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

Episode Date: July 20, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with Chef Josh Skenes, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: how to cook beaver tail; industrialized food versus "real" food; Saison: the focus is purely on taste; closed-loop agricultural systems; you can't ever replicate the true taste of nature; how to deal with the lack of consistency in wild game, and whether or not that's actually an issue; proper shot placement; monolithic bullets; stomper bucks in Idaho; caviar from white sturgeon, shovelnose sturgeon, paddlefish, and lake whitefish; Steve and his fake uncle Don trollin’ for striped bass in front of San Quentin Prison; fishing for diamond turbot; ike-jime, or how to run a wire through a fish's spine to make it taste it real good; headshots; box crab; monkeyface eels; safe mold versus shitty mold; and more.Join Steven Rinella, Ryan Callaghan, and other surprise guests for a live recording of his popular MeatEater Podcast. Tickets for a raffle, with high-end prizes from Yeti, Vortex Optics, First Lite, Stone Glacier, Savage Arms, Benchmade Knife Company, Schnee’s, Weston, and Seek Outside will be sold at the event. Raffle proceeds benefit Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Raffle winners will be drawn following the podcast recording and Steven will be on hand signing books 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.

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Go farther, stay longer. You know, as we get into talking about different food, I feel like there's an important thing to clarify here. It's like last night me and Giannis ate dinner at Josh's restaurant, but we've also hung out a bit and just socially and had some wild game that Josh and friends, did you go mostly by Joshoshua or joshua both yeah that josh has gotten from friends or harvested himself so if when we're talking it sounds like there's confusion ever between what we consumed in the restaurant and what we consumed like for instance in my hotel room last night um bear in mind that there's important distinctions there between commercially produced meat that can be sold in a restaurant and sport harvested meat and fish that you can just get

from yourself or be gifted to you from a friend and share with other friends when there's no financial transaction going on. So just bear that in mind as we talk. I'm not going to go in and clarify all this stuff all the time, but it's an important distinction, and I just want people to be aware of that as we march through some of the foods we're going to be talking about. Josh Gaines, Saison Restaurant. Does it annoy you when, if you look at Saison restaurant. Does it annoy you when

if you look at Saison online, there's two things that people will point out. Just a Joe Blow. Like a Joe Blow. If you went and typed in Saison San Francisco, he's going to find that you have three Michelin stars,

which is like a tremendous measure of success as a chef and restaurateur. And there's going to be another descriptor. Does that descriptor annoy you? That it comes up? You haven't told me what it is yet. That it's the, if you take a national perspective, that it's the second most blank. Yeah.

You know, unfortunately, that's the… Do you hate it? Or is it kind of like a thing? No, I don't hate it. I mean, I think that there's a certain reality to it. Can you tell people what it is? The second most what? Well, it's the second most expensive restaurant in America, apparently, because reporters can't do math.

But I feel like it, or go ahead. Well, you know, we started, we put the price, you know, out front in the beginning, right? Everything was included. And then if you look at, you know, let's say another three-star Michelin restaurant, you get a base menu price. Then there's four or five supplements. And you add all those things up, and it's like double the price of here. Gotcha.

So just by coming out and saying, here's what it costs. Right. All inclusive. So it's like 14. How many courses does it wind up being? It just depends. Anywhere from eight to 16. So you're just laying it, when you lay it all out.

I was trying to put it all out there. I was trying to say, hey, guys, here's our- There's no math. There's no math. This is this much. You'll be here for a couple hours. It's this much. And then it positions you in that way where you have all over online. People like that expression.

Yeah. How many three Michelin star restaurants are in the U.S.? I think there's 13 or 14, maybe 12 or 13, 12 to 14. Are there other ones in San Francisco? Yeah, there's one. So we were the first along with another place called Venue. Yeah. I think we should explain, if we can,

just a real general idea of what Michelin stars are it'd be important who's the chef that killed himself when he lost the Michelin star I mean which one I think there's a few the guy you're talking about the famous guy his name is Bernard Lozuel

I think he's in France so yeah explain like the Michelin star thing so Michelin I guess is the you know it's also the tire company, but they started publishing a guide, I think it was in the 30s maybe. And it was probably meant to sell tires, but it gave people a guide to destination-worthy restaurants. And so it was either one, two, or three. And three is basically the pinnacle of the cooking world or the restaurant world. And it really means that it's worth a detour, a full trip to go to a restaurant. Yeah.

And then in your place, you wear a camouflage hat i noticed last night when i was dining here so you had that wasn't because you were here actually it's just no no i know what i had on so you but that's the interesting thing is that um you're like pretty open like you're very open yeah about the fact you like to hunt um even though you live in a town that's perceived by many people who don't live here like it's perceived by outside as being like a place that would be a hostile environment for hunters yeah but then to be here's like a person who is sort of at the pinnacle of the the restaurant world the pinnacle of the restaurant world, the pinnacle of the cooking world,

in this very space, and just being flat out open about it. Have you ever felt blowback at all? For just being like, this is what I like to do, this informs my cooking, it's a lifestyle I have. I mean, you get blowback on you know instagram or something

but you don't you know in here you know it's the our purpose is just for quality right the quality of the product so you know for me the whole the whole reason for for starting hunting again was uh good meat it's you know you you know as a chef you start to chase uh quality and uh so you know i was just looking for you know a better quality and so you know over the years it led me to hunting because you can't really replace that uh you know that that quality level you know provided that you handle it in the right way um as getting it yourself so or at least seeing the whole process through right yeah um so you know whenever you're at a point just i mean to speak to that like you're as getting it yourself. Or at least seeing the whole process through, right? So, you know, whenever the question... You're at a point, just, I mean, to speak to that,

like you're... You were explaining last night, you don't, every fish that comes into your restaurant, you like to come in alive. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If we could get the elk in alive too, we'd do that, but it might stress them out a little bit

and not taste as good. Yeah. And you have staff, you have like a staff fisherman yeah yeah yeah so we have fishermen and these guys bring us basically everything alive so the whole purpose is that we get all of our stuff alive because uh you know the reality is is like as soon as you you know you know pull a trout out of the river you know it starts to go downhill you either cook it right there and you get to experience that kind of perfect taste. There's a small window. Usually for all things, there's like a window.

You get a window in the beginning and that's what, maybe 30 minutes after you harvest it. Whether it's meat or fish or whatever it may be. It's maybe an hour. Let's say an hour, right? And it's perfect. There's one particular taste, you know, kind of attached to that period of time. And then, you know, as time goes by, rigor sets in, you know. Yeah, can I ask you a question?

I was going to ask about rigor. So if you actually do, say, you know, eat a piece of your elk in that first hour, will you actually be able to eat it and enjoy it before you have any sort of rigor? Exactly. Yeah. So it's a, you know, there's two, there's, that's what I'm saying is there's a basically two particular, you know, sets of time before, before rigor sets in, before, uh, you know, any of those things really happen. There's that, that taste everybody's familiar, you know, any hunters familiar with that taste. And then there's that, uh, I guess, I guess what we call aging, right?

Where we age our meat to a certain point to where, you know, the enzymes start to break down the meat and they start to make the meat more delicious or the fish more delicious. And, you know, really everything has its sweet spot where it tastes, you know, perfect, right? So our job is really to find that timing in the product's lifespan and then choose the right point to cook it at. So for an elk, for a big piece of meat, we could hang those primal cuts for a month, three months even. And so it's really all about just kind of finding that right moment when it tastes its best i want to get back into i want to spend a bunch of time on aging because you were telling me some things like aging game that you found just from your own personal stuff and then your work in your restaurant that's that's kind of upended some

of the things that i thought were possible some of the extremes that i thought were possible on aging and what you get on it i also want to talk about your fish killing method what i call what i heard was ekg maybe how do you properly say it? I don't speak Japanese, so I wouldn't know. I call it Ikejime. I've just listened to a Japanese dude say it when I go down to the fish market. Ikejime, I think. You grew up in Florida.

Did you grow up in Florida? It's like the fisherman's paradise, right? Did you grow up around fishing? Oh, yeah. I grew up fishing, you know, uh, you know, all kinds of jacks, barracudas, tarpon, sharks, you know, you name it. Alligators. Yeah. Um, but, uh, but I, I, um, uh, I got out of there in high school and I moved to Boston and then went to school in New York and then finally came out here. Like your, your family's, your whole family moved or you just left on your own? No, I just left. I grew up around a bunch of people that grew up in New York,

and they always talked about the big city, big lights, and so I always had a dream to get out of there and go move to New York. You studied what there? Well, I went to Boston. I had some family there. Planned on actually going to school in Boston and then didn't and then wound up going to culinary school in New York at a place called French Culinary Institute. Yeah, I know that place. Yeah.

Which is now, I think it's called ICC, International Culinary. Yeah. I gave them a beaver tail one time. Oh, is that right? Yeah. I was messing around. For a period of time, I was trying to mess around finding out how the mountain men cooked beaver tail. You know, you're reading about the mountain men, and they love beaver tail, right?

But you get the sense that it's just from oral stuff that was eventually transcribed into writing of people describing the mountain men's diet. But no one really got into how they were actually cooking it or what they were doing with it. And so I started messing with it and put some stuff up online about messing around with beaver tail.

And a guy at that school, I gave him one, and he had his students prep it out. They did some pretty exciting stuff with beaver tail over there. I don't know if exciting comes to mind when you give a culinary school some rare ingredient, but what's like the makeup of the beaver tail? It scales over. So when you look at a beaver tail, you're just seeing the scaly surface.

Yeah. That tail will be emaciated in the spring to the point where you can see the outline of the bone that runs the length of it. Just like the end of the spine runs into the tail. But in the fall it gets so fat i think it gets like 60 percent heavier in the fall when it builds up fat and when you burn off the scales you just put it next to

your fire for a long time it'll eventually start to bubble and burn and you can scrape that skin away. And underneath it is what looks and tastes like gristle and fat on a real fatty ass grilled steak. And you slice that thin and you'd eat it and you'd be like, that tastes exactly like gristle. But yet to consider that the people that were eating that, they were living on a diet of very lean, wild meat. And I think it was just like a, it was a fat source.

So it's all fat, basically, from like top to bottom. Yeah, it's just fat. You slice it thin, put some salt on it, and it's like surprising because it's surprising that that is what lives

inside of a beaver's tail. So what about the meat? Do you eat the beaver meat? Oh, yeah, it's good, man. You like the meat? Yeah, love it. Well, just put that on top, like a little, it's like a little. You like the meat? Yeah, love it. Why don't you just put that on top?

It's like a little Toro topping or something. You could cook the meat down and then put the stuff on there and make its own little fat source on there. All right, I'm going to give you a recipe for beaver tail after this. I already got it. You got one in your head? I already know what you need, yeah. So, yeah, that was my run into that place. But I had some other point i was gonna

make about beaver eating beaver tails yeah i don't know did you know by this point like when you were going to school like at what point growing up did you know you had a knack for cooking and then also at what point did it be that you started to associate hunting and fishing with your interest in cooking? Well, I don't know if I ever thought I had a knack for cooking in the beginning. I had to pay some bills. Is that right? Yeah. And so I got a restaurant job.

Well, actually, my first restaurant job was in Florida. I was a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant. And I just always had restaurant jobs because they were easy to get. You know, back then, you can, you know, any schmuck can get a restaurant job. So it was just, you know, it was just what I had. And when you were back there scrubbing dishes, you weren't like, son of a bitch, man. This is what I'm going to do with my life. Well, you know, so I grew up doing martial arts.

And I started when I was about five or so. The organization of actually dishwashing and getting a pile of shit thrown at you, bus tubs of plates and cups, and having to go through the process of rinsing them, washing them, getting in there, getting out of the dishwasher, getting put away, drying them. Yeah, do wax on, wax off. It was like this movement.

Smart starts movement. So I was excited about it. Really? I like my dishwashing job. Yeah. I was the fastest dishwasher in town, man. Is that right? You were a coveted dishwasher?

I know that it worked for me when I was my short little stint in the kitchen. When we had new guys washing dishes. And, man, they'd be just crushing in the weeds. It'd be at the end of the night where not only do they have all the cups and dishes and plates and still work coming at them, but the whole kitchen is just breaking down. So now there's, you know, pots with, you know, stuff stuck on them and cheese melted everywhere and all kinds of pans. And, man, if you just jumped in there a couple nights

and gave them like an hour of your time and just busted butt with them and then all of a sudden it's like your rapport with them was just golden forever you know they're just like all right man i like you i like you forever this dude can handle burned on cheese then yeah i don't want to i don't want to like belabor your bio but i do want to understand kind of how you came to be who you are well i think it was really random you know it was really just kind of happenstance in my opinion you know i i i was interested in certain things you know uh cooking you know is physical act and i think you know growing up doing martial arts it was you know a relationship to craft right i mean you know it's

a craft and so but in fact i i went back and forth on cooking and martial arts for a long period of time when I first started, you know, after I went to culinary school. Like you were doing competitive martial arts? Yeah. Yeah. When I was younger, I did. I did. I do Chinese martial arts. And so, you know, I did some competing when I was younger.

