The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 099: Wild Game Basics

Episode Date: January 15, 2018

Seattle, WA- Steven Rinella talks with chef Andrew 'Pooder' Radzialowski, First Lite's Ryan Callaghan, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: Jacques Pépin, a.k.a. Jack Peppin; Steve's squid jigging breakthrough; stuffing a deer inside a pig; Matt Rinella's strange new wild game recipe; the thinking man's hot sauce; Pooder's culinary tips; catfish fat; Cal's morel tip and tongue preparation; how to cook venison ribs to perfection; standard-issue whitetail deer; the bridge between the hunter and chef; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We're talking to Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. First off, what did you guys think about that mountain lion meat from last night?

Very good. Yeah, I thought it was delicious. Cougar meat. Yeah. Very good. Even my mother-in-law Very good. Yeah, I thought it was delicious. Cougar meat. Yeah. Very good. Even my mother-in-law ate it. Yeah. I was surprised how tender it was.

That recipe, well, it's, you know the chef Jacques Pepin? I call him Jack Pepin. Oh, yeah. He, that's his little sauce. Chinese five spice powder.

Uh-huh. Sauce, but I like foopled it which is even more than quadruple in it and he just does he does it with pork uh-huh and just you know kind of braises it for a little teeny bit yeah oven but i like with that cougar meat except for the loins that cougar you gotta waylay it with some long cooking. Yeah, because we did that. Because that was just like a roast. We did that loin for that one dinner, and it was a little dry. We grilled it, and it was a little dry.

Now, the part of the loin that has the fat on it is different because the fat on the lion fat is good, real good. Yeah, I almost felt like between all the chunks that i had and i've eaten over the last year that the i didn't like the backstrap as much the loin you like that roast last night didn't you well yeah because it has just more fat incorporated in it that was a fatty hunk that you're getting to use where that backstrap is very very lean you know and um it's just like no matter how you braise it or do whatever if you braise a fatty piece of meat and you braise that lean loin the lean loin still tastes drier it's drier in

your mouth you know you can stop it with sauce as much as you want right yeah it definitely benefited from that long slow cook well you'll notice that when like in my slow cooker, it was only the sauce in there, which is like five Chinese five spice powder, soy, ketchup, ginger, garlic, sherry vinegar. That sauce only came up like a third the way on that roast, which is probably like a three pound hunk of a lion's back leg. And I flipped it a couple times in there. Then the end mashed it up.

Not mashed up, but broke it apart so that it all took a little bath toward the end so that it all had a little sauce bath. Yeah, it was good. It's good, man. I like it it and then um impressions about squid well you've squitted yeah you've squitted down there first timer first time squitter yeah when you say you that was uh andy radulowski oh i haven't done intros

yet we're joined by chef andrew radzolowski who i have known for a bazillion years and real quick before we get to that i want to touch on me and andy's first wild game meal only kind of a wild game meal we were having like a little party back in the probably around 1995 1996 we were throwing a party because we were living in the same sort of weird flop house we were living in a house that had four people living in it none of whom were on the lease like this house had a very like a constantly evolving sort of cast of characters who lived there yeah there's many people went through that place yeah and we borrowed a pig roaster from my mom's neighbor, I think.

Or was it? I think I borrowed it from him. Yeah, you did borrow it. I had to like drag it an hour to where we lived. And then we had, so we had a pit, like we were getting a whole pig. But then me and my brother were out fishing steelhead or salmon. Was it the fall? It was the fall.

We were coming back from fishing salmon up on the Pierre Marquette River. And the dude in front of us ran a deer over. He didn't want it. So we took the whole deer and then drove it a couple hours down to Grand Rapids. Cut the deer up in the garage. And then sewed the whole deer with baling wire inside the pig. Yeah. And it came out phenomenal.

Unbelievable, man. Unbelievable. Like pork fat basted deer hunks. That was me and Poots. That must have been a pretty big pig. That was a big pig. Yeah, we fit the whole deer in it. I can't remember if we boned it.

Like we boned a lot of it out. Yeah, it was in pieces, I think. Yeah. But we got most of it in it. I can't remember if we boned it. Like, we boned a lot of it out. Yeah, it was in pieces, I think. Yeah. But we got most of it in there. Crammed in there, soldered up with wire. But the funny thing is, this all happened right on the corner of a very busy intersection in the middle of Grand Rapids. Who was the instigator?

With the party? With the pig turducken situation i don't know we just had a we were already cooking a pig and then we picked up a roadkill deer and well that's the key to the situation is having somebody who's like yes i will follow through with your stupid idea i have no recollection did we wrap something in hog wire too yeah or chicken wire did we roll that pig up in chicken wire no because it was in a roaster i think we just put that chunked up deer in there and just sewed it shut with baling wire and threw it in a roaster what happened was see i want to tell the story but i don't want to reveal my preferred alias that i use

anytime i had to have a social media account don't want to reveal my preferred alias that I use anytime I have to have a social media account. So I can't reveal my preferred alias. Anyways, we heard the doubt. Like in our neighborhood, we heard that you could block off your road in order to have a family reunion. Basically, we're trying to elude getting the party broken up by the cops. So we thought like, oh, we'll register as a family reunion. We just used the name from the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But that never registered it anyway. It just had our, yeah. So anyways, that's how far me and Andy go back. But you were going to say, yeah, so Andy is squitted because you're a Pacific Northwesterner. Yeah. You've done a bit of squitting. For the last 20 years. 20 years.

Yeah. Andy lives out on a lonely little island called San Juan Island. westerner yeah well you've done a bit of squid for the last 20 years 20 years yeah and he lives out on a lonely little island called san juan island where he catches fish and cooks and then uh we'll touch on that some more cal initial impressions of squid jigging loved it man i mean the whole scene like the whole asian community down there just chain smoking away and really extremely limited communication, even amongst us. And it's all about just like harvest. And it's dark, you know, city sounds going around and ferries moving around. Get a contact, buzz some cigarettes outside.

Yeah, and generator exhaust fumes. Yeah, that little combo. It was great, man. I loved it. You were lucky because we kind of had a translator last night. Did you catch that one dude that had some English? No, I've now and then had the privilege of sitting next to it. Most of the guys at Jake's Squid are,

I did a story on this years ago for Outside, and most of the guys I interviewed, well, in virtual, all the guys I interviewed were from Vietnam, like born Vietnamese, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines. Tends to be, I think that crew where we were, I think that crew is almost all Vietnamese that goes down there, I believe.

So yeah, you don't get a lot of... It's hard to... You kind of hack your way through some communication. But now that I've been next to guys who speak pretty good English, then you can sort of get the inside scoop. Well, I just don't... You know, like most little... I kept relating it to being on like a busy steelhead river i mean for the most part generalization for sure but for the most part if you are willing to

communicate with somebody it is possible um but you're still not going to exchange information it's like oh what kind of what color whatever are you running how far down are you most guys aren't going to tell you exactly what they're you know consistently hooking up on and it'd be the same in the little fishing pier community that we were in last night but what's different there is you you're not allowed any personal space on the squid pier. Yeah. Yeah, I was getting crowded out in that corner. If you start tuning them, people will, I mean, it's not measured in feet.

The amount of space you're given, like where your line hits the water, is given inches. Yes. People will just drop in. I think, too, though, the difference is that, you know, in a steelhead hole, you might be looking at, you know, what, 100 fish if it's a lot in there. And a lot of times it could be a few. There we're talking about thousands of squid. Probably tens of thousands of squids.

Really? You think it's that many? I mean, no, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know know it's a pile of them when they're in when the school comes through i mean it's got to be i mean just looking at a quick few quick online photos of like you know squid mating it's yeah okay big globs but yeah i mean and you're still like fishing into the abyss, right? You have your big bright light, but that doesn't do anything for the angler's vision at all.

It's like you're just illuminating murky, you know, zero visibility water. Yeah, you're running like a 20,000 lumen light, but you still got to use a headlamp to tie a knot. Yeah. Oh, I mean, yeah, so it just, it's got all the things I like about fishing. thousand lumen light but you still gotta use a headlamp to tie a knot yeah oh i mean yeah so i it just it's got all the all the things i like about fishing you know lots of lots of variables to figure out um but still tons of opportunities i like the multicultural bent to it too because i spent my whole life fishing with dudes who look just about like me yeah yeah no matter where i go

there i am you know and it's like the fish with people who are coming uh who have a completely different like american experience is nice man yeah and then when that dude hauled up the crab last night i was kind of giving him the thumbs up he's like everybody's cheering this guy on he caught a rock crab on his squid well he was special because he had caught a rock crab two nights in a row two nights in a row yeah that was cool just the whole scene itself sometimes you kind of get lost a little bit you're kind of focusing on looking down at water and jigging then all of a sudden you look up and there's a jumbo jet going over there's there's a ferry you kind of forget that you're right in that whole crazy downtown city we bumped

into like the two business guys yeah older business guys on the way out yeah like well how'd you guys do and then there's the fancy bar across the street and it's like nobody in there yeah don't don't say too much because that that little there's a lot of well yeah yeah kind of a little like i kind of like it yeah for sure and i have noticed mugs out on the piers that i feel like weren't out on the piers that long ago okay i got you like i'm i'm afraid of uh from talking about it too much that you you could i feel as though that you could instigate a demographic shift for sure an unwelcome demographic shift for sure out there that's where your staying power would come into play what do you mean i think folks are like yeah this sounds great and just dip their toe in

you'll get real frustrated real fast yeah yeah you gotta do a lot of jigging before you start kind of getting the basics i mean unless you got someone standing there giving you the what's up you could show up and just be kind of like, what's not happening here? Because squid don't hit. Squid, it's not a hit. Fondle. They fondle.

Fingering. They fondle. And it's not a hook. You're impaling the squid on wires and he doesn't hit he's he's down there fondling toying with the thing but super fun and because of all your guys's knowledge i felt like a squid jigging pro in about 40 minutes you know oh no yesterday it was a big i think i've been out four or five times prior to last night and yesterday was a much different uh feel for being part of the steve ronella's squid jigging crew i mean through yeah yeah that's what it felt

like it's like okay and steve had told me he'd sort of had a breakthrough a couple weeks ago he caught like 49 in an hour with the two kids yeah that's what two kids which is like less good than you do by one person right you know that's like that's not like three rods in the water that's like 0.75 rods in the water right yeah i think the first time i went out i didn't catch any and the dude right next to me was just one after another pulling them out. And, yeah, it can be frustrating. It makes you want to snap your rod over your knee and throw it in the water. It's like, how?

And I look at his jig, almost exact same setup. And it's like, how is this guy just pulling one after another? And I'm just sitting here. Because he knows when a squid's looking at his jig. Yeah, true. That's what I was saying about walleye last night, how they don't so much hit as look at it. Yeah.

