the that that ball joint area and
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: with kidney fat so that it dried on there and
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: form like a barrier. What are you doing when you
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 1: do that? Well, So in that instance, we're basically preventing
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: too much dry rying out too much meat loss. Right,
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: So you know, the the the the outside of the
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: meat ages really well, but where the meats cut ages
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: not as well. So because you've introduced because in the
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: butchering process, you've probably introduced some bacteria onto that. You
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: probably introduced some bacteria onto that cut. Mostly I don't,
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: I have no idea, but most of I mean, like
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: definitely feels different. Like when you skin an animal, it's
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: got that the fell or the fascion on the outside,
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: and where you've cut, it's just different. Yeah, yeah, and
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure of of why, but but um at
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: least scientifically, but but you know, it just doesn't age
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: the same, right, So you gotta you gotta protect it
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: in some way or the other. And easiest thing to
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: do is just to rub a little salt, you know,
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: on there. You rub a little bit of salt and
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: then let it hang. Then you're you're almost guaranteed that
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: you're gonna be good as long as you drive down.
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: So if a guy was gonna rig up let's say,
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 1: let's say you were like, you're like the fridgerator. I
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: don't have room in my fridge, um whatever, right, you know,
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: you know you don't have room to hang up a
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: whole damn deer's leg in your fridge. If you're going
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: to rig up a space or a room to to
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: do some long term aging, lay out kind of the
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: parameters of what you're after. Well, I would get a
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: fridge and throw it in, or you can you know
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: you can do you can go to I mean let's
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: just say that, um, you know, resources aren't an issue.
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: Then you know you go get a commercial uh like
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: a like like one of these things he's reach in.
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: It's like a like a Stanley steel reach in refrigerator's
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: got a lot of room around or just like I
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: got a little room in the inside so you can
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 1: get good air circulation around that meat. Then um, you
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: know I would put a fan in there. Those typically
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: already have a fan, you know, but I'm fine doing that. Yeah,
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: you don't need to get it. You don't need to
• 2:04:46
  Speaker 1: get into like d I Y, like crazy ship that's
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: gonna cost five bucks, like perfect World. Yeah, so yeah,
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: you get you got a refrigerator box with a really
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 1: high air circulation, and you throw a hook in there,
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: and you put your meat inside and just and at
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: a point you get to where you're not doing any
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: maintenance on it. Right, so after you know that typically
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: like after the first week or so, depending on the size,
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: Like if you've got a whole elk leg in their
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: real elk lay um, then that's gonna take a little
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: longer to try out. Right, you gotta watch it carefully
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: from long. You gotta tend to it. You gotta make
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: sure nothing you know, it's not touching the side of
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: the refrigerator so the moisture doesn't accumulate, or not touching
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: other meat or or uh you know, it's got free
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 1: air circulation all the way around. But that's really the
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: only thing you need to worry about. And then the
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: temperature you don't want to get you want to keep
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: around probably perfect not much warmer than forty five degrees
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: or so or yeah, I mean I would keep it
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: at thirty six, keep it at thirty six, and then
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: you're you're, you're, you know, all those things just helped
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: to kind of mitigate any issues that you'll have and
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: you wind up with a delicious, you know, age piece
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: of meat. You know. The other thing that it does too,
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: is it also it also uh you know, like I
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: think a lot of people talk about gaminess, but really
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: that's the beauty has no definition. Yeah it but that's
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: the you know, it doesn't it's all subjective, but that's
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: the beauty of wild meat to me. Is that gaminess, right,
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: or rather the taste of wild meat. But you know,
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: aging it for a long period of time actually decreases
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: that aroma of gaminess that it makes it more savoring. Right,
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: It's like a it's like a palatable savor nous that
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: you get once it's once it's aged all the way.
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: And when you're doing that, the end would be the
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: end would be that the dryness on the outside marches
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: in from each side and you'd eventually wind up like
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: in this perfect situation, this perfect aging situation, like when
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: you went too far would be that the part that
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: you needed to trim away to get to the good stuff. Uh,
• 2:06:41
  Speaker 1: that part grew and aid away what you were trying
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: to say, what you were trying to hang onto in
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: the middle. Do you just have like a piece it
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: was like a solid rind. Yeah, I mean you got
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 1: you you'll you'll trim off roughly maybe half an inch
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 1: all the way around, basically skin rind around that. But
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: that mark, but that slowly goes inward, right, I mean
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: over time or does that? Does that? Does that? It
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: does over time the head of time and then you
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: know so that that's uh that barbary sheep, that al
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: dad that have up there. You know you can you know,
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: you have an inch that's wasted around you know, Ryan
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: all the way around it's wasted, but on the inside
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: it's still you know, it's over a year, so it's
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: dried all the way. But you can cut off a
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: slab of that like for shutto and eat it like that. No,
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: ship man, man, that's like I gotta start getting more
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: into that ship. Like I've done some I've done some
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: of that stuff. Only like what because conditions were right? Yeah,
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: well I'll say I'll send you you know what you
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 1: do is we can. I can send you a spect
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: later on, like the perfect the perfect environmental conditions for
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: all that. Yeah, we'll put that in our shower notes. Man. Yeah,
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: all right, do you got Yanna Yanni like a final
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: thing you want to ask about? Oh? I do, man,
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: But I think we're at a time really well, yeah,
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: we're close. Yeah, my colu, you are throwing away if
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: you hunting fish and handle your own stuff, you're throwing
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 1: away a lot of good stuff. You don't it's not
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: even that you're a dick, just you just don't know.
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 1: You could be a dick too. But it's like you
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: don't really good stuff because you just don't know how
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: good it is. Yeah, someone's got to show you. You
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: gotta talk to people who know more than you know.
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: There's there's there's not enough information about it. Really. I
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 1: think that, you know, we gotta look at our practices
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: and reassess. But you know, you need you know, it's
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: not like it's not that easy to use, you know,
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 1: eel skin if you've never seen it done before, right,
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: So we've got to have the information. It wouldn't Yeah, yeah,
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: you don't know that you're you don't know that you're
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: not being smart until someone demonstrates it to you. All Right,
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 1: you got any final things you want to add that
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 1: That was the one dude. It's like we should do
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: this like every little once in a while and just
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 1: keep talking about it because yeah, I got it. Well
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: it's never ending, really, right, it's never ending if you
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 1: really start to look at every animal. Right, there's so
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 1: many and everyone's a little different. And we haven't even
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: gotten into how to slower grilled pineapple with clarified butter. Well,
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: that's our butter. It's not even clarified butter. It's butter
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: and rum our, butter and rum, butter and rum. Yeah, alright,
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: next time. Next time it's all about pineapples. Alright, Uh,
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: thanks again. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate you
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 1: guys coming all right, man, don't forget the Meat Eator
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 1: Live event, Ellen Theater, Bosa, Montana, August six pm. Still
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 1: got a couple of tickets. Get him now,