The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 190: What's in Your Freezer?

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Spencer Neuharth, Danielle Prewett, Ryan Callaghan, Phil Taylor, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Starting the rut by mixing corn and Viagra; fact checking the poisonous status of daddy long legs; what, exactly, is flavor?; appreciating the natural; paper towel budgets; how to properly brown ground meat; theories on fat content; Ol’ Cal’s throat roast; the rules for applying salt; death bed wild game cooking advice; and more. Order MeatEater's Straight Bourbon Whiskey 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.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Spencer, a guy wanted to know if you can get the rut rolling early by putting out corn mixed with Viagra. I would say no. You don't think that's going to work? No.

There have been a lot of studies done on what drives the rut. Is it the moon? It's not the ability to get. Cold weather. Is it barometric pressure? Is it hunting pressure? Things like that.

And it always comes back to the only thing that like really determines when the rut is in your area is day length. Does, I don't know, does Viagra, that doesn't serve the purpose of increasing one's desire. I'm the youngest one in this room,

so why would you ask me? Because I thought maybe, I don't know, like, I don't know, but my understanding of it, I don't know that it increases one's, it's not like an aphrodisiac. No. Now, if you put an aphrodisiac out mixed with some corn.

Yeah, that would definitely work. But all you're really doing is like, you're assuming he has a dysfunction, the deer. The buck has a dysfunction. No, you're not assuming that. You're just assuming that if you gave him a eight-hour erection, that all of a sudden it would start the rut. For erections that last over eight hours, please consult your physician.

He'd have to consult a veterinarian. Please consult your veterinarian. The rut isn't really determined, anyway, by a buck's willingness. That's right. It's the doe's willingness. And so that's why you get, like, the secondary rut one month after the first rut, which is usually like November 10th, for example, is kind of a baseline date. In the

Midwest, you get the secondary rut one month later because those does cycle back in that were not bred the first time, or they are doe fawns that didn't come in to estrus one month prior. When that secondary rut happens, you get that increased buck activity again, because there are some willing does in the woods. So you're saying the very good work. For a doe maybe. Get their cycle change.

I have a follow-up question on, on you explained what triggers it very well. Length of day. Yes. But so do cloudy days make like less light come through making it shorter shorter shorter day so if you had more cloudy days like up to november 10th would it start earlier maybe if there was like a volcano that filled the atmosphere the ash. To block the sun out. Yes. Maybe then. But otherwise, no. Okay. Danielle, remember we talked about hush puppies for a long time?

Yep. A guy wrote in about why he thinks they're called hush puppies. Okay. And where they came from. He says it was a relatively common food among slaves in the South. And the name itself came from using these delicious nuggets, his words, to distract guard dogs

when trying to escape. Hmm. Which I like. I don't know if it's true, but I like it. Hush puppy. I had the best hush puppies in Tennessee. Is there a good hush puppy? Yeah, I didn't think so, to be totally honest with you.

Yeah, I'm not a hush puppy fan, but this guy was putting green chilies in the hush puppy, and they were very good. Yeah, but dude, you just like any of the green chilies. I do, I do. That's true. Some hatch chili. Couple quick things. Other quick things uh other quick things so we talked about this guy what state was it the guy was saying that if you that like some hunters had expressed saying that

you don't want to shoot a collared deer because it might have a micro tag in it and if you ate the micro tag that the government then's going to track you. I forget. It's like big brother paranoia. Yeah. Okay. A couple biologists wrote in about this. I appreciate them taking their time to do that. He was saying that, just bear with me a minute. would you accidentally get it how big are the

they're small we got a good so small that it could go through a grinder even and you would still ingest it well no because the guy that wrote in was saying that people told him if you do shoot a collared deer you have to grind it all into burger in order to destroy the chip to prevent the government from tracking it that's right this guy uh goes on to say that he had an interesting couple points about it he was working on a master's research project on survival of adult gobblers in the black hills of south dakota you'll appreciate this spencer so adult gobblers in the black Hills, they radio collared, not tagged, but like literally put a collar on 75 gobblers. Um, unsurprisingly hunting mortality was far and away the highest

source of mortality. That's what kills them. Uh, but they also had in the black Hills, they had gobblers getting killed by lion mountain lions, bobcats, great horned owls. Goes on to say, whenever I couldn't locate a radio caller and it wasn't reported, he would just go and drive around Custer and Hot Springs, South Dakota. And scan the city with the radio receiver. Do you guys watch, have you guys watched the, uh, watched or read no country for old men? Yeah. Yes. When the guy just drives around trying to find the money with the transponder in it.

So this guy drives around. Yeah. Trying to find the suitcase of the transponder in it. This guy drives around like that. He twice has regained his signal outside of hotels outside of motels entered the motel with his receiver and knocked on the actual door where the guy was in there with his red turkey collar and he then asked them do you have something that doesn't belong to you?

Wow. Because I'm guessing it says on the radio caller, if you were to find this, please call this number. And when people didn't, he also one time found one of his still out in the woods in the back of a truck. And then Carmen Van Bianchi wrote in about the tags themselves. You know how much I like Giannis. I do. If someone, I like Carmen more than Giannis.

One of my favorite people. If you threw a grizzly bear at Carmen, I would shove Giannis in the way of the bear. What these things are called, what this guy's referring to about eating the deer and still having it in there is a passive integrated transponder or pit tag. They're not really trackable.

Oh, another guy was saying, just for funsies, I'll tell you what he said in a minute. Another biologist wrote in. Carmen's talking about pit tags. The government can't track you with a pit tag. When you have a pit tag in, you pretty much have to go past a reader to do any good for anybody. So you can put like pit tags in fish. And then you put the scanners near the river and you can scan fish coming by and tell when it picks them up,

but it has the pass by this thing. She's even in rivers where they had a lot of scanners because they're doing studies on fish and the scanners are already in place. She's gone and pit tagged beavers. So you could track beaver movements since the scanners were already in place. That's cool. Um, goes on to also back me up on this she says so basically unless the government has hidden pit tag readers all around

us if you ate a pit tag you'd have to get very close to a fish reader somewhere probably have to rub your stomach on it for it to pick up the number. They would know that a pit tag has passed, but that's the only thing that they would know. The collars are what's actually trackable. And she says, she backs me up, and I completely agree with your reluctance. I'm quoting Carmen. I completely agree with your reluctance to shoot an animal that has a collar on it. They're totally tainted.

This is coming from someone who places collars on animals. This is shocking. They're totally tainted and less wild. And someone else has already gotten the best of that animal. I'm even a little disappointed when I work and recapture an animal that someone else has already tagged. It's less exciting than catching a fresh one. Even seeing a wild animal with a collar on it is less cool than seeing one without.

