The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 140: Getting The Most Of It

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with wild game experts Danielle Prewett and Eduardo Garcia, along with Chris “Ridge Pounder” Gill, Seth Morris, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: a dude named Keith grinds an axe; souped-up weasels; capitalizing on Doug Duren's urine and Dirt's chew spit; letting Mother Nature take over; unseasoned meat as seeing someone naked for the first time; everything about cooking tongues; to sous vide or not to sous vide; fish thawing 101; Steve's trifecta of wild game ingredients that need to come from young critters; Pennsylvania meat hunters; the standardization of commercial meat production; Jenny Long Muzzle and whether to target animals by age; and more.For more on the ideas and materials referenced in this episode, head on over to the MeatEater website here. 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, underwear-less. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. This is embarrassing.

A dude wrote in. This is kind of like stunningly embarrassing but a guy wrote in and he's driving all around the place he says he drove from he drove from northwest Wisconsin through the prairie provinces of Canada into the Yukon all the way to the Alaska coast 10,000 miles of highway

listened to a bunch of podcast episodes and decided he needed to scold me about attributing a quote to aldo leopold that aldo leopold did not say the quote is ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching even when doing the wrong thing is legal which i've quoted a thousand times he says Leopold never said such a thing, ever. Now, he goes on to be real mean to me. This guy's name's Keith. But then you could tell that he had the same problem, because I've searched through the Leopold archives in Madison, Wisconsin, while I was writing on a related topic, and I found no such quote anywhere in his writings or

speeches. He scoured all of his works. Doesn't find those words. Last year, after seeing an anti-hunting group and a pro-hunting group both use that quote in the same week, attributing it to Leopold, I decided to answer the question once and for all. I contacted an old associate, Kurt Mein, the world's greatest Leopold authority, a trustee of the leopold foundation a professor

of ecology at university of wisconsin the author of the definitive leopold biography he doesn't know where that quote came from either he has read every quotable word leopold ever wrote or said. Gosh, I feel like in Bugle Magazine's column, what's that column called? Ethics or Situation Ethics, I believe, is the column. Come on, someone help me out. Nobody else reads Bugle?

No, I know the column. I want to say that that quote attributed to Aldo Leopold is in the header of that column. I've been reading that son of a bitching quote for my, not my whole life, but a lot of it. I got turned on to Aldo Leopold is in the header of that column. I've been reading that son of a bitching quote for not my whole life, but a lot of it. I got turned on to Aldo Leopold. I could tell you the year I got turned on to Aldo Leopold would have been 1996.

The reason I'm thinking of that year is because that was the first year we tried to cook a deer's tongue, which we'll be talking about shortly. Another thing, research just came out. They've been doing this extensive study of lynx and fishers. Hold on. Are we done with the quote?

Oh, you want to talk about that more? That's it? No, go ahead. Did you do any research? No, but I feel like he's probably right. As rude as he is. Here's how he ends his email. Eldo was a great man and a deep, deep thinker,

but he never said what you keep saying. He said, stop it. That's how he ends it. Just straight talk. Stop it. Sounds like my daughter. Stop it. I think we're going to get...

You might get a follow-up email on that one. Well, I didn't say his last name. How many dudes are running around named Keith? No, from other people. How many dudes are driving around 10,000 mile loops named Keith? I believe that this will be his favorite podcast of all time. Oh, yeah. Oh, he'll eat it up.

He'll eat it up. This one's for you, Keith. Because he's like, yeah, I'm right, you're wrong. This one's for you. Yeah. He's got, yeah, I'm right. You're wrong. This one's for you. Yeah. He's got a lot of, he's one of those dudes that is like, you get to the bottom of his email, and he has a lot of logos of his affiliations.

Like, you know when you go on like hunting and fishing chat rooms, forums, everybody ends with like a quote? Sure. Like 45 ACP because shooting twice is stupid stuff like that like guys will like have a quote that like really sums up their personality he runs with um he runs with like his affiliations i like the guy because he's the kind of guy that rather than sitting there being annoyed he's like you know what he'd probably like to know i'm gonna send him a note but in his email stop it the bottom tagline he doesn't have any leopold quotes no i'm gonna put that quote in

the bottom i think and i was gonna say that i said it now that no one knows stephen ranella now that no one knows where it came from yeah maybe maybe he's just giving you permission to just own that one i think so i'm gonna start i'm gonna start making the dice at it and after your quote says steve ranella and then it says thank you keith here's another quote that probably isn't true but i heard that sammy hagar have we talked about this before you honest i don't think so i heard that sammy hagar and i haven't looked up to see if he said this it kind of doesn't make sense but i heard that sammy hagar said that his lyrics come from thinking he knew what someone was saying in a song and then learned

what they're actually saying and then just took what he thought they were saying and made it a song so kind of plagiarism like how in in a god you know in the garden of eden it sounds like he's saying in a god of davida so it'd be like if you wrote a song like well now that i know he's saying in the garden of eden i'm gonna write a song where someone says in a god of davida but i don't know what he could have heard that would make that where he thought they were saying i can't drive 55 oh yeah the original like what is he actually what was the song no he is saying that do you understand what i'm saying what sammy hager said yeah totally so you can't take that and go like well that's how he must have come up with i can't drive i've got a great example or i can't remember who the original artist is, but Stuck in Lodi again.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Creedence. Yeah. Thank you. For many years, decades, I thought they were saying only the good die young. There's a similar song, similar lyrics.

So that's how they came up with that song, only the good die young. That's how Billy Joel came up with that? Maybe. I thought Townes Van Zandt penned Stuck in Lodi. He might have. Not Creedence. that song only the good die young that's how billy joel came up with that maybe i thought townsman's aunt penned he might have he might have not credence he wrote he wrote every song unbeknownst to a lot of people yeah he wrote all the songs yeah tragic okay him and jj kale can i move on to this fisher research out of maine there's a good one everybody knows what a fisher is. It's a member of the weasel family.

A mustelid. Like a souped up pine martin. Which is like a souped up weasel. They're doing some lynx research in Maine. And they're finding that, and this is bizarre, they're finding that fishers

successfully prey on lynx. Wow. Wow. That's awesome. Because they're putting, they have lynx with, they have collared lynx. And what people do when they're doing mortality studies is you put a collar on a thing that logs a GPS waypoint every whatever.

I don't know what's typical in a mortality study, but it logs a GPS waypoint every X hours. And then all of a sudden you see that that thing doesn't move for an unusual period of time. And then you go there quickly and try to ascertain what's going on. They're doing the lynx work in the winter so there's snow on the ground so you can get a pretty vivid picture of what happened and fishers seem to get on their trail and track them and they even mentioned in this thing that it seems that during snow flurries during snow

storms they will make their move and jump on the links and kill it by biting the back of its neck now this should also be known about fishers. There's some bad mofos because they're one of the few things that really regularly kills porcupines. They get them rolled over and attack the soft, quill-less belly patch. Pine martins do too, right? I don't know about pine martins. I heard that.

They're cousins yeah uh guy wrote in about uh mark kenyon was on this show and he's talking about eating apples how you can eat apples to mask your the the scent that you breathe out uh i don't know if that works now i remember hearing the same thing about carrots like eat a bunch of apples then you smell like something deer would want to eat this guy was saying one of the upsides he acknowledged the many downsides one of the upsides of of being a chaw dog is that he when he's up in his tree spitting out chew spit he's he's that deer come up and lick up that dip. Whoa. You don't buy that?

No. It's going to get people chewing. Yeah, a guy wrote in that we talk about chew too much and it's going to make... We've had a couple people write in and say that us talking about chew made them start dipping again. Relapse. He pulled a new gas station and bought a tin. And another guy said that we're talking about dip.

And I feel like when I'm talking about dip, I'm talking about people getting cancer and riddled with holes in their face. But he said we're going to make kids start dipping if we don't stop talking about dip. So I hesitate to talk about the deer-attracting qualities of dip. But the one thing that we're missing there is that you don't have to catalyze dip to have a smell by putting it in your mouth. You just

bring an extra Yeti and dump a can in there with some hot water and then dump it around your tree stand. Like it doesn't have to touch your body. That's a good point. You just buy a log. Yeah. Have a thermos. Yeah, just dribble it the whole way out. Cancer free. Or just

have Garrett just put the lid on a bunch of his gatorade bottles and sell them save them yeah yeah you're going to you're going to a sporting good start next to the doing the doing right urine is just a bottle of dog it should be doug duran's piss and dirt's juice dirt spit or you make a concoction of buckman juice and Dirt Myth spit. With some apple? That'd be a great product, man. It was, yeah, Doug Duren's urine mixed with Dirt's chew spit, and it's like a deer. It'd be like the world's greatest deer attractor.

You can just call it rut. Okay, one more quick thing. I did my correction. I talked about deer licking up dip. I talked about fishers i'm gonna touch on new zealand which is a kind of baffling situation and and no one here is going to have an expert opinion on that and another thing guy was talking about uh seth right you were just sharing with us recently about shot gobbling turkeys by throwing rocks at stop signs

yep okay guy hunts in upstate new york and he says the most beautiful shot gobbling that occurs is he hunts by a lake that has a lot of loons. Oh. And in the spring, a loon will light up, and it'll shot gobble turkeys. That's one I have not heard before. Yep. Add it to the list.

Who can do a loon call? That's tough. that was pretty good not bad uh okay new zealand now this is this is just talent i'll just tell this i can't put any there's nothing i can do here for you i'm providing nothing but just telling about this is outside of my area of expertise i'm deeply american but um just as like game management in africa baffles me game management in new zealand baffles me but there's a debate going on where like in new zealand um the the sort of radical left of the environmental movement is very anti-game animals because there's no game animals native to New Zealand. They had those big 500-pound birds, but they killed them all.

I think they were extinct prior to European contact, like the indigenous people, I think. Once it was settled by you know what became the indigenous population those birds were wiped out but when when europeans started showing up they decided trucking over all the game animals they were familiar with from europe and also asia and even some from north america because they put some elk here and there but uh and they brought tar over himalayan tar and cut them loose in new zealand and they occupy the alpine areas of new zealand and apparently cause some amount of damage to native flora so the hunters want all the game animals they like to hunt for them and the left side of the environmental spectrum would like to see them eradicated and right now there was like some really

aggressive coal was proposed and typically when they go in coal tar in new zealand so the government shoots them out of helicopters the reason you see so much crazy stuff happen in new zealand it would never go on here like you know landing helicopters next to animals and killing them and having year-round hunting with no bag limits is all because it's non-native it's all non-native wildlife that isn't particularly welcome in a lot of places but when they when the government guys are up shooting them out of helicopters a lot of times they'll just shoot the females and they'll leave bulls so guys can go hunt them but someone came up with this really aggressive coal plan, which would have, I guess, once and for all,

put the finishing touches on a number of these populations of tar. And the hunters got all mad. We had a lot of hunters from New Zealand writing in to us saying, hey, man, you should speak up on this. But I can't really speak up on it with real authority because I don't really understand. But I know that oftentimes you'll see hunters in new zealand and australia kind of be like hey hunting here is good or hunting here's okay because it's all non-natives anyways we got to get rid of the non-natives so it puts you in a weird situation if you've

been articulating that perspective and all of a sudden now you're like, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Don't kill them all. Right? It's a weird situation. What was the aggressive plan the liberal left or whatnot came up with? Oh, it was killing hundreds of thousands of tar and shooting all the bulls.

Yeah. And you have to assume there's probably flavored with a little bit of anti-hunting sentiment the way it's presented to me because they used to leave bulls around because without females they're not doing a lot to explode the population and then hunters could go hunt the bulls yeah and you know whatever get the hides eat the meat i hunted tar in new zealand this is probably one of the more dangerous hunts i've ever been on. What's your take on it, man? My take is I remember visiting – Do you mind introducing yourself?