But I always went back and forth because, you forth because really practicing took up so much time. And so cooking at that time was a distraction from practicing. And so I went back and forth. And finally around 20 or so, I gave up and just needed to pay my bills and started cooking full time. And so- And where were you then i was in boston yeah i was in boston what kind of food were you doing uh just like bistro food you know random bistro i worked out i worked a couple restaurants in boston that are well known um but uh but it was it was uh you know it's like i used to sneak in the bathroom like read my like martial arts book you know little scrolls and shit in the bathroom and, like, read my, like, martial arts book.

You know, little scrolls and shit in the bathroom. I was like, oh, I got a break now. It's a 15-minute break. I'm going to go read my scrolls in the bathroom. So I always went back and forth. And it wasn't really until I came out to San Francisco where I really, really, like, started to, when I was, what, 13 years ago, I really started to, to, uh, you know, focus wholly on cooking. So, so working, working, working in other places at the time still. Yeah. So, well, yeah, when I came out here, I worked at a place in the South Bay called

Chez TJ little, little, um, little restaurant that it's been around for maybe like 25 years. Yeah. And I had a garden in the back the back but but it allowed me to really refocus and really you know uh yeah you know treat it as a career and and um and uh you know it was a learning process i came out here and there was all these incredible products you know coming from the east coast where there's there's just not the same you know you know convergence of you know all all these amazing things there's like a there'sproducing region here. There's a wine-producing region. You can go outside and hunt. I guess you can do that anywhere.

But basically, they have everything you would want here as a chef to really produce good food. You felt that? You felt that the ingredients available to you and the products available to you was just better here than it was in the East? I mean, you go to Whole Foods. I mean, I don't know about now right it's a little different now but when i came here yeah for sure i mean you can go to whole foods and you can look at uh you know three varieties of radish whereas you know the you know uh what the hell was the

name of that place in the east coast i don't know but you go to the supermarket out there and at that time it was just just wasn't the same yeah Maybe it's because I was dirt poor when I lived on the East Coast. You know what we were talking about yesterday driving around here? In the last couple of days, we've done kind of my life, when you are in an agricultural area, you're usually looking at stuff that's fed to stuff that will become food. Like where I grew up, it's like alfalfa and feed corn. When you're driving around California, you'd be like, oh shit, there's a field of cauliflower.

Or there's products where you're able to there's you know there's like products you know where you're like you're you're able to in this climate in this area grow the actual things that you eat you know all the artichokes tree nuts it just kind of gives you a different relationship to how stuff is after because most people just look at are looking more at commodities when they look at agricultural fields rather than looking at finished, table-ready items being grown. Unless you have a garden. Yeah, that's true out here. It's got everything.

But it's still, you know, all that stuff out here, the majority of it's still kind of monoculture and cities devoted to just artichokes. Yeah, I got you. Right? So it still has its issues out here, right? So it's really all the small, it's all practices, right?

Until you really get into the smaller practices, then, you know, there's a lot of issues with, you know, agriculture in general. So when you got the idea to start your own, is this the first restaurant you started? Yeah. Did you at the same time decide to be that you're going to get a restaurant and get a farm? Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, you need a farm to really have the best things. But most restaurants don't have a goddamn farm.

Well, that's true. But if you're going to make good food, you got to have a farm. You just took it to be like, it's as simple as that. Like, if I'm going to have good food, you've got to have a farm. You just took it to be like, it's as simple as that. If I'm going to have a restaurant, I'm going to have a farm. You need a fisherman. You need to get meat in a certain place. You need to find dry goods. As a chef, you've got to audit your list of how you really procure ingredients if you really want to get to a place where you're actually producing good food in earnest.

So explain the farm that goes with Saison. Is it called Saison Farm? Yeah, sure. We'll call it that. I saw it written somewhere. You had a duck hanging up somewhere and I saw it said Saison Farm. Yeah, that's just our internal language. It's our farm, right?

It's called the farm. But, yeah, it's just, you know, you got to, you have to, you know, you got a few choices, right? You can pick up the phone as a chav and you can call, you know, your purveyor, your wholesaler, and say, hey, look, you know, take six heads of lettuce today. Right. But, you know, the whole process of wholes wholesaling is you know there's there's a middleman there's there's a you know usually maybe another middleman someone who actually sources all this stuff out then there's the actual producer so you're separated and by the time it

gets the restaurant you're five layers away from from getting the actual product yeah so you know it goes to a whole it goes to you know a shipping, it goes through holding in the warehouse, and then maybe you get it maybe three, four, five, six, seven days later, right? So at that point, you know, it doesn't taste and doesn't have any resemblance to really what a great product really is anymore. You know, the aroma's gone. That original taste when you picked it is gone. And most likely the product itself is, you know, from some seed that was, you know, spliced and diced, you know, seven different ways to have no resemblance of the original taste of that product. So we just wanted to, you know, take it back to a time

to where everything had flavor, right? I mean, really since, what, World War I or II or whatever it was that, you know, everything it was, everything has been kind of bastardized. Our seeds, our seeds, and all our produce. I mean, you really think about how many people have eaten a ripe tomato from a great seed off the vine when it's truly like 100% ripe. It's very few. So that was our purpose. We wanted to just you know have great products

you know that's the thing that comes up a lot in conversations about food i feel like over the last two decades or whatever is uh that i sit on both sides of what i'm going to bring up where people talk about the industrialization of food okay and we generally now sort of talk about it as a negative right because we have the luxury in this country we have the luxury of like eating very fine food but to contextualize it a little bit just to show you that just to demonstrate like my how i sit on both sides is contextualize a little bit during world war ii we had estimates vary but perhaps millions of people starved to death in europe right we had rations in this country on you know there was like dairy rations meat rations major shortages and coming out of that it wasn't long after that that we got used to this idea that we might be

in the very near future entering into another major world conflict with the Soviet Union. And I think at the time the most pressing issue was, how can we create a system where we have the capability of throwing a switch and feeding Europe and fielding this military? And so we just like, it wasn't that we got lost our way. It's just that we had a period where our priorities were completely different. And then some good things came out of it, like that we would bank soil, right? You'd have like farms that were put out. That when dairy prices dropped, rather than having a dairy farmer go out of business, we would subsidize them so that they could stay ready to jump into action should the need occur. So now we look at it, I feel like, now we look at it, we're like, we're getting away from that.

We're getting away from the industrialization. I feel like we're always going to keep an open eye to the fact that it's just because we have the luxury of doing that. But it wasn't like evil people trying to do evil shit. It was just people trying to get ready for a catastrophe, which we had just witnessed happen. No, it's true. We operate within a very narrow

little hole. In our little hole, our little pond, our focus is purely taste. It's taste, and along with taste comes some other benefits. I'm not in any way saying that you're guilty of what I just claimed, but I think that there's a way that

I think we lose sight of some of the motivations of how stuff came to be and treat it like it was just bad decision making. It's all just Monsanto just trying to make an extra buck. Yeah, but it was like a lot of factors at play. Right, yeah. No, it's like a lot of factors at play right yeah no it's not just the evil uncle right that that yeah but but you yeah but now just to get

back to where we are yeah now we do have at this moment in time the luxury to have like to pursue perfection and absolute ripeness and food rather than just shelf stability. Well, there's also some really cool solutions, too, that you see coming around, right? Especially with the age of technology, there's closed-loop agriculture systems that are happening that produce, I think it's 20x the volume of product in a really small space. So you can put, you know, one of the most interesting ones is, you know, it's completely closed loop. So what that means is really,

you've got, you know, a little pod, a little capsule, and it's an artificial and growing environment. And you can fit a ton of product in there. You can grow a ton of product in a very small space. You produce, you can produce, I don't remember what the numbers were, but I think it's roughly 20,

30x the volume of food out of this little small space. You can also control the nutrient drink that goes in. You can control the sun cycle, all of those elements that go into growing food. And since it's closed loop, you're basically recycling all of that taste and all of the nutrient drink. And it's all computerized. And so you can basically, let's say you had an artichoke that was perfect in 2001 in Salinas. It was the best artichoke you ever had in your life. You can go look up all of the historical data or all the weather data and you can plug in those data points to this closed loop system and you can basically replicate that exactly so there's some cool stuff coming out also but that's interesting

that would have interesting implications for the wine world yeah well so the issue with that now but the issue is that you lose a little bit of what's called terroir right you know because you can still produce a delicious sweet plant that's that's great that's the way that you maybe like it but you can't ever replicate really truly the taste of nature right it doesn't just it's not possible you can't so so that's the downside of that where uh where in your if we're in if we're checking back in down and on your biography and at this point we kind of got you where you're here you got a restaurant you got a farm um where did like you're sort of a where did your re-awareness of hunting come in because you were like exposed to it in in a way in in Florida and were aware that it was a thing

people do. You'd like to run around out in the woods. Yeah, you'd run around. As a kid, you'd run around and there's alligators and snakes. You talk about running around with spears. We used to try to hunt wild boars with spears. It was never successful, but we'd wait in the tree and try to throw a spear down. But it was more of just being a kid.

Yeah, like Tom Sawyer and around. Yeah, exactly. You get some frogs. We'd get frogs and we'd eat some water moccasins and rattlesnakes and stuff. But it came around because of products. It's really taste, right? At a certain point, you look at, and you start to dissect all of our practices

and all of our food practices. And at a certain point, you realize as a chef that grain-fed beef doesn't taste good anymore. all of our food practices. And at a certain point, you realize as a chef that, you know, grain-fed beef doesn't taste good anymore, right? You start to notice, you know, it's a process, but you start to notice the fact that that beef, you know, or meat in general, everything tastes like corn or everything tastes like shitty wheat, you know,

or whatever it may taste like. So the whole purpose was taste, really. Our whole purpose is really taste, right? How do we really find a product that is like it once was or whatever our reference points are for a particular product, right? Like what is the most delicious meat? What is the most delicious lettuce? And then so your experience with Wild game kind of started to shape your

impressions of what was possible and what could be done and what things would taste like variations well i'd been i'd been getting uh you know we get we get a lot of uh we get a lot of uh hunters here that give us meat you know give us wild ducks or or deer or whatever and just kind of donate it to me yeah and um so i've been eating it for a few years out here. Surprisingly, there's a lot of hunters in California, or at least a handful. Also, friends would pass along stuff you'd check out. Yeah, they just pass along meat.

I'd eat deer and duck. And that got you interested? Well, yeah, it just re-sparked that or reignited that spark, right? And, I mean mean wild ducks are really delicious right and wild meats you know really good we treat the right way so so uh at a certain point i just wanted to get it myself you know i just i just wanted to i wanted to you know have all wild meat so there's a thing that happens and maybe you can explain this to me when you're looking at when you're reading about chefs and reading about great restaurants

you're always seeing that that anyone can produce a uh i shouldn't say anyone but yeah let's just say anyone can produce this great dish once okay but the the the true sign of expertise of like mastering your craft is that you can do it 70 times in a night or whatever number of times in a night and have it be the same and then you can do that for weeks right and just like execute it again and again and again i don't know if you use that measure of success but you're familiar with that's a thing people bring up when talking about being a great cook but with wild game you look at me like you've never heard i've never heard that to be honest but you're familiar with that's a thing people bring up when talking about being a great cook. But with Wild Game, you look at me like you've never heard this. I've never heard that, to be honest, yeah.

I was reading that. I was reading someone talking about that. No, I was reading the RDA. Someone's saying, I was reading a profile of a chef in the New Yorker. Makes sense. And it was a guy saying, yeah, perfection to me is 300 eggs Benedict without a mistake, without one customer return. Yeah, sure. Like as the craft of cooking goes, yeah.