Well, now. I want to know how, because we have some folks here that haven't weighed in their opinion on that. I'd like to hear from them. Oh, do you think it'd be cool to get a, to shoot a deer wearing a collar? I had an instance where seeing deer with collars was really, really cool. And I told you about that, didn't I? I was getting my butt kicked hunting mule deer. And I called up a biologist buddy of mine.

Not, just to kind of get an understanding of what the heck's going on. Not be told where deer are at. And it was just this. Why? Odd deal. just to kind of get an understanding of what the heck's going on, not be told where deer are at. And it was just this odd deal. But this buddy of mine is like, hey, yeah, you know, 99% of our collared deer have been on winter range for two weeks already. Dude, you can't be getting that kind of information man and he said we have there's only three colored deer left that haven't shown up the very next day end of the season last day of the

season there again are no deer to be found all of a sudden i look over here's this doe with a white collar oh really yeah and then two more does show up with white collars. Huh. But it was just like very odd, but super fun. We were talking to someone one time. I think this is what started this whole conversation long, long ago. Is we were talking to a biologist up in Fairbanks. And she was saying, I have collars on legal bulls right now that are hanging around Fairbanks.

And I remember thinking, wouldn't it be nice to know how to find those things? Yep. Or not. Oh, yeah. That was my friend Casey. Yeah. Depending on what kind of fella you are. So, Danielle, what do you think?

Do you see an animal with a collar? Are you going to pass? I don't know. The only thing, I've never seen a deer or a turkey with a collar. I just think about waterfowl and banded birds. And people go crazy. They go crazy. Yes, for banded ducks and geese.

And we got a banded goose, and I thought it was super cool until we called it in and realized it was just like a one-year-old local bird i was like man i would have preferred not knowing he wasn't uh yeah so when you think when you got the information back you're like oh this is like our next door neighbor not some awesome migrator yeah that that we were definitely expecting a 20-year-old. This is amazing. Yeah, our buddy Ronnie Bame, he shot one one time and turned in the – he shot a bird with an ankle bracelet and turned it and he said it had been banded about 100 yards away. On the pit tag subject, I used to work for a fish hatchery that primarily dealt with endangered species like pallid sturgeon and paddlefish. I guess paddlefish aren't endangered, threatened in some areas.

But anyway, we would pit tag these fish. On a paddlefish, for example, it would be on the third scoot from the back. And then to read this with the— What's a scoot? Scoot's one of their bony armored plates. Yeah, if you handle these things, like a wild surgeon will have super sharp scoots. It's like those lines that go from their head back to

their tail. You'd know that if you were listening to Cal's Week in Review. I already covered that. He might, maybe he listened, but he doesn't have good retention. Yeah, maybe. Anyway, these... Listen, you try to retain anything when you got my two in the house with you trying to listen to Cal's Week in Review. These pit tags can be coded. There's like 35 billion combinations. to retain anything when you got my two in the house with you trying to listen to cal these pit

tags can be coded there's like 35 billion combinations because it's a super long series of letters and numbers but to read these things the wand that reads them has to be like pressed against the skin of the sturgeon where that pit tag is at. Oh. You have to be like. So the government needs to pin you down. Yes. Like I could not walk into the building that has these tanks with tagged sturgeon and just wave it and then read a certain sturgeon. You basically have to be pressed against this pit tag reader. Wow.

So if a black helicopter, if you're hunting in Kentucky and you get a deer wearing a radio collar and you eat that deer anyway and don't grind it, eat it whole muscle. And later a black helicopter lands by you and some men jump out and tackle you and hold you down and wave that thing all over your body. At that point, you will know that you're being tracked by the government. Yes. And even with like the pit tags we use specifically, it does not give away location. You know what's in front of you because you're holding this wand against it. But if I pit tagged you, Steve, and we were in the mediator office, I wouldn't be able to track your location even within this building. Got it.

And if you're wearing like a helmet made out of sturgeon scoots. You're even more protected. You're even more protective. You're even more protective. Another guy, this guy's a veterinarian. He places pit tags on animals. What's he got to say about it? It says very few, even microchips. Okay.

So he's placed microchips, not pit tags. My very first point is that microchips generally do not have GPS capabilities due to size and battery limitations. They're only meant to store information that can be read by a scanner. They place them subcutaneously on animals, mammals. He puts them between the skin and the muscle. If you're in Kentucky hunting and you get a deer and it's got a radio collar, when you strip the hide, that thing's going to come off with the hide. Plus this guy, just for gets and shiggles, ate one and he thought it was fun to use the scanner to watch it move through his GI tract. And then he shat it out in 36 hours.

What do you think of that? I like the dedication. Veterinarian. Yep. Right from a straight up veterinarian. Quick thing on Latvia. Giannis, did you know that a mutual friend of me and Giannis, a Sika deer hunter, sent in a thing that he was having to find himself passing by the Latvian embassy in our nation's capital. And the Latvian embassy had a sign out bragging up how Latvia is one of the most introverted nations in the world.

It's an odd thing to be bragging about this day and age. Yeah. And it was, um, that they let their literature speak for itself. Hmm. So I would say Yanni is an outlier as a fairly extroverted person. It made me think of the fact that Latvians let the literature speak for itself. How many of you guys have seen Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man? Not I.

Really? God, Jim Jarmusch? I would do anything to be in your shoes and have not seen dead man so that i could go watch it and have the pleasure of seeing it for the first time again i'm gonna add it to my movies list right now it's the greatest premise of any movie ever made on earth uh are you familiar with the poet william blake yes okay bear with me man there's There's a real-life poet named William Blake. Famous poet. Now, in the movie, there's just a dude from Ohio named William Blake. Okay?

He gets a job offering out west in the 1800s and travels out west and quickly gets in a gunfight and gets shot. Wanders off in the desert with what looks like it should be a mortal wound, but it doesn't kill him. An Indian happens upon him. It just so happens that this Indian had been captured at one point in time and sent to Europe

where he was taught poetry and was part of a trap. You know, they used to like display Native Americans. They used to take Native Americans in the 17, 1800s. They'd like take them to Europe and display them like circus displays. The Indian played by Gary Farmer had his character when he was young, had been kidnapped and brought back to Europe. And as part of this traveling road show, he would recite poetry and they taught him to recite the poetry of William Blake. He finds a man dying in the desert who just so happens to be William Blake,

but this William Blake from Ohio has no idea about the English poet, William Blake. But the Indian is like, I have found William Blake. William Blake is dead. I need to return him to where he's supposed to be. He needs to go back to the spirit world because I have now recovered out in the desert, William Blake. And the William Blake has no idea what he's talking about.