Like, I understand it more and more all the time. And I got to see the flip side of the coin last night where when we were packing up, like a big part of that pier community came over. They were looking in our buckets to see exactly how we did and then they were looking at the jigs it was the first time i've ever been the subject of envy the first time i've ever been the subject of envy on a squid you can see it on their faces being like yep that jig is no different than mine like i just that's i love that part of it yeah it's just it was like

a 180 from the last few times like there's like nobody's paying attention to us we're just watching everybody else catch squid after squid after squid and this time the gal walks up looks in her bucket she looks at me and she's like huh seven pounds pretty good i was like yeah yeah i didn't like that aspect of it man i like i like flying low out there under the radar but yanni last thing i want to talk about this is something that you brought up to me that really breaks my heart um you're saying that like well it's because you haven't let me explain myself well i'm giving you a chance now can i can i tee it up yeah yanni found out that you can buy frozen squid for about 450 a pound and now like squid jigging less no i didn't say less you you put that word in my mouth i just said it changed

you know like my sort of perspective about it because that's you know one thing that i enjoy thinking about whether it's fishing hunting or, you're sort of out there getting things that maybe not everybody can put their hands on. You like the exclusivity. Yeah, and it makes it special. Yeah, like when you're out fishing spot prawns and those things are $40 a pound. Or what's a king salmon going for nowadays? Yeah, you'd spend a lot of money. I don't know.

I mean, you think about the marketing that goes into Copper River. I mean, that stuff comes out at, what, $50, $60 a pound when it first hits. It's unbelievable. You like that. You like either that people can't get it, like with Mountain Lion. If you want to eat some Mountain Lion, you either got to get it or have a buddy who, right? It's hard to find. Yeah.

But Joe Blow, anybody. That's the thing with saltwater fishing though freshwater fishing you're catching a lot of fish that there's no way to go get it like there's no way you there's no commercial way to get it yeah unless you're great lakes it depends on the species yeah, you could be fishing lake whitefish, which you can get. You can get walleye. You can get rainbow trout. You can get lake perch. And then there's all the aquaculture fish. But there are a shitload of species that you can't go by.

Morel mushrooms would be kind of somewhere in between. In between. You can buy them. That's another thing. You can buy it that's another thing you can buy it right yeah so there's things that there's game meats like lion being a great example there's many more moose you know that you can't purchase there's no way to go buy it then you have yeah illegal just there's no commercial market for it so there's that then there's the stuff that anyone

could go buy and when you catch it and you're like holy shit i just caught a 500 fish that feels pretty good like if you go catch a 30 pound king you got a valuable fish or a hundred pound halibut is a valuable fish then there's stuff that you go catch, which is a lot of ocean fish that's really not that expensive and pretty widely available. I don't think about it too much. Would I prefer that squid were worth $100 a pound? Sure. Because why not? It would probably attract attention, though.

Then it might attract attention though then it might it might be the reason why you can walk down there every night and find a spot on the fishing piers because they don't have that much value because even if you get a limit when you get a limit but here's the thing frozen squid if you get a limit 10 pounds so you could feasibly walk down and if you got the time to put in and you're good at it you can walk down and every time you walk off the pier you're walking off with a fresh version of something that has a commercial value of less than 50 bucks if you get a limit

what's the limit of squirrels worth can't sell squirrel there's no commercially available squirrel but what would a limit of squirrels really be worth if you rolled up to a guy and said hey man i got five squirrels what do you give me for them well people don't have people haven't had assigned a very high value to it they should they don't know any better so you're really not going to get very far unless you ran into me you wouldn't want to buy some other guy's squirrels yeah maybe but you know i know that when i did some uh bartering

back in the day some trading before you realized it was illegal yeah with elk meat i mean i put a very high value on that i mean a hundred a pound. You do know it's illegal to barter elk. Yeah. Don't do it anymore. Now I just give it away. But I think with this... Yeah, you give... It's hard to define, right?

Yeah. Because I'll... For instance, I recently said to my brother, who really missed... Because he lives in Alaska. He really misses panfish. They don't have panfish. So, because we fish a lot of perch,

I said, hey, hey man when you come down for christmas bring a cooler because i froze you a huge block of perch fillets and he's like i'm bringing a cooler anyways because i'm bringing down a bunch of king salmon for you now i don't imagine someone's gonna kick my door down and arrest me and there's not like i never said to him i'll give you x and you'll give me x it's just like there's like a sharing a type of sharing that goes on but i think you can't formalize it yeah we should look into that yeah it's just so odd because i mean this is stuff i do all the time but the funny thing is invariably like the circle that i trade amongst we also end up eating at the same dinner table

with a lot of those together and you eat it together anyways yeah like yeah i'll give them the purge and then we'll eat the purge together right but if there's no money exchange is it is it still illegal you can't actually yeah you can't go you know someone just recently sent me i feel like it's probably a i feel like it's probably a thing put out, a sting operation. But someone just recently sent me a Craigslist ad where some guy is like, hey, we only eat wild game. I'm willing to pay $4.50 a pound for deer or elk if there's any hunters out there that would like to sell their game meat. It could be legit or it could be a sting, but someone sent me a screen grab of the ad. But that's a purchase. I've been solicited that way but it is it's like you can't you can't engage in bartering

which i imagine the definition the definition has to be some sort of formal arrangement i got a buddy one time that was coming back from shrimping, and there was a guy, it was a crowded pier, he's coming back from shrimping, and there was a guy that was coming back from lingcod. And my buddy said, so he doesn't know this guy, my buddy says,

hey man, I'll trade you some shrimp for one of those lingcod fillets. And there happened to be an undercover game warden on the pier. Didn't find him but says you most definitely will not i find that hard to believe that's that's that's a formal it's like a sale he's like making a sale but with no money exchanged how is how is it good services yeah yeah you're like doing a thing but me saying to to my bro, oh, hey, I froze you up a thing of perch.

And he's like, oh, sweet. You know, funny you mentioned that because I froze you up some kings. I'm not like my giving him the perch isn't dependent on him giving me the thing. We're not a formal relation. It's just like an understanding that you are generous and share. Yeah, that seems blurry. So if I came down with a flail lingcod and said, Steve, let's eat this lingcod. And on my way out, you said, oh, here's an extra necro.

I'll take that with you. There's no problem with that. You're giving me something, me giving you something. Yeah. But it's different than a dude showing up on a pier and saying to a guy he doesn't know, I will make a formal trade with you. Because if the guy says, I'll take some shrimp, but I don't want to give you my lingcod filet, then I guess he just gave the guy says if the guy says hey i'll take some shrimp but i don't want to give you my lingcod filet then i guess he just gave the guy some shrimp yeah it's like it's like i

think it's a slippery slope because it's like okay yeah so we allowed the lingcod shrimp trade you know well the next time maybe he doesn't have any lingcod so he's like well i'll just give you 20 bucks or you can come by my oil shop and i'll you know change your oil or you know and all of a sudden you get to a place where you're basically selling the wildlife now friends of mine in alaska who are subsistence who live in subsistence areas they're allowed to barter yeah they can barter in a subsistence area, you can use fish. You can use wild-caught, subsistence-caught fish to do formal bartering. Do you know about if you can do it with big game?

I don't know if they're allowed to do it. I don't know if they're allowed to do it with big game. And that fully extends to the goods and services realm. Yeah, you can use it as a currency. Gotcha. Gotcha. Service my boat motor, i'll give you you know i haven't read okay i haven't i haven't like gone around i should clarify this is coming from

someone who is deeply familiar with the system gotcha yeah and that was his explanation to me but i don't want to stand here and say that i've like thoroughly read it and explored the whole thing i'm just kind of conveying like what he explained to me about it i want to clarify too that it's um knowing that squid has no value it's not going to it doesn't it has a great value sorry like that you can just go and buy it you know for a cheap price at a store it's not going to change my enthusiasm when i make it and serve it to other people and share it you know for a cheap price at a store it's not going to change my enthusiasm when i make it and serve it to other people and share it all right let's do this i'll be very excited calamari menu i want to find out that'd be a good little project for you as i move things along what does it cost to buy calamari in a restaurant a calamari appetizer eight to twelve bucks oh there you go and it

only takes a calamari appetizer in a restaurant is two squid two or three squid three would be and again depending on the size of squid but three i feel like would be a heaping bowl. So last night we had 40 appetizers worth of squid. So I can't even begin to do that level of math. We were ripping beaks. What do you think the cost is? I'm about ready to move. Just as a warning, like I give my kids five-minute warnings

when it's time to leave the playground. I'm about ready to move on. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Five-minute leave the playground i'm about ready to move on go ahead go ahead five minute warning i'm just about ready to move on 500 bucks worth of calamari plates all right so there you go cal go ahead andrew what would you say like your standard like breaded fried calamari appetizer would would cost to produce from the restaurant side or like your you know simmered sauteed with some peppers calamari appetizer well really yeah i mean it's really low cost because you think about just the appetizer where you're getting the breaded fried and a little bit of sauce on the side i mean there's nothing to it but the squid

a couple cents worth of flour or cornmeal or whatever crust they're going to put on it, and a tablespoon of mayonnaise. And that's, you're talking, you know. That's good markup. Yeah, real good markup. Can we plug your catering place? Sure, sure. Well, yeah, you could plug anything you want island time on island time catering on island time which does a disservice because you're the most punctual fast efficient

person i know it is it is a little but it's spelled tricky t-h-y-m-e a delicious delicious fun so any listeners out there and what's your range what's your zone uh you know mostly san juan island but i also do have a dba as as my own chef andy which i do a lot of more small detailed yeah mobile stuff obviously i've done some traveling with you and done some other events in and around so we'll come back around and replug you later yeah um all right what else oh another thing i want to get to before the main thing we want to get to we're kind of already on subject we're actually on subject definitely but go into i'll talk about something for a minute yanni oh boy oh how about the uh can i talk about the tour demand tool that's what i'm trying to talk oh that's your time talk about yeah hit it

um and now we interrupt this for an announcement from yanni we are going to do a do we know how many stops roughly 10 maybe yeah man not somewhere eight the eight to ten range eight to ten live for now for now events um in the next year is that safe to say yeah um all across the united states but we don't know where to go steve and i had a list going of places we thought we should go and then we thought well it'd probably be better to ask people to impose some rationale into it on it instead of just being like yeah it seems like a place where a lot of dudes live yeah and because we'd fight about it i just kept saying we gotta go to pennsylvania they got millions of hunters steve's like nah nobody's gonna come pennsylvania so now if you're in

pennsylvania and you're like bullshit we could fill us we could fill a theater full of people you can go to steve you got it up no i'm having connectivity issues we're gonna have a uh it's called a tour demand tool yes and we're gonna embed it across uh all of our social channels platforms you'll be able to find it there. And basically, go on there, and you're just going to have to type in, like, I don't even know if it requires your name, but basically your zip code. Zip code and email. Zip code and email. And then we'll open up a dialogue with you.

Yeah. No, you just request your zip code. And you want to get all your buddies to do it, too, if they live in and around your area. Because whoever gets basically the most votes, that's where we're going to end up. Yeah, this is not like screwing around. This is like how we're actually figuring out where to go. Yeah.