Yeah. So I hear that now and then. And on the other hand, with wild game, you're opening yourself up to such a tremendous amount of variability. Because they're not the same. You know, if you identify, like if you have a farm and you identify, man, this dude at this farm produces some good-ass lamb because he's got some breed of lamb that works well on the land where he raises it. He's got a great irrigated pasture with the right blend of forbs and grasses

and his alfalfa is beautiful and he's able to run this thing. And when I get a leg of land from him this year, it's great. I get a leg of land from him next year, it's great. That shit isn't what wild game is like. Because you shoot an animal you buy you know i don't know i look it looked like a good animal i shot it but i got over there and had recently crashed into a porcupine so its entire belly was

full of quills and every one of those injuries was full of pus it was emaciated. Or I shot it and wasn't the first guy that shot it because his back leg on the side not facing me had been injured by a bullet. And so, you know, it was packed with dirt and it was a mess. Or I killed some big crazy buck that had been rutting hard for two months and hasn't probably eaten a lick of grass for two months and tasted like shit. Or I shot a deer and it fell into a big sinkhole,

and I couldn't get it out until a couple days later with a rope and a buddy holding my ankles. Sounds like you had some really shitty hunting experiences. So I'm just saying, that isn't like this dude that produces these wonderful lambs time and time again. It's like you can't – there is – like perfection is is out there but perfection isn't always out there you know i think like we killed like whatever was going on that year in idaho and we killed yanni we killed some stomper bucks in idaho and i don't know what was going on that year in idaho but that was like it was the best mule deer meat ever yeah and i've eaten a shitload of mule deer right and i don't know. It defied everything

you're supposed to eat because it's supposed to be like big giant bucks on a taste good. These are big giant bucks pre-rut that had two inches of tallow on their back and were great. That's my question. How do you deal with all the lack? How do you deal with all the lack of consistency

when you're, as a chef who's dealing with wild game, and not just commercially produced wild game, but on your own, you're dealing with hunted wild game? Yeah, for us, that's all, I mean, every product is like that, right? I mean, the whole, for us,

you know, it's so specialized that, you know, when we get a radish in one day from the farm, it's not necessarily the same as the next day from the farm, right's not necessarily the same as the next day from the farm. So you can take that theory with any product that you use. It could be the rain. It could be the amount of sun you get in one day. It could be their diet.

But every product changes a little bit every day. So the way that we operate is we basically get a product in the door, look at it, and then decide what to do from there. Because even if you're getting, you know, that lamb, you know, maybe they forgot to feed it one day. Who knows? Maybe the lamb is sick. You don't know, right? So everything changes just a touch. And even if it's just incrementally, it still changes every day. And so our focus is really on kind of capturing that taste. So, you know, if we get a buck and it's very bucky, then, you know, you got to decide what to do with it from there. So do you brine it to maybe purge some of that flavor out? Yeah.

Maybe you throw it in salted water for a few days just to kind of purge it and have a clean flavor. Maybe it's like that mule deer you got and you just throw it right on the grill. You don't even age it. So it just depends. And so our whole operating system in the kitchen is based on really kind of assessing what the product is and then deciding, you know, what methods to go through for preservation. And so that, you know, just selecting the right product is a huge part of it.

But, you know, you can either, for us, we either choose, especially particularly mead and game, you know, you either choose, you either use it right there or there's some sort of continuation in the preservation process that happens. So whether it's aging or curing or grinding into a sausage or whatever it may be, you know, it's just like anything else. Can you take this menu and do the menu that you served last night and do a sort of a speed walkthrough? Yeah, I got one over here. I want people to get a sense

of what dishes you like to serve. Well, let's see. You had a fistful of caviar to start. White sturgeon caviar. Yeah, it's white sturgeon caviar. It's farmed, right? It's farmed caviar. But that is a fish that a fella can fish for.

Yeah. In the Columbia drainage, they have open seasons. Then within those seasons, they have kill seasons. We allow to harvest sturgeon. We were making our own sturgeon caviar this year with a very abundant sturgeon called shovel nose sturgeon. Where do you fish that? In the Yellowstone River. Yeah, you're allowed 10 a day.

Oh, wow. Shovel noses. And you get them in the spring, they're about a big one. It'd be two and a half feet long. But they have caviar inside. Oh, yeah. But it's like painstaking to separate the eggs. To separate the eggs? Yeah. we gotta put it through a little sieve it doesn't work you gotta just mess with it no there's nothing to sieve out so when you open them up when you get a female you open them

up and you know some fish have like the skein right the sack that holds the eggs like the most the easiest example of an egg to clean would be salmon where you open up that skein and you can just kind of like the eggs just kind of fall away right on sturgeon the skein and the eggs are just like almost interwoven where each egg needs to be kind of separated from the skein and it's it's painstaking like you get it where you have a ton of it and then we just cleaned it for a long time and then we're like dude i can't keep cleaning these eggs and then we salt watered the eggs and just ate them you've seen you've seen the commercial process the caviar right i have never seen how they do it so they just take they take uh i mean

it's the same right i maybe it's more on this like wild surgeon shovel nose but but on uh you know like a white surgeon you take the caviar sack out you you throw it into a sieve, and the sieve is the right size for the beads. But they just rub it. They rub it pretty hard. And they rub it, and then that breaks away all the membrane, and only the eggs basically come through. The eggs fall through. Yeah, and then they basically drop it in a salted water bath. And then a lot of that stuff will float.

A lot of the membrane will float. You just lift it off, and then the caviar is left over yeah and they repeat that process till it's clean the shovel nose sturgeon uh their egg is probably about this is this is ballparking it but their eggs probably about half the diameter of a white sturgeon there's another you know there's also another sturgeon or another caviar that comes out of the Yellowstone is paddlefish caviar, which people collect, and that's bigger, and that's a high-grade caviar. And then we used to get caviar out of, you know, and there's even a commercial market for Great Lakes whitefish.

They have a pretty good caviar. And that's a thing that people, you know, it's rod and reel anglers can catch. The reason I bring that up is I'm just like as you walk through this i i want to just establish what are these things even though you're dealing with a commercially caught version or you're dealing with uh you know something that's in the commercial chain right that can be legally purchased and sold in a restaurant that so much of what you're dealing with would also be identified as a type of wild game because especially in the ocean pretty much anything you're buying

for a restaurant is things that people can go catch on their own on sport fishing tackle right so sturgeon uh though most people don't do it most fishermen don't do it um producing caviar is something that's just like anybody could go do from a wide variety of fish yeah yeah they got they got uh uh surgeon fishing out here yeah yeah and there's some kill seasons wasn't scott peterson when he cut up his wife and dumped her in san francisco bay part of his defense was that he was sturgeon fishing when they asked him why he was out in a boat that day did you know that i? I have no idea. He did. And me and my fake Uncle Don used to troll stripers in San Francisco Bay,

and we would go right. He was baiting the sturgeon? Is that what the defense was? So, yeah, he was doing a chum line. Yeah, me and my fake Uncle Don used to do some trolling for striped bass out here in San Francisco Bay back in 2004, and we would just troll right in front of the jail where Scott Peterson is housed. The prison?

Yeah. What's it called? It's not Alcatraz. San Quentin. San Quentin, yeah. Yeah. They got like watchtowers. I'm not shitting you.

When we'd be trolling by, you'd wave at dudes in watchtowers. I feel like there's some sort of environmental issues over there, maybe some waste or something. Yeah, I was describing to Giannis that I would say that for toxic fish, they were delicious. 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.

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So on to the next the on X club, y'all. So on to the next one, Turbot. Yeah. Diamond Turbo. So Diamond Turbo is just a local local species of turbo. And it's smaller for the most part. But you can fish it. Yeah.

And you brought that fish to you. Show me the fish. one of your guys did. The fish was alive on a plate. Like alive, alive. And in, it wasn't, how many minutes went by? Five, six. And I was presented with, so one minute the fish is there on my plate, alive. I grabbed its jaw and it was very reflexive and a couple minutes later i had the liver two ways well a different his liver and a different fish's liver two ways

right you had made chitlins right explain that so you got so you you basically like you know on especially a fish like turbo you've got i mean you can use almost the whole thing right everything's good about it as long as you're you know especially when it's alive a few minutes before but um the the guts uh the heart the the livers and and and essentially the the chitlins or the the intestines the intestinal tract and the stomach are all delicious you just have to clean it properly so we boil it in salted water a few times scrape it out boil it scrape it out boil it uh and then once you chill it down it's got this little you know crunchy texture yeah um but uh it was it was shocking to have that like how good it was it's delicious right yeah the

little saison sauce on there we've got we've got this sauce called saison sauce it's a it's our it's our seasoning elixir and it's like uh it's basically a brew uh made of seaweeds local seaweeds local little silverfish uh all of the excess bones and trim and anything that we get from our fish and then it's grilled or barbecued or and and then it's mixed together and it's basically inoculated with a with a bacteria and then it's grilled or barbecued or and then it's mixed together and it's basically inoculated with a with a bacteria and then it's allowed to culture and ferment and it turns into this uh kind of elixir that's like the savory almost cross between white soy and fish sauce and so we season a lot of things with that you'll bathe those fish you'll bathe the fish intestines in that stuff yeah we season a little bit with that. Season a little bit. Yeah, and then the livers,

the livers are basically salted or rinsed in salted water like a brine, right? Because you've got to purge the liver. And then you salt the liver a little bit and then we either poach it in salted water or we grill it or we, you know, the version you had was basically salted for about a week, rinsed and then put in uh a seasoning paste which is like saison seasoning paste kind of like a miso

it's basically the same thing as a miso okay um so you had one version that was poached and one version that was salted and seasoned in our seasoning paste and then the rib slab explain what you do with the fish ribs or how the fish ribs become like a little serving tray. Grilled little rib? Yeah. Talk about that. So, yeah, I guess really the reason for that was because the bones still have meat on it, right? They have flavor.

They have taste. And typically, all the little tail pieces, anything you might feel might be tough. The connective tissue, the skirts, the little skirt around the outside of the fin. Basically the shit that 99.9% of fishermen throw

in the garbage. That stuff's full of flavor. A lot of those little sweet bits are that's the sweet meat to me because it's full of flavor. It's the stuff that gets a lot of use. Um, and, uh, that's all gets chopped up and then basically mixed into, uh, this chopped seasoned mixture and then, and then put back on the bone and then brushed with a sauce and then grilled. And so it's like a little riblet. Do you know that in, and I see i'm sitting right next to one of the scoffier's books that's how scoffier would handle carp you know in a lot of other countries carp are like a very

popular food fish and in fact they were introduced into the great lakes when the great lakes fisheries were declining at like catastrophic rates um a fish culturalist had the idea that they would put common carp into the Great Lakes to make up for the loss of food fish from environmental destruction in the Great Lakes. But that has obviously never caught on with Americans. Americans don't like to eat, generally speaking.

Americans don't like to eat carp. But Escoffier's carp recipes would basically be that you poach the fish, whatever you're going to do to it, to be able to strip all meat off the bone. Then he would mix that with all kinds of good shit to eat, right? Like you said, your little chopped up combination you put on there. But he would mix it with butter, cream, truffles,

and then lay the carp's tail and head down where they belong and reform the fish's body out of this concoction that he would make and then put new scales back on it and serve that as carp. And once you go through all that, that carp becomes pretty damn good. Yeah. But it doesn't have a whole lot to do with carp anymore yeah you just lose the taste yeah it's like it tastes like a truffles yeah exactly a creamy a creamy truffly kind of mousse yeah well back then you know there's a lot of uh a lot of um masking right because you gotling was a little different back then, right? And now we've got

so much information that we can you know, we've learned from other cultures that like Japan is a great example of handling, right? Where everything's just handled so well that the taste winds up being clean and kind of pure, right?

It requires, yeah, it's like I guess the way of putting it is the way you're handling stuff that's so fresh is you're just trying, you're like showcasing what the thing is. You're not using it to make some other thing out of it. Yeah, exactly. You're not doing like a radical transformation.