Oh, this is Eduardo Garcia, everybody. Thanks for being here. Good morning. Yeah. So having never been to New Zealand, I still think that anybody who lives on this earth can have some type of perspective, and it's just based on where you've been in life. So my perspective on the non-native species goes back to a trip I took in my early 20s when I was working as a yacht chef. So we were on a boat out of San Diego, and we went to an island called Guadalupe Island, which is southwest of San Diego in the Pacific Ocean. And it's not a huge island, but let's call it 15 miles in length and maybe four miles in its most widest part.

And it just comes straight up out of the Pacific. So super deep blue water right offshore. We were going there to fish for tuna and to check out the great whites that literally just troll the perimeter. It's part of a triangle of migration between San Francisco, Guadalupe, and Hawaii for great whites in the Pacific. And what are the great whites feeding on? They're feeding on seals. So yeah, it's a pretty sketchy kayak ride into shore.

They're feeding on seals. And then if you're fishing like we were, you're ending up with tons of carcasses. And so a good time is to just wrap a line on a yellow tail tuna or yellow fin tuna's tail, and you'll have 18-footers, 15-footers just cruising. Oh, like after you cut the meat out, just hang the carcass? Yeah, you'll have a cooler, and you just open the drain a little bit and have a carcass in there and just be dribbling blood into your you know behind when you're swinging on anchor oh yeah um so that's what we're there for you know with with the boss fishing and uh but when when we also went hiking on the island and this island was mostly denuded there was very little trees there was very little um flora and fauna, and there was skulls and live goats, so dead Easter Islands and explorations of the Pacific. And they used a few of these islands, not just Guadalupe, but Cedros Islands and islands off of Baja as these nurseries for food on the return trip. They would be returning lean and then they would

be able to harvest these goats that had just been living happy and fat on this island, right? But the population exploded, and they literally ate everything on the island to the point where the Mexican government came in and culled most of these goats back. Got you. But like the red-breasted robin, or I think it's even, there's an indigenous bird

to that zone called the Guadalupe robin, similar to our American red-breasted robin, that almost went extinct. And so that, my take on it is that like a place was built to be a certain way and as soon as as soon as we start screwing with mother nature we're done like there is absolutely no way to catch back up what i've seen let me give you a two-point counter. Yeah. In the case of New Zealand, so many of the things that were, like, so many of the native species were eradicated, you know, well, driven to extinction or extirpated. Yeah. So, you've already kind of got, I think that that sort of provided a motivation to repopulate it.

Right. So, there's that. And I'm not saying that's the final word on it, but you to like imagine right it's not like you're like supplementing an existing thing you kind of have this like people went to this place where you expect like a large landmass to have large mammals right and even though there weren't large mammals there there was these like large birds there and so people probably felt an absence sure you know um so there's that a quick note on the how the whalers used to stock islands all over yeah do you hear about the whalers that used to go and get uh they'd stop by and get giant tortoises in a variety of places like everywhere even people

would stop into the seychelles later and get giant tortoises off there and they'd go to other areas and get them they liked them because you could flip them over. Put them in the hold of the boat, flipped over, and they would stay alive for months. You want to talk about humane slaughter practices. Oh my God. The second counter is this, and this is an interesting perspective on non-natives, where the Hawaiian islands weren't colonized until around 1100 years ago so seafaring polynesians discovered kind of in a truer sense of the word being like the first

people to discover discovered the hawaiian islands 1100 years ago and they introduced and that they And they quickly introduced dogs, rats, probably accidentally, pigs, and a wide array of edible fruits. So Hawaii didn't have mango and papaya and pineapple and breadfruit. This is all stuff that was cultivated. Sure. and pineapple and breadfruit this is all stuff that was cultivated sure so i was hunting in molokai with some native hawaiians and the nature conservancy was had recently bought up some large properties and the nature conservancy was pushing an idea that they wanted to eradicate the wild pigs off of the land because they wanted to do a non-native eradication. The Hawaiians articulated a perspective to me that we're indigenous people.

We're native people. We've been here for however long we've been here. The entire time that we've been here, we've been here with pigs entire time that we've been here, we've been here with pigs. How can I be native, but the pig be non-native? And they said, if we really wanted to get serious about eradicating non-natives, I would be looking toward you folks rather than these pigs. So the point being, I think people get pretty used to having the animals around that they have. And to these boys in New Zealand who've been writing in, it's a really insulting idea that you would wipe out their resource. I get it.

But again, man, I don't really know. I don't really know the answer. It's like Texas. You want to introduce yourself? Hey, I'm Danielle Pruitt. Okay. Texas? Yeah, I live in Texas.

And it's sort of the same thing there. A lot of non-natives. You want to eradicate some of that. But then again, you have all these outfitters that profit off of it. So it's like that constant battle between the two ideas of what do you do with this problem we have? And then the people who are banking in on it, cashing in, actually keeping and trapping pigs and letting them go. Yeah. It's catch 22.

For sure. Yeah, the pigs, they get a bad rap because they can be destructive, right? But it is different in this way than a rainbow trout and a brown trout because i don't know there is some competition in the native rivers right with other with the native fish yeah but it's generally not like brown trout generally aren't causing trouble no not that we know of i think that they're they know that there is some competition in our rivers with native fish and the introduced trout right but yeah it's not all sudden made a campaign to call out all rainbow and brown trout out of the rocky mountain states get a little pushback but you know what i would be in a position

i to be consistent if someone proposed that to be consistent i don't know man i was gonna say to be consistent i would support it just to be just to be just to have just to be able to be to have the clarity but you see that my point that one of the things that i believe is that there are moral and ethical compass needs to migrate and mature with, it needs to evolve with everything else. And just because it's kind of an easy thing for us to say, yeah, let's bring it back to its original holistic way, I struggle to believe that that is actually attainable

in some scenarios. Sure. I don't believe it is at all. There you go. And so what it means, though, is that we have to shift, like it's a paradigm shift that needs to happen.

We need to shift our perspective as to, okay, well, what is the new normal? And some of these things are here to stay. How do we continue to uh be stewards well getting the fuck out of the way and just let mother nature like cull also and figure it out you know like a friend was talking to me about mountain lion hunting here in montana last week and he was saying you know what i want to do he said uh he said i think we need to shoot um

female mountain lions right for what purpose um to in his mind it's part of um game management is is he wants to see fewer lines he's watching all the so i'm living in southwest montana where the predator population is robust and growing yeah right grizzly bears wolves mountain lions you name it that being not even a debatable point no i want to clarify for you this isn't like a debate it's just by the numbers yeah you know and and so his point is like hey we need to and he was just talking about mountain lions and i'm just sharing a conversation that happened that he uh he's like you know what my point of view is I want to harvest female mountain lions. Eliminates the next generation just right off the bat.

And if we have a few more toms out there, the toms naturally will be culling their own kin to keep their own population down. That's what Mother Nature has instilled in them to do, you know? Yeah, they practice fratricide. There you go. And so in his way, he was just saying, like, I'm going to mediate a little bit just to kind of let Mother Nature take back over a little bit. Yeah.

Which was interesting. I didn't have much to debate there. I was just listening to him saying, yeah, all right, I hear you. You know, are you going to eat it? That was my next question my next question you're gonna eat it and he's one of those he's a little on the fence with you know the things he does and doesn't eat for the wild but um i was like well fuck it give it to me i'll eat it you know yeah it's pretty good i've heard i've heard tastes like pig i like it you know i like it none of this is what we're supposed to be talking about is everybody cool on the things we brought up so far no that was the perfect segue i can't believe i missed a good segue yeah yeah eduardo just

served it up man do you mind taking it and running since i missed it yeah speaking of eating mount lions oh no because i wanted to segue into the tongue to tongue oh so i gotta go back i gotta go here here check out this one here's the a segue for you. Hey, remember when I was talking earlier about 1996? Mm-hmm. The tongue? Yeah. Well, here's why. That was when I, no, it wasn't 96.

We cooked tongue in 94. First time. 1994. I had moved away from home and was living with my brother danny and our buddies brian and matt drost and we lived in a house i remember my rent was 110 a month um but also a part of the house was actually falling away from the other part of the house where you sacrifices you could run an extension cord from inside out without opening a door or window honestly and like i remember the shower leaked so bad the landlord wouldn't come over there that we went and bought a gallon of roofing tar and roofing tar at our shower

and roofing tar takes forever to dry in a shower. So, you know when you set your shampoo bottle down, it'd get like roofing tar on it. So, every ledge has a roofing tar ring on it because it just took months for that roofing tar to set up. That kind of place. And we were eating a lot of deer meat. And we were eating every part of it. We were just eating everything we could get our hands on we're bagging yeah we ate four deer between the opening of bow season october 1st we ate four deer between the opening of bow season the beginning of christmas

break which started like december 10 and we always knew that people could eat tongues i was telling danielle about this yesterday and we would uh we just took i remember one night we were partying and took a deer tongue and just boiled the pot for a long time and just didn't like couldn't get it figured out i didn't know about the skin thing right did you guys get that yeah and we kind of decided we sort of put it on put that whole idea on ice for a long time but i'll point out that it also took us many years to figure out what was up with beaver tails hmm did it took a long time to be like oh so that's what they're talking about when they talk about beaver tails it's all fat

inside it's like steak gristle inside there i wonder if you could just render that somehow oh yeah trying to you could render it no on it you could render it out for sure um so there's that so danielle talk about how you cook up to your tongue then i want to i don't want to have uh then i want to do our little talk about tongue well we were talking about about this yesterday and for people who who look at it as this terrifying alien looking thing imagine that it's sort of like a little pot roast that is enclosed in a hard rubber case so all you'd have to do no matter pretty much i think any tongue recipe is always started the same way, boiling, braising, and some sort of liquid to tenderize, cook the meat on the inside, and you're also separating the skin from the meat. And then when you plunge it in that ice bath, that cold water shocks meat, it contracts, and then you have a little bit of separation to help you peel it. And from that point, you have endless options.

It's like a piece of meat. I was thinking about doing some sort of pot roast, cut it into big hunks, add it to carrots, potatoes, whatever, some stock, and just put it back in the oven for a while until all the vegetables are cooked, and it's like a pot roast. But I think there's a lot of things you can do. You haven't tried that yet? I have not tried that yet. I have a lot of ideas.

I used to always tell people that it wasn't worth messing with any tongue up until you got into elk. But I now realize that that's not at all correct. Yeah. Because that deer tongue we did yesterday, just a regular old deer tongue. Makes a lot of. Yeah. It makes a really, like a,

like a definitely like a meal for someone or an appetizer for six to eight people. Yeah. And I think that's a nice thing about if you've got one tongue and you want to have people over, have a dinner party and really share something different that most people have never experienced, having that sliced up and seared, I think whatever you do after you braise it,

having some sort of hard sear after either on a grill or in a hot saute pan helps enhance that texture a little bit. Some coloration is really big. Because it can get kind of a weird look to them. Yeah, it's like that grayish color. And to me, that's sort of the first thing I see. I say it all the time. You eat with your eyes first.

You see a meal, if it looks like shit, you've got it in your head that you're not gonna like it so i always find some way to add some sort of coloration to to that meat so have you ever just cured them no i haven't because when i first started getting uh better at preparing them it was because i hung out with a buddy of mine who's a chef and had like an actual restaurant and he used to do a lot of uh he used to do a lot of tongue dishes in his restaurant he was jewish so he's got you know like a just like we're discussing this as well yeah like hispanic culture boss culture you know there's a bunch of cultures around the world that like utilize tongue and have like tongue traditions but then jewish delis it's, it's a very common dish in large eastern cities.

