The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 013

Episode Date: July 9, 2015

Anchorage, AK. Steven Rinella joins Danny Rinella, Brandt Meixell, Janis Putelis, and Mike Washlesky for a conversation about preserving wild game. Subjects discussed: smoking, pickling, canning, drying and freezing wild game; author Peter Matthiessen's take on Anchorage; the wild boars of Latvia; making mountain goat stock; cool ranch Doritos; living on a diet of canned teal and Slim Fast; moldy moose bresaola; the best jerky Steve's ever had; differences between freezing fish, fowl, and red meat; rescuing freezer burned packages of bull elk from the bottom of a dude's freezer; recurring nightmares caused by a decade of fur trapping; buffalo suckers; bird hearts; gizzards. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. All right, this is the Meteor Podcast. We're going to be talking about smoked puss, pickled sucker, donkey dick, stuff like that, an array of which I have laid out in front of me. But first I want to talk about a couple other things real quick. We're recording right now out of Anchorage, Alaska.

We're in Anchorage because I'm passing through Anchorage on the way out to hunt for a muskox out on Nunavak Island out in the Bering Sea. It's funny because on the way here I was reading this book. The writer, Peter Matheson, many people don't know who Peter Matheson is. People who do know who Peter Matheson is often know him through his book Snow Leopard. But Matheson in the 60s wrote this book about the musk ox on Nunavak Island. And on his way to Nunavak Island in 1964,

he passed through Anchorage, where I'm sitting right now. And he had this passage I was reading on the airport. I want to read this to you. I'm sitting here with a couple of guys from Anchorage, and I want to read them this passage. From Anchorage, there is no road westward, and it remains a frontier town. Despite its efforts at mainstream respectability, it still has pawn shops full of guns, hides, and snowshoes, and saloons jammed with Indians and prospectors.

No longer gold, but oil. Violent death is not an unusual event in Anchorageage and its jail is full of wild young men the town has a striking location by the sea on a plateau surrounded by mountains and despite its recent earthquakes its prospects are immense but domesticity is soon to come its novelty stores will no longer sell small moose droppings made up as earrings, and it will be just another provincial town to which zoning came too late. He couldn't have been more wrong. No, it hasn't changed.

I was like, you think this guy would have passed through Anchorage last night. Don't you feel that? Oh, especially the moose drop earring thing. Yeah, you can still bite those all over town. What was that written in the 60s? 64. Yeah. Here's who's sitting here right now.

My brother, Dan Rinella and Brant Mikesell. Both those guys, if you happen to watch a show called Media, you might have seen these guys on the show. They're both biologists. Danny works with fish and aquatic ecosystems.

Brant works with ducks. So they're as involved in wild games. They're involved in wild game. It's the life of wild game and not just like what happens after it's dead, but things of the nature of keeping Wild Game around. And Mike Wasileski. You Polish, Mike? Out of Austin, Texas.

And then Giannis Petelis. Giannis, say something in Latvian. Say pickled pike in Latvian. Can't do it. He's not fluent. You know, my dad listened to the Bozeman episode, and he was happy that they don't air the Meteor podcast in Lavian because he was a little embarrassed about my Lavian skills

when he put me on the spot on the last one. Yeah. Giannis speaks Lavian, wears a special Latvian ring, went to Latvian camp. He's never been to Latvia. We did get a trail cam pic of some nice little... That was amazing, man. Latvia, where Giannis' family hails from,

has actual wild boars. I'm telling you, in the U.S., people are always talking about Siberians, wild boar, wild boars. It's like there's something else going on in Europe. You look at those pigs in Latvia, that's a pure form of boar. There's a lot of domestic strains that have weaseled their way into U.S. stock because them pigs are not the same deal. They look very fleet-footed.

That picture, it must be some sort of a trail cam or a traffic cam pig. These pigs are running across the street at night in Regal Avenue in the capital city. It almost looks like not a single pig's foot is actually on the ground. They're running and they're so quick like nobody's really touching the ground there's there's just like hey man they look like a wild animal and in the guidebook there's a

picture of a wild pig and i'm like man that pig is a wild pig running through the snow and it won't be in the eurasian pig it's like like the U.S. ones are a little bit different. We're getting way off subject. Smoked puss, donkey dick. We're going to talk about... Everyone here is involved in, at a

hobby level, and beyond a hobby level, preserving wild game. I'm talking about canning, drying, freezing, charcuterie. Whatever it takes to carry wild game. I'm talking about canning, drying, freezing, charcuterie, whatever it takes to carry wild game over. I want to have a discussion with a bunch of people who I regard as having levels of expertise about what they like to do with wild game to hold it over. This is everything excluding fresh consumption.

When I was thinking about this, I thought about dividing. I kind of like made some notes to myself. And they put all the different forms in alphabetical order. And within that, we're going to start talking about canning. And just what we have here, what do we have? Someone rattle off. Everybody rattle off what they have here. What do we have? Someone rattle off. Everybody rattle off what they have here that's canned. Smoked octopus.

Dan's got smoked. Okay, smoked octopus. Where is it from? What's up with that? It's an octopus that I caught at the cabin that Steve and I and some others share in Salt Recove, southeast Alaska. But it's an octopus that rode up from about 250 feet of water in a shrimp trap. In it or on it? In it.

Oh, he got in it. In it, yeah, and it was an octopus that, I don't know, maybe the tips of its arms, if you kind of spread it out, it might be maybe four feet across. I mean, it's a substantial animal, but it fit through the eye in a shrimp pot, which is about, it's not as big around as a beer can.

So somehow those things just contort their way through those little holes. A little bit at a time. Yeah, they get through there. But yeah, so I pulled it up, and I was with Ron Lighten when we got it. He took four arms, and I took four arms, and vacuum packed it, brought it back to Anchorage and boiled it for a half an hour, smoked it for a few hours, then put it in a jar and processed it

in a pressure cooker. If it wasn't for smoked octopus, I wouldn't have gotten involved in buying that place because when you took me out to meet Ron and he gave me that jar of smoked octopus, the best thing, man. Just so rich and perfect. And then Brant's got everything in the world canned here.

Yeah, so right on top we got some canned rendered bear lard. Which looks like lard. Looks like Crisco. Yeah, it's way cooler though. Half pint jar of Crisco. Then we got a can of canned bear meat, which getting the fat off all the little chunks of stew meat is practically impossible.

So there's also some rendered fat in there. Some canned smoked salmon. Some goat stock. From mountain goat? From mountain goat from this fall. And then some donkey dick, a.k.a. summer sausage.

But we're not on to that yet. That's different. That's not the can. So I'm jumping ahead, so we'll stop on that. What is that? And that last can, that is moose rib meat off the bone in a jar with barbecue sauce and then processed in a pressure cooker. So a whole bunch of stuff but that's the most interesting thing because so many people ditch rib meat or just grind it i mean there's nothing wrong as long as you're using it for something great

but like any possible other use you can find for that stuff so you just like took the rib chunks yeah and you say it's but it's not it's hit and miss it's hit and miss. It's hit and miss. And there's a lot of jar to jar variability. But like from what? Fat? Yeah, I think it's fat and just the overall amount of meat in there compared to connective tissue and stuff. It's like some of them are pretty good and some of them are pretty marginal, you know, and so on. I'd be curious to see what you guys think. We should try it. You know, I want to check it out.

Now, all the stuff we're looking at, can stuff we're looking at is canned and glass um just like classic bell jars it's ball ball current ball current ball but you had you should explain to me because uh for a while you danny got into canning game meat and steel cans yeah the thing i always remember man it's so funny, is years ago, back when we were just so poor, you had sent down a teal. Yeah. You'd stuffed a teal inside a steel jar and canned it.