Well, it's good enough to where you don't need to, right? There's no need to, you know, stuff it with truffles and cream because it already tastes delicious. You just can't screw it up. The rib slabs, then you cook the tail. Yeah. You had the head, you had the tail,

the rib slabs. The head and the tail were basically just purged and salted water. We poached them and then we grill them. We just poached them for a few minutes at a low temperature. I think it's like 60 degrees, just to set kind of the head. And so it basically cooks the head evenly all the way through

and loosens up all the good bits, like the lips and the connective tissue and the cartilage or whatever the makeup of the fish is. But it loosens all that stuff up. And then we grill it. And then you just pull it all apart. So the whole thing falls apart, basically. And then all of that good stuff on the inside, which is really one of my favorite pieces

or my favorite bits, is easy to get at. So on the fish we were eating last night, we ate the head, the tail, the trim, the guts. What the hell do you guys do with the the meat well that's what you ate in the little bowl with the flowers so that's just served raw yeah it's just raw and then when you kill a fish i learned this from my friend helen cho because i was out fishing with helen cho and her boyfriend john um we were out this one time dicking around on a fishing charter. And the fish they would catch, John would kind of sever the spine and then run a hunk of wire down the interior of the spinal cord to relax the fish. I was explaining to you last night that in South America, I watched

Amerindians do that with big turtles that they would catch. If anyone's ever caught a snapping turtle, when you cut the snapping turtle's head off, the head's very much not alive in any kind of sense of the word of being cognizant, but it's full of

activity. The body is clenched up, and the the body is clenched up and the body stays absolutely clenched up and not like rigor mortis but just like a nervous system clenched up for hours up to eight hours before that thing finally relaxes and you can skin it and they would do that practice ek gma i'm sure that's not the word they use down there but they would do that they would ream out the spine and just relax the whole animal and you get the same effect by when they electroshock

cattle during the slaughter process where they'll hit that thing in the head with a captive bolt gun and I can't remember if they then I watched them doing it at a couple different places they bleed it and then shock it, and that shocking relaxes the animal, but you're getting at something with fish, like, can you explain the process? Yeah, well, it's not even just fish,

it's also game, too, like, the way that I try to hunt is pretty specific also, but I'll talk about fish first, so, you know, it's basically just neural death, you're basically just ruining the nerves so that there's no reaction, continued reaction, right, so you basically, you know, it's basically just neural death. You're basically just ruining the nerves so that there's no reaction, continued reaction, right? So you basically, you know, let's take the turbo, for instance. Every fish is a little different in the way you kill it, but the goal is really the same. You get brain death and neural death, right? Or neural destruction, I guess. And so, you know, we, for instance, you know, insert a knife right at the place where the head and the spine meet and also the brain is. And so it's basically just one stroke, one kill, right?

Yep. And then we make a little incision on the back of the tail through the spinal column. Oh, you know, that's right. That's where John runs the wires, the tail side. Yeah. And so you grab the tail. It gives you a little handle, basically. You grab the tail, and you stick the wire on the neural cavity, the neural column, basically,

that goes all the way through the spine of the fish. And you just run that up and down until it basically destroys the nerves. And then the fish is limp. Just limp, limp. Shockingly limp. Yeah. And it just goes completely limp, and it preserves that texture in the fish. And the taste is very, it also, to me, it produces a really super clean taste, right? You don't, you know, there's something about an animal running away or struggling that produces a different taste, right? It releases whatever it releases in the system.

And that taste, to me, is different, right? Yeah. And you're, to me, is different. Yeah. And you're going to touch on hunting. And I'm going to preface what you're going to say. And I'm not going to go after you about it or challenge you about it. But what this man is about to say is a controversial notion. But I'll let him speak to it. You're talking about head shooting? Yeah.

Yeah, head shots? Yeah. You're a head shot man. Yeah, absolutely. 100% of the time i count among my head shooting uh associates you and my friend ron late no i got another head shooter buddy isn't tony a head shooter i don't know but he's like a marine corps oh that tony yes he is you're right he is yeah so yeah you like to you like to do neural what

do you call it neural death right it's the same thing i mean it's the same principle really but you gotta you gotta let me preface that with like if you're if you're not gonna put several thousand rounds through you know each each you know shot and in in every way you can possibly practice and you probably shouldn't try to shoot for a head right yeah but um because you're robbing yourself of your margin for error right right well in to me even worse is that you're going to injure it and it's going to run away yeah that's what i mean that's the worst part yeah no i don't mean that yeah i'm not worried about if it was like if every shot was either instant death or a miss there's no shot i would ever pass up right yeah it's the trouble is you know the trouble is in those ones that that fall in the gray area between those two extremes like

when someone's shooting at a shooting at an elk with a bow they're trying to hit it in the heart and they spine it and it drops and they're all excited you could be like well i would temper your excitement with the fact that you were like 18 inches off and if you had moved that 18 inches off in other directions you would have had a very different outcome yeah but you happen to be 18 off in exactly the right spot you know well i mean i guess my opinion is if you can't if you don't feel 100 confident with the shot don't take it i mean that's that's my opinion is if you don't feel 100% confident with a shot, don't take it. I mean, that's like if you don't feel like you're guaranteeing yourself, you know, your point of impact is going to be exactly where you think it's going to be,

just don't shoot. Yeah, no, I'm with you. That's what people like, we've been asked many times, like what's an ethical shot and an unethical shot? And after wringing my hands about that question a long time, I was like, if you're surprised you got it, that's an unethical shot. A hundred percent.

If you want to be like, holy shit, I can't believe I got it. Then it's like, you probably shouldn't have touched the trigger. Yeah. But yeah, so, yeah, we'll leave that one there, but explain like what you're after. Yeah. So yeah, so, yeah. We'll leave that one there, but explain what you're after. Yeah. So provided all that, then you're really after the same thing you're after with the fish. You're basically, I'm shooting right behind the head where it meets the spine.

And at that point, it's going through and the thing drops and it's dead. Yeah. Or at least I think it's dead. Well, if that happened, it'd be pretty damn dead. It doesn't move afterwards, that's for sure. Do you have any thoughts on bleeding? Because I believe Ron, doesn't he say when he makes a good headshot,

he immediately runs up to it and bleeds it. Because when you hit something through the lungs, you're like self-bleeding it. The blood's all going to expel. There's no need to run up and then cut its throat because the blood's laying in the chest cavity or all over the ground well i have a different opinion about blood and game i think it just depends well there there's so there's an old french method let me hold you up for one

minute because finish what you're saying about like why you would bleed it after you hit it in the head you're honest right because like you're saying if you hit it in the head. Be honest. Right, because like you're saying, if you hit it in the... Or this is Ron's thinking. It's legit thinking. I mean, livestock, it's how they slaughter livestock. It's how they slaughter cattle. Right. I guess so that your meat is not full of blood

and the flavor of blood. You run up there and cut its throat and bleed it. Yeah, so when you're slaughtering cattle, they hit it with, like I mentioned earlier, somehow this came up, oh, electric, using electricity. You hit it in the head with a captive bolt gun, or in the old days, a.22, and then right away, while it's still kicking on the ground,

hoist it up in the air by the back foot and cut its jugular to expel the blood. I think that has to do with also shelf stability and flavor issues. But go ahead. I'll mostly defer to your judgment on the taste of it. It's subjective. But there's an old French method where they suffocate like a bird, like a pigeon. Yeah.

You've heard of that? Yeah. Yeah. And so the taste winds up being pretty good. You know, it's different, but it's like, it's bloody, it's spicy, but I like it. It's delicious. And so, I mean, if you really think about it, you know, animals, the meat is full of blood, right? Yeah.

So, that's what you're eating anyway. A little more blood's not going to kill you, right? Yeah. So, you know, I just... You don't take it as a given that blood has to get out. No, not at all. I don't think so. I mean, you know, at the same time... Do you guys bleed your fish?

Like, the fish you killed last night, do you bleed the fish? Definitely. So, fish, that's a different story because fish has this very kind of, fish blood has this very irony kind of metallic taste that you don't want at all. And I think, you know, all blood has that to some degree. But a lot of animal blood, like duck blood, you know, think about, you know, old French sauces, like, you know, duck blood in the sauce or any birds. I mean, a lot of cultures across the world eat a lot of blood, right? They eat blood. You don't waste the blood.

Here, for some reason, you waste it all. Or you catch the blood and make blood sausage with it. Yeah, so I like the blood personally. I think it's good. Again, it's practices, right? It's handling and practices. But to me, it tastes good. Yeah, Scoville has a a lot of things too where you uh use the rabbit blood yeah yeah yeah like a little see that sauce yeah yeah that's a good point yeah so um so anyway what we're talking

about headshots yeah like what you're striving for the kids you may have you know wild game the kids you may essentially right now that's that's what we're striving for, right? We're striving for that instant death to where it's basically, there's zero suffering involved. And, but even before that, one of the things that I've noticed is that, and if you go out there and you scare an animal and it's running away,

or maybe you injure it, which I have before, and I was so horrible about, but it's running away. And then you finally get it, it tastes different. Oh, absolutely. It tastes totally different. So for me, it's one of those things where you basically sneak up on something.

You put in enough work to actually harvest it in a way where it has no idea you're there. It's eating some flowers, just like this bear that I just got. It's sitting there eating dandelion flowers, and the next thing it's dead. One shot, one kill, Instant, it's done. So to me, that's the way I like to hunt. Do you feel like it could not only affect the flavor, like the difference between an animal that's hurried or rushed, scared, versus completely unaware, as well as the texture or sort of the tenderness?

Yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, without a doubt. If you, I mean, it's the same principle. Like if that thing goes down right away and it's completely limp the second, you know, that bullet hits that, you know, wherever, it's limp, right? It's already relaxed.

There's no, there's zero struggle involved in the process. So the thing is limp. The meat's soft. Another reason I don't like that idea is because I have all kinds of animal skulls around my house. Yeah. And I wouldn't have that anymore. There's your bear right there. Take a look at that skull.

Well, how'd you get it put back together again? I never shot the skull. I shot right there behind the skull. So it's right in the neck piece right right where the basically and i i basically am putting my eye right on the back of that skull right behind the ear right and that's where i'm looking yeah all right man we'll leave it at that now box crab what the hell why is there why is uh box crab not a thing let me hold on let me go back one sec the other thing is is uh the other the other way that I will shoot, too, if I know that I can't, if I really want to get that animal and I know I can't make a perfect head shot is the high shoulder, right where the spine is.

Yeah. High shoulder. The bullet splits apart. It shoots into everywhere. And the same thing, basically. Yeah. But it gives you more margin. I'm familiar with that one.

And I've gone for that a couple times and right when uh right when monolithic bullets started to be very started to become more popular um you know solid copper bullets people yanni you should explain this because you follow this shit better than i do like the barns yeah but like like when monolithic bullets became more popular, you started hearing way more people talk about high shoulder shots. Yeah, that's because those things punch right through, right? Right, so a lot of people were getting the pencil effect when it would just go through.

If they missed the entering rib, they weren't getting that expansion they were used to in a lead-cord bullet, jacketed bullet. And so it was getting that pencil effect and the deer was running a little bit farther than they were used to and so i think they were moving their shot placement to that high shoulder which i advocate that all the time because i think it's a pretty big uh target still you know you don't have to aim that close to the spine the spine actually sort of dips down behind the shoulder.

So it's not like you're aiming only three inches below the top of his back there. But it's also up in that area is what's called the void. Dude, listen, it's hard to make predictions about the future. I will die. I will live out my life, hopefully, and get really old. And then I'll die. I will live out my life, hopefully, and get really old, and then I'll die, and on my deathbed, if you said to me, hey, man, what's perfect shot placement? I'm still going to be like, really?

That's what you want to talk about right now? And then I'll say, but if in fact that is what you want to know as I'm dying, double lung. And I'll tell you why. The first time I shot an animal with a monolithic bullet, I was hunting in New Zealand, and I I shot an animal with a monolithic bullet, I was hunting in New Zealand, and I shot a stag with a monolithic bullet, and it was pretty far out there,

but not ridiculously far out there. And I was like, oh, shit, I missed. Okay? Because he's running around, rutting these hinds, chasing them around. And then a while later, he kind of got where he looked like he wasn't feeling well, but still was like yeah you

know i'll keep chasing these hinds you know not feeling too well and then all of a sudden got woozy and tipped over and it looked like someone had taken when i butchered it it looked like someone took a field tip arrow just an arrow with a practice point on it and jabbed it through the chest cavity yeah so i've had this with pigs before wild boars because down and down in southern california you have to shoot uh all copper right you can't shoot anything it's not copper steel there's no lead allowed yeah it's condor zone and so uh the whole damn state now right not yet i think it's next year oh that's what it goes yeah i know it's coming uh it's definitely coming yeah um that's why i've watched washington's real nice right now but uh um it you know i've

shot pigs where you know there was a group of them and i and i shot three at three different pigs and uh i thought i completely missed i was like well i they ran away i was like they just gone i was like oh fuck that i don't usually miss yeah because i don't usually take those shots. I put in a lot of practice. And anyway, we saw one running away. He ran up the hill, little one, and then he dropped dead. So I said, okay, I did miss. So then we started looking for the other two pigs, found all three, but in the end it was the same thing, a little puncture that went straight through. They were all straight through the lungs right by the heart.

They just keep going. It doesn't have that terminal uh you know damage right no and then i got onto the after that i got onto the whole high shoulder scene but again i hit it like you remember that when you're hunting muskox dude he didn't even give a shit that it's like i just feel like it's imperfect you could speak to it. I don't care. No, but you remember that you said you did pull forward just a little bit because, right? I was worried about, yeah. You about hitting another animal. And so you personally judged and put it forward.