And it looks cool, too. It's a really easy little thing. Yeah. By saying you want us there, you're basically saying, yeah, I'd buy a ticket to go to the event. What size theaters are you guys looking at? A few hundred folks. We did one in Bozeman. How many seats were in Bozeman?

440, I believe. Yeah. That sold out a couple weeks before it happened. So you folks got to get on this if you're going to do it. When it happens, you got to strike fast. Or as Yanni says, you got to be on the dance. What was the thing you were talking about yesterday? Being on the...

Opportunity dances with those on the dance floor was the thing your time yesterday being on the opportunity dances with those on the dance floor yeah that's right okay now to get back on subject you know what my brother matt and putty you've been hanging out matt for 20 years you know what matt's my brother matt's favorite uh recipe is right now his favorite wild game recipe i need to like set stage a little bit about Matt. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. Boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do

a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on

products and services hand picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out

if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. No, I won't. I'll just let this speak for itself. Matt, when he butchers a deer, do you know about this? His new thing he likes to eat uh no okay when matt butchers a deer he saves all the scrap so like the tallow tendon silver skin it kind of throws a rough mince on it and saves it in little like when you open

his cupboards he say like every butter tub or cream cheese container that guy has ever generated coffee anything he has he's just like he's got a large area of his kitchen is dedicated just him where he throws any sort of little tub i think he actually he probably grocery shops and based on those tub sides yeah he's like yeah i'm kind of out of this i don't need any butter week. I'll get some margarine because it comes with that. Because that's the kind of tub I like. When I was over there, we came back from that turkey hunt, and somebody had snuck by and put three garbage bags full of Folgers containers in his kitchen.

He loves containers and tubs. So one of the things he does with his containers and tubs is he freezes scrap, deer scrap, because his dog likes to eat it. So when he goes to feed his dog, he'll take one of these little tubs, frozen, just with scrap in it, and just add a little water to it and put it in his microwave for a bunch of minutes. Oh, but did you say what originally those tubs were for? Butter and coffee and cream cheese. No, no, no, no, no. Why he was making them.

Yeah, for his dog. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I wasn't paying attention. Yeah, you're doing something else. So, because then he'll microwave it like to oblivion

or until it turns into like it's something that would have an industrial application if you needed something like an organic type of rubber. Yeah. Right? And he gives it to his dog shifty on its food well i don't know how i have but but he one day just must have been hungry or whatever and now that's what he likes to have and that's how he likes to fix it oh so his deer he's not like the thing he likes to eat is the tallow tendon and silver skin and

blood clots microwaved in little tubs that he then likes he must salt it at least i think he does put salt on it yeah that's his that's his hot tip yeah i think the microwaving in the tub is really what pulls that dish together. That's his hot tip. Infusible plastic flavor. Yeah. My latest hot tip. Here's my cooking hot tip. And this is hard to replicate. had a mule deer buck tenderloin that I seared in a pan

and then, so just browned it on all sides, rubbed it with salt and pepper, seared it in a pan, so I browned it on all sides and stuck it in a 400 degree oven for not long enough so that when I pulled it out,

like I don't have any reason to think this, but I feed my kids a lot of really extremely rare meat, which I used to worry that something bad would happen to them, but if they've been alive long enough now or something bad was going to happen to them, it would have happened to them by now. But anyways, I still sometimes will cut into a piece of meat and I'll be like, my God, that is raw.

You know? But then they eat it and they're fine. Yeah, go ahead. I just want to ask, from a professional chef's perspective, is there anything, like, at what point can something like that get dangerous? Like raw meat? Because I think that's probably in a lot of people's minds. Well, I think you guys have the most experience with that as far as the bear.

I mean, you know. I don't know. My worries go, yeah, with venison. No, large game, you could eat it raw. You know what I mean? But my concern is the parasites. Yeah. My concern is just that it's like could potentially be hard for their system.

Right. A two-year-old? Yeah. But you got to work and experiment, you know. But it doesn't phase them. Because I think they've just been eating it the whole time. I remember my brother had this girlfriend who was vegetarian for a long time. And then one day we shot a deer and she ate a whole bunch of rare deer meat.

It was puking her brains out. Because it just like shocked her system. Shocked her system. So that's my concern more than other things. But anyways, then I wrapped this thing up, what was left of it. Wrapped it up in saran wrap. and left it in my fridge for like a week. Then there's a sandwich shop called Mean Sandwich and they have a habanero sauce. And somehow, I don't really know how, I haven't checked with everyone in my family, I have to understand how this happened.

But one of their containers of habanero sauce ended up in my fridge it's like a thinking man's frank's red hot buttery so i took my raw deer meat my mostly raw week old deer meat back out cut it in slices melted a bunch of butter in a pan, recooked it all over again in that butter, dredged it in that habanero sauce that I found, and that was the best thing I've ever eaten in my entire life. Hard to replicate.

It's a lot of steps. Yeah. And it involves you going to mean sandwich. And time. And it allows you to let it age to have a thing kind of cooked in your fridge under plastic wrap for seven days the best thing i ever ate wow that's my hot tip you got a hot tip from matt really like which is microwave no i'm not like i said it's a thinking man's habanero sauce, though. Spicy.

Too spicy for my kids. My two-year-old insisted that I give him some, and he declared it spicy. That's my hot tip. Poot, what's your hot tip? Hot tip. Poot's tips. I should clarify that Andy, while it's not his name, he has never once introduced himself as such as wildly known as Poot. So if I say Pooter, that's who I'm talking about, is Andrew. I like that style, though, when you take that backstrap or tenderloin like that and sear

it on the outside and have that rare bit in the middle, but then pan sear that later because... Is that a thing? I thought I invented that the other night. It reminds me of taking a roast beef, a medium rare roast beef but then turning that into a steak sandwich. Hit that hot in a pan with the onions and peppers

and the flavor that then comes out of that. I love that. I'm a sandwich guy though. You like making sandwiches? You familiar with Mean Sandwiches? Nope. Where's that at? Over in Ballard. I'm a sandwich guy, though. You like making sandwiches? Love sandwiches. You familiar with Mean Sandwiches? Nope. Where's that at? Over in Ballard.

Yeah. I'll check it out. Yeah. Good sauce. Hmm. Give me another hot tip, Poot. That one didn't count. Hot tip?

Well, we were kind of talking about it earlier, just in the way of, I was bringing it back a little bit, just in the way of, just bringing it back a little bit, but the way that things are handled and processed along the way, you know what I mean? Over the years of hanging out with you guys and then seeing the way that things have evolved, especially up at the shack,

you think about how kind of crude it was at the beginning. Things were just kind of getting right off the plate table, wrapped in a saran wrap and it was at the beginning. Things were just kind of getting right off the plate table, wrapped in a saran wrap and whacked in the freezer. And to see that evolution of... The introduction of more expensive stuff. Correct. And I think just a general care.

Like your brother Danny is just meticulous on his fillets. And you can always tell the difference. But I think that translates down the line so well from the way that it's handled a when it comes like right out of the water or obviously an animal that you put down on the ground and every step that's taken if there's care that goes into every little step i think the end result is leaps and abounds above everything. Yeah, because a wrong move dealing with fish, like a couple wrong moves can really put you in a bad spot. Yeah, yeah.

And when you pull that out of the freezer and you have a piece of meat that's just absolutely pristine, it's just like, I don't know, to me it's like it's it's like christmas you know to be able to pull that out and not be like oh well we got to cut this away we got to you know it it elevates everything along the way i think we were down and we were down fishing blue catfish in kentucky we went to this guy's house and that and tell you started hanging out we went down spent a bunch of time in kentucky uh jugging limb lining what else trot lining yeah those three jugging limb lining and trot lining for channels flats and blues turtles and turtles and i'd always like to fish catfish but i never understood and i knew that there was catfish you put in your mouth and it was like oh my god is that bad and it was catfish you put in your mouth it's like wow that's great i never realized that

that what you're the difference between those two things is fat the catfish fat tastes horrible and we went down with a guy who catches i want to probably thousands of pounds of catfish a year. Oh, yeah. Easy. Because we had in the hundreds, maybe. We had 20-some catfish that day. Not hundreds.

We had a lot of catfish. Maybe not 100 pounds of fillets. No, no. Like live weight. You know, I think we had in the 70s for live weight. Bunch of guys fishing. Either way, the guy cleans a lot of catfish and to watch this guy uh he just fishes blue catfish with jugs but to watch this guy go through his cleaning process and how meticulous and fastidious and like this is is the way you do it, you don't do it that way.

And his setup and how carefully he defats those flays. And then he'd take all that pieced up meat and put it in a wheelbarrow with a hose in it and would just stare at it and stare at it and stare at it, watching for any little wisps of oil that would be floating on the surface. And what he would go through to get it where he's like now that's ready to eat and that's the difference between good catfish and bad catfish a guy like that i think you should follow that up with that we sort of had a uh you know an

impromptu you know like a check on that the other day when we were cooking catfish oh yeah it's that little strip of dark on the belly right that's it's that and there's orange fat yeah yeah yeah there's the there's the bloodline which they're real careful about getting rid of then it was fat and the other day we had some catfish a huge catfish we're just like trying to test the catfish recipe and had a big piece of catfish and i didn't defat it i kind of like half-ass defatted it and duh that mud and it was store-bought yeah and i think that kind of tripped us up because we just figured i store-bought it's been well taken care of you know not so much we kind of took that same approach when we were fishing those shovel nose um sturgeon up at the l stone and they kind of have that same

and we're kind of watching videos and they said it's really important that you make sure you clean all the way down to the white meat and so we were kind of you know taking our time removing and we did a little tester and you could taste the difference. Oh yeah. And I found it too. Even like there's certain species. Salmon. It's weird because salmon, why are King salmon so popular?

Yeah. Because of the fat. Because the fat's so great on them. Yeah. You know, it was, well, I'm just like, why is domestic pork fat real tasty, but deer fat is not. So King salmon, people like, like them because they're fatty. When we've butchered sharks, like lemon sharks, you got to get all that fat off.

Roasts that taste nasty. So real careful is what you're saying. Yeah. And then your brother, Matt, took all those little pieces in put them in a tub put them in a microwave in a yeah microwave those in cream cheese tub for five minutes and turns them back into gold yanni what's your uh what's your hot tip whoo um i wasn't ready for this really um hot tip cal you got one? Come back to me. Um, I got, I got one. I, I real consistently get complimented on, uh, on anything involving the morel mushroom is I like to, so I dry all my mushrooms. Um, and then you have to reconstitute them to cook with them and i guess you don't have to but i do

and so they sit in a bowl of water for you know 24 hours in the fridge and then i'll pull those mushrooms out um snip them in half with kitchen shears give them a rinse again in the same water let that calm down pull those mushrooms out and kind of give them a light little squeeze to drain that water back in there and then i'll strain the water the liquid the reconstituted the liquid that i use to reconstitute the mushrooms yeah and then i just use that as mushroom stock for whatever sauce or the roast that I'm cooking with the mushrooms. And, man, it makes a difference. Are you familiar, though, with the school thought that you should never, ever wash a wild mushroom?