But at one point, William Blake, the guy, the kid from Ohio shoots someone and the Indian says, from now on, all of your poetry will be written in blood. And I thought of that. And I thought of that. And I thought of Giannis as a Latvian. Deep.

Deep. Many layers. It's a good ass movie, man. It's just dead man. Dead man. Dead man. Great movie. I'm on it.

And if you don't like watching movies because the gunshots are too loud all the gunshots are super quiet which is very funny they all go it's a good movie uh dude wrote him if you date a lot yeah married wild phil's married yeah everybody's married danielle's not not if you date a lot he always takes

his dates fishing because that way they gotta buy a fishing license and he feels like he's supporting his state fishing game agency by making so many people buy a fishing license then he says if they don't like that date that's dating catch and release

I like how he's like ensuring something good will come out of this date so whether or not he likes the person or not it's good attitude true conservationist there yeah exactly uh quick one guy was using janice's marriage advice tip what do you call that tip? You gotta think of a name for it, because it would be easier. Yeah, well, it's not mine. I stole it from the great Wayne Dyer.

But, uh... Who's that? Oh, I know who he is. Yeah, Dr. Wayne Dyer. How would you describe him? He's a self-help person? Yeah. Is he like Dr. Phil? No. I don't knowhelp person? Yeah. Is he like Dr. Phil? No. I don't know about Dr. Phil.

Is he like Dr. Oz? No. No. No, he's up there with Eckhart Tolle. So he doesn't think that prunes will cure cancer? Danielle is going to describe him for you. He's up there with who? I don't want to say he's new age, but, or spiritual necessarily. So he's not new age.

He's not spiritual. He believes in all that stuff you hear me spouting off about. Positivity, grace, you know. Do you know what we're talking about, Danielle? Can you explain Yanni's marriage saving advice? We've explained it so many times. I don't know what, No, I don't. Maybe I have heard it.

No, this is where if you're having a tiff or an argument, any level. Oh, you just put it on a scale? That's right. Oh, I thought that was a really good tip. It's a great tip. I used it once. But it almost got this guy divorced. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. Someone explain the tip. I can't explain it anymore. I've explained it too many times. He might have deeper problems. He had a miscommunication. Ah, okay. I can't explain it anymore. He might have deeper problems. He had a miscommunication. Okay. Well, how it works is if you have an issue and you feel like it's probably, you can't call it petty, but for whatever reason, you're like, you know what?

We're not going to resolve this. Let's just throw it on the scale. And everybody throws a number between one and 10. And whoever has the highest number gets to be the sort of winner of that discussion, and you can make the decision and you go on. You missed the whole main part of your thing. What do you mean?

You forgot to mention that you're throwing a number about how much it matters to you. Yeah. You didn't say that. Sorry. Well, I was going to follow up with that you have to be careful. Are you tracking this, Phil? Phil's getting a far

away ass... That was a far away look in your eye, Phil. You can't always throw tens because, you know, it's like the boy who cried wolf, right? So you got to pick and choose what's important to you. Yeah, it's like how much it matters to you. Yeah. But didn't you also say one time that there. Yeah, it's like how much it matters to you. Yeah.

But didn't you also say one time that there's like, it's a fallacy to throw a low number because you don't want the other person to be like, why don't you care about this? Like I do. Someone else said that. Yeah, we get a lot of reader response, listener response about this. I'll take a shot at it real quick.

It's a system that Yanni came up with. No. By which, if there's an argument, let's say me and Yanni came up with by which if there's an argument let's say me and Yanni are arguing about Danielle said she used this so she could just give the example I do have an example I mean I don't actually remember what we were arguing about

make something up okay let's say let's say Make something up. Okay, let's say you're getting a new countertop. Oh, God. Let's just say. Let's say you're getting a new countertop, and they're going to put in one of those things that automatically dispenses, one of those little things where you put your dish soap in there,

and it's kind of built into the countertop. It's like a little spigot coming out of the countertop. That are always worthless. And from what I've seen. Yeah. Let's just say you, oh yeah, let's put it this way. Let's say you're debating about whether or not you have one. Okay. And you don't want one and your husband does.

And you can't decide. Then you wind up doing, you say this, you say, on a one to 10, how much do you really honestly care about this subject? Right? And if you're like,

your husband's like, I've always dreamed of having one of these. These are really great. I hate having the bottle of Pomolive sitting on the counter. My mom used to wash my mouth out with palmolive. And every time I look, I think of that. And it makes me have animosity toward my mother. And that reflects even into animosity for my own children.

Right? And the wife, you're just like, I just think they're kind of stupid. So you give it a one. Your husband gives it a 10. He wins. He gets the stupid pump. This guy proposes to his wife, and then they're having an argument. And he throws a one, and she throws a 10, and she gets super mad at him.

And then he realizes that he explained it in a way where she thought he was giving on a sliding scale of 1 to 10, how much do you value our relationship? Oh. Yeah. And without even thinking, he's like, 1. That's rough. That's good for now. I wonder if there's like a little. now i want to oh go ahead no no maybe that was the conclusion she wanted to come to no she got real mad at him oh right like because then you could get your divorce and have it be that it wasn't even your fault

which is what i imagine a lot of people want. Yeah. Yep. You'd be like, well, I was a truthful spouse, but he betrayed himself, and now I'm dating this new guy. And here we are. Spencer, can you tell us about the daddy long leg deal? Yes. So at TheMeatEater.com, we have a new series called Fact Checker where we sort of investigate the suspect yarns that we've all been raised with.

Yes. Some examples like, should you drink urine in a survival situation? Can you eat rabbits? Tell them about that. Should you drink urine in a survival situation? The answer is no. So Bear Grylls, his entire career has been for naught. Yeah, so it's something that's often picked up on when a news entity writes about some survival situation.

For example, the guy that cut his own arm off in the mountaineering accident. It was a mountaineering accident. What was it? Canyoneering. Canyoneering. Aaron Ralston? Yes. Great recollection.

Sure. You'd think that a guy that could remember that would be able to remember what he forgot. So when they wrote about that guy's events that led up to that, they talked about how he drank his own urine to survive. And there's other examples where somebody was trapped in rubble after a building collapsed and they drank their own urine to survive. So stuff like that. So it's often told, but you shouldn't actually do it. It'll dehydrate you like saltwater would. You are putting these toxins back in your body that your body just sent away.