But I feel like with the lung shot too, you can be off the lungs in the back and all of a sudden you're into the liver, which animals go a long way when they've got a bullet through their liver. And you go farther back, and you've just gone straight through the paunch, and good luck finding that. Well, look, at the end of the day, if you know for sure you're going to make the shot, it's ethical. Yeah. You've got to be confident.

I want to keep marching down those things. I want to talk about some other stuff. Box crab. Okay, if you went out and asked Joe Blow, Joe Blow dude, who eats at Red Lobster or whatever, is Red Lobster still a business? I don't know, but I just read something about somebody getting food poisoning there the other day.

When I was a kid, I'm telling you what, if you were going out to, that was the pinnacle of a fancy dinner. Like on prom night, dudes would take your high school girlfriend down to Red Lobster and you were setting the stage.

And listen, guys out there, if that's your plan or you just did that to take your lady out there a couple weeks ago when it was prom night, we're not dogging. I'm not dogging that at all. I'm just saying I don't know if there's still I don't know how Red Lobster is still kicking ass or not. Yeah. No, I think they're still around.

Well, just let me also help with anybody out there who may get food poisoning from Red Lobster. I got food poisoning one time from some sort of bio-disease in the oysters here in the Bay Area. I was really sick, man. I ate, I don't know how many oysters I ate that day.

They were contaminated with something. I was at the point where I was sick for hours. I was dry heaving. There was no liquids left in my body. I went to the hospital. They gave me this little IV thing and a pill. I felt better in like 10 minutes. Is that right? The fact that it obsessed me that you even insinuated that I was dogging on Red Lobster because if you were to number line out on a 1 to 10, number line out on the quality, like if you took a week and be like, okay, what quality of foods does this person consume during a week?

If I, Red Lobster would be like on the 5 mark. How do you weigh, yeah, I think I'm dogging on Red Lobster. I just haven't been following. I was just clarifying. I just haven't been following whatever the scene is over at Red Lobster right now. Make my damn point. People know that there's good crabs. And they like snow crab,

dungeon-esque crab, blue crab, king crab. And there's a redundancy here. Like tanners are snows, right? Tanner. I don't know. Tanner's another word.

Yannick, you check that? I think when you hear tanner, there's a redundancy. I'm not thinking clear right now, and there's a redundancy in that list. But your favorite crab is a crab that doesn't fall on the list of super good crabs. That's because nobody knows about it. You think that's what it is? Fishermen don't even really fish it. When I came in and I looked at that tank of crabs,

I thought you had a bunch of dungy bodies in there, legless dungy bodies because of the way they suck their legs in. Yeah, they box up. That's how they get their name. They basically pull in all their extremities, and it forms like a perfect um shape into the around their shell they're not so they don't cost nearly what uh they gotta be way cheaper than a dungeon s uh no they're they're more expensive because nobody fishes them i mean you got it's it's a boutique fishery basically so

i've got a fisherman who i have to pay you I have to pay X amount of expenses to just to get the stuff we want. So it winds up being a little more expensive. So how did you come to prefer box crab and not be like, hell, man, everybody knows that king crab is the best crab in the world or dungeon nest is the best crab in the world. You just don't see box crab around commercially. First of all, we try to just use everything just from right here okay you know we'll take it all it's it's west coast because it makes sense for us in terms of taste so everything you pull from bc down to south of

here yeah exactly down to like santa barbara basically and so that's all that's all relatively the same environment right more or less i, there's obviously some variation, but, but, um, Northerly, uh, northerly Pacific waters. Yeah, exactly. Um, but, uh, you know, we, we just get, we get random stuff from our guys, whether it's our gatherer or our, you know, which gathers our forger and, um, whether it's our fishermen or, or whatever it is, they bring us a bunch of stuff, you know, all the time, random things.

And, um, and so we're constantly kind of exploring, you know, what are these, what can we grow? What can we find? There's a lot of stuff out there, especially in fisheries that aren't fish because everybody's so focused on one kind of commodity, you know, a good that everybody's going to, you know, basically pilfer, you pilfer the entire salmon population until there's no more left because they get a higher price, but then there's 20 other species out there that are actually really delicious. That are underutilized.

And completely underutilized. Yeah, like another dish, and this is the thing I've been harping on for people that live in the Pacific waters is what I feel has got to be like the most underutilized, not that being underutilized is a bad thing, but the sea cucumber being a thing that's just like, like in my mind, underutilized. Well, it's, you know, it's, it's like, I feel like it's a, like a challenging thing for people to, to get past because it's, you know, it's, it's slimy. It looks nasty to some people. But, you know, it's kind of a hidden treasure, in my opinion.

It's delicious once you treat it the right way. Did you guys like that sea cucumber last time? I loved it. It was great, man. Yeah, it's delicious. It's not the way we do them. I noticed you don't fry anything. Do you ever fry anything? We grill fry.

So our whole, you know, our whole kind of ethos is all fire cooking. So if you noticed, every single thing you had was cooked over the fire in some way, some manner. And so all of the methods that we used to use for regular cooking, we've now created a way to cook it over the fire in the same way. So when we fry something, it's called grill fry. And so let's say you have a flour. And we'll coat this flour they like a like a floral flower right yeah and uh we'll coat it in a batter i'm gonna have a specific batter and we will uh let it dry a little bit and then we have perforated pans they're just like saute pans and so we'll

we'll we'll then take the dried the coated dried semi dried, semi-dried rather, or at least the batter is dried, flour. And then we'll brush the pan with oil and then brush the flour with oil and then throw it on the grill. So it's basically sealing that batter around the outside. And so you wind up with what we call grill fry. Do you call that your hearth over there? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So we're going to take a picture of this and put it up in the show notes so you can go check it out. You got a hearth that's like six feet wide? It's eight feet plus six feet. Different sections. You got a fire going in there. And what woods? I know you said you'll burn some almond.

Almond, fruit woods of different kinds depending on the season. So if you have, for instance, fig season right now. So we'll take fig wood and we'll grill a fig dish over the fig wood. And so we use that kind of layering method for different fruits. Could be apple, could be quince, could be pear, whatever it is. And when I came in here this morning, you got about a rick of wood stacked outside your front doorway to come inside. So they got a fire.

They got like a campfire burning in your kitchen. Yeah. And as I was eating, I was looking over there and imagining that I'd walk over and it'd be like this giant grill set up with a big-ass fire and a grill way over it. But what the guys are doing is there's a campfire burning, and they're shoveling out little, like, little shovel piles of amber. I feel like you're misrepresenting the campfire. It's not a campfire because there's no one camping. Yeah, but it's not.

How is it different than a fire you'd build if you built a fire anywhere? Tell us. It's a fire. No, it's wood burning on fire. Relatively, I think. No, we're just burning down a bed of ambers, basically. That fire is devoted. Okay, Yanni's tripping up on camp.

Okay. All right. I'll tell my version. You tell your version. All right. You got a damn fire. Wood burning in a fire that was remarkably similar to how one might think of as a campfire. Right?

It's not in a, it's just burning in the corner. Right? Am I wrong or am I right? You're right. Yep. And your cooks who are working this take what looks like the kind of shovel if you had a fireplace and you had like a little shovel to shovel out ash out of your fireplace periodically they have one of those and they scoop out a pile of embers

that's not even a quart of embers and make a little ember bed and have little grates that they have sitting over that ember bed, and that's what they're working on. Yeah, or any utensil. So we have perforated pans, we've got grates, we've got skewers, a variety of different tools that we use to cook over the embers. And that ember bed is not more than two inches deep and probably not that, and maybe a square foot.

Yeah, depending on what you're cooking. Depending on what you're doing. So there's a lot of, I mean, basically, the majority of the cooking is done near the fire and over the ambers. And then you got your racks way the hell above the fire. Right. Where you just got all kinds of shit stacked up there.

So I'll give you an example of like, you know like uh so we you dehydration right dehydrate uh um whatever so for us let's give me a difference uh let's use uh there's a dish that's well known that we do that's called brassicas and so it's a bunch of brassica leaves things in the brassica family could mustards you know cabbages whatever yeah broccoli is a brassica leaves, things in the brassica family. Could be mustards, you know, cabbages, whatever. Yeah, broccoli is a brassica. Sure. And so you take the leaves, and we basically lay it out flat and maybe brush a little light amount of oil on there and then lay it out flat on a rack,

and then we'll put it over almost imperceptible heat, just really a scattering of ambers. Where it's probably over four feet above that. Well, that's a different thing. That's what we call fire in the sky. So that's a different method. It's like a different type of dehydration where it's slowly getting smoke. But it's a similar thing, different outcome.

Okay. And so this is just above a little bed, maybe three inches above. It's on a rack, a bunch of leaves, and it just slowly kind of absorbs the flavor of the fire. And it gets dehydrated. So that's one example of, and it's like a chip. You can just eat it like potato chips. Gotcha. But it also has that, like, beautiful sweet smoke from the fire.

So that's one example of, like, really low cooking. And then, you know, for meat, for instance, what we'll do is we'll get a chunk of meat out right and we'll we'll temper it near the fire so it's already slowly starting to accept the heat right and it's and it's uh you know we pull it out of the out of the aging room let it come to room temperature put it near the fire okay and so it's slowly already starting to accept the heat a little bit right and it's softening and it's developing more flavor right uh and then we'll throw it on a bed of ambers which is you know however big the product is and the height of the bed depends on the heat that we want and then the distance from the top of the ambers to the bottom of the product is also dependent on how long we want to cook it for how

much you know heat we want or how hard we want to sear it or whatever, right? Yeah. So, okay, talk about those quail. How long do you, so you had a plucked quail. How long do you age a plucked quail for? Six days. At 45 degrees in a room with a lot of circulation. A lot of air circulation.

The key is that you've got to have air circulation all the way around these meats so that you're starting to dry it. But you want the humidity to also be high enough to where it doesn't dry out too much. Yeah. Right? So that's the balance. So you've got the perfect room. Perfect room. And it's 45 or so degrees.

Yeah. And six days. And that quail sits there plucked, just gutted and plucked for six days. Yeah. And then you grilled the quail and i've grilled like a mess of quail and i was telling you that when i grill a quail i grill that quail for not 10 minutes you grill your quail for two hours yeah really low heat in and out of the heat right in and out so you're basically that's the you know that's an in and out method of roasting meat to where you're basically exposing the meat to

depending on how much fat content is meat. Let's say for this quail, for instance, medium heat for just a very brief period of time. And you take it off the heat and you let it rest out. So residual heat really has the opportunity to spread throughout the entire piece of meat and then once it comes down to basically tepid or room temperature where there's no more cooking happen then you repeat that process over and over again and you wind up but i have never this is this is the most surprising thing that that you cook is that you wind up with... It's like the texture...

You can tear the bird apart. Okay? Yeah. It breaks apart like how a bird should break apart when it's cooked. But the texture is... You achieve a texture that's more like raw quail. But not flabby, though. No, not.

But it still has a translucence to it. Right. It doesn't turn into your classic white stringy. Dry. Yeah, it's translucent down to the bone. And definitely not raw, but has almost like a cured quality to it. Well, here's what we're doing, basically. Basically, you're not only allowing it to age so those those oils start to uh first of all some of the moisture

comes out of the bird right and then when you're going back and forth on the heat like that you're getting all that moisture to move around a little bit but you're not putting on so high of a heat that you're forcing it out you know right so that stuff is just moving around in there gently and eventually it just rests out and rests over to where it's cooked, but it's not overcooked. Yeah. Yeah, I forgot. We were going to come back to you,

and you were going to offer the more accurate version of the damn fire. I'm curious about this. Well, when I saw the fire that – well, I saw two things that I was going to ask about, actually. One, the campfire that Steve was referring to. I doubled around and said it's not the campfire that Steve was referring to. I doubled around and said, it's not a campfire, it's a fire. The fire that he's referring to that was in the right back corner, right?