Me and Matt carried that teal everywhere for the longest time. We were eventually up hunting in Unit 652 on the Mus shell river from i remember it we had in our backpack the teal the canned teal and a whole bunch of slim fast steel cans because matt had this neighbor in miles city named wes who had died and when he died uh somehow or another someone brought over all these cases of slim fast that

were somewhere in where i don't know i don't know how i was affiliated with wes's death but we came into possession of a bunch of slim fast i bring wes up for an interesting thing because you want to talk about meat wes was uh before he died and after he died didn didn't have one of his thumbs. His thumb was gone. When he was a kid, they used to hook a – they'd take the tire off a truck and run a belt on the rim. And they would, off that belt, power a big buzz saw to cut wood. And Wes cut his thumb off, off. I mean like joint and everything. Cut his thumb off.

And Wes said his brother took the thumb and threw it into the pig pen. And the pig just ate the thumb. Never got it reattached. So we had his Slim Fast that Matt inherited, all this Slim Fast. And I remember we were walking around. Because he couldn't open them. We were walking around drinking Slim Fast with this can of teal in a can. I remember Puder was there, a friend of ours, Puder, and he had drank about six Slim Fasts one day

and was commenting that if this stuff really works he's gonna be skin and bones in no time it was we opened up dan's can of slit this can teal and we must have been carrying it around too much because it was honestly like a can of bones it all just fell off the bone it all like dissolved or something yeah it's like we're trying to make sandwiches out of it you just had like drink what's on top and pick the bones out you know and it's like danny's canned bones man look home canning me is it's i mean you're cooking it hot and you're cooking it long and it's when it's a pressure cooker so water gets up to what is it about 220 in there yeah it's under pressure so it's way hotter than just like a pot of boiling water and

then you wind up processing the stuff you know for sometimes an hour or more and so yeah you're really cooking the hell out of it so it's it's hard to gauge well i mean it's hard to avoid i mean it's just part of what i'm saying you just don't know you know yeah like for like when i go to do one of the things I like to cook is just to do corn meat in a pressure cooker. You can't look. Do you know what I mean? You're just like, I don't know. Sometimes you blast it.

Sometimes you open it up and it's not ready. Sometimes you open it up and it's like broth. You don't know. What was with the steel canner? You don't use it anymore. I still have it. I just haven't used it in a while. I keep thinking I'm going to, but it's essentially the same process it's supposed to be cheaper or what

no it's actually more expensive and that is yeah yeah because you know when you're when you're working with glass jars they're reusable all you need to do is buy it in the in the in the the rings that seal down the lids are reusable and the only thing you're buying are the lids yeah they're less than a buck a piece. But when you're canning in steel jars, you're replacing the whole can every time. They're kind of expensive, actually, just to buy them locally. So what's the selling point? They're portable.

You can't break them. They're light. They're unbreakable. Yeah. So it's nice for going on trips and things, not lugging glass around. Oh, for sure, man. Yeah. When we were kids, our laundry room doubled as a canning room.

It was kind of that era when people were really into canning, I think. Yeah, a little back to the earth. My mom had all these shelves in the basement, and she would can venison, just cube up venison, do it. So you cube up venison, pack it into the jar raw, pour water on it, sometimes water and mustard, sometimes like a thin barbecue sauce, and then vaporize it in that can. But it was good, man. Like sandwiches and stuff like that.

I remember loving eating that stuff. And I started doing that again very recently. Yeah. And when I did it it i did it just like mom used to do it just chunks of well i wasn't venice well it was moose not deer but just chunks of moose meat in a jar and just straight into the straight into the pressure cooker like just like mom did it and that turned out pretty good but the other thing i did that i think improved it substantially was just browning it first oh is right? And then packing it in a jar.

But no sauce or anything? Nope. Nope. A little bit of salt. Yeah, a pinch of salt. That's all I put in there. Just water and salt. Yep.

And very little water. You don't even, yeah. Do you put water in? You don't have to, but I do. I do. Not all the way up. Maybe half, three quarters of the way up. That's what's funny about the smoked puss. It's sealed, but just the pieces of puss bounce around, and they're like marbles, man.

Did you put water in there? No. I don't generally put water in. So that's all just salmon fat in that jar right there. That's salmon oil in there. But that jarred, chunked meat, especially the stuff that I browned first. If you're in a hurry, and you didn't thaw out meat for dinner, and you just take some of that, and you can just shred it with a fork and a pan

and brown it and make tacos out of it or just throw it on a sandwich or whatever. It's super fast, and it's really good. Throw a little barbecue sauce in there. Oh, yeah, barbecue. It's basically just like having a leftover pot roast that you can shred, so it just comes out of a jar on the shelf.

The last time I canned a bunch of meat, it was for that reason, and that's what I use it for, is when you screw up and you don't thaw something out. Yeah, exactly. You don't know, like, whenever you go away, you're doing something to your kids or something, and you come home, and you're like, man, I didn't thaw anything out, and it's so late, and everything's screwed up. I'm either going to have to go order a pizza now or something. Yep.

I would take that can and open it up do it i'll make some tacos yeah because like you just that way you can stay on it you can stay on a good you know game kick without without without blowing it off but the last thing i canned not long ago is i just made we did this thing called a mixed boil where he boiled like tongue all kinds of stuff in a pot and the liquid was so good i just canned all that it was salted already very salty so you can't reduce it down to make like a demi-glace or something because it'd be like overpoweringly salty but i jarred that and now that stuff's soup in a can like you pour that stuff out you don't you just add anything to it and it's good yeah you put a carrot in there and it tastes good, man. I did 12 quarts of that

stuff over Thanksgiving and I'm down to two quarts now. I've eaten 10 quarts in the last couple months. That's something that both Brant and I have been doing over the last several years now. It's just bringing a whole bunch of bones and making

a bunch of stock out of them. What do you guys do when you're doing that? What did you do to make the goat stock? So roast, cut up, quarter, a bunch of onions, peppers, carrots, celery. Leave the skin on the onions. That's one of the things I've learned. The skins help give it that nice dark color. So quarter all the veggies a lot of recipes a lot of recipes you'll find i'll say

you know kind of do the veggies and the bones together but i go a little bit bigger so i'll go just an entire baking sheet of veggies roast them till they're good and brown maybe put a little oil on them then do ribs ribs or femurs uh radius all know whatever whatever bones you have handy roast those good till they're good and brown throw them all in the pot cover them with water and then simmer them real low for as long as you can stand it like days i usually can get it done in a day and then i'll let it cool down overnight because then all that fat will solidify on the surface. Yeah. And it's real easy to pull off.

Yeah. If you set it outside, it comes off like a Frisbee. Yeah. Exactly. Yep. Do you strain yours? I do several times. Cheesecloth?

I use paper towels and a colander. Yeah. Yeah, I run through wire, then I run over cheesecloth. For no reason other than it just looks like it. It's a static. Yeah. Stock's got run through wire, then I run over cheesecloth. For no reason other than it just looks nice. It's ecstatic, yeah. Stock's got to look good, man. It's got to be clear. I don't want it to be cloudy.

Honestly, it doesn't alter the flavor or the utility of it. But you're going to go through all the trouble doing it. It's just so easy to run. Even like a nylon or something, man, you run through there to pull it out. And then definitely get that fat off. That fat, like earlier we were talking about poudre and the slim fast. I didn't run through there to pull it out. Then definitely get that fat off. That fat, like earlier we were talking about Puder and the slim past. I was sick to it.

He, this is such a hard story to tell, but you know what I'm going to talk about. One night we're out drinking and we're talking about ice fishing at night. We're talking about late night ice fishing. Ice fishing all night. Later that night, pooter starts telling a story about the way he likes to cook sausages where he

will add a bunch of butter to them and then cook them and then they'll eat sausages and they'll leave them in the boiling liquid and put it in the fridge so you know the fat sets up like a white thing so hours go by after our ice fishing conversation and this comes up and pooter says i'll remember this sentence for the rest of my life of his sausages he says now you want to talk about some late night ice fishing auger a hole through that and see if you can't pull out one of them lunkers. Speak of trying to break through the layer of fat to pull out one of his sausages. Alright.