But those people don't deal with mushrooms out of burns. Well, morels, just with the gills on the outside. They are hollow on the inside, so they're like natural bug homes, worm homes. Yeah, I'd always read that about how you shouldn't rinse them. And you see it in all kinds of places. Like, use a gentle brush. That might be true if you're, depending on where, if you're, like, picking morels in some kind of real grassy river bottom area

where it's a nice mat of grass and he's living there in a dust-free environment. And you found him that day and there was a nice dew on the grass or something. Yeah. I've spent more time eating morels that I didn't wash because you're not supposed to wash them and having a miserable time wondering about what's going to happen to my teeth. Yeah. From the grit that I'm eating.

Because even if you, especially when I'm cooking for other folks, I'm real gentle with them because I want them to be pretty. It's impossible to clean those things. Yeah. Like you will never get every stitch of dirt off the sucker. I soak them. I think they're hardy enough you know they're not like morels yeah to get the grit not like a shaggy man it's just going to dissolve it's a it's it's hardy enough to to hold up to to why i usually soak them for a while fresh just to get

it clean just to rinse them yeah my bro one time was picking them he was out trying to pick them for sale he had a commercial permit in a big burn. They're opening up commercial harvesting. Just to clarify, just for listeners, mushrooms have like a mycorrhizal. Am I saying the word right? Mycorrhizal. There's an underground, the mycelium or something like that mycelium a mushroom has an

underground structure so when you see a mushroom pop up this isn't a good perfect analogy but just think about like this when a mushroom pops up you're seeing the apple of an apple tree but in the mushrooms case it's not you know it's not the same thing as a plant, but it's fungi. But what you're seeing is the macro fructation, the fruiting body of a very large underground network of mycelia. I think it's mycelium. Mycelium. Yeah. A big structure.

Imagine it as this tree-like underground structure that puts off a fruit. When we talk about morels after forest fires there's something that happens it's not well understood that the underground structure of the morel is is there it's like omnipresent it's just down there and something about the action of the fire it might be that it stresses that whole system out and it's like holy hell we got to get out of here yeah and it cr and they will all of a sudden crank out you could have scorched earth yes moon dust and the following well it could happen different times generally if it burns one summer so it burns in august the following april may june depending on elevation latitude and other factors all of a sudden in the right place it's just a bonanza where

whap it is carpeted in morels that is the difference between mushroom hunting and mushroom harvesting yeah and guys that commercially harvest morels will often that that's where commercially harvested morels are coming out of oftentimes is out of big burns where you can go and pick like a hundred pounds of morels now my bro one time picked a bunch fixing to sell and he picked them after a rain and his entire pick was rejected for how gritty too much ash well can't get them clean so he then had his tub supply got maxed because he then had like everything possibly he was like drying morels non-stop and then we ate gritty mushrooms for and i've done like a pretty damned abusive cleaning process on these before and and i think the the right way to do it lies somewhere in the

middle like it's amazing how much that mushroom gets beaten up and when you're finally draining your wash tub bucket tub whatever how much mushroom is on the bottom there and residue down there with all the ash and and every third morelli open up has a rolly polly in it yeah yeah no i mean they're buggy they're dirty but man they're delicious yeah bug hey yanni will you uh will you type up i just want to get people square type up mycelium and mycorrhiza mycelium being m-y-c-e-l-i-u-m mycorrhiza being m-y-c-h you'll figure it out now i've been told that there is hardly a surface out there that doesn't have a morel spore on it. I've seen them come up in some crazy places.

Did you see those studies they've done where they've gone in, like they go into a school where you have like a building with tons of small rooms and multi-floors on it, and they'll go in with a mushroom and walk down the hall and then wait some period of time and then go in and test the air and the spores yeah no the sport yeah like a mushroom spore there's a thing like a lot of mushroom hunters be like oh you can only carry your mushrooms in a basket not a bag because you need to make sure the spores are getting out and being distributed yeah that but people say the spores are omnipresent yeah they're

everywhere and it's multiple multiple multiple generations that are um the way i've been told now is you know they're uh the mushroom hunters they are where they are type deal they're just waiting for that combination of heat but not too much heat, moisture but not too much moisture, disturbance but not too much disturbance to create that little micro climate that they like. When you're hunting, you're going to your spots.

I've been hunting. I know over 20 years, I know every year there'll be a mushroom in that same spot. You just got to be there on the right day. You watch the weather. You wait for that perfect soil condition, and then you go out there, and boom, there they are.

I've had a couple times where I moved, where I moved away from an area and then very ceremoniously passed along my morel spots. I'm not sure if I'd do that. I mean, those are, yeah, there's certain things that I just cannot part with. I'm like. You just want it to be that I'd rather no one picked.

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. I'd rather they rotted into the ground. It is so hard to find them sometimes. But one cool experiment for folks that are into picking mushrooms is if, you know, you get your mushrooms home, you lay them out on a big screen, and you start that drying process they will and it must be somewhat forcibly discharge those spores on the screen and so um you know if you have like a dark window screen um you remove that mushroom and then you look and it leaves a really beautiful design of spores on there and i always thought somebody much more artsy than me could probably

make something cool well that's a that's a diagnostic tool for id and mushrooms it is yeah is you take a spore print because you look at a mushroom you're like that's some bitch a mushroom is brown but you'll be reading like you're trying to trying to go like, so is it the good one that looks like that or the poison one that looks like that? And it'll say, the good one that looks like that will throw a purple spore print. The poison one that looks like that will throw a yellow spore print.

And you lay that thing out on a white piece of paper and get a spore print and look at it like, I don't know how, it's brown, but that's got a yellow, there's a yellow mark on that paper. I've only been poisoned by mushrooms one time. Was it a real deal

or was it just kind of... Gastrointestinal upset. Okay. So wild mushrooms have two... A mycologist, which is a... A mycologist is a mushroom biologist. A mycologist might hear this and be like, that's not right. But this is, I can tell you, I can guarantee you that this is kind of right.

There's mushroom toxins that are neurotoxins, okay, that mess with your head, like eating shrooms, right? That'd be like a neurotoxin. And then there's mushroom toxins that just like screw you up your digestive tract, right? So they mess your brain up or they mess your gut up. I got messed up by the gut kind and it was eating queen bleats while caribou hunting. And I'd eaten a million queen bleats in the lower 48, not a million, but quite a handful. And then we were eating them up there. And then I later learned from a mycologist who was saying you know it's a thing that a lot of people who can eat queen bleats wind up being intolerant

of the queen bleats on the arctic slope some difference about them there's a mushroom that that is highly toxic unless a caribou or reindeer eats it then you can drink that reindeer's piss and trip let's take it into the extreme that's a lot of work yeah it's one of the it's like uh it's like the fly garrick or one of the related to that so when you're watching a cartoon and there's a mushroom it's a red mushroom with white spots on it that's like present in all cars. It's like the classic poison mushroom mushroom, which grow right near my house. There's some of those. Most

falls, there's some of those about 150 yards from here. A white mushroom, a red mushroom with white spots out like in the Smurfs stuff, that's the mushroom. Yeah, but if a reindeer eats it and you drink his piss you'll trip not that i've done it but it's a it's a thing that siberian herders do it's yeah tripping in the boreal forest

what'd you find out y'all have you done your research yeah the you just want a definition of the two yeah because i don't like mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus like bacterial colony consisting of a mass of branching thread like hyphae that's who's living under the ground yeah mycorrhizal is that is that a term for the relationship? Yes. Symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular host plant. Yeah, because like morels. That's right. Now it's coming back to me. Morels have a mycorrhizal relationship with, say, tulip poplars in Virginia,

elm trees near where I used to live cottonwoods aspens must be ponderosa pines apple i found some underneath some ponderosa apple orchards in some places and you might have none of these things growing in your yard and haul in some wood chips and then all of a sudden realize you had some morels pop out of your wood chips i've seen that happen yeah when I was a tree surgeon. Interesting. Because, yeah, people do that now, right? Like they bring in half-rotten logs in special locations.

Doug Duren does that. Yeah. Not for morels, but he does it. There is a quality difference. And this is something we've tested out thoroughly between what we refer to as natural morels which are non-fire producing morels okay yeah and your fire morels now your fire morels typically um overabundance bonanza abundance uh the year after the fire and then they decline

rapidly sometimes from what i've seen fall off the face of the earth they're just not the next year the next year now you have your annual spots where uh if the conditions are right they'll produce every single year the big giant yellows morcella esculenta even if they're small or blonde or black, the wall of the mushroom seems to just be meatier. Got you. And man, those things, there's that. That's something I've noticed but never thought about.

You're right. I never correlated it to location, but somewhere else just have a wall on them. I got one about the size of a perfect size of a good high-walled saute pan and uh one mushroom one mushroom wow and uh did how big is the saute pan this was uh probably uh 14 holy shit yeah you ever see the back of Mushrooms Demystified? The morels the dude's holding on the back of that book? Yeah. No.

Head size morels, man. Oh. So, but I smoked this thing with smoked octopus, elk Italian sausage, spicy, and like a nice, you know, mirepoix, probably carrots and some celery and stuff and and baked that baby for a little while and topped her off some mushroom sauce or some uh tomato sauce and tough to beat man but cutting through that thing the point here is it is a steak yeah yeah you're like whoa you know it fights back against the knife. It's great.

Now, Cal, talk us through your tongue preparation. Are you guys going to cover this in the new cookbook? Yeah. We talk about tongues in there. Good. Good. I know you're like a big tongue man. Is that a recipe that you share?

Yeah, it is. Oh. It is. Maybe you can share it with me, and then I can share it with the rest of the world. Why can't he just tell us right now how he likes to cook game tongues? He can do that as well, but it's hard to then replicate that. People are dying to know. I get questions every single day. Hey, you got a tongue.

You guys talked me into taking a tongue. Now what do I do with this i do this damn thing yeah exactly so uh the quick version is is i prefer pressure cooker i'll pile a bunch of tongues in there let it roll on high for like 20 minutes can you back up yeah uh at what point do you think a tongue is worth messing with i take them all even out of like a white tail little tiny white tails that mountain goat this year all right take them off any old tongue yeah i may not i know i am not as picky as some folks and you speed cut it where you open up the bottom of the jaw yep pull it out yeah it's almost out of like uh scar face right yeah it almost wants to come out yeah so you cut along the inside uh line of the jaw uh and then you can kind of reach up there and hook it and then

you're cutting at the back of the trachea and and the rest is pretty explanatory it's disturbing how fast you can get a tongue out it is you like to think your tongue's in there better than it is yes now if your critter has frozen like if you chucked her in the back of the truck and it froze overnight, then you have to be more careful because there's a good chance you're going to cut through a portion of your tongue and then you got to kind of cook it right away because the nice thing is they're all self-contained. So the peeling part is... You wash it. You wash it.