There's a lot of reasons why it's a bad idea. But you probably get driven crazy by thirst and then just drink it the same way. Sometimes people get driven crazy by thirst and drink salt water. Sure. Yeah. So if it gives you, I guess, a peace of mind, but overall it's a bad idea. And it's also not a cure-all for like these, uh, Eastern medicine claims that you should put on a jellyfish sting. You can put it on a sunburn. It will get rid of warts. It's good for your skin if you drink it. Yeah, my buddy fell on an urchin one time

when we were fishing, and he pissed on it. All of that's wrong. You shouldn't do it. He was married to a doctor. She wasn't there. He hadn't even met her yet, I don't think. But, yes, never mind that detail. Send her to TheMe don't think. But, yeah, it's never mind that detail.

Send her to TheMeatEater.com then. So that's the kind of thing. But hold on, is there anything good that urine can be used for? It's waste. You can write your name in the snow. Sure, sure. I can write Yanni's name in the snow. I peed on our smoldering campfire.

Hey, there you go. There's just a couple embers left. and I figured that was putting it to good use. Mm-hmm. So another one we recently wrote about was were whales stocked in the Great Salt Lake? Oh, can we turn to the – did someone just mention vomiting? Or was I going to mention vomiting? Oh, no. I was telling the whole office about how you vomited so much while we were spearfishing,

and you had somehow left that out. No, I've told a lot of people about that, and I'm going to tell everybody about it right now. Oh, you said you had acid reflux. No, that was different. I had a lot of problems. Oh. But we never got the Daddy Long Legs thing. Are you coming back to that?

We're getting there, but I'm segueing. I'm pivoting off. I'm trying to segue off. Okay. Check this out. Spencer said how about drinking piss doesn't do any good, actually. And I said about how sometimes people will become thirst crazed if they're stranded on the ocean and they'll try to drink salt water. So I was going to segue off my own interruption to point this out. Spear fishing.

You know, are you familiar with snorkels that have the check valve in them? No? Not a water man? Not that kind of water man. Okay, some snorkels have a check valve in them. Is anybody familiar with these? You go into water and there's a sliding ball.

It's buoyant, and the ball comes up and blocks, so you can go into water and your snorkel doesn't fill. Or even splashes coming over, your snorkel won't fill full of water. I've been using those a long time. Now that I'm officially dabbling in the spearfishing world, I've been told that those are naughty because they bubble too much. And people don't like bubbles underwater. Fish don't like bubbles.

They don't want you bubbling. And so these guys use these uh pretty wide gauge so you can breathe through them very heavily short low profile wide gauge snorkels that they clip to the back of their mass strap so that when you go into water you spit the snorkel out the snorkel is not up in your business it doesn't obstruct your visions just hook to the back your head out of the way and's small profile, so there's not a lot of drag. I'm used to a more robust, check-valved, longer, side-mounted snorkel. And switching to this new snorkel system allowed me to breathe in.

It made me drink a lot of salt water and at one point out in the water i had to full-on i twice like a two-pack spread apart um full-on vomited into my own area right i kind of brushed it away i sort of splashed all my vomit away. So you were on the surface when you had this gagging situation. I was, yeah. You really want to know what was going on. We were hunting in a kelp forest, and you come up in that freaking kelp, man.

And you have to, like, dig your way. You had to, like, create a hole to get your head up to get a breath. A little panicky? No, just you get up, and the kelp is so heavy that it would lay the snorkel down and you'd be, oh, I'm fine. And you'd take a big, you'd be like out of breath, you know, whatever. And you'd take a big ripper and it would, the snorkel would be cockeyed, whatever, because of the kelp. So I, one day I went out and drank so much salt water that I had to eject it all. Yeah.

Giannis, did you get panicky up on the surface? No one was panicky. Well, no, I definitely felt the anxiety of being around and in the kelp. It gets thick. I had a good look. I don't know if they ever gave you this tip, though, about swimming through it on the surface and how to use your gun. Yeah. Like put it up above your head and it sort of splits the kelp and you you can move through it

a little easier i've actually developed a system i'm pretty happy with for getting through the kelp is that no it can definitely feel like it's sort of a bunch of hands and arms grabbing onto you and and you guys were it's spooky you were spitting out your snorkel before you dive, right? Yes. Pulling it out. Yeah. Is it so dense that you could like lose the sense of what's up and what's down?

No, no. It grows vertically. No. But you, when you were down, you could look up and see holes and then adjust your rise to hit little holes where you might have a better luck busting through to get a breath.

And it's always way worse at the surface than it is underneath. You could travel quite freely underneath because all the leaves are laying on the surface. It's just the stalks are underwater. So you could kind of snake around in there a little bit. But then when you wanted to come up, it was hard and it was causing me to drink a lot of that damn salt water.

And this happens to me all the time. Last time I was in Baja spearfishing, I had to climb up on the beach and vomit. My body doesn't like, my body's anti-salt water. I was impressed though with the way you got back in the game because I was already in the boat. Steve got to the boat, told us about vomiting and flopped into the boat, literally right to the floor.

Had a 90 minute timeout. People were talking to Steve and he was not responding. He was fine, but he was not in a talkative mood, which for Steve's, not very often. He's on the ground, and about 45 minutes later, he was back in the water, charging. Wow. Dude, yeah, I'm hardcore, man.

Oh, not about that. Just going belly up for 45 minutes. Oh, backf I'm hardcore, man. Oh, not about that. Just going belly up for 45 minutes. Oh, backfired. That's tough. Anyhow, so there you are. Dog daddy long legs. Yeah. So.

Oh, no. Whales. You were going to tell us about whales. No, I was just giving you some examples of the kind of yarns that we look at or long-held assumptions. Can I tell you, I never heard that there were whales in Great Salt Lake. I hadn't either, but I was in Salt Lake City a few weeks ago, and the Uber driver was telling me that. You actually pull a lot of good info off Uber drivers. And this has been oft repeated on forums and blogs, specifically even the University of Utah Biology Department has like a short blog section talking about when this happened, that these whales were stuck there. But it never did happen.

Why does the university say it did? Is it a joke? No, they're just misinformed. Hold on. The university is misinformed? The University of Utah is misinformed about a whale introduction. On their biology department website, they have a short thing talking about

when this happened back in the 1800s. No. Yes. What? I'll pull it up. Hold on. The actual university is wrong about whether or not whales were let loose in Great Salt Lake.

I think it is something that's just been overlooked. Like whoever is auditing what goes up on these websites happened to miss that, you know, within the biology department, there's this quick blog post that who knows, some grad student probably contributed talking about when this happened. Man, if I was going to send my kid to that school and then I was thumbing through the website and encountered a thing that they had let whales loose in Great Salt Lake and then learned that that wasn't true, I would withdraw my child's application.