Done with pooter. So canning. That's like a basic rundown on canning. Now I have like charcuterie written down, but then I got it broken down. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers

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You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. So I want to talk about drying because one of the things we have,

you guys should check this out, is I have, where is it? That's Brasola right there. Try this. I just washed all the mold off for you guys. Where is it? That's Brasola right there. Try this. I just washed all the mold off for you guys. What is it? That's off a shoulder. Shoulder of what? That's a chunk of moose shoulder. Brant's moose.

That stuff is good. Matt Carlson's really dialed in on this stuff too. All this is, so you make a keir. You take a piece of meat that's about as big around as a piece of French bread or a loaf of French bread, half as much as long, and pack it in a kheer. It sits in a kheer for a while.

And then I put it into this thing called the umai dry bag, which is like normally to make air-dried meat, you got to put it in cheesecloth and have the perfect temperature and shit to hang it up in your whatever, like a pastry room or something. But the bag, the Umai bag, some people hate it. I love it. Because you put it in your fridge and put it on a rack and just cure it there. So you can do like all kinds of things.

You can do prosciutto, anything in the bag. It just takes longer, but you don't need to tend to it. Now, Hank Shaw, he says he don't like those bags at all. But he's got higher standards than I have. This is delicious. I'm telling you, man, I put that in the salt sugar cure. Then I put it in that bag, and I put it in there around Thanksgiving. It's been in there months. And every week, I put it in that bag, and I put it in there around Thanksgiving. It's been in there months.

And every week, I poke it. And when it gets to be like, if you make a fist, a tight fist, and poke the space between your thumb knuckle and your pointer finger knuckle, and when it gets to feel firm like when you're making a tight fist and you push that patch of shit or whatever that is right there you're high muscle i'm telling you man and i run it through a slicer i have a deli slicer okay now carlson makes it the same way without doing the umai bags this is harder lets it go longer i could make that like a brick yeah it's just like so here's a bag just like semi-permeable semi-permeable close it okay semi-permeable i know a guy i don't want to i don't i know a guy i don't want to know

who it is i don't i can tell you who it is but i know a guy who sent some of that material off to a lab to find out what exactly is it is it patent protected and they couldn't figure out what the hell it was really yeah so I don't know what it is. It works, man. But here's the thing. It's soft because that's the middle. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, it's harder.

If I waited for the middle to be perfect. So anyways, this stuff you never cook at the Brasola. It's like B-R-E-S-A-O-L-A. You never cook it. So you cure it, and then you let it dry. Then you slice it, and it's like jerky. It's never been smoked, never been cooked, never been nothing. It's the best thing on the planet, man.

It gets a white mold on it. Hank Shaw said, don't worry about the white mold. I hit a Twitter message to the Umai people. They said, don't worry about the white mold. Yeah, how thick is that mold on the outside? Not like a mil. Just a little layer. A layer.

Very easy to wash off. But that stuff, man, my kids like that junk. Yeah, my kids would like that too. I love it. That's just like a dried meat. I've only tried it once. I just hung a chunk on a hook on an 18-inch piece of string in the garage at 50-some degrees for months and waited for that same tenderness to.

And it was good. It had this flavor, but it also had this little bit of- A little fermented? Yeah, a little bit of twang that was tough. This has a tiny bit of twang. Well, don't you hang duck breasts up in your shed? Back when I used to duck hunt, yeah. Did it never turn out?

They were okay. They were dry. Yeah, they were edible. Yeah. I mean, they weren't as good as that. That stuff is good. I think the white mold on meat is kind of appetizing, too. That might sound a little weird, but like on a salami.

Yeah, salami is just on there, man. Yeah, I think it's beautiful. A buddy of mine who's a chef, man, he says black fuzzy mold is the only mold he cares about. Oh, the only mold he avoids. He don't like black fuzzy mold. He don't give a shit about green mold, white mold. Black fuzzy mold is trouble. You ever made sauerkraut?

Yeah. Oh, not mold. You skim off that stuff. Oh, yeah. That stuff gets rank. The best jerky I ever had was definitely in Hawaii, hunting with the guys on Molokai, who just do air-dried jerky, where they teriyaki the jerky, and then they got boxes,

because of all the bugs, screened in boxes. They just set the box out in the sun for days and days and days and the screen keeps the bugs out and their jerky is the best thing man never heat never touches it you know this recipe right here is out of uh that's out of ruleman's book charcuterie which in my mind the bible on all things cured and dried meat. I mean, it's just like his stuff. It's like there's not a ton of stuff in there. It's slim. The book is slim.

He doesn't give thousands of variations of everything. But it's like I've never had anything out of Ruhlman's book not work. And I've done it all with Wild Game. And I was fortunate to sit down and talk to him for a long time with it about doing Wild Game. And he messes around with wild game a lot. He doesn't see any reason why the preparations aren't the same.

It's weird. When you look at cookbooks, remember that probably the number one selling wild game book of all times, that L.L. Bean cookbook? It's like, here's an antelope recipe. Here's a moose recipe. We always get messages from people being like, do you have any moose recipes?

I'm like, that doesn't mean anything to me. It's like, the recipe should follow where you cut the chunk of what chunk of the animal it is. There should be shank recipes, backstrap recipes,

ground meat recipes. There's no such thing as a moose recipe. No. You know? But, that's the other thing that I find.

The point I was going to raise about that is I don't spend a lot of time messing, I don't spend a lot of time even looking at wild game cookbooks.

I just look at cookbooks of people who do stuff I like and then just over time you kind of get a sense of what you can pull off or not with game. So we'll say, though, about that L.L. Bean cookbook, he does have it broken out by all the different species. His ossobuco is antelope ossobuco. That's right, yeah.

But what about the raccoon recipes and the muskrat recipes and the beaver recipes? Would you do movesose like that? No. That's not what I say. I say hooved game. Hooved game. Now, yeah,

in the guidebook, which is not a cookbook, but in the cooking section of the forthcoming guidebook that we've been working on for years now, we treat it as hooved game. That's a good way to do it. Hooved game. And then you got clawed

game, which is a narrow... Yeah. Bear. I do stuff with bear that I would not do with anything else. I don't eat bear steaks. What's your main jerky like you had you guys do jerky yeah remember dar growing up like not growing up later late dar like dad's yeah yeah fishing buddy did dar he was uh he was scoffing at the idea of making jerky that's probably the last time we ever hunted with him. Oh, when we were on the slope?

No, no, no, no. We were hunting rabbits. And I remember because my old girlfriend finally took a rabbit. What percentage of rabbits are squeal when you shoot them? Like one. Yeah, okay. I finally got my girlfriend to go rabbit hunting. First rabbit we shoot.

I'm like, you got to make this never happen. Oh, my God. god on that trip which is a long time ago dar said i just eat everybody else's jerky you guys do you just want to wait on deer meat when everybody else brings it into work for them you guys do jerky like what do you do you know i'm i'm the only the only real insight i have on jerky is i really like it cut with the grain i think i disagree completely with that i think it's i think it tastes kind of mushy if you cut it across i don't like cross grain jerky yeah i like it with the grain you like cross grain i like to cut it so dry it out no no it's actually got moisture in it i like like to cut it thicker, though.

I like it to be more like that. It's not technically called jerky. If you were to buy it in a gas station, it's like a steak cut that's jerkied. You know what I'm talking about? I like to make it more like that, where it's more like you're biting into a dry piece of steak as opposed to a dry piece of cardboard that doesn't taste good. I wouldn't even be able to tell if it's done your way because when I'm making jerky, my test is when I bend it, does it not snap and does it reveal white fibrous lines? Oh, that's just so overdone, man.