I like the pressure cooker, but you can just boil it also just flat ass like that's it you're not brining it ahead of time just not not for the way i like to cook it oh please that's what i'm trying to find um and then uh i'll take it just like a pepper and throw it in the freezer uh like paper bag throw it in the freezer and then you start working on your sauce uh which chopped up a bunch of back up just like a pepper i got that part you're not for my likens you're not spending enough time on what it is you're doing by pressure cooking and boiling it okay and or boiling it so basically your tongue has um and that's true your tongue everybody's tongue has this rind on the outside a skin yeah um the meat on the inside is nice and fatty uh which is probably why i like it so much and by um boiling it um you are getting uh that skin to kind of release i i would think and then get

where it slips off yeah and then if you chuck that thing in the freezer um for reasons unknown to me it separates really easy like finger peel with zero meat loss yeah because you don't want that but the top the tip it's difficult the tip is difficult and it can be triaged and that's where like your small white tail tongues um the kind of the chucking it in the freezer for 20 minutes is kind of critical because you get too much meat loss if it sticks to that yeah yeah if you have to like use a knife to shave it that's what i found so like if i'll simmer it for three to four hours depending on how big the tongue is and i just keep checking by jabbing a fork into the base yeah and then i throw mine in an ice water bath yeah same result you know it just it varies so much it does like

i was with a buddy of mine a chef you remember that have you met uh matt weingarten that chef i was watching him do nine veal tongues one time and the outer skin on a veal tongue is not well adhered to the tongue like it is on a game animal because he just like simmer him for two hours throw him an ice water bath and it was like taking someone's shoe off yeah the skin was just like simmer them for two hours, throw them in an ice water bath, and it was like taking someone's shoe off. Yeah. The skin was just like whoop, gone. I'm like, dude, that ain't anything like what I've experienced because I'll boil them for three to four hours,

and then I'll be able to get the base of the tongue slipped off, but then I'm in there with a paring knife working away on the tip because you're getting that outer skin layer off. And maybe subconsciously that's why i would kind of wait till thanksgiving or christmas when i've because if i help pack some somebody's critter out of the woods for them um you know i typically have an abundance of meat but everybody's like hey do you want a quarter off this thing i'm like yeah just give me the tongue yeah it's got to where people fight over the tongues i know i was talking to remy warren and got elk he got elk and i was like you know and it was he was like go ahead and

grab what you want off the elk and i could like grab myself up and i grabbed the tongue he's like i don't know about that i don't care it's like i don't care about the tenderloins and back straps don't take the tongue man it's it's the real deal so um then while this meat your tongues are in the freezer i uh work on the sauce uh which my buddy jim chardelli this is mom's's Creole sauce is what he calls it. But it's chopped green olives, pimentos, garlic, red wine, black pepper, and crushed canned tomatoes. I said, well, should I just get tomatoes? No, get canned tomatoes.

Yeah, that school of thought bugs me. When people are down on you for using, it's just different. Yeah. It's just different. It's helpful sometimes. Yeah, but I don't know if it's super helpful, but is it like coming out of the depression thing? I don't know. No, just use canned tomatoes. Poodle, are you prejudiced against canned tomatoes? No, I use them all the time. I don't know. Like, no, just use canned tomatoes.

Pood, are you prejudiced against canned tomatoes? No, I use them all the time. You do? Yeah. I mean, there's an application for them. I mean, they're processed to the point where you want to put them into a sauce, you know? Yeah.

So get this sauce kind of simmering, you know, with enough liquid. And I also use my, uh, reconstituted morels and the, the juice accompanying that. Uh, and then I'll pull the tongues out. I'll peel the tongues, uh, chop the tongues into, you know, about, you know, you know your uh thumbnail size pieces maybe a little bit bigger and just let that simmer uh and then i'll fry polenta i'll just get the you know the tubes of polenta that you see at the store yep cut them into rounds and give them a nice little fry and then uh and crock pot's perfect for this too um but you know take you know sauce and a couple of chunks and make sure there's morel in there and stack it up all

nice on that polenta and a little bit of parsley on top and it's fantastic it. That's the tone. Sounds good. I mean, it is a meal I look forward to every year. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

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can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more as a special offer you can get a free three months to try on x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all and it's simple i mean it's not it's not it's not kitchen magic right what i've been doing like

i tend to smoke them there's a lot of quizzical kind of real questioning raised eyebrows for our listeners here really staring me down no not at all i like this i just didn't know that's what you're doing with the tongues i like it okay. We've been hearing about it for years, about your fancy tongue dish, but I don't know if you'd ever explain it to us. I'd put it more on the peasant side of things, right? Peasant dish? Yeah, traditionally.

But in the old days, they were so valuable that it would warrant people to go out and hunt buffalo just for the tongues. You could get a couple bucks for the tongue. You could get a dollar or two for the tongue, which was huge money back then. They were pickling them, right?

They'd pickle them and pack them in barrels of salt and ship them just packed in salt. Salt packed. Was it like a bar food? Yeah, pickled tongue and smoked tongue. They would pack them in salt barrels one time there was a there's a case where there's a in the historical account there's a case where a group of sioux hunters near the junction of

the i think they're near the junction where the yellowstone flows into the missouri which i think was fort union sits there where the Yellowstone flows into the Missouri. So I think it was Fort Union sits there, where the Yellowstone River hits the Missouri and North Dakota. I think that's Fort Union. And a group of Sioux hunters killed 5,000 buffalo near the fort and just sold the tongues out of them because it was valuable. There's a lot of cases like that. I know i do have to say like my eastern montana family um they weren't i made uh this tongue as an appetizer for the whole you know whole clan uh last christmas and

the kind of the older generation was pretty skeptical because every single person there was like ranch family once they made it sound like once a week it was just kind of on the rotation there there would be a beef tongue that had been uh brined into pastrami and it was beef tongue sandwiches once a week, and they were not super jacked to be eaten tongue. I basically make a pastrami with the tongues. I mean, that's got to be good. I love it.

But that's what I stole from Matt Weingart. I think what's surprising about it is just the texture. When it's handled right, how tender it actually is. It just falls apart. And when you cut it, it's got like a weird mosaic of like white and red cool pattern yeah a couple couple years back when you did uh we did thanksgiving at your place and we had maybe three or four tongues that i think you had brined and smoked you know and they

were just phenomenal really good i brine them while i like cure them yeah with a dry brine and i vac seal them in a bag with the dry brine do you cure them with the sheath on yep take the whole damn tongue scrub it with a scrub brush have a cure salt sugar and seasonings and vac seal it into the in with the dry cured and throw up my fridge for a week or two and just flip it now and then in the back sealed bag because the liquid settles and you flip it and the liquid settles. Then I smoke it for a long time. Then I braise it to peel the skin. And then that liquid that you braise it in winds up being amazing.

It's like a smoked stock. Yeah. Then I slip it in. There's a lot of fat in there then i slipped there's a lot of fat in there oh yeah a lot of fat yeah that uh moose tongue that uh uh we got up in bc i stole your moose tongue from from that one on the river trip uh that i threw in the pressure cooker, let cool completely, like cold, cold, peeled it, sliced it super thin, olive oil, salt, pepper. And a moose tongue's a big tongue. That thing disappeared.

About six people took that thing down. Yeah, it's a three-pound tongue. Yeah, and it was, I mean, just phenomenal. But it was just cold, good olive oil pepper it was fantastic all right i'm gonna walk folks through on how to do deer ribs it's like it's very important because people don't understand this i was one time down in south carolina and we took a deer to a deer processor. No, we didn't. We just went, we dropped by a deer processor in South Carolina. And this guy, as he's like admitting deer into his processing plant, skins them and takes a sawzall and cuts the rib rack right off and throws it out with the feet. Like not even going to look at it a processor i don't know if there's uh

call me a liar no no i'm adding to your story i just think that i don't know if there's a processor in our country that deals with venison ribs. Really? And I don't even think that... I'm saying that we're just deboning them for the grind pile. I mean, I live near one, and I see the mountain of carcasses. They're all ribs intact. Really?

And it's mostly elk, you know. Elk ribs. So anyways, okay, here's what you should do with your deer ribs. If you don't do this, you're stupid. Take, skin the deer. You got the deer and skin it. And eventually you got where you got, there's the deer laying there and he's got his ribs on him. And because you already gutted him, you already split the sternum. Go down along the spine with a saw and cut the ribs free along the spine so that you wind up with a Fred Flintstone rib rack.

We'll put up a picture with the show notes. We'll put up a picture of pictures of how to do this, what I'm talking about. Take that rib rack and then saw, if you're talking about a general standard issue, white tail deer, saw that rib rack into three long strips where you're cutting cross bone. Is this making sense? Yep. And you're going to wind up with three strips of what looks like pork ribs

from a restaurant. Yeah. And what you did the other day that was slick that I hadn't seen is you rolled the ribs into. Before sawing them. Yeah. Yeah. You could take that whole rib rack and you had the mat you it might not make sense listening to me but once you're doing it you'll understand on top mode depending on how you cut this whole thing you can take the rib rack and just roll it up like a river rafting table what do they call those tables roll top tables roll a table

roll time industries roll it up like a river rafting table the good and then you roll a saw it so you're cutting cross bone you're gonna wind up with three long strips 10 11 ribs in pieces that are about six inches long five six inches long depending on the size of the deer then you cut those down into pieces that have three two or three ribs per piece so you have two or three ribs that are six inches long connected by all the meat that was over and under them let me back up if it's a particularly fatty deer take a boning knife and cut away as much of the tallow as you can am i missing anything else yanni no no do all

that because well unless you want to mention i guess what i was thinking about is when you're cutting it off the carcass you sort of end up with having the like where there's almost like a 90 degree turn of bone at the top end going to the spine yeah it doesn't really have a lot of meat on it there's a seam in there there's a seam and that's really where you should be cut so it's not quite right against the spine if you're real crafting good with a knife you can cut it there's a seam in there there's a seam and that's really where you should be cut so it's not quite right against the spine if you're real crafty and good with a knife you can cut it there's a joint there's like a joint in the rib it doesn't look like what it's there and you can actually cut it with a knife if you know what you're doing but just the sawzall is fine too yeah and then on the bottom edge you're sort of dealing with where it joins into the sternum

sternum and there's a joint there if you know what you're doing you can cut that with a knife but i'm trying not to get people intimidated well i'm just saying you might run into this so you can just saw it off too yeah like right now like i'm playing rhythm guitar and yanni is soloing off of the rhythm right i was like telling you the basic outline and yanni's adding texture so keep doing that all right but you're cool up so far i'm great now take these things and if you have a pressure cooker so now you got all these blocks of ribs they look like what you'd get if you order ribs in a restaurant if you have a pressure cooker take these things and put them in your pressure cooker and put an inch or two of water in your pressure cooker with them

and pressure cook them at 10 pounds of pressure for 20 minutes now do you do you put any rub on that beforehand not yet not yet you can but i don't think it's necessary okay i don't think it's necessary at this point straight up water out of the faucet. If you don't have a pressure cooker. Put them in a slow cooker. Crock pot or slow cooker. If you don't have one of those, put it in a Dutch oven or some kind of oven safe receptacle. Cover them up in water and put them in your oven.