Yeah, I've seen it. Jewish delis have tongue sandwich. So he came from that perspective but was also very big into charcuterie. Mm-hmm. He would take like a dozen veal tongues and do them all at once. And he would put them in a dry brine, skin on cure them with pink salt so then when you then you braise them pull the skin then he'd smoke them but it would be that pink salt would turn it like a beautiful beautiful red didn't you do that on a yeah yeah i've done that yeah i remember seeing

that yeah so that's how he would conquer the color problem and it also make it that when you know i think you should do first it's just like really quickly walk through the steps of like just how you cooked it how you cooked the deer tongue yesterday uh yesterday's so we braised it you braised it in a little pot. Probably three hours. That wasn't just water, did you add? Stock. Okay, it was stock. So I like to think that whatever you're braising it in imparts some flavor.

So some sort of flavoring. I would have just done water because I don't think it really matters probably. I don't know if it would either. Because I didn't want you to look down on me. Well, I told you I never, ever, ever tell anybody to use like a bullion cube. I really just, I hate those. That might be the only time I would ever do that is because I have not yet tested side by side, braised in water, braised in stock.

If that meat, peel it and you were to take a slice right then. I haven't tested that yet. Wine testing? Yeah, because I don't know how much you can actually penetrate and flavor the meat the way you normally would flavor meat in stock with that shell over it. Yeah, but I knew you were going to season it, and I knew you were going to make an accompaniment.

Yeah. So I think if you were just going to be like, no, I'm just going to boil it, like in the old days, like they used to do out on the Great Plains, shoot a buffalo, cut its tongue out, boil it, slice it up, eat it, then I would want to boil it in the salted stock. Right. Right? But since you're going to do all that other junk,

I would have just done it watered, but I didn't want you to come over to my house and think that I was a shitty cook. So I put put stock in there i told you not to use your good stock though i did say that um yeah and i think you so you can braise it stovetop put a lid on it low uh pressure cookers are awesome tools to use if you man, you've got to be careful with pressure cookers. What do you mean? Because you can't monitor it. So I am a fan of manual pressure cookers and the newer ones.

What you're supposed to be doing, if I would allow you to do it. I'm sorry, am I off track? Yeah, just march us through like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. What you did yesterday. Okay, okay. So we braised the tongue until it was tender. And you could tell we stuck a fork, like one of the spokes of the fork, and you could tell that you could just sort of slide it under the skin,

and you knew the meat was tender after about three and a half hours. So we pulled it out, gave it an ice bath, peeled it, which took a little bit of time. Yeah, you're kind of peeling and kind of using a paring knife. Yeah, so you don't want to cut through the meat. And so I used a paring knife, I think a super sharp fillet knife that's really thin and flexible would also help just to sort of – kind of like you're getting silver skin off. Who sharpened that knife?

You sharpened it. Oh, that's right. It's very sharp. Go on. Yeah, because it always seems like with those tongs, man, you get like half of it that just comes right off, and then the other, there's different binding materials between the skin and the meat in different locations on that tong.

And there's definitely... Can I butt in for a minute? Uh-huh. Rich Pound, are you cool? You haven't said a thing all day. Well, I got i do because she's marching through the steps i know and i did i do have a question i'm glad you asked because i was trying to find my moment but um is it safe to say that like for the domestic chef and like people cooking at home that if you get a tongue like the best thing to do is to just baseline just braise it first and then get creative you have to do i wouldn't worry about dry brining it ahead of

time and all that if you're just gonna do if you just want to be like what's this all about if you want to be what's this about i would make the thing that she's talking about yeah that was really good because my the chef buddy that does the dry brine the peel the, the smoking, that's some labor-intensive shit. Yeah. But the thing is, he's doing a dozen of them. And these are beef tongues. They're bigger. So he's doing like, he's making a day out of it.

You know what I mean? The ROI is really there. The return on investment. Where are people finding Daniel's recipe? Oh. Good question. We're going to put it out in a video. Oh, nice.

Cool. I look forward to seeing that yeah go on march through you good chris yeah but so if you got a tongue like say you shot your first deer you cut the tongue out you're like oh i'm gonna do something with this you don't want to stick in the oven you don't want to put it in a slow cooker you want to braise it first right well slow cooker would work fine yeah it would so you do the same thing same thing cover it in liquid cover it in liquid you good seth you ever cook a tongue i have not but i i do have some in the freezer and it's like i look at them it's like man i don't know i don't know what to do with that thing hang on they last forever they do that was my question how long

they last in the freezer you got that protective sheath on them yeah all humans will be dead as long as there's a freezer running somewhere the tongue will be fine man some future species will cook that tongue up uh okay march is through okay so yeah i start every process with the same braising it and then peel it so it So it's a lot easier to peel if you've cooked it first. And then being super patient, you don't want to try to cut the meat. You don't want to cut the meat thinking you're just going to peel it that way. You want to sort of wiggle that knife in between. I think the same way you sort of start getting silver skin off of meat and then use your fingers and you can start to peel sometimes it doesn't work so easily and then you just have to be patient but so once i got it peeled then the skin is like don't worry the skin is extremely

obvious there's no question about what it is you're trying to get off. Yeah, you're not like, is that meat? Is that skin? It's like, that's, you just, that's, it's also bumpy. It's hard. It's gross. So do you peel it because of like, it's just tougher than hell? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like eating plastic, I would imagine. I don't know what, or a rubber. Yeah.

You can try it. Let me know how it goes. We could have given you a whole handful of it yesterday make a little skin i didn't know you were curious about i didn't i didn't know if it was if it was just like an appearance texture thing that i i think the texture matters so it's like at the very back of the tongue there's like always that that hump i don't know the correct term for that but there's always once you peel like those big taste buds off there's still like some raised bumps so i'm that textural things like that really bother me so i take that paring knife and shave it kind of like you'd shave your face so it's smooth

so you don't have any like bumpy textures you shave your face i don't know if i had ever shaved my face that's what i would imagine speaking to a group of guys saying no that's good she's being relatable yeah okay so there you are tongue's all peeled up you got the little bump yeah you scrape the bumpies off yeah and then slice it if i could slice it as super super thin i i would have um maybe wrapped in plastic wrap put it in the freezer time willing and that sort of hardens it up and then you can really get nice thin slices but when it's sort of just fresh out of that ice bath it's still a really firm texture it's still really easy to cut through. So I sliced into about quarter inch,

eighth inch. No, man. Quarter inch? No, they're way thinner than quarter inch. They were thinner than that? That knife was sharp. That knife was so sharp. Those were not quarter inch slices. They were about eighth inch. Three sixteenths? I don't think they were that thin.

But I'll take it. Well, four sixteenths is a quarter inch. What do you think, Annie? 3 16ths sounds good. Maybe even a hair less. Go ahead. Real thin. So then I made a nice little spice mix that had some smoked paprika in it. So a really nice

bright red color. So once you mix that and season the meat with that rub, then you finally got a little red color to that gray meat, which is... And that made that shit come alive, man. And that's when you go from like, this is tongue, this is meat. It's like kind of hopping that bridge that people need mentally to get over from animal

Once that hit, it was ready. It was looking good. Yeah. Once that hit, it was ready. It was looking good. Yeah, so then the last step was hot saute pan, a little bit of oil, sear it on both sides. And I always use a little spatula to press it down because a lot of times meat, that pressure, they like to sort of dome up. And then the circle doesn't get seared, only the ring on the outside edge. So I just flatten it down one by one, flip it over, do it to the other side, and you're done. No, he drizzled it with something. Chimichurri.

This is a good high-grade, this is advanced wild game cooking. That shit was good. Real good. It was really good, but it seems so simple. Like advanced, but simple. Yeah. I try to make it approachable for people. If you're at home,

you're not looking at a hundred steps. It's like, oh, it's that easy. Braise it, peel it, slice it, sear it. Ta-da. Chris, what made it advanced in your mind versus simple? What about the complete tongue recipe? I think the one, like knowing what to do with the presentation because of the gray color,

like being like, oh oh we need to add some spice to this one for flavor and two to make it like appetizing to look at and then two like knowing things like the doming and like flattening like that's a little more advanced like i wouldn't know how to do that but simple in the way that like i'm not a good cook but watching that watching you cook the whole thing it was like oh i could probably do that yeah if i had like a walkthrough yeah you could set chris's baseline by having you share your uh famous gray rabbit recipe and that would that would give everybody a good baseline of where chris is coming from his culinary experience, I cooked some gray rabbit. It wasn't good.

It was gray in species? No one really understands the story. Dude, I don't really even understand it. So it's not just me? No. It was a cottontail rabbit. It was a swamp rabbit. Same as a cottontail?

Yeah. Was it sylvalogus aquaticus? It's a cottontail that grows to five six pounds it was a big one sounds like a nightmare yeah dude yeah but these are cool rabbits delicious cool thing about these rabbits you know a normal cottontail just shits wherever he pleases a swamp rabbit has a log oh yeah i forgot about they got like a defecation log where they got a little spot where they presumably like they like to use it. They get up and look around and get up out of the water when it's wet.

These rabbits will swim away from you. They'll jump in the Mississippi or the Ohio and swim across the river. That's amazing. And they'll live out in the marsh. Five pound rabbits. My dog would love that rabbit. And they got a little log where they like to go. It's like llamas.

Llamas will pick a spot and shit in the spot and make like a little hill. And then they'll actually climb up on the hill after many months of building it up and use it as a place to get a look around. It's pretty smart. It's like a prairie dog thing. That's like the ultimate, ultimate recycling of materials. They're like, not only is it food, but it's also function. Yes. Closed loop, man.

So they have a defecation log and chris took some it's very good it's very good to eat and he took some and he sucks at cooking not sucks at cooking sucks at cooking game by your admission i'd say sucks at cooking okay flat out sucks at cooking yeah the game doesn't help because it just adds like another level of like carefulness tried to prepare the rabbit for a lady who he was you know trying to impress it came out gray no one was happy he felt that he'd set he'd set everything back tell us the recipe the procedure i forgot i think it was a recipe in one of the in the small game don't you dare but here's where i messed up here's where i

messed up i think come on i think the taste wasn't wasn't bad it was just the color and i think the issue was like i just didn't brown it enough before because i think it calls for browning and then you bake it right maybe but anyways the browning that's i think that was my fatal misstep was like as it was like i was just worried about burning it the whole time and that's the perfect segue because that's exactly what danielle was just talking about was like making food appetizing to the eyes yeah and you you didn't pull that was rule number one and then nobody was like i wish i would have been there for this meal man would have been yeah a fly on the wall or more like steve or more like chris's chef that was there to no no no fly on the wall

fly on the wall uh moving on you good we don't you like we beat you up about this a bunch of times like because we don't know what happened the reason i'm moving on is there's no lesson no there's no lesson like if i was there if someone would have been there i would have said like that's actually looks great there's not a problem yeah or whatever did it look bad or did it also taste bad no it tasted i mean it wasn't like probably amazing but it was it was edible for sure flavor was good flavor was there did it was it tender it was a little it was it was not as tender as i'd hoped it could have gone for another 30 minutes. Yeah. The tenderness was, yeah, that was a little bit of an issue.

And then the gray. The color was the worst part. Eduardo, do you mind, can you jump in and give some perspective on tongue? Because I'm guessing that you didn't discover tongue when you were 20. Well, no, I actually discovered tongue when i was 18 oh yeah not uh only because i was in culinary school so that's how you found out about it yeah so it wasn't from like like it wasn't like a family thing from having family from mexico well it could have been the wrong part of mexico no No, no, no. You're right on many levels except for

my... It could have had tongue really from my mom's side, which is Russian, Jewish from the East Coast, New Yorker. So that easily could have brought tongue into our life. And from my dad's, the Latino edge. But no, I was raised sort of in sort of more of a

natural culture. I was raised on tofu and miso soup and not a lot of in more of a natural culture. I was raised on tofu and miso soup and not a lot of game, not a lot of proteins. Really? Like meat-based proteins. Yeah, more vegetarian, macrobiotic cooking, which is whole plant cooking. What about fish? Fish was expensive, so trout. Yeah, if the twin bro and I caught trout, we'd eat trout.