Oh, really? Like, I like to do my jerky. You know what I'm talking about? I know exactly what you're talking about. That's what I, like, I see that and I'm not interested. You don't want to give it to the dog. I like to have my jerky done as much as if you're doing, like, say, smoked salmon. You know, like, more like the doneness as if you threw a steak on the grill

and cooked it. Dry and cured. I got you. I'm ashamed to say this. I wish it wasn't true, but in my mind, not that I have any problem with this company. I can't think of the name of the company. But in my mind, the best jerky that I make is when I

buy, when you see those kits with the cure and the seasoning. Like I have done many, many, and I have experimented with them back and forth. But like just for a reliable crowd pleaser jerky that your four-year-old is going to like, those little kits. The kits, yeah, they are. It's just good, man. Key ingredient, man. MSG.

It makes everything good. Listen, I say this with shame. I'm like a guy who's admitting to... I say it with shame. I'm not proud of it, but I'm just saying it. If someone said, make jerky to please the masses, I would do that kind of jerky.

Because there's something in there that changes the meat. You know what I mean? You can't go and make gas station jerky. I can try. But a friend of mine pointed out you can't make a Dorito.

Do you know what I mean? People say, what's the weirdest thing you ever ate? I'm always like, Cool Ranch Doritos. You go try to make me a cool ranch dorito in your house i don't care how much shopping you do you will never make a cool ranch dorito that is science and gas station jerky is not actually it might be people me i don't know what it is man no i hear what you're saying there's a difference between i mean what we kind of try to do.

What we're talking about is processed meat, but we're still trying to somewhat stay away from the overly processed. Exactly. And I'd say as a general goal of eating game pretty much every day, what I try to stay away from is the overly processed food while I still process. We're talking about cooking or canning our meat at 225 degrees for an hour. I mean, it's processed,

but trying to quote-unquote keep it pure. So yeah, trying to do something that's as processed as a Dorito, you're not going to do it, but do you want to do that? No, I'm with you. Now, do you do or do you not do pink salt on recipes? I rock kosher salt, man. So you don't do pink salt number one, pink salt number two on cured hams and stuff like that? No, I don't.

I don't go with nitrates either in my summer sausage. Yeah, it's nitrate. One's a nitrate, one's a nitrate. I don't know if nitrates either in my summer sausage. Yeah, it's nitrate. One's a nitrite, one's a nitrate. I don't know if it's one or two. There's no empirical evidence to suggest that you shouldn't. I do, but I always feel worried about it, but then you can't find any real reason to be worried about it. Yeah, I haven't looked into the science on it,

but you always hear it's bad for kids. They used to give it to inmates to keep their libido down. Salt Peter. Oh, that's straight Salt Peter. Petered out. They would give them Salt Peter to keep them from sodomizing each other. I've heard that one. You have heard that or have not?

No, I have not. I don't know if it worked or not. You heard that, Mike? Mike's knowingly shaking his head. Mike, is that what you had in jail we're gonna take a quick break to service our sponsors we'll be right back pink salt one so if you don't know what we're talking about when you're looking at recipes for any kind of any kind of cured meat that's striving toward

some sort of shelf-stable attributes like hams and stuff, you'll often see where people want Prague powder, which is Pink Salt 1. Or Pink Salt 1. What other names do you ever see it as?

It's about Prague powder and Pink Salt. One is a nitrate, one is a nitrite. The difference between the two, I could look it up right now. Someone can look it as. It's about a Prague powder and pink salt. One is a nitrate. One is a nitrite. And the difference between the two, I could look it up right now. Someone can look it up. One is that one tends to last longer.

Yeah, I don't know the difference. Anyways, most stuff has pink salt one in it. I use it. A lot of people have an idea that you shouldn't be dicking around with it. And some people say the only thing you get out of it anyways is it does it makes a vibrant red so when you eat like an old red like you know at least you can call hot dogs like reds or red hot or something like that because they had a super vibrant red to them that comes from that pink salt and when you do corn to meat you put the pink salt in there and it really makes

because if you make like corn meat for saint paddy's day it'll always get this sort of grayish as you get in the cure doesn't penetrate you know and it gets gray in the middle you do like you put pink salt in there and that sumbitch is pink you know All pink inside. Morton's Tender Quick. That's what I use. It's loaded with it. It's just basically salt with nitrates added to it, I think. Yeah, it's sugar. Salt, sugar,

ton of sugar and nitrates. You're saying the only thing it does technically is the color, but the whole purpose of it is that it's a preservative. It does color, but it also functions as a preservative it does color but it also has it functions as a preservative so that's where the potential health concerns come in because you're basically pickling your stomach yeah or i don't even know i've never read like a i've never read a compelling thing about it but it's just like some stuff is so when it comes to this issue like

not eating things or eating things i i tend to think we're not done making colossal mistakes right like we laugh like can you believe people used to you know whatever like people used to be out playing and they'd be spraying ddt on them i mean it wasn't that long ago that joke isn't done being funny our kids will say can you believe about something we're doing right now and yeah is it might it be it's not going to be drinking water it's going to be like something like that oh yeah tree to drop so yeah tree to drink yeah it could be the tree to drink and water. It's not going to be that they're bad for the... We used to just eat deer meat.

They'll be bad for the... We used to put pink salt on that shit. All right, I'll move down the line. Freezing. I got a million things to say about this. I believe... For red meat, hooved game meat,

the best thing to do is to wrap it very tightly in plastic wrap. Saran wrap. I don't care. I'm not saying saran wrap. You know what I mean? Like saran style plastic wrap. Cling wrap. Wrap it very tight and cling wrap the good stuff not the cheap stuff buy it on uh buy the big ass rolls on amazon

because it just they never end like the 1800 foot rolls um it seems like you're taking it in the shorts but then you realize that three years later, you still have the same roll of Saran Wrap. And I do a layer of waxed freezer paper. Wax side in, very tight. And I'm telling you, you can eat meat done that way. If you trim all the fat off it, the tallow off it, for years later. Absolutely. It gets better with time.

It peaks at about one year. I'd say so. Danny doesn't like... People age meat. We should talk about aging meat. We have to back up in time because we're on to F and we need to go back to A.

We should really talk about aging meat. Danny, when you kill a moose, talk about your theory on moose. When you kill it, when you eat it. Oh yeah. I, I, I, it's like seasoning firewood, man. I put it in the freezer and forget about it for, you know, till next, till next fall. I mean, if I can, um, because it's pretty tough when you go, when it goes into the freezer,

a hunting season in Alaska is in August, September for moose. That's the funny thing about Alaska. You guys are doing all your stuff in August and September. Yeah, it's basically summertime, and then hunting season ends when fall comes. When people down in lower 48 are getting all fired up for November gun deer, it's like full-on balls-out winter. There's nothing going on over here. We're getting out the ice fishing gear and the skis, man.

You get home from moose hunting, and got you know hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat but it's you know in town it might be 60 degrees in the daytime so you can't hang it flies flies everywhere so you know you're just in it's a race to get the thing in the freezer you can't age it you can't you know hang it at all when think of anguish, I think of pick and blow fly larvae off. Yeah. It's bad. And so depending on the moose, man, sometimes if you just were to cut a steak off a hind quarter

that you just brought home from the mountains, I mean, it is so tough. I mean, it's almost inedible. Metallic, too. I don't know what's the flavor. I But yeah. Metallic too, you know. You know, I don't know what's the flavor. I just know I can't chew the damn thing. You know that irony, like that gets tempered in time, I feel.

Yeah, I'm not sensitive to that. Steve, I've told you about this, but two years ago, Matt Carlson and I did an experiment. We shot those moose, a couple moose, and it was the same thing as Dan was describing. Time crunch, hot out, had to just process right away. So of the two moose, we put seven quarters, back straps, everything in the freezer. Then we kept one quarter, and we aged it. Matt kept on it for a week and butchered it, labeled it completely separately. I will say that that aged meat for the first two three months it was better but after three months of the stuff that didn't age i prefer that for the next year is that right the stuff that was aged once you got out a year after

it had been frozen it was actually it had a little bit stronger taste and it was drier. But immediately, the first couple months, it was definitely better. There's so much, we are now talking about aging. I'm going to get back to freezing, but I'm going to tell two aging anecdotes to say that I don't know the answer to this.