I just felt like there was an intense management of that fire. Oh. And you're saying campers don't manage their fires. Sure. I just imagine a fire, just like this pile of wood that's on fire, and there may or may not be a bunch of embers or whatever,

but this was like two or three pieces of wood that were being very carefully managed to extract those embers. Yeah, here's the difference. Yeah, you're right. I didn't even notice that, really. I don't even think about that consciously, but basically, you're camping, you want the flame. You're out there, you

want the flame. You want the heat from the flame. For us, we want the ambers. So we're basically positioning it away to where it's all piled on top of each other so that you can stick a shovel in there and harvest the ambers when you need it. And you're pulling out, you're pulling out, are you guys crushing the ambers a little bit? No, but that's why. Because you're pulling out like centimeter like square centimeter embers yeah so that's why we chose almond wood because it burns down almost perfectly but a lot of wood does too if you just if you just manage the fire like you're like yanni's talking about so you you have

you know we've got that little fire of you know under the amber pile let's say imagine is i don't know four to six pieces of wood all burnt down and then you've got another maybe two or three on top to just regulate that bed of amber so it keeps it glowing hot the whole time. Yeah. So you've got some flame going on. Yeah. So you're not grading out the embers, like how the embers all look so perfect. That's just the quality of how the fire is being managed and what kind of wood you're

burning. Yeah. I mean, pretty much any wood you can accomplish the same thing with, but it's really the management of the, the, the pile of flame, flaming logs on top of the bed of the Amber is to keep it hot. Hey folks,

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. I'm guessing there's also some sort it looked like there was just like the perfect draw like the perfect air moving across that uh fire yeah right like it was just like it seemed like you could put your hand three feet above where that fire was and you would burn your hand just because of the way that air is moving across it providing oxygen you know to so it's burning super hot yeah this is a design of the fireplace right so it's got that you know it's got that suction and basically like the way that this this has a little lip over the like the hood has a lip over the fireplace it basically draws the air in the fireplace up around and then out the flue so it's just good fireplace design

yeah yeah it's really surprising to me like how much you guys are cooking over fire. Everything, even dessert. Yeah. It tastes better, man. Did you have to dick around a lot to get your hearth or fireplace right with circulation? Well, no. I mean, I had a really talented designer who designed the draw of the fireplace. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Abalone. So those small, because you can dive for abalone in California. You can dive for abalone in Alaska. There's regulations on it. I know that, for instance, at our place in Alaska, because I'm not a resident of Alaska, I'm not able to dive for abalone. My brother is. He's a resident of Alaska.

He's allowed a couple abalone a day. They're much smaller than down here. They've got a size limit on them. So you serve some small abalones. Those must be out of an aquaculture facility. Yeah, exactly. I got you. And then you had some giant abalone shells,

and those are probably like wild shells. Those are the ones I ate. I just use it as a plate now. Do you dive for them? No. You never dive for them? No. No.

Yeah. No, ever since I heard a story about my buddy, well, this guy that I know, not my buddy, but a guy that I know that dives for abalone around here. He's like a sea forger and uh he was telling me a story about how they went up i think it was around eureka or fort bragg or something like that a lot of abalone up there and uh him and his friend were they got in the water and uh and uh there was there's a bunch of seals in the water and which is a good sign there's no shark right basically yeah or or it's a good sign there might be one soon well so uh so they're diving and he comes up and i guess the boat is uh off

the disc 100 yards maybe and uh then he realizes there's zero seals in the water right all seals are on the rocks and so you know obviously he's freaking out a little bit his head and uh swims to the boat uh takes his gear off takes his flippers off throws in the boat you know, obviously he's freaking out a little bit in his head. And swims to the boat, takes his gear off, takes his flippers off, throws in the boat, you know, goes to push up into the boat, sits down, turns around, and there's a great white right below him with his mouth open, maybe a few feet. Yeah. Just takes a pass by and goes away.

That's terrifying. Can't do it, man. I feel that surfers get a lot of mileage out of their dealings with white sharks, but there's a lot more surfers than there are abalone divers, and I think that the abalone divers are more in the mix. Yeah. Have you read Cannery Row by John Steinbeck? No.

We talked about it a couple times yesterday because it takes place in Monterey Bay, and they do a lot of, even back then, so Steinbeck was writing during the Great Depression, right? Writing about that era. And in that book, those boys are always illegally harvesting abalones back then. It's been like a tightly regulated industry for a long time. We also talked about Cannery Row because in the book, one of them works

at a bar and whenever a client leaves, he just takes whatever was left in their glass and dumps it into a bucket. That's what him and his friends all drink. That's their alcohol source. Wait, I missed that. What was it? What do they drink? The guy that works

in the bar, anytime a client leaves anything left in his drink, in his glass, beer, wine, liquor, whatever it is, it just goes into a bucket. They just dump it into a bucket. And they drink that at the end of the night. And that's what the crew in Cannery Row, that's their alcohol source, is just the dregs from everyone's drinks. But they're also avid abalone poachers

uh monkey faced eel i've fished for those before that's not a that's not a popular commercial fish nope uh but they just i think they just um allowed a commercial fishery on it now yeah yeah um well i mean i think i uh i i don't think eel in general is very popular, right, for a lot of people. Unless it's like, you know, unagi. Right. But it's delicious. It's very similar, right? If you were to cook it exactly the same way as unagi, it would come out, you'd wind up with a very similar texture.

So it's less fatty, but other than that, it's very similar. Yeah. You know, with unagi, more and more they're turning to American eels because of how depleted eels are. The eels that the Japanese are traditionally using are so depleted that they're turning now to American eels. And there's a lot of controversy right now because what guys are doing is harvesting glass eels, which is a baby eel.

Because, you know, like anadromous fish, right? Anadromous fish live in the ocean and run up a river to spawn. A catagronous fish lives in a river and goes out to the ocean to spawn. And eels are catagronous. So they're in American rivers. And they go out and they just keep going out into the Atlantic, and they keep just going to deeper and deeper and deeper water. And that eventually leads into a place called the Sargasso Sea.

And they spawn in the Sargasso Sea. And then the larvae just free float on the currents. And eventually the larvae develops into what's called a glass eel, which is just a little teeny thing that looks like a translucent piece of a noodle or just like a little, almost like a little piece of seaweed that you can see through. And they start migrating up rivers. And now there's a big market for guys that go out and harvest glass eels, which are worth thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per pound, to sell glass eels into aquaculture facilities because you obviously can't breed them in captivity.

You can raise them in captivity, but they can't be bred in captivity. So we're in a situation now where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is more aggressively trying to get a grip, as this demand for glass eels is growing, to try to get a grip, like as this demand for glass eels is growing, to try to get a grip on where these things are coming from, where they're going, and if we're going to wind up doing to our own eels what they did to their eels and completely deplete them out. So have you had a full-grown glass eel?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we smoke them. Yeah. I used to, like, I lived for a while i had an old girlfriend that was doing a writing fellowship in rhode island and we rented a house she rented a house that sat on the tide line in rhode island and i would trim deer steaks at night or whatever and i would just take like whatever i trimmed off silver skin and stuff and I'd put it on a hook and I could cast it off my deck out into a little bay and I would open the bail on my rod and lay it in front of the couch when we're watching movies at night and I would take a little piece of masking tape

that was white and just pinch that masking tape on the line at my rod tip. And we'd be watching the movie, and pretty soon you'd see that masking tape moving across the living room rug. Then I could just grab my rod, open a sliding door, and I'd pull eels up over the deck rail. And you'd get some freaking giants, man. And I would just gut them. That is a brilliant way to...

It's a great way to fish. It's just lazy fishing. I would just leave the head on gut them and brine them and smoke them and what i the way i would produce them is there's a guy uh there's a guy named ray turner on the delaware river who runs an eel weir and when you're doing eel weirs they just build rock wall rock wall funnels for commercial harvest and they're hard instead of like they're harvesting the run, right? The eel run.

But the eel run is going down river. Everyone thinks of like a fish run going up river, but they harvest them when the eels are migrating to spawn headed down river. And so I was writing about him in my first book and he kind of turned me on to how he likes to cook his eels. And he runs a place called Delaware Delicacies and sells eel and sells american eels so he does smoke them or he smokes yeah he runs a smokehouse yeah so he smells a variety he sells a variety of smoke products but

his his his like main offering that he sells in the restaurants and things is that his main offering is a smoked eel yeah well these guys these guys are you know what they're basically in in rock holes yeah right monkey face yeah that's how my uncle don taught me how to catch them is just dipping bait down into cracks in the rocks yeah yeah they have out here they have this little like upside down pole it's like a stick basically with a little leader on it i guess a. A little hook and bait. It's almost like jigging for them. You only have like six inches of wire off the end of your rod

because you want to be able to cram the stick back into things. They're big. You'll feel them in there bucking around. You drag them out. It's like a six inch leader and a bait on the end of

an eight foot long around and he'd drag them out but it's like a six inch leader and a bait on the end of a you know like a you know eight foot long car antenna yeah it's an interesting way to fit so there's no line well there's a leader yeah a little sleep but you got a poking pole yeah the technical term would be a poking pole with a leader out like a wire on the end with a hook. And you're just trying to deliver that bait by cramming it into cavities, under rocks, any kind of cave thing. And you'll hook them sometimes. What you got to be careful about is you got to think ahead. Like, are you going to be able to drag a big-ass eel out of there?

Because he might have come in some other route. Like, let's say he's got something you don't even know about where he's coming in some hole and then he winds up in a spot and you cram through some little crack to get him and then you get him where he's on but you can't get him out how you came in. So you got to make sure

you're always fishing a crack that's going to be big enough to pull like an average monkey-faced eel back out of the hole. And it's a dangerous fishing because you're out in shit that's just getting battered by waves. So it's fun, man.

But it's like a high-risk angling. So, all right, we talked about sea cucumbers already, which is kind of my, I'm like way into sea cucumbers right now. But we got to touch on that again. Monkey-faced eels? No, the sea cucumbers.

We didn't talk about the eel skin yet. Oh, right. No, and that's another crazy thing. Yeah. So for these eels, they're basically grilled. The flesh is grilled, but there's a sauce that's brushed on, made with all the grilled bits, the bones, the trim, all that stuff from the eel. It's put into this sauce and allowed to basically create a glaze, more or less.

Then it's brushed on the eel flesh and it's grilled. The skin, in Japan, they do what's called fugu, the blowfish. That's the one that has the toxic part, right? Yeah yeah so if you don't

cut it the right way it'll kill you yeah right um but uh but anyway they take the skin and they they make like a cold skin kind of like salad or something or you eat it with the flesh and so it's basically boiled skin like cleaned and then boiled skin and then chilled and then it's just how long you had to boil the skin for? Five minutes. It just depends. In monkey face deal, it's pretty quick. So you scrape all the slime off. Clean it, purge it, rub it in a little salt, rinse it in some water, and get all the meat off. And then you can basically just boil it in a pot if you want.

For us, we put it inside a cryovac bag, and it's basically compressed in a cryovac bag so it's flat and it never curls up. And then we just steam it when it's in the cryovac bag until it's tender you can just push through it you can just put your fingers through the skin and once that's tender you take it out throw it in an ice bath and it's it's ready to go you can steam it in the crab it's not in the water it's in the water because it's in a cryovac well we just place the skin directly in the bag you don't have to you know and just and just seal it and compress it and seal it but then put it in your in your like sous-vide water yeah you could do that or you could just steam it just holding it over just put it throw it inside a steamer okay yeah yeah and then and then so you can either put it in the water or you just steam it right um and uh and then once it's tender just chill it and it might be tender in how long? Just a couple minutes.

Every fish is different, but in this particular case, it's like three minutes. And then you slice it so it looks like julienned carrots. Except with a texture of cold noodles. And then you put a sauce on that or toss it in something. Yeah, there's like a little vinegar made from the monkey face, the old bones, and some herbs. And then you serve it with the flesh yeah that was a very surprising dish the the skin yeah yeah because that's the kind of that's kind of thing that impressed me most about what you're doing is you put more attention into the more love and care into the that everybody

throws away that's good stuff man that's the stuff, man. That's the sweet meat. That's the good stuff. Like a lot of this stuff is like the, you know, the chitlins or the skin or, you know, and there's so many alternative textures or, you know, other textures or flavors that we don't use. We, in my opinion, we have a very wasteful, you know, kind of culture in the way that we, or at least right now, because, you know, our food practices are so like, oh, let's just take the, you know, let's just take the tenderloin and throw the rest away, because we don't know what to do with it.

So really a lot of it is just, you know, just got to reassess some of these things. Yeah, that's the thing I think that needs to happen in game management is a lot of states are aggressive about salvage requirements, okay, about curbing wanton waste. And I think that it's not even like a lefty-righty thing, right, where you have like some politically very conservative states, Alaska, Montana, that are really strict about salvage

requirements. So if you think about the goal of you know, a goal of conservatism would be that you're alleviating people from regulation. Right? You're not telling you're like, the goal is to not tell people what to do. Not mandate to them how to behave

or what to do. But here you have like really conservative states who are also saying, no, dude, you are going to retain the usable portions of your animals to the point where my brother hunts a moose unit in Alaska where they mandate that you retain the liver. That's the only case I can think of where a state has come out and said you're not going to waste that moose's liver and that in that particular unit but some states are still like

really lax about it i remember being down i remember going down in south carolina with a friend of mine down to his local butcher and when they gut a deer part of their deer gutting process is to saws all the way the ribs and saws all the way the shanks and that all goes into a dumpster because even they're a commercial processor they have the salvage requirements aren't in place and then the commercial processor is not even even attempting to deal with it ribs and shanks i my own two, every shank and every rib off those deer was into a dumpster. That's crazy to me. Think about it from just like a sustainability perspective. If you're a hunter and you're out there and you're throwing away half of these things, it could be turned into, I mean, think about it. You could make soup for a week, two weeks, three weeks.