Or put them in your slow cooker and cook them for three hours until they're fork tender. You want to cook them until this happens. Until you could imagine just stripping them off the bone with your fingers. If you wait until it just naturally happens, it's too late. You got to get them at the point where you can handle it, where you could grab a little chunk of the, because the meat retracts and leaves little bone ends out there.

You want it at the point where you can grab one of those bone ends and lift the whole thing up and have it not fall apart. But if you wanted to tear it apart, you could. That is the moment to strike. In a pressure cooker, that moment lasts for minutes. In a slow cooker, that moment lasts for a long time yeah that's a that's a large window to shoot but we did some the other day and i want to say it was right at four hours three and a half four hours and we felt like how did we not caught it right then and there we had

a lot of other stuff going on and so we checked them we're like oh it's fork tender right now but they were at the far it's fork tender right now. But they were at the far end of fork tender. They were getting ready to start falling off the bone. And you'll notice too that you've rendered a lot of that tallow out because of the liquid, the surface of the liquid is going to be very oily. And that's really my question here is, and where I get tripped up and end up just saying,

screw it and cooking the whole thing is. Cooking what whole thing? The ribs. Like I just, it's not even worth trimming off any fat because I can't get to all the fat, right? Because there's so many layers in there, right? Yeah. And that's confusing to me.

That's why I'm just saying like do it a rough once over. Yeah. And I don't know why I do a rough once over, but this is easy to do. Gotcha. So you're saying you just render it out anyways. Because some of the fat's alright if it's hot. The next step, pull them out of the liquid and lay them on a tray.

And let them dry a little bit. Drain off and dry. Now you hit them with your favorite dry rub. Right? Then you walk over to your grill your outdoor grill and you throw them on your outdoor grill and all you're really doing is warming them up and putting a little char on them they're

already cooked and ready to eat and you take a mop you take a half cup of cider vinegar, a half cup of yellow mustard, mix that up, throw them on your grill, and baste them with the vinegar cider, the vinegar mustard mop until they just start to char

up and get all nice and warm, and then you eat them. And you will never discard another rib the rest of your life. And you will hate the man that does. I love it. Even call him stupid. It's so, yeah, you will call him stupid and hate him. It's that good.

I have left some deer ribs in the woods. Just the, they're each, you've said it before, you know, every animal, wild game animal is its own beast. It's different. And the deer I got this year, like, that was a giant, the rib section alone was a ton of meat, and that definitely came out with me. But, you know, Montana, you know But Montana, very end of the season, some buck that's just been rutting like crazy,

and that rib meat looks like jerky about – it's almost done jerky. And there's nothing on the outside of it. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there's no – I don't think there's any state where you – like all the states have most states have what's called salvage requirements or wanton waste laws um and they spell out for you what you need to keep yeah when i first moved to idaho you had to keep the rib meat is that right

and you had to keep the neck meat and then they changed that law, and myself and my group of buddies that I hunt with were just wickedly pissed just because that is phenomenal eating. I think a general salvage requirement should be much stricter. I agree. They should be spelled out. It's fun. I love to read them because of how specific some states are. I think generally they should be more.

I think it would generally be good for hunters, good for hunting, and good for public perception to have much stricter salvage requirements. Yeah, the optics of it would be good. One day, this happened a million years ago, but one day I was really upset about some things that I had seen other hunters do. And was really upset. And me and Yanni were driving down the road you remember this yeah and we look and there's an elk gut pile laying out in a field and i'm all mad about something you had to preface this that we were talking about um you're upset and you're like yeah this is just not right this is it's i forget what you

were upset about maybe was it just guys were flock shooting elk or some guys had got we some guys had gotten onto a herd of elk and we're using text messaging where it's not allowed we're using text messaging to like coordinate efforts on a herd of elk right and uh somehow that guy we got to talking about taking stuff out of the field and you were like yeah my dad you know and this that and the other we took everything out like my dad to go check other gut other dudes gut piles to get the heart yeah and i'm saying like well like i didn't grow up that way even though i grew up hunting a lot like i didn't grow up like nobody taught me like and plus we like just dropped our deer off at the processor but like i didn't know about shanks and neck meat and hearts and livers and sure we ate like heart and liver like one night and that was usually the night of opener in wisconsin we'd have like a meal

of that but that was it like if i shot a deer some other time of year like it just that didn't come home with yeah so anyways yeah we're driving down the road we see a gut pile and i jump out all the huff and go running out in the field to go get the heart and the heart's gone because you're like i guarantee those sons of bitches left it out here yeah and the guy had the heart and i just the guy had taken the heart and i got back in all back in a good mood nobody would hunt that way and be a heart man right but then i was like yeah those guys all right i got uh gotten a little debate with my uncle about that particular instance. Oh, the one I'm talking about.

Yeah. And he was like, you know, people got to eat. That's getting groceries. And I said, yeah, but because of the use of illegal communication, legal communication i feel that the the scale just tipped way out out of whack right just went way too far to the hunter's advantage uh versus the game's advantage and that's just not the way the system's supposed to operate and in that location it's not open to your individual interpretation because it's just against the law. True. Like it or not, that state has made that not legal.

Yep. Listening to this, it seems like more hunters need to make the connection to the food end of it to elevate that. Because you're talking about the tongue and the neck and the shank and the ribs and these things. Most people are just discarding this, which if you know how to take care of that, it's some of the best eating. Some of the best stuff. And is it just because a lot of hunters just want to grind sausage and want burger meat? Does it need to come in education of how to take care of those cuts and make them so delicious to eat? I mean, it seems like...

Yeah, I think education is a big part of it. Was it Gingmorden telling you or me about how... This is in Montana. But he said, you know, three years ago, not, he never saw deer come through check stations

that still had shanks. That's what happened to him. They'd leave him in the field. Yeah. But now, he feels like almost no shanks get left in the field. I had a game warden from a western state come up to me, and she's like, I feel that because of your show,

I honestly feel that because of your show, I see better field care. How cool is that? Oh, yeah, that's it. I mean, that's the end goal, right? And she said, I feel like it's going to mark a difference. That's awesome. To begin having conversations about this stuff. it's going to mark a difference. That's awesome. To begin having conversations about this stuff.

It comes down to work, though. Yeah, it's work. When you're talking about the difference between what I used to do to get an elk out of the woods and what I do now, more weight on your back, more time spent at the carcass, more time spent at the butchering table at home. You'd be surprised how many people are picky little kids, though. My kids aren't that way. Marcus, you know, more time spent at the butchering table at home. Like, it just. You'd be surprised how many people are like picky little kids, though. My kids aren't that way.

My kids aren't picky little kids. But a lot of grown-ups are just like squeamish picky eaters. Like their parents indulged that when they were a kid or something. And now they're like, you know, I'm not going to eat that. Like, they honestly sound like that. Yeah. My kids are kind of mad when I bring home little four or five inch ribs off like the like if you cut the rib slab and into thirds instead they like it if i just like leave it the whole thing whole like they just have such a more enjoyable dinner when they just have like the giant bone in hand and they're gnawing and pulling

they love it yeah so i think, so I think there's that. It's like being like a little picky, squeamish person. And what he just said about laziness. I mean, I guess it's extra work. It's just you think if you were out there in that whole experience that you would just try and get every little ounce out of it, but I guess not everybody's wired like that. No, and then there's the other thing too. It's just like hard to learn how to do it.

So it's really, but here's the thing. If you become a good hunter, that's hard hard like it's hard to be a good hunter yeah so if you have it in your brain to become a good hunter which is extremely difficult you definitely have in your brain to learn how to do like a handful of procedures on how to cook right yeah that makes sense but you're right you you see and it's funny because hunting like you can't divorce hunting from its roots hunting is a like hunting owes its history owes its inception to the fact that it was a food gathering method correct it's like a food gathering strategy and still today if you go hunt with certain indigenous cultures, they have absolutely no waste.

In certain, you know, depending. That's a blanket statement. There's also cases where people have driven off 800 buffalo off a cliff and then butchered a dozen of them. And then the rest rotted because they probably were surprised as well that 800 went over there. They were just hoping to get a couple so i mean there's like there's times when that's not the case but generally it's like food acquisition and wide utilization when we spent time down in south america they don't flay fish they cook fish whole and suck every bone so when they're, there's a little teeny pile of glistening bones laying there. That's amazing.

Head, every single thing, right? Hunting takes its heritage from that, but at some point in time, in some people's minds, it got divorced from food acquisition. I'll talk to guys, be like, big time hunter guys. I know they got a bunch of meat in the freezer and you talk to them they're cooking something different boneless skinless chicken breast because it fits into my workout

routine I'm like you of all people you of all people are cooking chicken tonight four or five bucks in the freezer man where are you at pooter on your uh would you prefer i call you andrew for this sorry about that you can call me whatever you want

what because i mean i definitely got into food uh really the separation between just enjoying eating food and actually cooking my own food because a combination of single parent home and and having game meat in the freezer so I was like I could eat something out of a can or I could dig something out of the freezer uh but you you told me today that you haven't been or you're very limited on the big game hunting side of things yeah yeah i did not grow up hunting um but food was a big part of kind of growing up and and family holidays and that so that's kind of the route that i got into food but um the experiences that i've had with hunting are with mostly with

the ranellas and then and this kind of crew which i learned kind of later you know probably in my late 20s i kind of started getting into with you guys um and that experience was just first being out you know in the in the wilderness and and having that whole experience, I think it was just over the top. But for me, the, the second that animal got down on the ground, it just, it just excited me so much to, to be able to see it start to come apart. And instantly in my mind, I'm, I'm thinking, okay, I can see that, that loin, I can see that rump rose and in preparations in my mind and the people that i was going to share it with i mean that was the most exhilarating thing to me that drew me into it is is the fact that i can go do this on my own and then be able to turn into something pretty good and then to be able to share it with everybody else i think that's really what drew me in

yeah i don't think you ever saw it as anything, even like with fish. Not that you don't enjoy fishing, but I feel like for you, the link, the food, the fishing, hunting, food link, it was never like a thing that you sort of discovered later. Yeah. With you, I feel like you always viewed it as a food thing.

Big time, big time. But the experience that comes along with it is just like the biggest bonus there is because it's you know it's an amazing experience to get out there um but yeah with fishing i you know i have friends that that fish that don't really like to eat fish that much and then i'm like well why are you out there you know uh i think we're saying there's a guy i know that i've met him a couple times i heard about this aspect of someone else but he's a duck hunting fool you know i think he hunts 40 50 days every duck season will not eat a duck but to his credit he's cultivated like a large group of people um in a he's cultivated a lot of friends in an immigrant community near where he lives who love duck and that's a thing that he does he he is very

careful about getting the ducks getting them gutted and bringing to the people that he knows want the meat and use it well. But I just wonder, like, how could it be? Like, what gets you up in the morning? Yeah. Well, I mean, look at fly fishing. I hate to harp on fly fishermen, but, like, thousands of trout caught by some of these folks every summer. And no one's eating them.