Years ago when I was in graduate school, my roommate shot a calf elk with his rifle. So it's already a calf elk, right? It was like late, it was like February, so it was kind of beyond calf elkiness. Shot a calf elk with his rifle. And we hung that thing in my garage. And the weather in Missoula was just perfect where we never froze any of that thing.

We hung it in the garage. It was like 20 degrees at night, up into the low 30s during the daytime and we hung it hung it and it got to be where i'm not kidding you you could shove your thumb into that elk yeah best thing i ever had it was so good we ate the whole thing right on or off skin. Okay. It'd get a rind on it. You'd cut that rind away. We'd cut a leg off, get some meat off the leg, lay the leg laying on a tool cabinet or whatever. And it just got better and better and better. Now, I always butcher my own stuff, but a couple years ago, we did an elk hunt in Kentucky.

And due to heat issues and other travel considerations, I did something that I haven't done in forever. Brought the whole elk, bull elk, not an old bull. How old do you think that bull was? Johnny? Yeah. Brought him down to a guy, and he hung the elk for 10 days in controlled circumstances, and I felt like that elk hanging 10 days in controlled circumstances, and I felt like that elk hanging 10 days wasn't,

it still needed to go in the freezer for a long time. I don't know what the answer is. I mean, I don't think you're hurting anything by aging it, but there's just like, I think it's so variable by the animal, by all kinds of climatic conditions probably. I don't really know, but I know this. You don't pull, you cannot pull a piece of meat out of your freezer that's been in a year and tell me it's tough.

It doesn't happen. You know? We went to, when Eric Kern, a friend of ours, Eric Kern, a friend of ours from back home, who we had kept in touch with because he lives in Montana, he got married. And he was marrying a a gal whose neighbor was out of town the weekend they got married and the guy out of the goodness of his heart says why don't you allow some wedding guests to stay in my home because I'm out of town anyways.

They let the groomsmen of which I was included and my brother Matt was included, stay in his house. We're staying in a man's home who's lent his home to strangers. Matt looks in the man's freezer and is horrified to find that this guy has a bull elk

from five or seven years. It was ridiculous. In the bottom of his freezer. It just has that look like no one's ever going to eat this elk. Obviously not. So Matt thought it's wrong to steal, but it's not as wrong. I love that you and Matt looked in some dude's freezer, by the way. That's awesome.

He's like, it's wrong to to steal but it's not as wrong as letting this bull elk rot or get inevitably tossed out when this guy drops some box and knocks the cord out of his freezer and it shuts down or he just throws it out he's not gonna eat it he's gonna eat it what he ate and matt took it that elk was fine not it was definitely like you could, it was edible. I bet the outsides were dry. Yeah, it was. Well, you had to trim. It was edible. It wasn't fine.

It was edible. It wasn't going to get eaten. And I think about that. I don't want to say I think about that every day, but that was a bold move. Because Matt doesn't do things lightly. Like he really weighs. He's not like, he's not impulsive. He's not morally impulsive.

It was an affront to him. This same guy, Matt, once killed a bull elk that was just the most horrifically tough animal I've ever been involved in. And he gave up eating anything for a while but boiled cabbage because he didn't want to waste any of his jaw power. gave up eating anything for a while but boiled cabbage. Because he didn't want to waste any of his jaw power on anything but chewing up his elk. So at night, he would eat boiled cabbage and his elk. And I'm telling you, if he had froze that thing for two years,

if he had just been like, okay, that never happened, and froze it for a year, that thing would have been fine. Would have helped i can't give you any hard and fast usda stats or anything but i just feel that this is true i don't think anyone at this table disagree oh in regard to tenderness the freezing meat makes it taste better now which brings us to i used to hate vacuum sealed bags because they always pop. But I realized they pop because of handling. And in some circumstances, it's just impossible to transport them.

But vac bags are not bad if you treat them so delicately. But if you're the kind of guy who likes to get in your freezer and start digging around, you're going to pop all your freezer bags. I pack them between layers of newsprint now because the same thing I was talking about, saran wrap and wax paper for red meat, but that doesn't work for fish. I don't think. I don't like it

on salmon. I don't like it on hal, but I don't like it on freshwater fish, perch, bass, bluegills. I don't like that stuff. I like to use vac seal, but when you vac seal, you can't mess with that bag and bang it. It also helps to wrap it in saran wrap before you vacuum seal it can't mess with that bag and bang it it also helps to wrap and spran rat before you vacuum seal it was that right no i like to do that no one told me about this works good for a couple reasons first it keeps the sometimes you know the the liquids will get in

when it's trying to seal absolutely so and corrupt the seal yep so it prevents that i also think it provides some protection if there's any pin bones from accidentally popping the seal. And then if you do break a seal, you still got a layer of protection on the fish. That's a good idea. So it's an extra step, but. You know, we. Can't remember what I was going to say. Well, I try to remember what I was going to say. Well, I try to remember what I was going to say. Do you remember one time we went back, we were fishing halibut at the shack,

and came back with all of our halibut packaged and stuffed into a rubberized dry bag? Yeah, I've done that a few times, yeah. And then emptied it out into the freezer, and a couple weeks went by, and there was the most horrendous smell coming from your gear room oh from the dry bag and we kept going in there and taking everything out of that room and no one would ever look in the dry bag and we eventually found a pack of halibut oh that's right in a dry bag and so we disassembled this room multiple times until someone finally says, I'm going to look in all the bags. Because we thought it was a dead rat or something.

It was a pack of hell. But man, God, that smelled. You know what's funny? That same room was really stunk up pretty bad by a bag of dog poop. I walked to my dog and I picked up his poop and stuffed it in a little bag and had it in a backpack or a coat pocket or something

hanging in the hot furnace room and months went by and oh, the same thing except worse. That's one thing about urban dog ownership. I don't have the temperament for dog owning, but urban dog ownership is like seeing people

out. As a kid, your dogs just ran. You didn't associate with their droppings. But it's so intimate in an urban environment when you got to take your dog out. It's still steaming in the morning air, man. You got to bag it up and walk around. Turn that bag inside out. Pick it up.

Feel it in your fingers. Take the most biodegradable substance on the planet and put it inside an unbiodegradable substance and throw it in the trash. I'm going to run through a couple things. Giblets. Freezing giblets. I do. Back bag. Or I'll take just a milk carton or something like that and freeze them.

Put a layer in. Cover it with water. Freeze it. Then you kill a couple more birds. Put the gizzards and hearts and livers on top of the ice add another couple inches of water till they're covered freeze it and i do perch that way like if you're just dinking around like catching a couple perch now and then flam throw them in there add to it add to it add to it add to it and then eventually you got like a big thing of frozen flays in water. I think that for freezing, fresh water, like low-fat fresh water fish,

bass, bluegills, perch, I still freeze them in water. You know? It's just because nothing happens to it. You freeze salmon in water and it goes to hell. It looks like hell. But you can freeze those white flesh freshwater things. Thawing? How do you guys thaw?

Countertop? Warm water or the countertop. We don't have a microwave. You don't use a microwave in your house? I don't like them. Why not? Because they're going to make you sick? No, no.

It's just because they're trying to thaw something in the microwave. It gets all cooked on the outside and brown and gross, and it still thaws in the middle. No, I'm not like Joe. I'm not Joe Microwave. It's disrespectful. Yeah. We go days without using our microwave. Yeah.