Gotcha. And I guess when I was in my teens, we started hunting. So we were like, Mom, we're eating game. You know, brought like a deer leg home. Yeah. But so tongue for me, cooking school was the intro to methodology. And through methodology, and when we talk about cooking, methodology required a diverse range of muscle cuts that require different cooking methods in order to have a tender brown, not gray rabbit, et cetera. You know, so my take on tongue was that was my first experience.

And then traveling through traveling around the world, you see it on all kinds of menus. It's really the U.S. has one of the most limited animal-based protein availability, kind of, you know, like available options out there. You go to Europe and they're eating turkey every single day, not just on Thanksgiving. Well, that's our holiday, but you know, not just in the fall. So I've seen and cooked tongue a bit. And I, you know, I think it is interesting it is interesting especially um i mean heck you have a i think you have a recipe out there for like duck tongues you cook duck tongues before no not me really so people do people are cooking duck tongues i mean that's that's a bite i've been i've been served it but i haven't prepared it yeah so tongue this is how so here's my thing

hold on i can't let duck tongues go. Like, for real? What was it like? It's like a crispy duck tongue. 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 a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Popular in Asian cultures. More like wok fried and then tossed in a sauce kind of a thing.

So imagine eating a popcorn shrimp. Maybe not as tender, but there's going to be a little chew in there. Are they peeling those too? I don't think so. I haven't prepared them. Interesting. We're going to be trying it. Well, duck hunting season is coming up, so I'll sign up right now for that trip.

That'll be fun. Yeah, man. We'll discard the rest of the carcass and just pull a bunch of duck tongues. There's a handful. I got a running list of shit I want to mess with that I haven't messed with yet. Have you ever been to a dim sum place

and eaten the gelled chicken feet? Mm-hmm. I want to get around to replicating that with turkey feet, grouse feet. Feet are great. So feet, we're bouncing around a little bit,

but the best chicken foot recipe I ever had was made by a Jamaican lady, and she would use the feet. It's what I do now. I make all of my chicken stock out of chicken feet because it's loaded with all of the tendons. You raise up chickens, don't you? I raise chickens. It's not enough to butcher myself.

I just buy pounds of frozen chicken feet from a butcher or grocery store. And the reason I use those for chicken stock is because per square pound, I guess, or however you want to equate that, a foot has the most connective tissue and ligaments and cartilage and joint matter which is packed with collagen and collagen when cooked down turns into gelatin which creates your beautiful viscous broths and stocks that have mouthfeel and stuff so pound for pound and pound and dollar for pound it's like the most economical way to have the best tasting stocks out there is go for the shins the hooves the um the feet the tail right if you're hunting animal with tail i know you're worried about how far off track you are and i know where i know where you need to wind up yeah can i throw

another thing in to ask you if you have any familiarity with sure um you're familiar with bird's nest soup yes okay so there's a type of swallow a cliff dwelling swallow i'm not talking to you i'm talking to the listener there's a cliff dwelling swallow that produces a spit that has a glue-like quality to it and they take nesting materials coat it with this spit and and then build their nest. And bird's nest soup, it's a thing that people do to, you basically take this thing and simmer it and extract that viscous liquid from it,

and it's used to make a somewhat viscous consomme. I took cliff swallows, you know, the mud ones, the mud nests that you see here under bridges and stuff. I took a bunch of those and bashed them up

and boiled them for a long time and then let the dirt settle and strained it off and reduced that down. And I could never find what I was after. Like I could never get like that spit, that viscous spit.

Different type of swallow. Yeah, but go on. Tongues. Yeah, tongues. We're talking about sort of what's my take or what's my, I think it's a muscle worth eating. I think it's just, it's ridiculous. If you look at the commercial industry, you know, the commercial industry wastes very little because everything's got value to it. I messed you up.

That's not where you were. Where was I? Feet. Oh. Could you do it with a turkey footwork? For stock? Have you done with a wild turkey? No, I haven't.

There's no reason why not. Yeah, I don't know why not. Of course you could. I save my geese feet for stock. You do? Yeah. Snow ge why not. Yeah, I don't know why not. Of course you could. I save my geese feet for stock. You do? Yeah. Snow geese feet? Yeah, Canada's.

So their feet are pretty nasty. So I always wash them clean, potato scrubber, scrub them off, and then I blanch it in boiling water in case there's anything bacteria-wise on it because you don't want all that inside of your stock. So I blanch them, scrub them, and then knife, start to break them at the joints to sort of open them up, and then I throw them in the stock. No shit. There you go.

Almost every part of the animal could be simmered down to a flavored broth. There's no reason why not to. Okay, now go. simmered down to a flavored broth, there's no reason why not to. Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. Okay, now go. On tongues? Yeah.

Yeah, so tongue for me, it's, I enjoy it a few different ways. The way Danielle's recipe shares, which is slow cooked until it's tender, peeled, and then browned off. Do I have that right? And seasoned. I like it that way. I also like it more as a deli meat as well.

So slow cooked until tender, peeled, and then left whole. And so I'll cook a tongue, peel it back, and then once it's at that tender place, I'll just refreeze it again and just label it cooked tongue and at that point it's ready for kind of a array of possibilities you could do you mess with deer tongues too or just bigger ones i usually just mess with the bigger ones as of yet i have a very limited time uh in my day-to-day and and the roi comment earlier it's kind of bang for your buck like an an elk tongue or a cow tongue just has more bang for your buck. I'll go down. They harvest bison on the park line here in southwest Montana as part of an indigenous hunting opportunity for native tribes from the Pacific Northwest to come in and hunt bison that are coming out of Yellowstone Park.

And I'll often go down during that time of year and pick up heart and kidney and call fat and tongue if they don't want them because, I mean, that's a major bang for your buck. That's a good idea. Freaking huge. Well, you know. But so I'll keep a cold, a cooked tongue in the freezer. And at that point, I'll thaw it out and slack it and then just slice it.

What does slack it mean? Slack it means is a restaurant term when you pull something out of the freezer and let it thaw slowly. So you would pull something and put it on a tray and throw it in the fridge for a couple days and let it slack or thaw out and or put it on your counter. I always felt like when you dump a frozen something because you're stressed and hustling, you don't have time and you dump it in warm water, you're almost like stressing more water and moisture out of the meat. And you end up with a lot more coming out of it than when you just let it naturally thaw on its own at room temp. So when the tongue is then thawed, I'll just cut it like just quarter inch, just like you would a steak sandwich. And I'll throw it on a bagel with arugula or sprouts and onion and good mustard and mayo and just make a sandwich out of it. Really?

Now it's a cold cut. Oh, yeah. It's amazing. And it's interesting, right? So I have this thought a lot is that how often are folks eating meat without seasonings, without salt, without any herbs, without anything but the meat? And you know, like that's what rabbit tastes like. That's what antelope tastes like. Rarely.

Rarely, right? And so oftentimes we're eating a combination of, it's like seeing something naked for the first time. Seeing to eat a meat, you know what I'm saying? It's like, oh, that's what you look like. But to eat something without any of the dressings. Never. Yeah, never.

And you should do it because then it starts the fundamental process of the education of, well, that's what it tastes like. That's smart, man. For me, the baseline is a little bit of salt. If I really bad, I'd be like, what's this like? I still put a little bit of salt on it. But you're right. You should strip it down.

Well, boil pasta just for the easiest test. Just boil pasta in naked water and boil pasta in salted water. And it's not so much that you're tasting the salt. If it's salted appropriately, salt dehydrates. So salt pulls out natural flavors in the form of dehydration. It's pulling out moisture from anything. You put salt on an apple, you's going to, you're going to see liquid come up and that's natural. That's the moisture that's within that organic matter, right? And so salting is kind of fundamental to pulling natural flavor out. You can over salt and that's a bad deal too.

So, so that's one way I like to cold slice a tongue. And then another one that I want to mess with more is, is slow cooking it till it's it's tender and then slicing it and then frying it. So you're still trying to brown it, but I'll just shallow fry it in a cast iron full of lard, right? And maybe dredge it a little bit too. So take that cold sliced tongue, season it with some salt and pepper, if you will, flour, and then fry it. And now all of a sudden you have this crispy little chicken fried steak thing happening. And that's pretty sweet. Yeah, I've been wanting to do the same thing because then, for me, it reminds me of calamari almost.

Yeah. That soft texture, crispy exterior. Have you ever sous-vide tongue? I haven't. I haven't either. No, I'm currently in a personal head-butting match within my own mind between sous vide versus no sous vide and the love-hate kind of going on. Explain that. Give me the argument against each. Well, if anyone out there does or does not,

if you do not know what sous vide cookery is, sous vide cookery is basically in French, I think it translates to cooked in vacuum. And it's basically you are taking anything, putting it in a plastic bag of some kind, moving all the air out. Ziploc, back seal bag. Exactly. And then submerging that bag in a water bath and using an immersion wand, a heated wand, to then circulate and maintain a temperature within the water, which then brings that food in the bag to that temperature and holds it at that temperature. You're doing a great job right now. I feel like we should just have you on hand. Just now and then to do an explanation of something i don't know what sous vide was that

was super educational well it's been around since like the 70s yeah and yet it's just like gps i always hear it and then when people are like sous vide i'm like oh yeah i know what you're talking about i always thought that was something like so new well but it's new to us so gps is not new to the world but it's so like so many things that require development and R&D, there's a ton of time and energy and money that goes into that. So it's usually developed for the industry, and then it comes down to the consumer. Yeah, I think it's already like, when was the life cycle in New York restaurants of sous vide? Well, they didn't quit.

That's where it found its use. That's where it found its thing. If you're a caterer, say, or you're doing a wedding, and you need to have at 6 o'clock, you're going to serve 100 four-ounce steaks. It would be that you could have this giant tank with a circulator in there, and all those sons of bitchin' steaks are in there at 130 degrees yes but and they're

just ready to go and then you pull them out put a sear on them put a flame on them and wham 100 out the door at the same time or you could pre-prep all these entrees and have them all ready and you and you start serving dinner at five and you're serving dinner until 1 in the morning in a bistro and all this shit is just like done. It's done. Order comes in, you grab the bag out, open the bag up, put a sear on it, it's fucking scallops, whatever,

put a sear on them, out the door and you're just basically grabbing sacks out of a hot tank of water, putting the finishing touches on it, dress the dish, go out the door. But wouldn't you agree also that... And it's not like they quit doing that because it got hip. They're still doing it.

Right, but I think that there was a hipness at one point to it where people were like, I am going to find a sous vide steak filet or whatever because it is special. When it was on the menu listed like yes exactly or right rather than being just some secret trick that would be off-putting to people everyone remember when kale was all over the menu it's like not kale's not fucking new to anyone yeah because like someone started busting kale's balls because it's got like uh what's wrong with kale everybody got hip on kale and then it came out that everybody started busting balls on kale because kale has some problem. So I have no problem with kale.

But when it comes to sous vide cookery, it was developed in the late 70s, early 80s, and went through the industrial use. And then just I think it hit the restaurant scene like in the late 90s and then 2000s. And then consumers, I think I didn't start seeing a purchasable. You go to Amazon and buy a wand, which is what they're called. It's an immersion wand. Yeah, like Breville. Breville has the – The Jewel, the –

Anova. Anova, that's the one I have. And you can control them with an app on your phone. So it's just a continuation of these tools like GPS and hunting now and Onyx on our phone and everything else. These things that enable us to just continue to be badass at what we want to do in our world. But my thing with sous vide is, yes, you could take the toughest cut of meat. And I've been doing more and more of this. I will literally – so some people wrap in plastic wrap and then butcher paper if you're butchering at home.