For the most part, no. Yeah, no, that's true. Yeah. So he gets up in the morning and does it. But I kind of think also it's like he's probably bringing like a class of food. He's bringing like a class of food to someone who might not be able to afford that food. We got another friend down in South Texas who has a network of people that he brings wild pig to and he said to us if i wasn't bringing them pig they're not eating meat well not just

wild pig but wasn't all those does that he has some medicine too that might have been yeah i remember him saying this isn't like that they prefer this over the stuff they buy in the store. He's like, it's this or it's not. It's nothing. Which is hard to argue with. And the fact, just like going down to the fish market and looking at that piece of halibut and knowing if I want two pounds of halibut to have a few friends over for the night that I'm going to be paying upwards of $100.

I mean, I know you spend the money and the gas and lure and all that but it's man it's just so much more rewarding enjoyable to be able to have that kind of quantity to to share you know it's the most rewarding thing in the world man well you're living the good life man if you go if you're you know and it doesn't take that much let I was talking to somebody else about this recently, about, like, what it actually takes if you don't own a fish shack, but to go to southeast Alaska on, like, a very, you know, purpose-driven trip to be like, okay, we want to, like, bring home a bunch of salmon

and whatever else we can catch and whatnot. And you could probably do it for not that, it's not exorbitant, you know. You don't go stay at a fancy fishing lodge no you market value you're going to end up ahead of the game yeah with the with the but again i feel like the exercise of it and the act of it i mean that's like really enriching your life you're doubling down right i mean you're simultaneously paying for your food and your recreation yeah with the same dollar so that's the funny thing that conversation I have is that people are like, well, you ever imagine what that costs per pound? It's like,

okay, let's figure out. You just went to Paris. You didn't bring shit home to eat from Paris. So what's that cost? It's like, what's that cost per pound? It's like, if you play golf, no one's like, well, what

that cost per unit? It's like, you don't even have a thing to begin measuring they don't even factor in their beers at least i got 20 pounds of fish where you can begin having the conversation about something i got home for it but no one presses a goal for every time he walks in to justify his outing based on what he brought home with him yeah he didn't bring home anything with him except that he lost two golf balls. Yeah. So don't bust his balls about what it's cost him. But you go out and bring a fish home and be like, well, yeah, but what did it cost you per pound?

I was like, what did you do today? What do you have to show for what you did today? At least I got something. Yes. And that is, I think that's the root of my hesitation. And I'm sure you guys have been there too. We got a lot of guys you know you're kind of like hey catching up and i'm like man yeah i'm fretting because i got this going on this going on and well hey man i got a bunch elk in the freezer so don't don't worry about it if you don't make it out i was like yeah I don't want to eat your elk man because you know

I want to be out there doing it more than anything oh there's yeah there's that aspect of it man is like I wouldn't it's fun for me to cook for my family and it's fun for me to cook for my friends it's fun for me to cook for myself

because like we went and got it yeah that's the value i would not do the things i do if it wasn't that way i would never be like all excited to cook something i bought at whole foods for people the way i get all excited to be like check that out man look at the damn mountain lion it's it's directly tied to the experience every single time you know yeah we were talking earlier you know you get to relive that experience and tell that story i'll tell you what man i've been digging into that uh elk from a fog mac and that's a hell of a story you're telling every time you're like yeah we could just left the other half there after that

incident but we climbed up in that tree got the other 400 pounds and then uh walked it out of there that's an intense story yeah i was just telling story the other day when we were up north slope you know to somebody that has no idea what that's all about and it's just keep reliving it over and over and over you know yeah up caribou hunting yeah yeah meat's long gone now meat's long gone stories live on they do andrew do you feel like when you're shoulder to shoulder with uh any of the rinella boys or whoever who's more on the hunting aspect as opposed to somebody who spends each and every day eight ten hours a day in a kitchen do you think you're approaching um any of these cuts the critter itself whatever it may be in a much different way no i mean hanging out with you

guys for years phenomenal the way that you guys cook up some of this stuff you know i mean and you have a nice base knowledge of how because game meat is different than cooking domestic animal i mean it just hands down you're talking about more fat you're talking about you know the game being a lot leaner so it is it's uh i think it's a great relationship of give and take as far as you guys have such an understanding of how to use the game meat in its proper way where sometimes then maybe i'll come in and and put a technique down that's a little fancied up a little bit you know that's the way i look at it like i know like i think we're learning from each other oh yeah because i'm not like you're a thousand times better like you're a thousand times better at cooking and just chefing

than i am what i know is i just have have had a lot of experiences with a lot of different types of game yeah and i kind of know its attributes yeah and know the general like approach to take with different parts of different game animals and like what sorts of things it could be used for that's what i know that's not easily replicated unless you've been exposed to the things i've been exposed to but the actual details of like assembling dishes yeah i just don't know like you know that's why it's fun for me to cook with you yeah and vice versa like i'll be like you know what's good to do with these loins is you like serum and throw them in the oven and then you'll go do that and you'll make a cauliflower puree and pickled red on you know i mean like all the stuff that goes with it i'm like now that like holy shit i would never have come up with that but what i did know is that this piece of

meat yeah and it's fun tends to be like best when prepared this sort of way it's fun because a lot of times like i'll let you kind of take that lead on how to yeah how to use that particular cut and then i know the technique of how to then take it and elevate it to a different level. But I think the reason you're such a good ground up, like you're a good chef of seafood, is because it's stuff you've been dealt with professionally for a long time. Like it doesn't matter, you catch a halibut. Halibut doesn't matter if you caught it or bought it.

Yeah. So you can really learn all about fish. The way you can't really learn all about what you're looking at when you're looking at a different three dead deer laying on the woods, laying on the ground

out in the woods. I look at them and I'm seeing something that you're only going to see after having had a lot of experience about what's the difference between all those things laying there. Actually cooking, I'm not really good at actually cooking you hold your home yeah i mean i can like cook like family style cooking you know but not like

restaurant style cooking but see that's where i think the whole hunting experience came in that got me so excited because a lot of times in commercial kitchens you're you're not you're not getting whole animals in you're getting cuts in that you know are broken down you're getting your primals and your subprimals and but to actually see the whole animal especially in its state from you know tracking it for days and and being out there in its environment and then to see it on the ground and then start to break down i i think everybody that eats meat should at some point see that process just to get it yeah i find myself stressing and i was just writing this actually in the introduction to our forthcoming wild game cookbook i was writing about

particularly with big game is i'm always pushing a cut-based approach to cooking wild game, to cooking big game. Because you'll find that you put up like a, you put up a recipe like, here's a great, here's a way to prepare heart. And people are like, oh, I see you had a thing up about elk heart, but do you have a moose heart recipe?

I think a lot of hunters tend to like look at, they stress too much like what the animal is when it's more important to know what part of the animal you're eating. approach if i'm like cooking shank i don't think differently about an antelope shake a mountain goat shank a whitetail shank a mule deer shank an elk shank a half well heavily is a little small a wild pig shank i tend to think more like what's more important to me not the animal that it was i don't really care i want to know what it was and all my like my wild game cooking is all based off the cut not like what it is yeah like when you open up a big game cookbook and they have like elk recipes and then you go and you flip and oh here's moose recipes i'm like dude there's no difference between the elk recipe and a moose recipe yeah sure there's going to be flavor profile differences i think from meat to meat to

meat but i don't think it's to the point where really you need to change the recipe no sure you can adjust it and you might have your favorites but for the most part yeah what you're talking about is knowing how to cook i'm like you know the techniques exactly how to handle these different pieces and you're right there are there are there's gonna be different elk, there are, there's going to be different Elkin moose, but there's also going to be difference from one moose to the next. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's something that's like special about the wild game.

That sort of like, you should be like, not instead of trying to cover that up, but you make the same recipe and you're kind of like, Oh yeah. You taste that difference in the caribou or you taste that difference. Maybe you taste like the willow in the moose and the caribou. You're sort of tasting that lichen or whatever other north slope browse he was eating on and in the dwight

tell deer you taste like the acorn and the corn and the soy beans that's the gmo you taste the gmos that's the bridge between the hunter and the chef though right i mean to know all the way back to the environment that you pull that animal out of knowing that the the down the line that the flavor profile is going to be different yeah but that stuff that comes like almost after the recipe sure after the method of preparation there are like i don't want to oversimplify this because let's just say you're talking about like the difference between whitetails and mule deer sure there are fundamental differences between whitet and mule deer. Sure, there are fundamental differences between whitetail and mule deer. But those differences might not be as extreme.

Those inherent differences might not be as extreme as the difference between one whitetail and another whitetail. If you were able to sort of like apply a number system to like quantify differences, is a half-starved four-year-old mule deer that just was hung up on a barbed wire fence got hamstrung by a coyote and then kind of healed up but he's not doing real well like there's that animal and then there's some two-year-old mule dude that's been hanging out in alfalfa field those are very different animals the difference between those two things is so much more extreme than the difference between a white-tailed mule deer right it's just like so that's all after the fact i just think that like in cooking you got to learn like what is it that you have we when i was a kid we cut up deer we cut up deer we cut up steaks which included the backstrap tenderloin and most of most like the the rounds and

sirloins from the back legs and then the rest was burger unless we made jerky so we would get done and all that whole damn deer would say two things steaks burger that was how i was brought up to cut deer. I now have a much more nuanced approach to it. And that just comes from experience, right? The willingness to have experiences. There are many, many people out there, and I still hang out with some, that it's like, no, that's the way you do it.

Steaks and burgers. Yeah. It's like there is no, what's the difference? There is no difference. Like, I eat Hamburger Helper. It all goes into Hamburger Helper. I'd rather some dude be eating his whole deer as Hamburger Helper

than some dude sort of watching it in his freezer uneasily feeling kind of like vaguely guilty about it for three years, waiting for when he gets to go pitch it because it's freezer burned. Dude, I don't look down on any kind of cooking. As long as it's wild

game cooking. I'm open to it all. You want to throw one last plug in? How do folks find you? Well, at this point, we're kind of on a small level up there on the island. Yeah, because you've got your main chef and job. Yeah, yeah. So the catering is just kind of a side project.

Yeah, but it's fun, and people would love it. I absolutely love it. If you want to hire a guy that you can actually hang out with and learn a thing a side project. Yeah, but it's fun, and people would love it. I absolutely love it. If you want to hire a guy that you can actually hang out with and learn a thing or two from. Yeah, yeah. Instead of some dingbat caterer. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, summertime is kind of the high season up there,

and if anybody's talking about San Juan Island. So it's a small population of people, so it's kind of a tight little community, but it's also a pretty popular destination for tourists. So there are a fair bit of events up there that get to the need for catering. So yeah, on island time catering. And right now we're just kind of getting off the ground. So if you went to the Chamber of Commerce, you'd find us pretty easy. And the other thing is, if you ever have, if you hunt and fish and ever wanted to have someone come and do small party events where someone who really has the know-how comes and shows you just what is possible with your stuff. Take that boring

old venison steak how to like really do amazing stuff with with your wild game for you and your friends um i would i would i would i would look them up too also i believe uh he's my favorite cook he's uh single as well so like and he's single yeah i finally get to do it to somebody else and he's single and he's available from one single guy to another the most eligible bachelor of san of the pacific let's just expand it to the pacific northwest perfect for that charismatic eligible bachelor of of the Pacific Northwest who also cooks. Yeah, and if you live closer to the Intermountain Rocky, what am I trying to say? The Intermountain West?