No, but you throw it. I mean, for thawing fish, especially if it's vacuum-packed, just throw it in some lukewarm water, and it's thawed in no time and really even and doesn't cook it and in culinary school which i did not attend they are like ice water bath to thaw really but i do i do lukewarm water if it's a vac bag i do lukewarm water to thaw it when i'm doing saran freezer paper thawing i um just set it out on the countertop if you're really smart if you know like you're in town like it's sunday and you know you're in town all week doing work you know you're cooking dinner every night i'll try to go down to my freezer and like pull what

i'm gonna be eating then instead of doing that every day where you're pulling, like, what am I going to eat tonight? You pull it, and it's not thawing time. You're like, oh, you're cutting it up. You weren't planning on cutting it up, but now you're cutting it up because it's not, you know. When I grind meat, like, when I kill, if I kill an animal in the fall,

and I don't really feel like getting into sausage making, and I don't feel like getting into all the business. I'll take all the boned out meat that I'm going to use to grind. I'll pack it in gallon-sized Ziplocs and just freeze those big gallon-sized Ziplocs. If I'm in a super hurry, I don't even trim it. It's fatty. It's whatever. Tallow in there.

I just freeze it in those bags. There's hair in there. And then I'll periodically pull a gallon-sized bag out, weigh it, thaw out so I got 10% fat, pork or beef tallow that I'm going to put in there. And then I'll grind that gallon-sized bag of meat. And when I grind it like that, I thaw it until it's still icy and then run it through my grinder. Then – and everybody says you can't do this, but it's total bullshit says you can't do this but it's total bullshit you can't do this i will then so i thought grind it pull off whatever i'm gonna make that night and then i will bag it in those i always do my burger in those little poly bags which are the best thing on the planet man the ones you grind right into yeah you buy like

ten thousand of them for a dollar or whatever you You got a little tape applicator. Yeah, I got a tape applicator. I will thaw the big block, grind it, polybag it, back in the freezer. And you cannot tell me you can't do that. Yeah. I have done it with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of meat. Yeah, same here. And you can Pepsi challenge it up and down. There is, wherever that comes from is BS.

You can't do that. How about on a steak? You're talking about burger. What about a steak? Yeah, because sometimes if I'm in a hurry, I'll come home and I'll throw a whole deer's leg in my freezer. Tag and the ball still hanging off it. The evidence of sex hanging off it. In a game bag in my freezer.

I'll pull that leg out, thaw that whole leg part it out freeze my steaks thumb back out eat them later it is there is no difference but when you saw your steaks so good would you throw us one of those back in the freezer i just can't imagine the situation where that would happen like i thought something out that someone's like hey man you want to come over for dinner and i'm like oh no i don't imagine the situation where that would happen. Like I thawed something out and someone's like, hey, man, you want to come over for dinner? And I'm like, oh. No, I don't imagine doing that. If I thaw a big chunk of meat and I cut some steaks off of it or if I only want half of it or whatever, I'll throw it back in the freezer.

I do it all the time. I don't have a problem with it. I tend to agree. I feel bad doing it. Because they always told you can't do it. Yeah, kind of like you shouldn't thaw something in the microwave, which I really try not to. I'd rather thaw it in the fridge, but I will in the microwave. Thaw it in the microwave.

You know what I wish was here? I mentioned it a couple times. Hank Shaw probably has a lot of answers to stuff like this because he thinks like that. But thawed in the microwave, I feel it sheds tons of liquid that it doesn't shed otherwise. Like if I took duplicate pieces of meat and thawed it in the microwave, there's going to be a bunch of bloody watery garbage on the plate that wouldn't be there if I thawed it in my fridge.

It's somehow like coming off fast. Somehow like the way the crystals are coming apart. I don't know. It seems to shed water. It just is kind of nasty. And then like Danny says, it gets warm and like brown. I will thaw red meat in warm water too.

That's something that I disagree with completely. I stand by it. I totally unwrap it. Get a waterproof bag? Get it naked. No, no. I'll unwrap it. But you can't get the...

I'll take the freezer paper off. You can't get the cling wrap off until it's thawed. Now I'll just take the cling wrap meat, just throw it in some lukewarm water. I don't like that. It thaws pretty quick. And when you pull it out, it's just kind of soggy. And I take some newspaper.

Looks like something that's been drowned. No, trust me, man. Trust me. Try this. And the water's all red. The water's all red. Yeah. It's just ain't right.

But that's that liquid that cooks out of it anyway. But you take the soggy piece of meat that just thawed and just take some newspaper and just roll it up in that newspaper and just put some weight on it. Squeeze all that water out of it. Yep. And that newspaper will soak up a bunch of water. And then you're reading your meat because that newspaper is never going to come off. And just take that piece of meat and just set it on the counter on a plate.

And like in 10 minutes, it's pretty and it's red. But how do you ever get the newspaper off it? It just peels off. It's not like those little Play-Doh things you get where you're like silly putty. Where you run it over a newspaper and it picks the ink off. It doesn't pick up the color. It doesn't pick up the ink. No. Try it sometime. I will.

I'm not afraid of anything. I've eaten meat that you've thawed that way and cooked and it was delicious. You never know. I can't. There's no way I can do it. I don't like the look. I don't like drowned stuff. Dry it off, set it on the counter and it'll sit in the air and in 10 minutes it's all red and pretty and you'd never know.

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uh, we're always talking about on X here on the meat eater podcast. Now you, um, you guys in the great white North can, can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Dude, here's the thing. This is gonna sound weird like when i used to do a lot of fur trapping for musk grass and stuff like you'd bring up drowner wires or stuff you remember this

dan but and you come the traps gone you know and the wires going down the water so i got one you know and and sometimes you had these one-way slides so you had to reach down in there and feeling around groping around you know and you'd feel the hair and i'd always have like these nightmares when i trapped you'd reach down it'd be like a human's hair down there and i'm telling you i don't like just like me floating in water i just can't stand it, man. But again, those guys in Hawaii that made the best jerky I ever had, they kill a deer, the first thing they start doing is filling up buckets with water,

and they put a bunch of salt in it, and they just dump all that meat in there for the night. It is good. Yeah, what else? I'm looking at them like, what in the world are you doing? Ducks and geese man waterfowl soak them in salt water it makes them better really yep oh but i couldn't stay i couldn't imagine doing that to a moose roast or a white tail man these boys did though and that stuff come out looking like pale it looked like pulling out wonder bread out of a bucket man

it still tastes good but it's just but it just kind of sticks me out. What are you taking out of the meat when you do that? I have no idea. I have no idea. Blood for sure, but I don't know what else. I just feel like you're degrading it. When you take a Black Angus prime beef steak, they don't soak that stuff in water. They don't want

whatever's in that meat. They don't want that leeching out of the water. I just don't think it's irreparable. I just think it can be fixed. When I was down at the cabin last fall, I shot a little buck with Ron Layton in his boat.

Not from the boat no no but he but we we we go to jail we motored we motored in his boat and then and then and then we you know we brought the boat the deer back to the cabin in the boat but on the way back home you know we stopped and dropped the front gate and he made me rinse that thing out for a long that's why he says his deer meat's good. He says his deer meat's better than anybody else's and he says it's because it pickles it. Yeah.

I'm like, I don't know about that. It's kind of just hunched over the front of that boat, just grabbed that little buck by the antlers and just up and down and up and down and he just made me do it for probably 20 minutes. I was getting pretty wore out, but took it back and hung it up and down and he just made me do it for probably 20 minutes you know i was getting pickling it wore out but you know took it back and hung it up and and you know it dried it just looked absolutely beautiful he swears by it yeah swears by it it was it was really nice salt water though it's salt water yeah now speaking of pickling that was on pickling um this we have one pickled thing i brought pickled sucker that buffalo, which is a native sucker.

Most of the suckers, not most, carp are non-native, like your classic golf course pond golden carp is a non-native. Then you have a ton of native suckers in the U.S., but there's a sucker that's as big as a carp called a buffalo, and all those rough fish and northern pike are good pickled, and when you pickle them, it dissolves the bones, and if you open that up and eat it, it is the best thing you'll ever eat.