Dude, I got to tell you, doing a lot of research on biology-based topics, this is not limited to the University of Utah. You come across some grad papers that you're like, that's just not right. Like there's, they're not all gems out there. This is on utah.edu's website and it is under the Rose Lab Department of Biology from the university of utah and it tells the whole story about how the great salt lake which is 75 miles long 35 miles wide

covers more than a million acres and then it goes on to tell you the story of how this eccentric biologist back in the 1800s stocked these whales there. What kind of whales? So to run this like down to figure out what the origin of this was, it actually went back to an article in a now defunct newspaper in Utah that used like some very heavy handed hints that they were writing something that was sarcasm and not to be believed but the story goes that back in 1875 this eccentric biologist had a theory that in the great salt lake whales could survive and so he went on a two-year mission south of australia to hunt and catch whales to then bring there. And they decided to do that because they weren't able to acquire any whale eggs.

So there's an example of where this article. Oh, why? It was like an Onion article. Yes, but it was from a newspaper. Like you see, there's an old timey newspaper clipping talking about this. I forget what your original question was. Oh, what kind of whales were there? No, you're right on track.

What kind of whales were there? Oh, yeah. There's no details given besides that these two whales were caught off the southern coast of Australia. They were then taken to San Francisco. There's no details on how they got them there. And then from San Francisco, they jumped on a rail line for these specially designed trains,

shipped to Salt Lake City and then carried a half mile from the tracks to the lake and placed in there. And they had these holding pens set up with long mesh nets so that the whales could stay near the mouth of the Bear River and be observed. But within minutes of these things being released, they busted out of the mesh. And after that, they were spotted a few times over the next couple of years, but then whalers came in like five years after they were released. Another like heavy handed thing talking about why this isn't true.

And they killed off the two whales there. But to this day, there are still reports of whale sightings in the great salt lake. You don't say. Yes. You know, there's a, when I was researching my,

oh, you want to see a segue. We haven't even approached what we're supposed to talk about. And we haven't even gotten to the Daddy Longlegs yet. But when I was researching my Buffalo book and watched, I got an announcement to make about that. When I was researching my Buffalo book

all these, you know, a decade ago, everyone knows a story that like, there a general like Sheridan in the sort of the lore of Buffalo. Okay. There's this thing that the U.S. military had this stated goal, this stated thing that let's get rid of the plains tribes. The key to getting rid of the plains tribes is just to kill all the buffalo. Then they'll have nothing to eat. And people thought that there's this myth that that was like the stated, that was a stated goal and not a, just a very real consequence.

It wasn't very real consequence, but that it was real consequence, but it was like the U.S. policy was to do this. And it came from the fact that General Sheridan, I believe it was, had supposedly said this in front of the Texas State Assembly. And it's in every history,

every old history book likes to mention this thing. Well, a student of Dan Flory's who we've had on the podcast one time went to like write about this and in his research found out that not only is there really no evidence of him saying this he never spoke to the texas state assembly but there it is it just is this thing that gets perpetuated and perpetuated and perpetuated. And then you look,

there's like, it's just someone screwed up or whatever. The segue being when you, um, a little bit about book business. When you sell a book to a publisher, like my, my book,

American Buffalo in search of a lost icon was published by random house and random house owns everything about, they own the world rights of the book and they can sell audio rights. So they sold the audio rights to another audio book company when it came out. And this audio book company hired, I don't want to disparage the guy,

I'm sure he hopefully loves his country and loves his family, but just did a horrible job. The worst job you could possibly imagine reading my book. When I got the audio version of my book and I turned it on, I couldn't, he didn't get a sentence out of his mouth and I was across the room turning it off. It's that bad. It's not how it sounds.

He doesn't get it. It's not how it sounds he doesn't get it it's not how it sounds it's like i would rather have had alvin and the chipmunks read this book than the guy you feel like the this man was so detached from the actual material that he wasn't capable of delivering the book yeah he's a soap opera actor and like you could tell that he wouldn't be able to even imagine a world in which he could imagine what's in my head. Anyhow, they had the rights for 10 years. I thought they had the rights in perpetuity.

They had the rights for 10 years. Random House just got the audio rights back, and I just spent three days in a studio, and I read the whole damn book from start to end and it's now it's already available so you can go on audible you can go on your bookstore like the itunes i whatever what the hell is it called like the itunes bookstore on your app on your phone yeah and it's me reading my damn book american buffalo in search of a lost icon. Read by me now, not some hoser. Daddy Longlegs.

Daddy Longlegs. So a lot of people have heard this claim that Daddy Longlegs are one of the most venomous spiders in the world, but they lack the fangs big enough to puncture human skin. Yes, I know this to be true. They are like... And if a bird eats them, it dies. but they lack the fangs big enough to like puncture human skin. Yes. I know this to be true. Like they are like. And if a bird eats them, it dies. Sure.

Yeah. They're like a loaded gun without a trigger. Well done. I'm very aware of this. I was just telling my kids this over the weekend. Oh, perfect. It's a death sentence. It's a death sentence for every bird that picks one up.

You need to read our website, Moriani. He did. He just can't retain it. All right. So when we started looking into this claim, attempting to track down the origin, it was impossible. Could not figure out where this came from. But within our editorial team, we have people from Hawaii to Washington to Kansas to Maryland. And every one of those people had heard this claim as a kid.

So like it's a nationwide, maybe worldwide. Kansas? Morgan Mason. Oh, yeah. That's right. I heard that growing up. Texas. There we go.

The whole country. Probably a lot of the world has heard this claim. But almost all of it is inaccurate. So for one, daddy long legs are not spiders. They are harvest men, which is also a type of arachnid. So right off the bat this claim is wrong.

They also do not have any venom in them. But what they do have and what maybe started like this theory or this rumor. No venom at all or no venom that can hurt you venom at all if something attacks a daddy long legs their first line of defense are those long brittle legs that

could break off and then they got seven more legs that can screw you away with and those legs will actually continue to twitch after something grabs them so it's like it fools the predator whatever it is a bigger spider or some kind of bird or whatever grabs on these So it's like it fools the predator, whatever it is, a bigger spider or some kind of bird or whatever grabs on these things. That's the first line of defense. Second line of defense is something actually like gets them in their mouth. They secrete this like foul smelling, foul tasting, foul looking substance that basically makes whatever's eating them. If it has like a sense of taste, release them. Okay.