I really stick to vacuum sealed, you know, almost everything. I just feel that if you can freeze it for longer, and what I've started to do is I'll thaw the item in the bag, and I'll go directly into the sous vide machine once it's thawed. So rather than... You can throw it in frozen. You can throw it in frozen, but you the sous vide machine once it's thawed. So rather than- You can throw it in frozen. You can throw it in frozen, but you better account for that because it takes a lot longer. But so here's the deal is that you can sous vide a tough cut, like we'll just call it like a deer shank and then pull it out 20 hours later at 170 degrees and it's falling apart tender now,

but there is no caramelization of sugars, which is when you have a steak or when you have a crispy fried egg or when you have a bruleed creme brulee, the cooking of sugar to the point where it's about to turn into candy or burn is caramelization. And it's a beautiful thing. It's like frying that tongue meat that Danielle's talking about. And so what happens is when you're sous vide cooking, you're wet cooking and there's no, uh, there's no, none of the sugars are being developed to a point of caramel. And so you're just losing on a ton of flavor. And so the old school method pre-sous vide, which is to make something, so you're trying to make something tender is you're braising, which is you're browning it and then you're putting it in a water or stock bath of some kind.

You're putting it with liquid and aromatics like carrots and onions and garlic, and then you're slow cooking. So you're doing the same thing sous vide's doing, but you're browning it first. And all that browning is going into the braising liquid, which then can become a beautiful gravy or sauce, right? So that's where my love-hate comes in. With sous vide, it's like you can put flavorings in the bag and then seal it up. And so I love it, but at the same time, sometimes I don't want to let a shit. Like I could cook a deer shank right now.

What time is it? It's like 10.30. I could cook a deer shank right now through traditional braising. Brown it, liquid, in the oven, 280 degrees, 6 hours, and it will be ready for dinner at 6 p.m., like falling off the bone. And the gravy in that pan is ready to go. All I have to do is mash the potatoes, right? So I'll counter that by saying I'll sear it before, like a roast.

Sometimes I'll sear it in a pan, put it in the bag. I'll put just a little bit of sock on the pan to sort of wipe up that fond, pour it in the bag. What's the word you just used? The fond. Never heard that word. You've got your own word. I noticed it on the glossary term. Scraping.

Scraings. Scrapings. Fond is another word for scrapings? Mm-hmm. Scrapings is another word for fond. Have you heard this word? Yeah, fond is the fancy culinary term. Dude, how do I not know so much stuff, man? You read Escoffier.

You probably missed it because you're drinking an IPA. You know how to deglaze the pan to get the fond to lift off? I get it. I get it. I just have never heard it described as fond. It doesn't take the same root as fondue. No.

Obviously. No, never heard the word fond. At least I admit it. A lot of dudes sit here going like, uh-huh, uh-huh. That's okay. But I'm like, never heard that word. Well, through your admittance now, everyone knows what fond is. Yeah. So I'll do that. Yeah. And then a lot of juices still extract from that meat,

and you have like a little bit, maybe like half a cup of really nice juices in there. But I agree. On something like a shank, you miss out on like really building a flavorful braise liquid. So for something like Osso Buco or anything like that, I'd probably always braise it. Versus sous vide. Versus sous vide. Yeah.

Yeah. And really, okay, so I'm going to distill my love-hate down just to make it really clear. It's a time thing. So the recipe that I've known to come by if I want meat to fall off the shank bone is roughly 20 hours at 170 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just what it takes.

That's a long time. For sous vide or for trad? For sous vide. Sous vide. And you just have to plan ahead. You just do, right? But I don't always have the luxury of planning ahead. So for me, six hours, old school style, in the oven, out of the oven, one pot, one pan.

It's really just as simple. It just takes less time. And you do end up with like a quart or a substantial amount of gravy that's pretty beautiful. So they're both great techniques. Can I throw, and then I'm going to ask you another question. Let's go. I'll throw in one more thought in here i think that when an argument in favor of doing say asabuco sous vide is that you don't need to be there to monitor it and the window of it being done is a much broader window

right yeah it's and it's like very safe to like leave your home leave this thing in there yes you'd be like yeah it'll be done maybe around 6 p.m. In this case, 6 p.m. tomorrow. Yep. But 10 p.m., it'll be kind of the same way. So I would argue that, no, not argue. I'm just going to add to that. These are all great options for anybody listening to get into, right?

It is a crock pot. A crock pot's electrical. It's super bomber and safe. It's no different than putting it in the oven. And in a way, it's- Gentle. Yeah, with the lid on it, it's self-basting, meaning you're evaporating the broth up to the lid

and it's falling back down onto the meat. And that's, I mean, people, when home cooks that are busier than I am, win every day with a crock pot. Like, great invention, right? Somehow, though though i feel like if i do the same exact recipe let's just say asabuco yeah in a crock pot and then the dutch oven with the lid in the oven i feel like i get a different result right better or worse that is

i'm i i think the oven is a little bit better you're right it's better and i think that it's somehow there's like a different kind of reduction going on. Like maybe the crock pot's holding more. The way the lid, you peeled off and you got something that tastes really good stuck to the lid of your Dutch oven. Yeah. Out of your oven. And that shit isn't there on a crock pot. I think it has to do with it's dry heat versus wet heat. When you're in a crock pot, I think it has to do with it's dry heat versus wet heat. When you're in a crock pot,

it's a steam-based environment again. And when you're in an oven, the exterior of that crock pot is all dry heat. It's just, it's a different, it's like, you know, being warmed by the sun versus being warmed by a sauna.

So just, it's different. I was going to say wood fireplace versus sauna. There you go. Good analogy. Yeah. Let me ask you another question. Then I'm going to ask Danielle another question.

Here's my question for you. If you're living out of a freezer, like eating out of a freezer all the time, you were talking earlier about pulling the tongue out and letting it just go into the fridge and let it take its time. How do you like to thaw fish out of your freezer? Countertop, room temperature. You do?top room temperature you do okay what about you i do that i do in my fridge i do in a vac bag in cold water depending i just didn't know if there's like because you haven't a lot of like technical training yeah it's sort of like where you have this you know you have like what works but there's also like food safety issues and all that kind of shit from

commercial kitchens i don't know if you had a different perspective on thawing fish if you had like never you can't ever set it on your counter no you can i i mean i the only thing i would say is size matters here. So if you are thawing out some huge piece of fish, like large, larger than a turkey. Like the belly off a 60-pound flat, 50-pound flathead. Okay. So the only caution here is that at that point, I would thaw in the fridge and I would give it four days. And the only reason why is so it's a controlled environment

where the extremities of that piece of meat are never reaching an ambient room temp of 50 or 60 while the inside's still frozen and you're waiting for that to happen. Whereas it's always going to be at the outsides, 30 something or 40, whatever your fridge is at, as it slacks. That's a good point.

Because you pull like a, let's say you're thawing out a venison neck. Oh, it'll take forever. Some bitch is sitting on your counter. It's sitting in like a pool of its own blood. Yeah. It all just looks like all sad and warm. Then you get in there and it's still, you're like still icy in the middle.

Fridge. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay. Do you guys want to talk about kidneys or hearts first game kidneys or game hearts first i've actually never cooked a game kit well any kidney really let's talk about game hearts i haven't either i'd like if anybody has some experience with you probably had to have eaten it with me i mean maybe in a uh scrambles. No, I was going to say like in... Oh, shoot.

What's it called? Giblets? Giblets. Giblets. Yeah, I've made kidney pudding with elk kidney. Tastes like piss. I messed it up. I didn't do it right.

But when I do kidneys, I just cube them up. I know you've had this with me. No. Did you do it on the Fognac out? Kidney with the... Yeah, you ate kidney there. Yeah. Yeah, but that was like amongst...

It's a kidney. No, I know. But I'm saying like, okay, sure. So yes, I have ingested it. But as we were eating that dish, I was like, oh, that's what kidney tastes like. Like very heavily seasoned with a bunch of other cuts in okay yeah do i walk around eating a kidney like an apple no what do i have you had it the way most people have it where you peel the skin. You're supposed to give it a good soak. Cube it up and put it in like an egg scramble.

Put it in an organ scramble. With Mo Fallon, with Mo Make the Camera Bleed Fallon, we even had kidney, lung, heart. That was either pre-Yanni? Were you working for us when we filmed in new zealand nope oh all right were you working for us when we filmed up on the breaks nope you weren't i was part time but i had other commitments that fall guiding and so that was one of the trips that i you weren't full balls did i go on okay i i've never uh game kidney, and I have a collection of them in the freezer right now

that I've been wanting to do a steak and kidney pie, just pot pies, like a big Dutch oven pot pie. I think that'd be good. I think the thing with kidneys, if you look historically, it's organ meat, and it's one of those things that it is protein however i'm certain they realize that it you know to just cook it medium rare and slice it like a steak is like it tastes okay however when it's dressed properly with a sauce and accompanying things it's darn palatable and and sometimes i think you know you can look historically at recipes and be like, oh, they've been doing that for a long time. That's why it succeeds.

So I have an interest in doing kidney pie for sure. Kidney, in my opinion, kidney falls into the trifecta of wild game ingredients that need to come from young critters. Like anybody who's ever had sweetbreads, anybody who's eaten sweetbreads in a restaurant, like a sweetbread is a thymus gland. It is delectable. It is phenomenal off veal. So like a six-month-old cow to get slaughtered, the thymus gland or the sweetbread is beautiful.

As the animal gets older it turns the the gland matures into this kind of waxy thing that no one eats yeah uh i can't remember which plains tribe maybe it's the black feet had a belief that um or at least, here's the way Euro-Americans who spent time among them captured what they took to be their belief. I always want to clarify that nowadays. That at a time, buffalo hunted and ate humans. And then humans got the bow and turned the tides and began hunting buffalo and eating them. And that the thymus gland was a chunk of human meat still stuck in the buffalo's throat.

Again, this is as explained by a Euro-american traveler who traveled and hunted among them so he could have got it all wrong yeah but that was his take on what was going on one missed word could have totally sent that story you know what i'm saying yeah because you hear a lot of stuff and you're like now that you understand kind of like who how these things pass along you realize that shit gets missed but that was his take on it um however it turns to wax later like i've tried to pull thymus glands out of game animals and it's just nothing like you know i've peeled sweetbreads out of veal it's nothing they're not the same i think the other two components would be liver an old like you take a liver out of a four-year-old whitetail it is not the same thing at all yeah then a liver out of a four-year-old whitetail it is not the same thing at all yeah than a liver

out of a fawn of the year and kidneys don't improve with age so that i have can i throw a question and on top of this yeah okay age of what you're harvesting and eating what's everyone's opinion on on eating baby animals versus full-grown animals? I think that a big, I used to be like, you know, people used to say this all the time, like, oh, the big ones don't taste good. Dude, I'm telling you, there is nothing on this planet that is better than a big, big meal to your box that when you pull their hide, they got like an inch of fat on their back. Is that the answer you're wanting to get at? Or is it more of the killing a young animal versus an old animal? All of it.

I mean, there's six of us here. I mean, so I'm with Steve. One of my favorite recipes that my dad used to make, he would ask me to go harvest an old mule deer buck because we knew it would have huge fat on it. And he wanted that as part of the thickening agent for his sauce but some folks you know like maybe look at a spotted fawn and they're like i couldn't kill that you know so i just wonder what you know like anything across no i don't have any i don't like the morality of it or the ethics of it or the aesthetics of it i don't give a shit either way like it doesn't matter to me at all yeah it doesn't matter to me i i always grew up as far as like eating

old versus young i always grew up with people like i grew up a lot of meat hunters um and pennsylvania meat hunters yeah and i always they always said like old bucks are just nasty yeah it's like growing up i had that in my head but like oh people pound in your head yeah you shoot a little buck i'm like oh that's a good eater yeah but you know as i've you know got more into like cooking my own shit i've never noticed a difference i mean i've noticed like with m deer, I don't know what the reasoning is, but like last year, I had four different mule deer in my freezer, and I made the mistake of not labeling which deer was what.

And some of those deer, just tougher than hell, had like a real irony taste to it i don't know it was because i handled it wrong and then other deer were they were they crippled up limping around for four days before you found them no no okay um and other other mule deer were just phenomenal yeah we did not last year two years ago we did a pepsi challenge we had a year and a half old buck and probably what a three-year-old buck maybe yeah three four-year-old buck eating the son of a bitch raw so it's like back legs now granted one had been aged for a few days and one wasn't. So that's substantial.