Yeah, man. Hell yeah. Open it up. Where's that from? We shot them with our bows last spring in Wisconsin, bow fishing for them, and. Hell yeah. Open it up. Where's that from? We shot them with our bows last spring in Wisconsin. Bow fishing for them. And they're big. I mean, a buffalo sucker is like this.

That's probably an exaggeration. I mean, these are like big 5, 6, 8, 10-pound fish, you know. Were you there, Yanni, when we shot that? That's a big chunk. Wrap your lips around that. Bruce, it looks huge, man. a big chunk here brandon have mine all right if you like pickled fish i do that's as good as any pickle fish fish has so much bone you couldn't have approached it when we killed it

you can't get i try i got in there man i remember like this is in my line but someone's talking about cleaning shad and he said it was like trying to fix a watch you know i deal with all the bones in there you know but i'm telling you man you couldn't go near that stuff i tried i was like i'm gonna debone this buffalo sucker you can't there used to be a commercial market for buffalo sucker you know it's like one of the more popular sucker fish. That's pickled. The other things that I pickle, I pickle northern, I pickle bony fish because it dissolves the bones. Bones just go away magically. I pickle, there's like a dog and a cat making a bunch of rack if you're hearing weird noise. The dog looks like an arctic fox.

I thought it was an arctic fox. It has mange i pickle bony fish i pickle any bird uh gizzards hearts and livers generally not livers but the gizzards and hearts i boil them till they're tender then add them to pickling juice i'll sometimes eat all the pickles out of a jar if to pickling juice I'll sometimes eat all the pickles out of a jar if it's like good pickles I'll eat all the pickles out of the jar then I'll just fill that jar up

with bird hearts and bird gizzards and chunks of deer heart and everything else and then wait two weeks and then eat that out of there I'm trying to think what else I pickle probably about it can you think of anything you like to pickle? Brian else I'd pickle. Try about it. Can you think of anything you'd like to pick?

Brian and I both pickle trout. Trout? Yeah. Like how? Oh, just like that. Like pike or like you did that, Buffalo. You throw it in raw. Like that was in raw.

Absolutely. Oh, okay. Freeze it first, but. Tenderize it. Kill the parasites. Straight vinegar first, and then... Yep. That's vinegar. Day with salt, day with vinegar, and then pickling.

Okay. That's how I do it there. So yeah, wash it real good. Then you do vinegar. Then I retain some of the vinegar, and then I make a regular brine and put some of that vinegar back in there. So you do 100% vinegar for a day and then the brine? You don't do 100% or like a salty brine for a day?

No, I do salt water. For a day. Like saturated. Yeah. Like floating egg. For 24 hours. Then I do all vinegar for 24 hours. Yeah.

Then I pour most of that vinegar off and probably wind up doing one part vinegar to one or two parts water. I have it written down. Then a bunch of horseradish, garlic, sugar. I like to make it sweet, man.

Do you have lemon in there? Never put lemon in there. It's not bad. A friend of mine turned me on to that recently we don't really have access to white fleshed fish here i mean like you know locally don't you well our fishery got shut the place where we like to fish burbot got shut down or at least to be pretty good but you can't fish until the ice goes out now so really why are these getting over hit over fished potential for they were clearlyfished potential for it we were clearly

vulnerable yeah we i mean we were pounding them on there you know you know how burbot or eel powder a lot of people know them they they also call them lawyers because like the the assholes the hearts right by the asshole on them so people call them lawyer fish lawyer yeah that's a good fish they also call them poor man's lobster. Oh, they're so good. I grew up in Minnesota catching walleyes, catching, we call them eel pout, throwing them on the ice.

I've never heard eel pout. I can't tell you how many eel pout I killed without putting a knife to. Threw them on the ice. I moved to Alaska. There's no walleyes here. What do you guys ice fish for? Burbot?

Oh, eel pout. All right, let's try it. That stuff is legit. There's no walleyes here. What do you guys ice fish for? Burbot. Oh, Eopal. All right, let's try it. That stuff is legit. It's amazing. It's super good. When I lived in Montana, we'd go out to this canyon, Fairy Lake, and fish perch. Then once it got dark, you had about an hour where you could get lingcod. We called them lingcod then.

Yeah, ling, lingcod. Oh, my gosh, that's a good fish. They got a lot of names. We'd boil them and dip them in butter like lobster yeah awesome that way how much time we got we're done we're an hour this stuff is legit can you tell us how you make this yeah i got smoked salmon candy that's how did you get so hard just brine the shit out of it and then and then smoked it for a really long time how'd you catch this fish? Yeah, that's some sockeye salmon that Brant and I dip-netted last summer.

Explain the dip-net fishery. This will blow people's minds. In the lower 48, this will blow their minds. You can't understand it if you don't see it. Explain the dip-net fishery. So, yeah, first let me note that it's open only to Alaska residents, but there's a few rivers around where you can go take basically an oversized landing net. The hoop can be up to five feet in diameter, so they're absolutely massive.

And the handles are usually about 10, 15 feet long. Yeah, yeah. So picture just a giant oversized landing net. But then instead of like that poly braided cord bag, it's got a bag made out of gill net. And so most of the fish you catch are inside the net, but some of them are actually outside the net. They just get tangled in the gill net. But you're just standing out in a river and waders and nipple deep water,

you know. As far as you can go without getting in the water. Or in your boat too, right? Yeah, or from a boat. People use dry suits to get a little extra edge out there or waders or from a boat, whatever. But yeah, you're just holding this net in the water. And if you're in a boat, you start motoring downstream.

If you're wading, you're just standing in the water. Some people put on a wetsuit and a life jacket and just float down the river with the thing. And you just hold it in the water and you're fish banging into it. You get one, two, sometimes three at a pop. The limit in the local fisheries is 25 for the head of the household and then 10 more fish for each person in the household. That's the annual limit. You can bring home a bunch of fish.

You'll go home and come home with 45 fish. So you'll go and pull that. You'll go home and come home with 45 salmon. Oh, we've come home with over 100, yeah, depending on how many guys you go with and how big their families are. But yeah. Yeah, we had one day this summer, we went and we hit it perfect.

We weren't even gone for, I don't think, 18 hours from Anchorage. We came home with 100 fish. 100 salmon. 100 salmon. How big are these salmon? Sockeye salmon. Chrome red sockeye salmon. Yeah, we're 100 yards from the ocean. hours from anchorage we came home with 100 fish 100 salmon 100 salmon how big is salmon chrome red sockeye salmon just yeah we're 100 yards from the ocean so they're they're super bright and how big are these a piece not big these are they're smaller three five pounds yeah

that's still a lot of fish man yeah they're gorgeous they're gorgeous that's that's that's what we're reading there it's equivalent to when you get a moose down and you think something's done. You got to chop it up. I mean, you go out, you have fun for 12 hours. Now you got a fillet 100 salmon. Yeah. But that's it for the year. You're good.

Yeah, how do you then go out and fish salmon with a rod and reel? Well, it's nice to get some variety. It's really nice to have some king salmon because they taste so different than everything else. So anyways, explain how you made this. This is great, man. What part of the fish is this? That's just a whole fillet. So these were kind of small sockeye that we were getting. That's a belly.

That's pretty primo right there. So they're kind of thin fillets, i was just i i was just cutting the fillets into thin strips and leaving the skin on and then i i brined them with a dry brine that was six parts brown sugar to one part kosher salt and that's it that's that's the brine but you can even go wait them put weight on them no, but I use a lot of it. I got a big tub and I'll lay a layer of these strips in there and then just cover them in that brine. It's just pounds of brine. Then another layer of those strips and then just cover it in the, not the brine, but the rub, the dry rub, whatever you want to call it.