So I'm guessing that's maybe what started this is that somebody observed that. Some sort of amphibian eating one of these things and then spitting it out because of that foul tasting substance. But they have no venom. And the other part of this, you know rumor is that they my favorite part they lack the big fangs which they actually have their fangs are similar to a brown recluse in size and we know

brown brown recluse can penetrate skin no problem they actually tested this on an episode of myth busters they got one of these things to bite somebody in a penetrated skin, but they lack the aggressive attitude to bite anybody. And the primary use for those fangs is to pick stuff up and hold it while it eats it. So they have the fangs. They're not spiders and they don't have any venom.

Explain them not being spiders. Well, they're harvest men. That's like... I don't know. They're not an arachnid it doesn't have the the body type to fall into the spider category right uh so they are a member of the arachnid class like spiders scorpions oh they're not lumped in with spiders. Correct. Yep. So basically the whole thing is wrong, but I cannot track down where this started or why, but my theory would be that somebody observed them eating something,

spitting it back out, and that's how it came to be. Yeah. That's good. And somebody wrote in after they read that and said that they were relieved to hear that. Oh, this is great. Because they hunted an area, a swampy area that seems to have a lot of these things.

And there was one instance where this guy was bow hunting and he shot a buck that ran off and he gave it a few hours and he went and started tracking it. And after a few hundred yards, he lost blood. He was down to just like pin-sized bits of blood that he couldn't see in the dark. And he thought that this buck was lost. He wasn't going to be able to find it. The blood trail was gone. At that point, he noticed, like as he was kind of going down this trail on his hands and knees, that a bunch of daddy longlegs were congregating in certain areas every few feet.

And those daddy long legs, once he kind of shooed them away, noticed that they were on these pin size bits of blood. Yeah. And so he actually used that for a long time to track this deer by watching where these daddy long legs were congregating and was able to find that buck about 500 yards away. Don't you feel as a writer that if you're going to take what you heard about Daddy Longlegs being venomous and go out and find the truth of it, right? And do all that. Don't you find that that contradicts a little bit you then taking what this gentleman said and putting it out there as though we're sure that this is what happened?

Yes, that's a good point. Do you feel that you might go to a daddy long leg and cut your finger and put a drop of blood and see if he in fact is interested in it? I think that'd be a cool test something that i learned while writing this is that you can't listen to anybody yeah but you should you should actually embrace like seeing daddy long legs around because they're nature's little vacuums these things will will eat, uh, dead bugs, aphids, flies, fungus, moss, bird droppings, worms, snails. So it's not out of the question that you'd like

a little blood laying there. So if, if there was this matted down area in a swamp and blood was falling there and there was a bunch of daddy long legs, I could see this happening that they were picking up on where this blood was at and like congregating to that area have we talked before i believe we have i'm sure you i don't i know you weren't present have we talked before about the the fooled by randomness yes yeah yeah fooled by coincidence

yeah i'm aware this is very anecdotal But But it might be gold I don't know I just think we need to dig into it We don't have to quite revise the Big game Hunting, butchering, cooking Guidebook

To include that into the blood trailing section Not quite yet But maybe someday Cause I think we should sell a box of daddy longlegs and when you lose a trail you scatter them around give it a minute pick the trail back up again box of 10 000 day long legs no venom and they're numbered one through ten thousand yeah no venom. 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 our northern brothers. You're 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,points and tracking that's right you were

always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's,

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slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. That's about it for precursor stuff. Oh, Danielle's going to talk about Oh, no, one more quick thing. So Cal's here. Spencerencer you've been hearing from already danielle pruitt it's here yanni and then uh there's a weird thing where there's a guy named phil here who's always here but he used to always be behind

um a yellow curtain sometimes here here, sometimes present, engineering behind a curtain. But Phil now has got himself a new station. No mic, but he's got a new station and he's present. So if you can feel the aura of someone,

you're feeling Phil. I'm going to take a little video and we'll post it so people can see Phil behind us do you have any oh Spencer would you mind sliding your mic over to Phil for a minute I wasn't sure if I had permission to speak but um hi how's it going Phil um of the things we've talked about so far do you have anything that you what has been your general um impression of the show so far i learned something new every single time i sat in here has anyone said anything yet and

you're like this person's so stupid there's no way that's true i wish they weren't here no not at all no this is it's good programming if anyone's heard the hunting collective i've been on a couple of times and people who listen to that know that this is not my world at all that's why i was asking yeah i was hired because i know how to twiddle knobs and and click buttons on a computer and make this show sound good uh but you haven't heard anything so far that you thought was just like like just like you're like these people are horrible no absolutely not no yeah okay do you like being uh front and center or do you like kind of having your own little office back there well so i mean steve uh kind of brought this up earlier when he saw me my mind wandered and i was staring into the the far the far distance

yeah what were you thinking about there phil i was honestly thinking about a way to set these these boom arms up to make you happy oh so you so you were doing work. I was doing work. Oh, I thought I caught you not doing work. No, I was drifting off. I was trying to picture how I could make this better. So I just wanted you to know. You were still at work. I'm on the clock, man, 24-7.

Because I had actually already emailed to have your pay docked by 30 seconds. God. But I'll retract. Okay, I appreciate it. I'll retract the email. Yeah, yeah. So that's why, at least behind my curtain, I was safe from you catching me.

Thinking about mics. Yeah, with my eyes kind of partially crossed. Yeah. But yeah, no, I'm happy to be here. Doing good so far. Yeah, thank you. Danielle, can you tell everyone about the proper way to uh about the proper way to ground brown uh ground meat yeah so i started filming that because

many many times when i first started cooking i you know you read a recipe and you're like brown the meat and then step two, you do whatever you're doing after. And it's just like this overlooked process. And I started to realize that browning the meat actually means that it should be brown. And if you think about any other recipe, say you're about to braise something, Why do we sear the meat before we stick it inside of a braising liquid? It's to sear it. You're creating the Maillard reaction. Amino acids, they start caramelizing. It's the chemical reaction between amino acids and protein when introduced to heat.