Substantial because one was literally in rigor mortis, that young buck. But really throws off the challenge. It throws off the challenge, but it also informs the challenge. Yes. Okay? Because everyone thought the big buck was better, just as eating it as carpaccio so even though they weren't totally equal and it wouldn't hold up to scientific rigor the test it does say that handling it suggests it might suggest to one that handling actually trumps

age of animal. Sure. I have a question. You cool with that, Giannis? Oh, I totally agree with that. Last year, we always have a big deer camp every year. One of the deer that was shot, it was neck shot, dropped immediately. And we immediately went over there and started working on it. And as we were cutting, some of the muscle groups they're like still twitching and stuff yeah do you think that causes any problems as far as like taste toughness can't say you you mean in in regards to not waiting until

yeah like the nerves have kind of run their course. Yeah, settled down. To cut it? I don't know. People talk about that all the time as if it's like life and death. Like don't mess with it until that time has passed. But think about how many people shoot a deer and the temperatures are in the 70s. You can't wait around. It's imperative to get that cooled off as fast as possible but there's like post-processing things you can do like a wet

aging a dry aging um like you were saying i think that trumps that like the age of the animal like how you take care of it in the field and at home makes a bigger difference than it does how old you shot. Except when it comes to waterfowl. I think waterfowl is totally different. I think a young bird is going to be insanely tender and an old bird is just not. Yes. Okay, we're getting a lot of ideas stacked on top of each other. Okay, sorry. No, no, sorry no no no i want to get

to this and i want i was hoping to talk about hearts but now we'll get this more important stuff coming up we're getting a lot of ideas stacked i want to put two to bed get into the heart of it yeah i'm gonna put two things bad one when i was talking about thymus glands kidneys and livers it's better on young animals and this is something that's always been widely accepted in cuisine is that those organs for whatever like as they live out their life of filtering or the animal matures or something they just change the texture on them changes the flavor on them changes and it's to the point where in the commercial industry it's a difference between going to market and going to a rendering plant.

Not that they know everything and they get everything right, but these are broadly accepted. In the horned and antlered game world, I think that there's a tremendous amount of mystery. I think that there's, one, huge variabilities between the animals' life histories. This is a point I make in our new wild game cookbook they have coming out it's like not all things are equal as far as like as far as you know some buck coming at you through the woods he might have spent three days hung up on a barbed wire fence with coyotes chewing on him and then he finally gets himself off there and then he comes through the woods and you shoot him and that's his life history that you'll never know and there's a that makes a big difference he might have been he might have wintered in some shitty spot and been starving to death all winter you just there's so much variability with the animals that you just

don't know and you might get something that tastes off and blame yourself for it and puzzle over, oh, if I had not hung it for a day or had I hung it longer. Like, you don't know. The beauty of, not the beauty of, something of the commercial meat processing industry is that they have got things standardized to a bizarre degree.

It's like you have an animal of a known lineage. It's born. It's fed a certain diet. It hits 800 pounds. It goes on to a feed mixture of X percent corn and X percent this. It's treated with this. It gets to 1,100 pounds. It goes to slaughter.

They all line up. The exact same thing happens to every one of them. The the exact same thing happens to every one of them the exact same process time happens every one of them they go into a cooler for just about the exact same time and it comes out and it's like they're stamping them out like a car factory i was just about to say that they know the variability shit they kind of know it's not like you know it's not like hey let's let's let this one lay out in the sun for a while. Yeah. When you go to the store to buy beef, you know what you're getting and what it's going to taste like.

There's no question about that. When you're hunting, you have no idea what you're coming home with. What it's already been through. So I think that's what leads to a lot of the mystery about, oh, this one time we had a whatever. I mean, my brother killed a bull elk one time time nothing you did to that son of a bitch it was hard to chew up it was like any other elk bull elk six point bull coming across the mountain bam bull falls over dead it's cold out do the same thing you do with every elk you could never chew that son of a bitch i don't know what happened to it um not that that puts

that thing to rest because now we're entering into like really interesting territory where i think that like foul rabbits squirrels that's some age specific shit there i think if you kill a cottontail rabbit you can tear its ear you can tear its ear like a piece of paper after it's dead that's a young rabbit it's just a different critter than an old rabbit and a pheasant that's two three years old oh yeah ain't same thing you can't just you can't just take that thing and uh you can't just take that thing and throw it on a grill when you're cleaning pheasant you can tell the difference like a younger pheasant and an older pheasant,

the way that meat comes off that bone is just totally different than like an old rooster. You're like, you're cutting it off the breastplate. And a young one, you're like, this is kind of just peeled off. You're like, there's something wrong with that. It's just so tender. Yeah, and you can take the pheasant's wing, stretch the pheasant's wing off,

and see if all the primary feathers are the same length, it's an older bird, and I would braise that bird. I would slow cook that bird. If the primary feathers aren't, it's different. So how many folks, we're kind of getting to Chris and Giannis still, though, and I'm just still curious about. You want to talk about that gray rabbit? Like we're hunting.

We're all hunters at this table. So hunting is the super conscious act of setting your sight literally and figuratively on a one thing and then harvesting it, hopefully. So are you targeting age ever? With birds, it must be crazy challenging. How the heck do you target a bird while it's flying? I don't think you could with any small game. As long as it's not a hen.

Well, pheasant. I think the only time I've done that is when I have a cow elk tag and I've gotten onto a herd and you can see who's like big mama lead cow yeah my buddy Jimmy Miller calls her Jenny long muzzle you know she's got like a 20 inch muzzle on her uh-huh and uh you know she's usually leading the pack and then behind her you've got like the mediums and then hopefully there's some calves around you know because you really need to see all of the sizes yeah to to make the call because oftentimes like the cow i killed last year she's by herself with a bull young five point bull two

three years old you know and i'm like oh perfect size medium cow so that's what i was gonna ask you want the mediums you don don't want Jenny Longnose. No. What's her name? Longmuzzle. But, yeah, so I shoot her and walk up to her and, bye, you know, just a giant, you know. And she's been eating, like, with the – Steve didn't think so. I served some when we were in Missouri.

Dude, I thought it was great. Everybody thought it was, like, best elk ever. You've been bitching about that elk all year. I thought it was the best thing I'd had in a long time. She's just got just a little more al dente than maybe it. But then again, it could be like all these factors, right? Coincidence and this, that, and the other that we're just not. You don't know what happened.

But anyway, that's the only time I've graded. There's cows running around out there. If you're in hunt season, there's cows running around out there that are eight months old, and there's cows running out there that are 20 years old. Yes. What about you, Chris? Well, I'm pretty spoiled. I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm spoiled because whenever I eat game meat,

it's always cooked by everybody at this table, and everybody at this table aside from me is a good cook. So whenever I'm eating, I'm stoked on it. So I don't have enough experience in my own culinary world to know, oh, a young animal versus an older animal. So let me ask you a question outside. We'll go conventional for a second. If you're buying groceries, are you buying mixed baby greens or whole heads of lettuce baby greens okay there you go so you like babies too yeah yeah me too

yeah so that's you'll so you're saying that you'll uh you'll select like let's say you're hunting deer and you got a a smorgasbord of them out in front of you yeah you shoot for young uh i'll do both so i i try to pull um i try to pull tags for my area that um if i can get some surplus tags or get a few b tags um i will i'll try to go for a young like let's call it max three-year-old male of any species because i think it has higher weight you know so i'm going to be bringing more meat to the freezer home that's that's that's an important and it's well it's probably the only sure way in the big game world that i know of to tell an age is a raghorn or a fork torn or something along, you know, like, you know, by its antler size, how old it is. Whereas that cow at 300 yards, that cow elk,

you really don't know if it's going to be Jenny, the long muzzle or, you know, Jenny, the short muzzle. And so I try to go with that, my A tag every year. And then with a B tag, I will, so that's my meat that's bringing home some weight is like a fork torn or rag torn and then with the b tag i target um i use white tail or mule deer doe tags we don't get a lot where i'm at but uh white tail i'll target small like first year second year animals and that specifically for whole leg cooking and and just tender tender meat and even the organ meats that are terrific when young. So you're shooting for the freezer. Yeah, and then it brings it to the next level

where I'm like, well, how do I kill this? If I do a hard shot, it ruins a lot of good stuff in there. If I do like an upper base of the skull shot, then it's less, but you have a higher risk of missing. So it's a combination of when I'm going for the younger animals, the harvest. I don't know, anyone else else i hit that all the time i'm like all right i try to put myself in a place where i know that i can make a like upper neck shot and not lose

a shoulder because it steps right when i shoot or that sucks for me when i end up losing a ton of meat through my solution to that is uh copper bullets and just punch them in the shoulder yeah because i feel like just like you just not you're not getting that crazy purple trauma yeah you still get conventional bullets i'm with you but you still get meat loss yeah and i've switched i've switched obviously you can't get go without it but uh i feel like you're still like it's still a shot where you can just drop them in their tracks, but go over there and cut out a couple inches versus sometimes looking at stuff that extends out like a foot on either side of the bullet hole. But Eduardo, you still shoot big, huge, giant bulls.

Maybe three in my life. Okay. And you don't think of those as being fundamentally different right they're different but you know you don't look down on them meat tastes great everything else but i you know i know that with like a two-year-old bull that uh loin or backstrap is just totally different than a six-year-old bull yeah i think so six-year-old bull backstrap the way i like to cook it is uh i'm tenderizing the heck out of it with like the heel of a knife or a fork or whatnot almost like

um what they call that like a swiss steak or something or they're kind of breaking all that connective tissue with like a cutter or something or a pounder so so let me ask you this and you got to be you got to be honest in your answer okay Okay. You've gotten some big smoker bulls. But you're saying like generally, if you had a big tanker. Let's not say like a big tanker where you're like, holy shit, I'll never see one like that again the rest of my life. But like a nice six and a raghorn. Typically, you're saying you would shoot the raghorn. Yeah, unless it's like over 370.

Unless it's like, holy shit. Yeah. Yeah, gotcha. Totally. I'd rather pick up their sheds. And you got a pile of them. I'd rather pick up their sheds because then you can like, it's like the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah.

Yeah, I've shed a tear before when, like, not that I would have said no, but my brother-in-law shot a bull. And I, you know, I like I don't recognize that like something in me at however many hundred yards we were away recognize that bull somehow like the face and then the colorings and not and maybe even the antlers a little bit and then when we walked up to it it was like I was the first one there and I just without even a shadow of a doubt I was like I know that bull I had his sheds. I was like, oh, fuck. Never going to pick up those sheds again. But, yeah, you know, my joy with antler hunting, big antler hunting,

I love getting first-time, like, people, folks that have never, you know, gone out and got a king of the woods, you know, to put on their wall or whatever they want. I'm all about that. It's a beautiful thing. And I love taking folks out for that. Yeah, big time. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, 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, 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

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Okay. Danielle, can you walk us through your heart recipe? The one I just did i want to leave people with it with a good um if you want to leave people with that then i want to bring up one more thing about uh this we're talking about waterfowl and uh oh shit yeah no please go ahead because our buddy boom Boomer Hesley wrote in, I think I mentioned this to you about how we're always talking about meat care for big game in the field, but rarely is that ever brought up for small game upland waterfowl.

And he was saying like, yeah, in Montana, you shoot a bird today, probably pretty chilled out in 30 minutes, right? Even with all the feathers and on it whatnot but if it's a 60 70 degree day down south and you're not gutting immediately because you're spending three four hours in the duck blind like how is that changing the meat you know how is that changing flavors you know that you got going on in there you're asking me yeah i'm just kind of throwing that out there because it's just it's something that i feel like like we're hammering on it with about like yeah getting

guts out and hanging big game this that and the other and it's just not not nearly discussed as much with i got a few basic waterfowl i got a few basic thoughts on it but again because it's wild game i can't like come and tell you absolutely uh i think they're not nearly as vulnerable to spoilage as our mammals large mammals okay large males they're so big and there's so much heat in there and they got that gut right that is depending on you know what it was up, they got that gut that's just full of gallons of stuff that's like ruminating in their gut and producing gas. It's just different.