You can braise the shanks and make stew for your whole family for another week. There's so much that's, I don't know how it got like this. It's crazy, though. There's so much on there. We live in just abundance man yeah we live in abundance yeah i'd say in most states you don't have to keep the neck no no i don't know about most no i would say yeah probably most states you don't need to keep the neck but it's like it's more like over the course of over the course of my hunting life i always learned more

and more stuff like i remember we used to always bone out our shanks and just grind them for burger. And I was like, oh shit, you can make all kinds of good stuff with shanks. And then I remember the first time I ever tried to mess with, it was my third year of college. We started trying to mess with cooking deer tongues and we couldn't really figure it out, but eventually got it figured out. And I'm like, oh no shit, you can cook tongue. And then on down the line, right right and then you think you get to a point where you're like man i'm getting to a point where i'm really utilizing a lot of stuff but then last night i eat with you and i'm like yeah i haven't even scratched the

surface i'm still i like recently we discovered collars on fish yeah okay so the the the meat surrounding the meat surrounding the um behind the gill cover like the throat of the fish okay uh recently discovered that i was like no shit like i can't believe how many pounds of this stuff we have yeah how many pounds of this stuff we'd thrown away. Another thing, like on the waist thing, man, is black bears. You recently were hunting bears this spring in BC, is that right? Yeah, I went to BC, yeah. I've never eaten organs on bears,

even though obviously they'd be fine. I can't think of ever eating a bear heart because I feel like, you know, man, for lack of a better word, I just feel like there's like a lot of weird, almost like a, for lack of a better word, like a spirituality thing, man, where like a bear heart, like it's just like, I can't look at it as an appetizing thing for some reason. But you were saying there's a tradition in Scotland that you cut an X. Yeah, there's an old, yeah.

On the tip of the heart. I feel you on that. I understand what you mean by that. I'm obviously not the first person to think it because of what you told me last when we were talking about hearts. No, I mean, it took me a while to get to the point to be able to even want to hunt a bear. In fact, some of it came from just actually watching your show too.

But yeah, there's an old tradition where you basically make an X in the bottom of the heart, and they say it's supposed to release the soul, right? So it basically allows you to consume this thing freely. Yeah, and so I never ate bear heart. I never ate bear tongue for another illogical reason because when i used to send bears in to get them tested for trichinosis um they'd want the tongue because apparently it's a great there's a lot of uh larvae get in the tongue and that stuck in my head um you know sorry to again that just brings up a question for me.

Steve and I are both carriers of trichinellas paralysis. Did you have a sore tongue when you had sore back muscles and legs? My tongue never got sore. Did you have a sore tongue? No. So you're saying that it never goes away completely? Well, they only know from animals that they've, it's hard for them to really map when it goes away completely? Well, they only know from animals that they've – it's hard for them to really map when it goes away

because you'd have to have an infected animal. No, I mean as a consumer of draconis infected bears. Yeah, you stay infected at least 10 years. Oh, wow. You can't get sick again. So do you have to take medicine all the time? No, because you can't. Unless you ate your own arm, You can't get sick again. So do you have to take medicine all the time? No, because you can't, unless you ate your own arm, you can't get sick again. You're a carrier,

and when something scavenges your carcass, they'll get sick. But you can't get sick from your own infected meat. Right. It's out of your digestive tract, and the larvae live in calcified cysts in your muscle. So the bear that we got sick from had, I think it was 868 larvae per gram. So if you ate a pound of that bear, you ate a half million larvae. That's a lot of larvae. And they die at 165 degrees. So what do you,

like, how do you get rid of it? You got to take pills? You just tough it out. Unless you catch it right away. Like if you ate, I gather if you ate infected meat, let's say you ate some raw meat that you found in your buddy's fridge. And then your buddy's like, that day or the next day, your buddy's like, dude, that was bear meat.

You're fucked. If you then took the deworming pills, you'll head some of it off. But once they get along in their life cycle enough, and you start getting the muscle aches, which is a month later, you miss your chance because you don't get sick for a month. In a month, you get muscle pain. And what that muscle pain is, I mean, you might have some gastrointestinal upset that you would just pass off as any number of things.

The muscle ache is so peculiar and intense that then you're like, something ain't right. But by then, the pill's not going to be any good. But even then, nine in 10 cases in our country are misdiagnosed for a fever. Yeah. Because when you get the flu and you get muscle aches, it took me... The only reason I would have never put it together if three of the guys I work with were all complaining about the same thing and we hadn't been together for a month. I wonder if I have trichinosis. You might.

You'll be all right. No, I mean, from the past, yeah. Yeah, have you had a similar bout? A lot of this stuff sounds very familiar. Yeah, you might be like, dude, I've just been feeling like shit. I got wicked muscle pains. I got some kind of something.

Yeah, I mean, I felt like I had run a marathon. Ten days later, yeah, I kept thinking I had a weightlifting injury across my entire body. And then you'll hang out, and then like 10, 11, 12, 14 days later later you're just back to normal and you got through it but you're infected now to say like how long you're infected for you'd have to know this is let me give it let me give an example when i was at the mountain house factory mountain house freeze-dried food i was like hey what's the shelf stability of mountain house freeze-dried food and they're like well we don't really know i mean we know what we'll say like a defendable position but a peculiarity of it is that we have some from a long time ago that we've kept in a controlled space and it's still good but we can

only tell like that we don't know the far end of it. We only know what the oldest sample we have is. And to really map out how long you stay infected, you'd have to have an animal that you knew got infected and when it got infected, and then watch it for 20 years, and then butcher its meat and see if the cysts were still good. And since no one's really done that, they can't say for certain how long something can stay infected for. It would be interesting.

I should donate. I might donate my body to science when I die because. I thought they could just take a chunk of flesh and do a biopsy. Yeah, but I don't want to go through that. So, yeah, I should wait a decade. I should wait a decade from infection, which would be, I don't know, what year was it? It was 2012. Okay. So in 2022, I'm going to go down to the CDC and I'm going to offer a biopsy of my arm. Then they will be able to test if the cysts are still

good. I'm throwing this out there right now to the CDC. They'll be able to test if those cysts are still alive. They'll know that you stay infected for 10 years. And I will, every 10 years, commit to testing to find out how long you stay, how long the cysts are good for. But they're good. I know it's like at least 10 years. But the only thing that can liberate that, the only thing that can liberate the larva from its calcified cyst is stomach acid. You're curious. You're even making notes.

Can you eat bear freely now? Can you eat an infected animal and not be sick again? Why don't you bring that up? I'll let Giannis field that one. Yeah, I don't know what got me back onto the USDA website. I think I was researching something else, Yeah, I don't know what got me back onto the USDA website. I think I was researching something else, but I saw something about trichinosis. I was like, oh, I'll read up a little bit. And it said that they think, they believe through some research that had been done,

that animals do develop an immunity um after they've been infected yeah but it's not not a hundred percent and also not all bears have trichinosis you don't you it's something that each individual needs to acquire through the consumption of infected meat so uh yeah you could kill a young bear and depending on what he's been up to, he's might not have ever encountered infected meat. But there is some evidence that over time as a bear gets older and older and older, it's the likelihood of it having encountered infected meat. And probably particularly when they get big enough that they're regularly eating other bears, the chances of that bear becoming

infected go up. By no means are all bears infected with trichinosis. I've had them tested and had them test negative and I had them tested and had them test positive. You know, in Japan, they eat a lot of bear that is undercooked or raw.

They might have a lot of trich is undercooked or raw. I mean, not raw, but undercooked. They might have a lot of trigonosis. I was talking to someone from the, I think they were from Doctors Without Borders, and they were saying when they're working in areas of like equatorial Africa, where there's a lot of bushmeat consumption, they roll in and just as a gent gent like when they come in and do vaccinations and stuff in villages they roll in and just do deworming under the assumption they're saying our our operating assumption is that everyone's a trichosis everyone's suffering trichosis so bush meat you know like not not already dead but but hunted bush animals right yeah so yeah

yeah in africa it's just like just like what we call wild game. But generally, like bush meat would be that people hunting wild game and selling wild game, you say the bush meat trade, where people are actively out hunting in the jungle for sale. Yeah, it's just the term bush meat. It's like, yeah, their version of wild game. So yeah, they operate under the assumption that people are eating carnivorous animals or omnivorous animals and just getting infected and getting reinfected and infected and reinfected.

And they go in and treat people with deworming pills. When I bought a deworming pill for trichinosis, it was $2,400. My insurance paid half of it. I bought it, and the pharmacist said, I'm not going to tell you what to do with this information, but I can tell you that that pill is $7 when you give it to a dog. But she said, I don't know about the dosages. I'm just, like, throwing it out there. And I took it, and I didn't get better any quicker than anybody else. Yanni't took it he wasn't gonna spend his money on something so you guys got better at the

same time and you didn't i was way too late we were we had already been sick for five weeks yeah one of the biggest reasons i didn't take it is because when i spoke we were interviewed um everybody was just about interviewed by like their local uh state and county health department we all got calls from the alaska state epidemiologist because it just doesn't happen a lot. And the CDC because it's like mandatory reportable disease. They have to do a case on it. And the Alaska guy

was like, look man, that steroid that you'll take as a pill is so strong and severe that in my opinion, you might be doing more damage to your body by taking that pill is so strong and severe that, in my opinion, you might be doing more damage to your body by taking that pill than what is going on.

Can't you just chug a bottle of whiskey every now and then? Sure. Purge that out. This comes up a lot. It's just fun to talk about. No one got hurt in any kind of long-term way. It's just fun and funny to talk about. I talk about it often and with great relish. What point was I going to talk about and i talk about it often and with great relish but uh um tell point was i gonna make about it well we got we got here by talking we were talking about

tongues because we ate bear tongue oh yeah so that's always like stuck you know when you get like little things stuck in your head right like i remember getting real sick off canadian hunter whiskey and not being able to drink Canadian Hunter because just like the association. So I got stuck in my head about bear tongue. So you got the image of like little maggots. Yeah, and so it turned me off. But from your bear you got the spring.

You're very generous because you only get one tongue out of a bear, and you shared with me some bear tongue, the base of the tongue you pointed out, which you like. The fatty part. Yeah. And that's like cooking tongue. But you also did something that I'd always heard about with illegal wildlife trafficking in Asia, which is bear paw. Talk about how you handled bear paw, which I am guilty of having never,

that was in my discard pile. Skinned the paws to save the hide, but never using my paws because they were like, I just didn't think about it. I had no idea. Well, if you really think through the anatomy of a paw, you've got, when you start at the top, you've got the skin and then the pad, then all of that connective tissue and tendons and deliciousness underneath that. Then the meat around the knuckles, the cartilage and all that stuff.

So there's a lot of layers of flavor in there, right? And for those who like maybe chicken feet or, you know, something along those lines. But basically, we just blanch off that outer skin and the hair, and then you can braise it just like you would any braise, like a shank, right? You throw it in some fat, some aromatics, or you just throw it in a little broth to braise it, and then we grill it afterwards. But it's got all those layers. It's got all those layers of flavor.

It's used so much. It has, you know, a ton of flavor already i it's one of my favorite things i'm just trying to think of something to equate it to but i can't think of something to equate it to because it was uh yeah what's the parallel i mean on the i mean you've got that you've got that collagen on the outside right it's like a like chicken feet almost, right? That's what I'm trying to describe is that collagen that you could – it would be hard to cut it with a fork, chews up nice, and it's like the texture and consistency of raw abalone.

I don't know, man. A little crunch to it. Yeah, it's got a little crunch to it. And you can keep cooking and it'll get really soft if you wanted to. But we've decided to leave a little toothsome so you get a little texture in there. I'm telling you what, man. If you took a bear paw like that and laid it out in front of most people,

I'll give you 10 guesses what the hell that is and no one is going to guess. It's not like the freaking claw on there. Yeah, the writer Jim Harrison who was an avid hunter and fisherman, he always said that he saw a skinned out bear and could never eat bear because it was like he was looking at a skinned out human. I mean, it's shockingly similar.