You're just burying them in that stuff and it pulls out so much moisture you know in a few hours they're in soup you started out with just dry brown sugar and dry salt in a few hours they're just in soup because it's pulling so much moisture out of the fish and the the nice thing about having that ratio so strongly skewed toward brown sugar is that you can't over salt them that way i got you um a lot of people will use so you can bombard them with brine and grind the hell out of them and it's not going to get too it's never going to get too salty and i you know i think you could probably even go eight to one in this in that you know salt or sugar cures them just like salt does

right so um but by if you get the ratio right, you can just absolutely brighten the hell out of it and not worry about getting too salty. It turns you a brick. Yeah. Did you know that fresh, you probably noticed, freshwater fish piss much, much more than saltwater fish? Yeah. Like a freshwater fish absorbs water and pisses copious amounts.

And a saltwater fish is always losing through osmosis. It's always losing water to salt. He's always losing his water and doesn't piss. Piss is a very small amount. Yeah. Water wants to flow to the direction to equilibrate

with the salt. That means the fish is shedding his fresh water. A saltwater fish is shedding all kinds of water to the ocean. A fish in fresh water is holding on to its salt. And a fish in saltwater is... But water drains into his body. Yeah, through the gills, yeah. No, through pores in his body. Yeah, through the gills, yeah. No, through pores in his skin. Well, the surface area is in the gills.

I mean, that's where the real surface area is, and that's where the gas exchange occurs, and that's where you get a lot. There's just a lot of opportunity for ions to move across the gills. Last thing I want to talk about we got out of the alphabetical order a teeny bit what do you guys like sausages

I'll tell you what I make for sausages I make summer sausage and I make a variety of fresh sausages I do my fresh sausages same blend 90% lean 10% fat I do a handful of fresh sausages I do them all in hog gut

and I freeze them all raw in back bags 3 or 4 per pack and that's all I do now I used to do all kinds of you know I just do fresh I don't do any like smoke this and that's all i do now i used to do all kinds of you know i just do fresh i don't do

any like smoke this and that i just got away from it all in summer or dawn yeah that's the only thing i smoke yeah do we keep referring to donkey dick is that clear what we're talking about? Summer sausage. All right. But Branson, we're running out of time. Branson, this new cheese. High temp cheese. It's revolutionized my sausage making. Branson, the cheese that you can put into a 500 degree oven and it won't melt. It's awesome. Is that natural?

For summer sausage. Here's what I'll tell you. I don't know. I won't use nitrate. So in the same summer sausage that I won't point nitrates in, I'll put high temp cheese in. There may be some issues there. What's nice is it's smoked and the cheese still has its integrity. Absolutely.

For brats and for summer sausage, it's legit. It's legit. It's good. The best sausage making book out there is again, Ruhlman's Charcuterie. I think. Do you guys use that book?

Yeah. You don't talk about that cheese though. Try that right now. When I first told you about this, you were questionable. Yep, you sent me some. Did you like it? You didn, you were questionable. Yeah, but you sent me

some. Did you like it? Yeah, I loved it. You didn't even tell me. No, I loved it. I didn't tell you I liked it? I don't even think you told me. Yeah, that was rude of me. Thank you. A little smoky, too. You can smell that smoke. That was good. A lot of mustard seed in there.

Yeah, what do you guys think about the ratio of mustard seed? I like a whole shitload of them. Yeah, I do, too. I think it adds some crunch. Yeah. So you can get that high temp cheese in numerous flavors. And I like it. I think it's good. I've heard people question it.

Maybe it's questionably impure, but I like it. Dude, I never told you I like the stuff you sent me. Oh, man. It's pretty rude. Do you sit around at night being like, I hate Steve? All right. I know you people don't have a long attention span we've already stretched

its limits any concluding thoughts? Giannis this is the least you've ever spoke in your entire it's been a long day we got up about 3am to get here I was going to go away with you do have concluding thoughts

yeah i do can you hear me now i could hear you i don't uh i don't can yet but one of the biggest draws for me is because i'm always up against like the freezer conundrum of like bam it's monday night t Tuesday night, and don't have stuff thawed out. I would try to do the Sunday thing where I really plan ahead for the week, but it'd be so nice to just have that stuff. And it doesn't take up freezer space when your pantry is just stocked full

of nice canned meat. And I don't even can my stock, so my stock is in my freezer. Yeah, canned stock is totally the way to go what if you had to recommend real quick give me the spiel on where i should go to or like what piece of equipment i need to in my mind there's only one it's that big presto it's like the kind of everybody has the giant presto everybody in alaska uses all american yeah oh really it does it's a it has a metal on

metal steel it has has a milled... There's no gasket there? Well, you put Vaseline on there. You don't need to. But it doesn't have a gasket, so it just never goes bad. They're excellent, but they're a little spendy. All-American is the manufacturer.

Mine's a big... It was made out of aluminum. One of those Presto ones that Mom had. I have the same one Mom had. I mean, you can't destroy it. And they're not that much money. It was made out of aluminum. What are those Presto ones? I have the same one Mom had. You can't destroy it. They're not that much money. The big ass ones are like $60-$70. The ones we're talking about are significantly more than that.

That's 50 million jars. I bought mine a long time ago. A couple hundred? $300? They're $300 for an All-American? Yeah, for the size we have. You can do 14-pint jars in a batch. Oh, so it's big.

Because I think mine is eight. You can layer jars. They're tall enough that you can do. Oh, really? You can do two layers of seven pints. Okay. The cost is when you go and buy jars at an actual store. It's like they say not to, and I'm not saying people should go do this,

but you know a lot of companies will sell pasta sauce and pickles and stuff in a jar. It might not be up to specs and up to grade, but if it's got that size lid, they say the glass isn't as good. I use them all the time. I never had one break. I don't know. I've heard you're not supposed to do that. I never had one break.

The other thing is you see people throw them out, go into any kind of Goodwill, Salvation Army, they're in there. They're in yard sales. But if you're going to go jar a whole bunch of stuff and you go in and buy brand new glass, it kind of feels a little bit like not – it just feels a little off, like the amount of money you're spending to do it again. It's kind of like jumping into Reload and buying a bunch of new brass at a dollar a piece.

It's expensive. It's like Reload and ammo. You've got to Reload years to make up for the startup cost. But I've bought very few jars in my life. When I see them, I just grab them. I keep them hanging out somewhere. It's fun. It's fun to can, man.

I like it. And then when everything goes to shit and the world collapses and everybody's cannibalizing each other and there's no law and it's just total anarchy, your freezer's not going to do it. Your freezer's not staying frozen. You can start canning humans. I know. You can. We can all can each other. So that's another selling point.

Unless you got a solar-powered freezer. Yeah, canning's fun. It's old-timey. I like it. Oh, there's something really satisfying about having just a whole cabinet full of pretty glass jars of stuff that you can't it's it's real nice i jar too i like to grow beets and make pickled beans i do too that jar that's the only thing out of my garden that i jar though tomato i'll jar tomatoes and i'll jar pickles and green beans too oh yeah

it's all right what a great gift too, man. My brother Matt, for Christmas, he sends out stuff like that. What do you mean? Do you go give everybody a gift card? Give them a jar or something, man. They like it. It's pretty. Oh, man.

That just shows love and respect and hugs and kisses all in one little package. There you go. Grant, concluding thoughts i don't know man processing meats it's fun and if you're gonna kill animals like it's one of those things you need somebody to get you into hunting normally you don't get into it on your own same with processing your own meat generally it's not one of those things you get into. But once you do, it's worth it. And it's cost effective and it's rewarding.

And I recommend anybody who's interested in it to get into it. Yeah, and team up with friends. If you kill a deer, have a couple guys over and process the whole thing and give them, you know, give them like a third of it. I mean, it's not going to screw you. I mean, they'll turn right around and do the same for you. You learn a lot of stuff that way. All right, signing out. Thanks for listening.