I think they're not nearly as vulnerable to spoilage. And I think there's something about the chest cavity on a bird that's sort of, you can have one thing going on inside the gut cavity, and it's not as readily permeating its surroundings because of the breast bone and that you're not really eating the meat out of the inside of the back. So if you leave a big game animal un-gutted for too long, you wind up losing all the organ meat. The inside tenderloins spoil very quickly. You have spoilage that starts at the ball joints

in the rear legs and seems to spread very quickly. I just don't see it moving around. Rot doesn't move around a bird in this sort of like cancerous way that rot moves around a big animal but if you like to eat the gizzards and the liver and the hearts which are all worth a try i think that you need to get them out of there in a hurry and also there's a thing to do with just like how pleasant the cleaning process is and And with squirrels, rabbits, ducks, geese, pheasants, after a few hours of wandering around in your game bag on a warm day, it just becomes like gutting them and cleaning them becomes not as fun

because the smell is so offensive and horrible. And it just leaves you with a negative feeling about it. And I think if you could take a duck or goose, pheasant, whatever, and it happens to be you get some snow on the ground, and you quickly gut it out, clean everything out, pack some snow in there,

wipe it all out, clean your heart, liver, gizzard, shove them back in there, it just is clean and nice and beautiful. And it's not like that, just the nastiness of gutting a bird that you should have gutted a long time ago. But for what I would, like the best duck that I've dealt with, and I'm not going to be done talking about it, you guys can talk about it. The best duck that I've dealt with has been like, take a duck, gut it, clean it up.

I put it in a brown paper grocery sack. I roll that brown paper grocery sack up and i stack those sons of bitches in my fridge like firewood and i don't mess with them for three or four days gutted gutted yeah wrapped in a newsprint or or grocery sacks and a little bit of that wrapping it's just like it keeps it from drying out because you got that gutting incision so everything starts to dry from there and also some people like don't like it and there's like parasites and the feathers that get all over shit and so your wife opens it up it's like what in the world but if you just like roll it up in newsprint or roll up in a brown paper bag put it in there

for three or four days and you get it out and you get like a duck and it winds up being that you could almost picture scraping that breast meat away with your thumb, that shit is good. That's all I got to say about it. Didn't in generations past, and help me out if you guys know this story. The hanging? Yeah, wouldn't they hang it by the neck and when it fell to the ground and you still had the head up in the string or the noose?

Then it was ready. Then it was ready. That's like a Scofie stuff, man. Yeah. I used to hang a bunch of my birds in North Dakota. It was always, we'd do it in a garage and it really- Sorry, quick question, interruption. Gutted or not gutted?

I did both. Okay. This is interesting. I want to hear this. I honestly can't remember if I thought there was a huge difference between the two, gutted and not gutted. But I'd say most of them, I did all of them. Well, the liver dam sure would be different.

Yeah, I don't think the ones that we kept internals in, we didn't need those. Oh, yeah, they'd be nasty. So, yeah. So, like, the ones that we did gut, we would keep that sort of stuff. But, yeah, a lot of times we come home from a hunt, depending on the temperature, our garage could sort of stay insulated. And if it was the right time of the year, if it didn't get too cold below freezing, we would just hang them up in the garage. We'd have what we hang our deer on. We'd just get the straps, have all of them hanging up there.

And it was nice because I would only come home from work, clean like two birds a night. The next night, clean another two birds. And I'd always write on the package how many days they were aged. And I actually have a lot in my freezer that I need to take each day out that I aged it for to tell the difference. We did it with a lot of Canada geese and some snows. But I've always found that snows are always tender no matter what, especially lot of canada geese and some snows but i've always found that snows are always tender no matter what especially in the ross's geese and i i couldn't age the the problem is i couldn't tell if aging it really tenderized the meat or if that goose

was just a much younger goose versus an older goose yeah so it's like you just keep getting these variabilities that you're just like how do you create the same standardization to test all these things it's it's really hard and then the weather changes and i'm like i can't hang these i gotta clean them all now or or whatever but that's my brother who's a statistician he's an ecologist but does a lot of statistical modeling and statistical analysis. And he, like a pet peeve of his, is people who look and they make assumptions about the constants. And they're like, oh, it seems like the pheasants that you kill on a Monday taste better than the ones you kill on a Wednesday. Because he's like, there are so many variables going on all the time. And people go like,

the smallmouth bass are only hitting chartreuse. Because I tied a chartreuse on and caught a smallmouth all of a sudden. It was like, okay, but the angle of the sun also changed. The barometric pressure also changed. Your boat moved. It's

really, people, hunting and fishing people always want to be like that's it yeah it's chartreuse yeah it's monday yeah people people want a hard answer and it's not easy thing to to answer because you you're tired after a hunt like it's hard to like get a piece of paper out and say i have x amount of snow goose this one is all white this one has a lot of paper out and say, I have X amount of snow goose. This one is all white. This one has a lot of gray in it. I know that one's... And then mark it, how many days. That's like serious research going on.

And I was working a full-time job of North Dakota. And so it was just like all those things at that point in time didn't really click that I should be documenting. Because we had so many birds that I really could have done a really nice study, but I just didn't think about that at the time. Did you ever hang it long enough that it fell off? No, but I hung it long enough that my dog ate a whole goose, and then we were like, all right, that's enough. I'm going to hang a duck this year until its body falls.

I was going to say, I just made him jump. Actually, I have done that before. I have had the body fall off, but I think the neck had already been broken from the string, so I don't think it counts. It's not a true... Not a true lynching? Yeah, but you've got to keep the temperature really constant

or in between. Maybe. I don't know if in medieval times they had the opportunity to do that unless they had a root cellar or something that was 50s or whatever it is. But I made a lot of notes here, so if I have the opportunity back on this podcast, I'm going to have answers to a lot of these things. Really? Yeah, I'm going to test them this winter.

Bird fowl, mule deer fat. What the hell is shot gobble? That was in the beginning of our… Oh, shot gobble is when a turkey… Do you hunt much turkeys no okay uh man a shot gobble is when a turkey gobbles to a sudden noise that isn't another turkey so for whatever reason when they're amped up in the spring and they're gobbling a lot um they get so keyed up as little primo says it's just them announcing to the world that it's their time of

year they get so keyed up that just any kind of sudden alarming noise okay they'll gobble to it thunder the same way they'll gobble to a gobble like like like really you think like like a turkey one turkey gobbles he's like and another turkey's like you're not the man i'm the man right but they get like with just anything going on so dogs barking thunder and we have kind of a running list of things that people have heard turkeys respond to i've like sonic booms um seth throwing a rock at a stop sign car doors slamming car horns going off dogs barking crows cawing uh blue jays geese honking geese honking a red tail hawk going so shot shock oh it's a shock gobble it shocks shocks them. I thought it was with a T, shot. And I was thinking, you know, like.

No, but they do shock gobble the shots. They shock gobble the shotguns, damn sure. Well, see, question answered. Can I add one thing? I don't know how close we are here, but. No, no, go ahead, man. I decided I'm going to end on something different. Okay. But you go ahead.

Oh, I just wanted to add a thought onto the gray rabbit story. Is this a redemption? Some sort of saving? Yeah, well, I think we have to have takeaways. This can't just be shooting the shit. No. And so if I was to offer anything that I believe to be truth when it comes to cooking, wild game or not, this is just broad line cooking, is methodology super key.

And just as we spend so much time focused on the gear, the technique, how many hours we spend on Google Maps and everything else pouring over, where we're going to go and what we're going to go do. And if you enjoy a good meal, that chef in that restaurant and that entire team has spent equivalent amount of time researching how to make your meal great. So they're doing the exact same thing you're doing in preparation for hunting in preparation of a meal. And so though it may sound daunting, you don't need to be a chef to be a good cook, is to focus on methodology. Because methodology, you see a bumpy two-track road, you know four-wheel drive on. daunting. You don't need to be a chef to be a good cook, is to focus on methodology. Because methodology, you see a bumpy two-track road, you know four-wheel drive on. You see more than 12

inches of snow, maybe it's drifted, it's 24 inches of snow, you know chains on. Those are the things we've learned. So with methodology, and maybe we can get here on a later podcast or we can write about it is methodology is your snow chains and four-wheel drive and you know rain jacket and it is your tool to cookery is knowing good methodology so you get a super tough tough animal with brazing techniques with proper methodology smoking you're going to break that thing down and it'll be palatable so to the gray rabbit one thing that is less methodology but is still a skill, and Danielle said it in the very beginning, which is we eat with our eyes, right? And so one of the easiest, put lipstick on your food.

And what I mean by that is put your makeup on. Garnishing a dish is one of the most underrated, easy-to-do things that changes the experience for anybody so your gray rabbit and you know you have your you know hopeful sweetheart or whomever coming over to eat and you're like man this is not looking you know how i want it um fresh herbs fresh chopped herbs not only add great flavor to it but um we are adds like a pop visual and visually it's like makeup it's mascara for your food. It's like when you see chopped parsley

or chopped herbs on food, it's like, oh, this was like... It's cared for. This was done by someone that knows what's up, you know? And so I would just add that in and that is that methodology is going to become really key for folks that want to get into game cookery

and then garnishing. Just a little bit of fresh herbs on there or crumbled dried bacon or just adding a little extra something gives it a mask, gives it a top coat. Yeah, I'll agree with you on that. I think these methods are the foundation. And once you figure out those things, then everything clicks. You can cook anything because it's the same process over and over,

over and over again. Ridge Pounder, would you rather that we call you the Gray Rabbit? No. No. No. No, thank you. GR? I mean, instead of RP. It's not bad the great rap you just don't really know the story you know

what i'll embrace the story there's a people out there that have probably been in that same predicament it's a good learning experience oh yeah man i remember in cooking school when i was 18, I served a pasta dish with a sauce called arrabbiata. It's like a spicy tomato sauce. In restaurants, you'll see penne arrabbiata a lot. And so I was making – she just was like a – we'd been dating for like a month. And I was in culinary school. I was 18 years old. And I was trying to pull out all these tricks.

But I made a penne arrabbiata. And she found a goddamn nipple in her in her dish a human nipple no oh no but a nipple nonetheless and there i am you know and yet when you you know i was like oh well that's because we just learned how to cure bacon in charcuterie class, and I had a slab of bacon, like a whole belly, and we hadn't trimmed the skin off. You garnished it with nipples. I cut the slab and rendered it to make the sauce,

and yet there happened to be this whole nipple that made it in. The rogue nipple that got in there. The rogue nipple. That's funny. That's a good name for a book right there, the rogue nipple. got in there the rogue that's funny that's a good that's a good that's a name for a book right there the rogue nipple a culinary tale yeah there you go the rogue nipple uh danielle can you real quick zap everyone i'm gonna let you take your pick i want you to zap everyone with um man how come no one notified me that i'm not running the right angle on my mic?

Can you zap everyone real quick with either, this is chef's choice, with either the heart recipe or the Roadhouse Snow Goose Steakhouse dish? Oh, I want to talk about the Snow Goose. Set the stage, everybody shit talks snow geese all the time. Yeah. So a very, very common conversation that takes place is, hey, what'd you do this weekend? Oh, we got into some snow geese. I got this great recipe. Let me tell you. And they go on and on and on and on.

And then they tell you to eat the rocks, throw the meat away. And then I chuckle. People still use that joke. Yeah. And then you eat the board. And then I listen to the whole story every time. It's the first time I've heard it and laugh and cry inside. I laugh because I'm like, I can't believe he's telling me this story.