That's what's going on when something gets crispy? Yeah, when you sear something and you get that brown exterior, that golden crust, that is the reaction that's happening. And that is what flavor is. And I read something really interesting about that. Many years ago, from an evolutionary standpoint, humans began to learn what was safe to eat based on that reaction. So when you have that reaction happening, it's the smell of roasted meats, toasted bread,

coffee, all of those like roasty, nutty flavors that are happening. You know, you start to salivate when you smell barbecue yeah or something being cooked um and so i thought that was kind of an interesting interesting thing like why do you start salivating it's you're telling your brain that oh this is good to eat i can it's safe to eat i'm buying it so anyway so you have these reactions happening in the pan and that builds a lot of flavor for whatever it is you're cooking. And browning meat is really the same principle. So instead of just browning meat just to cook meat through, because you're usually going to add other things to it, like if you're going to make a taco or like a pasta, like a bolognese type of thing, you're still going to cook it and

add other things to it. So it's not about really cooking the meat. It's about developing more flavor into the overall dish. Rather than just making it edible. I'm not trying to teach people this is how you cook meat through. I mean, this is how you make something better is what I wanted to show because I think it's just very overlooked. And so I did that little video, which is just one way of browning meat. And the way that I did that was based off the fact that the meat was freshly ground so like that's another thing

you should pay attention to i personally like to grind meat and cook it instantly instead of i used to grind everything all at once when i was processing the deer package it all up and then freeze it and then i hated that mushy texture oh yeah but i mean but that's just like but that's like a but you can't but that's a convenience thing man i know i got two ways okay so the way that i showed on the video was because it was freshly ground you get all these like separated strands from like being extruded the grinder, and you can separate it in the pan, and you get all these nice little crispy bits. Now, if you have a package of ground meat defrosted,

and you notice that it's just sort of in a patty form. Blah. And there's a lot of water from all the ruptured cell walls. Well, you should definitely pat it really dry first with paper towels. Is that right? I always do that. In fact, if it's really, really bloody, like if you're grinding meat and you're washing the meat and you're grinding and everything is just, there's a lot of water. And then you freeze it like that and then you package it up and there's just tons of juices.

I'll even set it inside of a strainer, set inside of another bowl, and leave it in the refrigerator for several hours. To start drying it out. Yeah, get all that juice out. I use that nice Lexan thing that you guys started using up at the fish shack. Those Lexan containers that have the perforated floor. Yeah, that's a good-ass container, man. But you know what?

We used to get those in Anchorage and the place that sold them, the restaurant supply place that sold that line picked up another line, which isn't as good. Are you talking about a rice strainer? You can buy them just right down here at J&V on Mendenhall. Oh, they got them in town?

Yeah. With the strainers? Yeah. They got the lids? Yeah. Oh, I always make my brother get them for me. It's like a rice to them in town? Yeah. With the strainers? Yeah. They got the lids? Yeah. Oh, I always make my brother get them for me. Like rice to clean your rice? No. Food service

containers. You know what Lexan is? Lexan container? No. It's a material. It's just a hard plastic that they use in restaurants that you can have hotel pans, half pans, all the different sized pans made out of, if you don't want stains. You can put hot water in it. You can put hot

liquids in it. You don't have to wait for them to cool. Yeah. Like any of those plastics that you see in a restaurant kitchen. But these are like commercial food service containers that are like the most... Anyone that hunts and fishes should have these things. I don't care what the hell brandy buy. This is a hot tip right here.

Yeah, and a lid. You want to talk about a lid. You got lids? I don't. I don't even know what kind I have, but it's got the strainer. But the bottom, it's basically a plate that sits maybe an inch off the bottom on little. Half inch. Okay.

Half an inch on like little plastic legs and it's just perforated. So whatever you put in there when you're thawing it out, it just naturally has a place to go. Okay. Yeah, man. You put your fish in there, you put your fish fillets in there and put it in your fridge, they're not basting in their own... Yeah. Right.

Works just like your strainer and bowl. It's just another thing to have in your kitchen. But a better thing. I just got the old know, the old, they look like flower petals that come out, little steamer basket things, right? I just got one of those for free. It's probably 30 years old,

but that thing's great for putting in a variety of containers for just this exact thing. Gotcha. It forms to a bowl, but also you can just lay it out there on a plate. Let your stuff dry thing. Gotcha. Because it'll, you know, forms to a bowl, but also you can just like lay it out there on a plate. Let yourself dry out. Yep. I want to get back to this though, because, hold on a minute now.

Why is it important to have dry meat? Well, I want to comment on this, because I noticed sometimes you'll be in a restaurant that like prides themselves on their hamburgers. And they like to point out, never been frozen. And I always felt like they were taking a hit at me because i always grind up my meat and freeze it but man you get some watery ass burger that's all from freezing yeah when you like freeze burger and thaw it out a lot of water gets released from that And it's funny you mentioned that you're sometimes grinding it up and it's not dry. Yeah. Well, whenever you're freezing, those liquids expand, puncture the meat, and so you do lose more juices.

Yeah. So that's why before you freeze it, you're like, yeah, there's just a little bit of juices in there, no big deal. And then you defrost it and you're like, where did this come from? Looks like somebody, you know. juices in there no big deal and then you defrost it you're like where this come from looks like somebody you know anyway so yeah draining straining it out patting it really dry and then if it's already sort of in a mound let me hit you with a question okay how if you take a paper towel and go to pat ground meat, does it just stick to the paper towel? No.

Huh. Make it a little bit, and you can just dry it off. Are you patting, like, the brick of meat? Or are you, like, spreading the meat out and then patting it? I actually put it out on a big... I use sheet trays for, like, all prep work. Either a big sheet tray, spread it out in a thin layer, and I'll take several pieces of paper towels,

set it on top until it all blots as dry as I can, or as much as I have the patience for. What's your paper towel budget? I go through like one pack of paper towel a year. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, my God. I just use paper towels way too much for drying me.

I was at a dude's house recently. But I don't use it for anything else. If I spill something or kitchen cleaning, I don't use paper towels. That's your dedicated use. I use it for drying me. Dude, I was at a guy's house recently, and I don't know, but I assume he has an anti-paper towel agenda. So he's using kitchen towels, and we're cleaning fish, and everything's getting kitchen toweled. And then I looked at the pile of stuff that needs to be washed.

It's got to smell so bad. Well, I'm just wondering, when you factor in the water, I don't know. I don't know about industrial processes. But when you factor in a bunch of laundry, and the soaps, and water usage, I don't know about industrial processes, but when you factor in like a bunch of laundry and the soaps and water usage, I don't really know. Like, I don't know what goes into making paper, you know?

I think that one load of towels is, is less energy or environment damage or however you want to put it is, I would think so. Than a roll of paper towels. I don't know. I'd be curious to know because I remember thinking like, oh, that's a cool idea. He doesn't use paper towels. But then after a while, I'm like, but he damn sure uses his laundry machine.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was camping with my mom and my stepdad. My stepdad was telling me how my mother has reduced him to a two paper towel, two squares of paper towel per day allotment because she felt that his paper towel use was just way over the top. Yeah. My mother-in-law likes paper towels so much that when she sets something on a table, she likes to set it, she likes to put a paper towel down. Is it coaster?

But for anything. So let's say she has to remember that she needs to take a pill. She has to take an ibuprofen later after she eats. She will... I don't know what's going on, but she'll lay down a paper towel and then put the pill on it.