I knew that going into it. This is the first bear I ever got. it's better not to hang if you have that problem if that problem would trip you up don't hang it skin it i've never met a person that's been involved with a bear that didn't say that about i don't get it like it's not that i don't get it it just i don't look at and be like oh my god it's a dude oh no it's just a bear like i've never had i don't like yeah Yeah, I hear you. Because the back legs... Well, just don't hang it by the neck and leave the fingers on it. That's what he saw.

I gather he saw one hang and it was like, not going near that. Alright, last thing I want to talk about. Last question. You have hung in your life, you have hung in your life you have hung game meat for a year right yeah over a year talk about that shit we get a million questions about we get a million questions about

what's up with age and deer meat and let me let me tee this off a little bit with kind of like what the questions come, what my personal experience is with it, and kind of just generally how I feel about it. And then I want you to go. But we get a lot of questions like, can you age deer meat? And I'm always like, yeah, man. If you have the proper facility, right, the proper kind of space, you can age deer meat.

I've found it is just like a dude with a house and a kitchen in it and that i hunt a lot of like pretty remote areas it often just doesn't come up for me right like i'm you're dealing in like imperfect situations where the the way to ensure that animal's going to be like ready for many future meals is to get the thing cut up and put in your freezer where it's stable because you've got to have a climate controlled environment. Another thing I'll say to people is what I often do for aging

on a daily basis is I'll thaw blocks of meat out. I'll thaw roasts out and before cooking them I'll let them be on a rack in my fridge for a week 10 days two weeks sometimes and it dries a little bit on the outside but i'll clean it up and cook that and i feel that that meat is different than when i thaw it out like there's some transformation

going on there it's tenderizing um I used to take ducks and just gut them and put them in paper grocery bags and put them in my fridge for 10 days. They were better than ducks that you didn't do that with. My general feeling about it is you've got to have the right space. I've never had the right space.

Now, you run with it because you've rigged up spaces to do this. How in the world are you able to do that? And I also would like to hear if you think there is something that the guy at home, without the special space rigged up, include that. Well, I mean, just to think about prosciutto. Okay. All right.

Those old methods of prosciutto, right? Okay. All right. It's, you know, those old methods of prosciutto are, you know, you rub the socket and then You rub the ball joint. The ball, yeah, yeah. Sorry. The ball joint around the, you know, like the femur, I guess it is. And then you throw it on the counter by your fireplace and you just let it sit there for a couple of days and then you massage it every day. It's not like you're burying the thing in salt at all.

And these things get left out at room temperature. So it's not really that. It's just a different viewpoint for us, especially in America. But you've got to have, I guess, at home, you've got to have just the right air circulation. You've got to have the right humidity level, but more importantly, just air circulation. So all you're doing is kind of mitigating the, you know, surface moisture and the air circulation. So if you dry it off and you put it near a fan. You mean like physically dry it off with towels?

Yeah. So before it goes in there, you know, it's got to be in a good state. If you dropped your leg in the dirt or something like that and you had to rinse it off a lot and it's contaminated, I wouldn't recommend it. Yeah. But if you have a good,

simple deer leg, throw it in the fridge. Throw it in the fridge. Skin it out. Dry it off. Hang it in the fridge. You've got to fridge. Skin it out, dry it off, hang it in the fridge. You got to have circulation all the way around. And the reality is that the microbes in the air do the rest of the work.

For as long as you manage the process from the original surface moisture and continue to dry it off every day and have a lot of air circulation around, it's really super easy to do. There's zero things wrong with a deer that's been in the fridge for two weeks. You can eat it rare and it's perfectly fine. As long as you don't mess it up in between.

And you don't, like, is it for safety's sake, if you're going to try aging something in your fridge, you're saying you don't necessarily, not necessarily, you don't need to rub that thing down with salt or you hear people about rubbing it down with black pepper which has some antimicrobial quality you don't have to know you don't have to but but you know there's a lot of like ifs right like like if if inside you know there's some sort of bullet damage or shrapnel or something from that bullet spread apart and maybe hit like a little membrane and then you know how in some

animals you'll have like um all that moisture in the fascia in between like muscle layers so that's also an issue because that stuff starts to seep out as you age gotcha so as long as it's in good condition then you're you're good so talk about what it looks like after you've had a hang if you've hung something for a year it has a lot lot of mold on it. That's like salami. It's got that white piece on the outside. How do you know a safe mold from a shitty mold? Usually a shitty mold is, the safe mold is that really fine textured, smooth salami looking mold.

It's white and kind of silky, right? A bad mold is green, black, big hairs, big spores of hair that are growing off the moisture, the wet areas. You definitely don't want to eat that. I don't know what it is, but you definitely don't want to eat that. When you age, let's just focus on venison for a minute or antlered and horned game. What are you trying to achieve by aging it? Well, the whole point of it is that you basically you know

everything has a sweet spot like we're talking about earlier you know and so like a fish being dead for two minutes or two minutes or being dead for one year exactly and so and so there's there's like i was saying there's there's typically two sweet spots there's right when you get it and there's further on down the road so you you've got to decide for every product which, you know, further down the road which point is best for each product. Yeah. So, you know, as the animal sits and ages, basically the enzymes start to break down this animal, right? And they, you know, the flavor becomes deeper, right?

Not gamier or what we typically think of as, you know, kind of a nasty flavor, but it just deepens. It also becomes more tender. And so at that point, you can cut off a, if you let something age for really, like that outdad leg, right? I can cut off a steak of that outdad leg, grill it, serve it rare, and you can bite right through it. Yeah. bite right through it yeah we had one time just perfect conditions where we had a calf elk that uh was hanging in a garage and at night it'd be down in the upper 20s you know in the daytime

it'd be up into the 40s but we ate the whole thing without ever freezing any of it and i remember toward the end you could put you could put a finger into it you could jab your finger into it once it's really delicious once you cut the rind away and my old man used to tell stories of hanging deer until they had an inch of mold on them and cutting the mold away and then cutting that rind away and having just like perfect deer meat under there yeah but if a dude's doing it okay explain this then what are you not wanting to not happen like what are the things when you look and be like uh-oh i need to figure something out because this is going south it's it's all about moisture control moisture control air circulation as long it just look if you look at it and it's a it's like a

soppy mess i wouldn't eat it. I wouldn't recommend eating it. What about odor? There should never be a foul odor. No, there's never a foul odor, right? So you should never have any kind of, like nothing should be, you know, after the first few days, it's going to dry and it's going to drip. Any blood will drain off. Any moisture will basically drip off.

And you're diligent about. And you just wipe it down every day. You keep a fan on it, basically. The easiest way to do it is just to keep a fan directly on the meat. Or if you have a fridge, just put a little fan inside there, which isn't always the easiest thing to do, but just cut a little hole and stick it inside. But that's it.

That's really it. As long as it doesn't smell bad and it doesn't look like it's completely coated in moisture, or there's no excess moisture inside the joints joints around the bones you're fine and another thing you you talked about was you were dealing with lamb for your restaurant and you had taken kidney fat and kind of covered the that that ball joint area and packed it with kidney fat so that it dried on there and formed like a barrier. Right.

What are you doing when you do that? Well, so in that instance, we're basically preventing too much drying out, too much meat loss, right? Okay. So the outside of the meat ages really well, but where the meat's cut ages not as well. Is that just because you've introduced, because in the butchering process, you've probably introduced some bacteria onto that cut?

I have no idea, but most likely. I mean, it definitely feels different. When you skin an animal, it's got the fell or the fascia on the outside, and where you've cut, it's just different. Like when you skin an animal, it's got that, the fell or the fascia on the outside and where you've cut, it's just different. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not sure of why, but at least scientifically, but, but you know, it just doesn't age the same, right? So you gotta, you gotta protect it in some way or the other. And easiest thing to do is just to rub a little salt, you know, on there, you rub a little bit of salt on there and then let it hang. Then you're, you're almost guaranteed that you're going to be good as long as you dry it down so if a guy was going to rig up let's say let's say you were like you're like the refrigerator i don't have room in my

fridge um whatever right you don't you know you don't have room to hang a whole damn deer's leg in your fridge if you're going to rig up a a space or a room to to do some long-term aging, lay out kind of the parameters of what you're after. Well, I would get a fridge and throw it in, or you can do, you go to, I mean, let's just say that resources aren't an issue. Then you go get a commercial, like one of these things is reach-ins. It's like a stainless steel reach-in refrigerator. It's got a lot of room around, or just a little room on the inside so you can get good air

circulation around that meat. Then I would put a fan in there. Those typically already have a fan, right? They got a fan, yeah. Yeah, no, I'm fine doing the, yeah, you don't need to get into like DIY, like crazy shit that's going to cost five bucks like perfect world yeah so yeah you get you got a refrigerator box with really high air circulation and you throw a hook in there and you put your meat inside and just and at a point you get to where you're not doing any maintenance on it right so after

you know that typically like after the first week or so, depending on the size, like if you've got a whole elk leg in there, rear elk leg, then that's going to take a little longer to dry out, right? Yeah. You've got to watch it carefully for long. You've got to tend to it. You've got to make sure nothing's, you know, it's not touching the side of the refrigerator so the moisture doesn't accumulate or not touching other meat or, you know,

it's got free air circulation all the way around. But that's really the only thing you need to worry about. And then the temperature, you don't want to get, you want to keep around probably the perfect, not much warmer than 45 degrees or so? Yeah, I mean, I would keep it at 36. Oh, is that right? Yeah, keep it at 36.

And then all those things just help to kind of mitigate any issues that you'll have and you'll wind up with a delicious aged piece of meat. You know, the other thing that it does too is it also it also uh you know like i think a lot of people talk about gaminess yep but really that's the beauty it has no definition yeah it but that's the yeah no it doesn't it's all subjective but that's the beauty of wild meat to me is that gaminess right or or rather the taste of wild meat but you But aging it for a long period of time actually decreases that aroma of gaminess. Is that right?

And it makes it more savory. It's like a palatable savoriness that you get once it's aged all the way. Yeah. And when you're doing that, the end would be that the dryness on the outside marches in from each side, and you'd eventually wind up in this perfect situation. This perfect aging situation. When you went too far would be that the part

that you needed to trim away to get to the good stuff, that part grew and ate away what you were trying to hang on to in the middle. You'd just have a piece that was like a solid rind. Yeah, I mean, you'll trim off roughly maybe half an inch all the way around, basically skin rind around the...

But that slowly goes inward, right? I mean, over time or does that not do that? It does over time. Yeah, over time. And then, you know, so that Barbary Sheep, that Alda that I have up there, you know, you'll have an inch that's wasted up there you know you can you know you'll have an inch that's wasted around you know rind all the way around that's wasted yeah but on the inside it's still you know it's over a year so it's dried all the way but you can cut off a slab of that

like prosciutto and eat it like that no shit yeah man that's like i gotta start getting more into that shit like i've done some i've done some of that stuff only because conditions were right. Well, I'll send you a spec later on. The perfect environmental conditions for all that. Yeah. We'll put that in our show notes, man. Yeah. All right.

Yanni, you got any final thing you want to ask about? I do, man, but I think we're out of time. Really? Well, yeah, we're close. My concluder is, you are thrown away. If you hunt and fish and handle your own stuff, you are throwing away a lot of good stuff. It's not even that

you're a dick. It's just you just don't know. You could be a dick, too, but it's like you're throwing away good stuff because you just don't know how good it is. Someone's got to show you. You've got to talk to people who know more than you know. There's not enough information about it, really. I think that we've got to look at our practices and reassess.

Yeah. But it's not that easy to use eel skin if you've never seen it done before. So we've got to have the information. Because it wouldn't even occur to you. Yeah. eel skin if you've never seen it done before right so we've got to have the information because it wouldn't even occur to you yeah yeah you don't know that you're uh you don't know that you're not being smart until someone demonstrates it to you all right uh you got any final things you want to add that was it that was the one dude it's like we should do this like every little once in a while and just keep talking about it because yeah i got it well it's never ending really right it's never

ending if you really start to look at every animal right there's so many you know everyone's a little different and we haven't even gotten into how to slow grill a pineapple with clarified butter well no that's our butter it's not even clarified butter it's what butter and rum our butter and rum butter and rum yeah all right next time next time it's all about pineapples all right uh thanks again man i really appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate you guys coming. All right, man. Don't forget the Meat Eater Live event,

Ellen Theater, Bozeman, Montana, August 15th, 6 p.m. Still got a couple tickets. Get them now. 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.

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