So you go along with it. Well, they know that I cook game. because I'm like, I can't believe he's telling me this story. So you go along with it. When people do that joke with me, I try to meet them with the stone coldest, most indifferent face they've ever seen. Really? I can't do that. I'm like, that's not quite right.

The viewers can't see the face I just tried to make. But no, I don't. You look confused on that one. I'm not good at that kind of stuff. make but no i don't and now eat the board you look confused in that one which would be a good way i'm not a good i'm not like good at that kind of stuff yeah so so that conversation happens a lot and and i get so sick of it and i get so sick it's almost like an offense to me in a ways to to say how much i love eating snow goose and they're like let me tell you how bad it is i'm like are you calling me a bad cook? It could be. I mean, my husband's the only one who really eats my food

and he'll eat anything. So to everybody out there who does not like snow goose or that you throw it away or whatever you do with it, let me change your mind a little bit. I call it the steakhouse goose and this is something I do with my sous vide. And I cook it for anybody who comes over for dinner. That's usually what I'm cooking is a snow goose. So I'll take it out of the freezer, let it sit in the fridge for a couple days or however long until I'm ready to cook. Pat it dry, a little salt, a little pepper. Sometimes I'll get crazy with garlic or thyme. And then a little salt, a little pepper. Sometimes I'll get crazy with

garlic or thyme and then a little bit of ghee in there, which is clarified butter, butter that the milk solids have been taken out. It gives it a higher smoke point, which you don't really need it for sous vide. I just, I think ghee has a better flavor because I think ghee, the difference between ghee and clarified butter, I think they toast it differently. But anyway, that's besides the point. And then I put it in my vacuum sealer, sous vide it, and I usually do it about 128 to 130, which is on the rare side of medium rare. So that way, when all of the breast meat is finished comes out of the bag they're all cooked to the same temperature about two hours at 130 yeah so my rule of thumb is for every half

inch thickness of meat you should be sous-viding at least for 30 minutes and that's if it's already sort of like defrosted pull it out to room temperature if it's frozen sort of like defrosted, pull it out to room temperature. If it's frozen, just like add an hour or more to that. So every half inch. And then the funny thing about geese, when you cook them, they like to sort of condense and shrink up and they get thicker. So I always add at least another 30 minutes to that. So if that geese is only an inch thick, I'm still going to sous vide it for about an hour and a half, maybe.

Because it's an inch thick, but as you cook it, it's going to become an inch and a half thick. Yeah, it's about three-quarter inch thick, half inch, three-quarter inch for a snow. And so I take it out, pat it dry, either seared in a cast iron or on the grill, because everybody wants their steak cooked a little bit differently. So I always started at the rare side. Medium rare is sort of the baseline because that's what I like to eat. I don't know if somebody else wants it longer, then I just sear it for a little bit longer. And that is hands down, everybody is obsessed with it. I love it.

It's like my steakhouse goose. Good. That's it. Thanks. It's pretty simple. simple it is really simple skin on skin off just the breast meat we're talking about here yeah this is just the breast meat no no skin have you ever rendered out all your goose fat i've tried we i saved actually think i still have some i think i froze it i don't know if that's, it's probably a terrible idea.

But sometimes if I get like only two geese and their thigh meats, usually like in that pocket between the thigh and the bottom of the breast, we'll always have like a lot of fat in there. And so if I'm just cooking dinner that night, I'll just throw it in the pan and let it sort of melt to brown the food that I'm cooking. And then the fat melts out and you're still left with some like kind of collagen-ish tissue. I'll throw that out and then brown the meat in there. Yeah, you can freeze it and then render it.

You can? Yeah. Like when you gut a goose and you reach into that gutting incision, those big fat globs like right in the bottom. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can freeze those things and render them out. You can get a hunk of it. Yeah, stuff's good. Yanni, final thoughts?

I was going to say how much we were talking about thawing meat, and I was thinking about what I did a bunch this summer because my house and kitchen were in disarray. Because of a remodel.

Yeah, once we had the new deck up, which is kind of a dark brown board, and it's south facing, so it gets the sun. You thaw your meat out in the heat. Yeah, once we had the new deck up, which is like kind of a dark brown board, and it's south-facing, so it gets the sun. You thaw your meat out in the heat? Direct. Well, in those pinch moments, right?

Because you're like painting, and then you're like, oh, shit, it's 6, and one kid's melting, and you're like, I need some thawed-out meat fast. I don't have a sink, so running underwater is out. There's nothing so yeah i was gonna say that's one of the great things about like the vac sealed like heavy duty we use weston bags they're heavy duty enough we're literally gonna like run grab it out of the freezer and then like slide it out onto the deck in the sun and like 30 minutes later i run out there and i've got something to work with just hope the health department has to come by yeah totally yeah or osha during our remodel

that's good that's your concluder yes nice work thanks eduardo finals concluders um Concluders? You know, I think on my end, no. I'm excited for, I mean, archery season's wrapping this weekend here in Montana, and that means rifle and then bird season's kind of upon us. So, yeah, I'm just excited to be out eating a little bit more. You know, foraging season's coming to a a foraging for non-animal based things is coming to a pretty quick halt here it's gonna be hidden under some snow man yeah it's gonzo yeah i'm gonna go out this weekend and i was thinking about it i was like man i think the only thing that'll be out there worth picking if i see it is rose hips and that's about it

so yeah um we found like at the bottom of scree slides and stuff, we found queen bleats melting out of, you know, that can survive. This time of year? Yeah. Snow, frozen, right? And you still find queen bleats. Yeah. That are fine. Wow.

I take it. That's one of the things that surprised me. Like one of the latest things I've picked have been queen bleats. Mushrooms. We've even picked frozen queen bleats. They like they can thaw i'll be fine but they're great yeah yeah butternut that's like the kind of the the last thing you find of the stuff that like dies you know oh i did and i do sorry i do have a clothing real quick do you deal with rose hips What do you like to do with them?

They jam? In the past, we've worked with it once before, but I don't do a ton with them beyond teas and whatnot. Yeah. But chutneys, jams, they sweeten. There's a ton of vitamin C and antioxidants in there. They're easy to pick, and they're not hard to find. And they live everywhere.

They live everywhere. There's really no one who can't go find them. I just don't like going home empty-handed, so I kind of feel like I've got to come home with something. Oh, sorry. We've got to bring up the spiny rose hip that we ran into in Washington. Spineless. Spineless? Yeah, all rose hips, the wild rose hips.

No, no, no the the fruit itself oh yeah you ever see a rose hip where the the hip like the rose hip the fruit is spiny no do you guys come across that on your archery hunt hunting southeast washington yeah we puzzled over it yeah i mean i know there's a lot of different varieties of rose hips out there. Spiny. Yeah. Huh. So freezing, we're talking about that a bunch. So I have a thought on freezing that I can close with is that I do believe that freezing is one of the greatest inventions of the modern world when it comes to eating and sustainability for the human race. Just being able to freeze things is amazing. And, um, but I freeze, I try to be real conscious when I'm breaking down an animal and I know a lot of folks it's,

it's good. It's, it's pretty easy. And, and, and, um, it can be a super boon to timing when you need a quick meal is to have your steaks already cut into two per bag. It's you and the missus thought out. Um, I tend to almost always freeze the whole muscles when i can um it's kind of like that protective skin on the tongue we're talking about things happen your bags get punctured when the freezer you know it's in the back and you uncover it in march and there's a little frost burn on it somewhere and i feel like even to the point where i will freeze whole muscles with silver skin on the whole nine yards. Because I know that when it thaws back out, if something's happened to it, I don't want to lose the good stuff inside.

So I'll trim it off the day I'm cooking it in March or April or May or whenever it is. So that's just one thing I like to do is I like to freeze whole mussels when I can. Yeah, I do it like freezing the loin. Yeah. You kind of want to leave that silver skin on there. But then the thing that's in the back of my head is like, man, when I give it to somebody, then I got to explain it to them and shit. And what if they don't remember to do it?

They're going to have a negative experience. So I'm always weighing in my head. I'll sometimes make a piece really perfect where anyone in the world would thought out and be like, this is ready to cook this looks beautiful yep and i'll put a star on the package or two stars double extreme cases and then i kind of like look and be like oh that's one that i could give to someone and there's gonna be no yeah puzzlement yeah they're gonna be they're gonna get it they going to get it. They're going to get it, right? I want a double-starred gift from that guy. Sounds nice.

Yeah. Chris? Not much of a concluder, but I would like if we could engineer some sort of cook-off between Eduardo and Danielle. Oh. Mostly because not even the competition side of it, but I just want an excuse to eat really well.

Like that's all it is. I just want to be like a judge just to... The contest is who can give me the most food. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can film it or whatever, you know, but... Well, I think, well, one of my thoughts is if... I've never hunted snow geese, but I'd love to go on a snow goose hunt.

And what I would like to do is I'll take those legs if you're going to take the breast and you got your steakhouse recipe and I'd love to confit those legs the legs are so good because they have a lot of fat on them they braise nice we should all plan

we should all just go out for snow geese in spring I was saying to Ben O'Brien yesterday I was saying there needs to be a meat eater rendezvous like a full-blown powwow where like everybody descends to just do a full-blown where would you want hunting session eating for the spring hunts you know nowhere i don't know over near that old neck of the woods yeah by the missouri yeah are they there late in this season well they have that they have that spring season where you don't even need a plug. They take the gloves off, man. Electronic calls, no plugs.

Yeah, it's crazy. My husband built his own homemade electronic caller. It didn't work. He didn't just want to buy a Fox Pro or whatever? You know, he does that a lot. He wants to do everything himself, bless his heart. So it's like you could just spend the money and get it, but he loves doing things himself.

But yeah, because he wanted it white and all, like the whole nine yards and multiple speakers out throughout the thing. It did work. You wanted a sound system. Yeah, because whenever— Surround sound goose calling? Yeah, because in the middle of the day when you're not doing anything it's nice to have some music out there yeah gotcha seth concluders um i got a question okay my concluder um back to organ meat

i've heard oregon or oregon oregon okay um i've heard multiple times people say that like freezing organ meat is no good yeah freezing livers is rough on livers freezing heart doesn't matter yeah that's that was my question i wouldn't hesitate to freeze the kidney freezing livers just changes the liver like the same thing that went in the freezer doesn't come out gotcha i think it's like it's it's like it's kind of like what happens to a fish fillet yeah you cook it you wind up with this kind of like to get like mushy plated no no the opposite of mushy oh it's like you take it out and it's like it lets off a shit load it lets off a lot of water. You take the slice. You throw it in the pan. It kind of deflates.

It gets a little rough. It's almost like it's not so much you'd say like it's an absolute no-no because it's not an absolute no-no, but it's definitely not. You just eat it when you get it. It ain't that big. My guess is liver fall into the category of muscle? No. Heart does.

Heart does. So my guess would be that it's just the, it's a more naturally tender, the makeup of that structure is delicate, right? And so when you're freezing it, you are rupturing through expansion the cellular walls of protein and that organ. And so when you thaw it, it's losing its natural structure and web. It's a real letdown. And especially dishes, if you're making dishes like liver pate and dips and things like that, it just isn't the same so if you're messing with the liver you want to mess with it like right away first thing take the you kill a younger deer

take the liver home slice in quarter inch slices soak it people my mom used to take you soak it in lemon like water with a lemon squeezed into it or even like those used to buy those little bottles lemon juice put lemon juice and water because it's a little bit acidic and a little bit of somehow seems to dissolve and pull out more blood people use people take liver home and soak it in salted water people take it home and soak it in water but it does you'll pull out and the water becomes like a rose color like it's definitely dissolving and pulling out some of the blood and then cook it don't it's just the first thing you should eat freeze all the other stuff that's my concluder danielle you kind of got your concluded you want another concluder

no i think i'm good all right good job everyone um next time we all get together we need to spend a little bit of time talking about game hearts until then thank you 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

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