Intermountain West, yeah. Cal is available there. Most eligible bachelor of the Intermountain Rocky West. And I can lift things and carry them. Do you have a specialty? He's a saucier. He's a saucier. In my personal endeavors.

You mean in love life? You talking about love life? That one's up to you. You can take it whatever you want. It's called the Poop Magoo. I really like cooking seafood a lot. You live on an island on the ocean yeah

and it's just so delicate and then if it's handled right man it's just so good um anything in particular in the seafood world well i think just out of the fact that i end up with a lot of it every year is is the big the heavy hitters this you know halibut salmon prawns lingcod lingcod and i think pound for pound lingcod stands up against anything i think it's one of my favorite fish um but i could only eat one fish the rest of my life and they told me it had to be lingcod i'll be like cool yeah that's cool bro yeah if it's done right it's it's it stands up against just about anything but uh yeah you know i also like kind of just doing the fun projects making sausage you know on a saturday afternoon just putzing around the house and having a big

cut of meat and in the smoker or raising something down those are those are fun days to be able to just kind of have a leisurely pace at it and play play with something all afternoon you know and then be able to like i said a few times but be able to share it that's my biggest thing is to lucky enough to that it is my profession but it's to be able to share those experiences and have people actually enjoy you know what i've produced you make a million little masterpieces that disappear right i think about you know the whole span of my career it's like there ain't nothing left it's all gone every. Every time. Every time. You think about architecture, you think about people that build stuff, and it's artists that hangs for a million years. Every day you're building tiny little masterpieces

that might take you three, four weeks and just snap. Like, that's gone. I never really thought about it that way. You're right. But when you're doing your eight-step duck pastrami, and all of a sudden it's just gone,'re like son of a bitch yeah and there's something sometimes that i covet things that i almost don't want to you know like like that the perfect stock that you know i made one a couple weeks ago just this it was beef stock but then i cooked it down

it was days and days and days and i got this thing down to a demi-glace where i started with 12 gallons and i got it down to just a cup full. And I just covered it. I didn't want to use it for anything because it was like, this is a masterpiece in itself. But that's where the reward is, is seeing people that enjoy it. Because it is. It's gone.

Every day you do it and it's gone. I'm going through that right now where I have two pieces of sable fish in my freezer. And you just want a whole lot of them. What is sable fish? And I like black cod. Oh, okay. And I like knowing they're in my freezer more than I like eating them. Because I like eating them so much.

Yeah. I like knowing they're in there. And I find myself like, I catch myself opening my freezer and staring at my two big pieces of sable fish being like fellas should probably eat them they ain't getting better they ain't getting better in there you know but then you're just waiting for

the perfect scenario right you're waiting for the right people to come over and the right preparation on it to make them I got a plan for them it's called lunch today right nope on it to make them. I got a plan for them. Yeah. I got a plan for them. It's called lunch today, right? Nope. No, I got my brothers

and their wives and whatnot are coming for Christmas. Yeah. Yanni? Anything to add? Closing thought. Yeah, I was thinking about how... Can I interrupt you?

Yeah. How you liking that brand Spickity New First Light? Loving it. What do you guys you guys call that a heli what do they call those things henley henley henley yep that's that's a sweet piece top secret though isn't it no man we can talk about her now but um you wore that love it in colorado right love Love it. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's a little bit thicker. It's got some spandex. No, that one is 100% wool.

The wool on the inside is just fleeced. Oh, is that what it is? It's probably as thick as a slice of bread, Matt. I love that thing. It's a little old school wool technology that we stole from the Swedish military. I think. Oh, yeah. Now you're getting 5%.

That's nothing. You were right, y'all. You were. Well, no, but I think it serves a purpose. You guys didn't put it in there for shits and giggles. Oh, you got squid ink on this thing? No, my kids were painting ornaments the other day and then showing them to me,

and I didn't know that they had just finished painting the ornaments, and so I've got paint on my phone and obviously on this shirt, too. Okay, yeah, correction. This new Henley is, I think, a 400-weight Merino, and there's 5% spandex in there because one thing that we dislike from tromping in the woods with pure Merino is how it kind of bags out on the sleeves over the course of a week.

Do you feel like it's going to help in the durability too? Yeah. Yeah. So it's got just a little more spring, a little more snap to it where you feel like it's not going to get that sort of like loose bagging you don't want to run home and wash it so it puckers back up again yeah right that's what i call it the re-pucker the re-pucker yeah and you know a big

thing that i mean you guys do for us and and i try to get as many days in myself is trying to explore the new items um and and see if they're actually doing the things that we want them to do in the field uh because they're just you can't recreate that stuff this is killing it for podcasting in steve's chili garage just perfect podcasting outfit man yeah you know and it's how do you test that you have a podcast do a marathon sash yeah gotta get poop down here and start going on it kelly got it oh yeah did you get a chance oh i interrupted you to ask you about your shirt yeah yeah i was admiring how attractive time how attractive you look over getting close to being out of time but um you're talking about how you try to eat a bunch of fish

during fishing or right after fishing season and sort of you know by this time of year now it's like late fall you're sort of getting over eating fish right because you've been eating a whole bunch of i don't like to leave my freezer as long as like red meat i just leave in there forever but i like i like but i've had the same thing happen with red meat you know like where i just had like the main thing in my freezer i had like two elk you know and maybe i had another whatever but for most part it's been eating elk and elk and elk and elk and for us that really like to eat only wild game you can't you can definitely get bored where you're like man just need something to switch it up and i was thinking about that and the answer is to be

like the steven ronella generalist hunter. Yes. And like this year, I'm like, all right. I kind of had it in my head. I put it out there to the universe. I was like, I need some ducks. Then my buddy called. He's like, dude, you want to go duck hunting? I got a sweet spot.

So we roll in, boom, some ducks. So I've got like 10 ducks in my freezer. Critical. You'll find that Giannis talks about putting something out to the universe. And what that means is he feels as though um if you're thinking about it it's kind of like a lavian uh it's not it's lavian metaphysics is that just by letting it just feeling away and letting people know a way that you uh a thing that you desire uh is it personal manifestation? People use that.

They throw that term. Yeah. So Yanni's like, bye. He just exudes a feeling of wanting ducks. And if he exudes that strong enough, the phone will ring. And in this case it did. And he now has a whole bunch of ducks. And now you got a sack full of squid.

My buddy Miller uses that for work. When he needs work really slowing down he's sort of like it's like hey universe needs some work bring 10 000 square feet yeah um he's a he's a tile he's a tile guy so 10 000 square foot house a lot of tile yeah um a lot of tile but, that's really helped me for keeping on the 100% wild game menu and being excited about it. It's like having some fish, some squirrels, some rabbits, some ducks, some elk. The generalist hunter and angler is a well-fed mofo. Yeah. People like to be like the big game big game you know white big buck white

tail deer hunter where you just you know expand a little bit man it really opens up your menu diversifies it you can only stuff so much variety into a sausage casing mm-hmm cal you got any final thoughts i don't have any can you guys tackle for me just put this thing to bed my mule deer neck scenario oh you can do that in two minutes i have this a whole mule deer neck i wanted to wrap it in the call fat and a beautiful big call fat and roast it on the pellet grill that's what i intended to do and. And to give you guys the full story, it was a really tricky, steep spot. When I was trying to get that neck out,

a lot of the blood out of the cavity came out and actually gave the neck about half of it a good bloodshot appearance. So I took it home when i got home and basically just put it in a very simple brine i think i just kind of threw some odds and ends in there but you know salt water was really the main ingredients so i don't think there's going to be any other leftovers but now it looks clean and beautiful again and it's thawing out out right now. I took it out before I came here to Seattle. I wouldn't do it the way you're talking about doing it. It would be an experiment.

I wouldn't do it that way. I think you could do it in a pellet grill, the neck, but I wouldn't wrap it up in anything. I would do it in a pellet grill and be basting the living daylights out of that thing. But think of the loss of heat on the pellet grill, though. I'm saying what I would do. And I would devise a dish, like tacos or something,

where I was shaving the neck meat off the outside, the nice smoky neck meat off the outside, and making some and then shaving some more and making some. If you want to have, but you're going to serve that whole damn neck, you're going to need to braise that neck down. And you're going to need to take that neck and sear it, give it a good rub, get a gigantic pan, sear the whole thing all over the place,

put it in a giant pot with a tight-fitting lid, and put it in your oven at 300 degrees for a ton of hours or in a slow cooker until you can pick it because you feel like it's just going to dry out on the grill it needs a moist method for sure it's not going to be tender you could almost do it in reverse like if you did the moist method first so if you braised it to where you're almost getting to like you're talking about the ribs where it's still gonna hold together but it's it's tender and then put it into a smoker or grill where then you could kind of infuse a little bit of that smoky flavor that is called the poot magoon and that's that's now you're thinking that's a good idea

pooter and there if you wrapped it in a coal fat, then that's just going to melt. It would melt, but it would also, if you were getting too tender and it was starting to fall apart, it would act as... Because I don't think I can put it in... I don't think I can get it in the oven. Because, I mean, this... It's a...

It's got to be a 15-pound... Even if you took... You know what you need is one of those little electric roasting ovens. I do need a roasting oven. I might have one I could send you. Even if you took a rack out, you couldn't get it in a pan in there? Maybe I could, but it wouldn't be a pan that has a lid at that point.

Aluminum foil. Weston. Weston electric roaster. Sealed tightly as you can. All right. You think that's the way to go, Andrew? Braise it. Braise it until it's just right there,

and then pull it out if you want to infuse that flavor. Then you could almost let it cool until you could work it, wrap it in your caul. Give it a good rub down. And then put it on your... I'd rub it down with, at a minimum, salt and pepper, maybe even something a lot zippier. Because it's a visual thing

right yeah it's a visual because i want that fred flintstone mega roast is yeah yeah i think i think boots idea but island time bro you'd have to pull it out before before it falls apart just kind of like you're saying with the ribs yeah because when i cook those next on it when i cook a neck dollars you cook it down and make like barbecue sandwiches me too yeah, you cook it down to make barbecue sandwiches with it. Me too, yeah. I'll cook it down until it looks like you could shake that neck and a bunch of vertebrae fall out of there

and look like something out of a museum. I mean, you can cook it down to where that meat, where you can just grab off fistfuls of meat off that neck rolls. Right. So don't let that happen. What did I just ask? About how to cook your neck.

Yeah. If I was paying attention right. Alright, I think I got it. You think you'd go call fat then? Or just save that for something else? No, why not? It'd be fun. Alright, eat your deer meat.

Eat all kinds of meat. Take care of it first. Cook it nice. Thanks for listening. 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

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