And then what is the life of the paper towel after that? It's done. My great-grandmother used to babysit us a lot, and she went through the Depression, and I remember— I went through a couple of those i remember she would she would take those paper towels wash them air them dry them out i mean she would use a piece of paper towel until like it was just nothing but just disintegrated that's interesting i haven't thought about it but my my great aunts did that too. Dan Bagan's wife at our fish shack will dry them out, depending what's going on. Yeah.

Where nothing dries. I like the dry. No, you can't dry them. I'll propose this. In the Rinella household, I think we have a healthy relationship with paper towels. We have them. And now and then we use a couple. That's it.

Okay. We have a healthy relationship with them. I'm doing a better job with plastics in the kitchen. I switched out to all the reusable Ziploc bag stuff. Ooh, the stashers? Which are expensive. Stashers? Yeah.

Holy shit, are they expensive. They're expensive, so you really gotta use them. Are you liking them, though? Yeah, because when you wash them, I just flip them inside out, scrub them, and then they kind of prop up to air dry inside out. That's what I was worried about. I was getting dirty in the crevices. What are they called? The ones I bought were stashers.

That's what I got. Stashers. Yeah. It looks like a Ziploc. Maybe mine were so expensive because I bought them at a retail store instead of like a... Like through a dishwasher? Heavy duty? Yeah.

Can you see what's in it? Yeah. You can get clear or colored. Dude, I might have to get a couple of these. I probably bought six or eight of them, various sizes from like, you know, small little snack pack to... I think the biggest one I got was a gallon and I think I spent $100 with shipping. How many did you wind up with? Six or eight.

And you're loving? Well, they're good for what they're used for. We're not going to travel to Alaska and then put a bunch of caribou meat in them instead of using Ziplocs and fly back with them. That's not what they're for. But instead of using Ziplocs around the house, they're great.

Let me do an environmental test on you. I turned you on to a, if I say so myself, pretty nice chanterelle mushroom spot over the weekend. Yes, thank you very much. You went out there and did pretty well for yourself, right? Did. I feel like you told me that you had two plastic bags full of mushrooms. That's right.

What kind? Grocery. Plastic. Yeah, full of mushrooms. That's right. What kind? Grocery. Plastic. Yeah. Reusing them. That's a good point. You recycled. Do you reuse your plastic Ziploc bag?

I mean, vac seal bags. No. I thought you said you were going to start doing that. I haven't yet. I think I'm going to start doing that. Oh, what am I saying? No, no, no, no, no. Oh, man, you want to hear a story about that.

I did. I just washed one, dried it, and put it back up. Awesome. I've done one sample. But check this out. Last night, I'm putting some stuff away in my garage. The other day, we went over to the Roscoe family for dinner. Kurt's been on the show before.

Stone Glacier Backpacks, Kurt Roscoe. Founder and designer. He's been on the show before stone glacier backpacks uh kurt roscoe founder designer uh he's been on the podcast uh and remember we had some a guy wrote in about how he's harder than a woodpecker's lips uh anyways went to the roscoe family for dinner and i brought over as a you know when you go to someone's house you bring them a little gift yep i brought over a a bunch of fish, a halibut and whatnot. And I brought it over in one of those hoppers, a Yeti hopper. And I was like, hey, there's a bunch of fish in there. Go ahead and put it in your freezer.

And then I bring my thing home. Well, when they, they don't know this yet, but when they were emptying the bag out, they failed to grab, this is a couple of weeks ago ago failed to grab out a pack of halibut last night i'm in my garage and i'm like what in the world is that i it's a smell that i i've smelled some smells in my day like i have smelled i would venture to've smelled more smells than 99% of Americans. Um, and this smell was hard to place and it was hard to track down. And I have, cause like, you know, you don't think to look in certain places. And I eventually realized that they had left a pack of halibut and it was in a Western

back seal bag. The bag hadn't failed, but it had puffed up like it was going to explode. Oh. With a hunk of green halibut inside of it. You ever see a lingcod that has that phenomenon where they have blue flesh? Yeah. That is the name for it. Green ling, get it too.

This had turned like an iridescent green inside that vac bag. And I handled it very delicately because it had blown up like a balloon. But hadn't ruptured. No liquid. But you could smell it. The smell came through the plastic. You could smell it. And it was smelly in the bag I bleached out the hopper and it's fine

No liquid had come out But somehow it had gotten so putrid That it put off like a putrid effervescence Somehow gas was escaping The liquids couldn't But the gaseous stench of this rotten flesh so this was the first bag that you rinsed out decided to try to reuse no what I did do though is I wouldn't put it my I was afraid because I wasn't gonna put in my garbage because there's a few days

coming and bears will get into it why not you didn't hang it up on the on the kids piece of wood that they throw throwing stars at? I didn't hang it on the throwing star target. I put it in my freezer. And then I made it look unappealing just to make sure no one thought, oh, I'll cook some halibut. I wrapped it up in some other shit and put it in my freezer, and then I'm going to throw it in the garbage. My guy was out of bad smell. But one time when I was living with my brother Danny in Alaska, we brought home some halibut,

and we had put them in a dry bag and then put the dry bag in the cooler. I don't know why. And someone had forgot a pack of halibut in there. And we took his gear room apart three times trying to find out what smelled. And no one ever thought to look inside a folded up, rolled up dry bag until the third time we took everything apart and eventually found that rotten sack of fish. You should have had a box of Yanni's patented non-venomous daddy long legs. Yes.

Turn them loose with pits on them, pit tags on them. There you go. And track them to the rot, to the stank. Are we covered everything now except for back to back to Yeah. Are we good on side

notes? Feel good, Phil? You can just nod. I think that Danielle is going to answer my question now about why is it important to have dry meat when you go to brown it?

Well, very good question. And this applies across the board for searing things. That moisture, when it hits the pan, it's steaming the meat. It's not going to create a crust. So this means if you pull it right out of the fridge and immediately hit the pan, what happens? It steams because it's really cold, hitting high heat. The same thing happens if you're going to grill a fish whole, skin on. If you put it on the grill while it's still cold, it's going to start steaming, and then that skin doesn't get crispy.

You're just going to stick to the grill grates. So, yeah. So drying it out, doing the best you can to prevent excess moisture will give you the best chance for getting a crust. I feel that of the ground meat I've browned in my life, and I've browned a fair bit of it, I feel like that I've boiled most of it. Yeah. Because we, you know, like if you're lazy and you don't thaw it out, I'll even take like the frozen wad of it and put some oil in the bottom of the pan and just speed thaw it in the pan. You know what I mean?

And it's not browned. It's like you're basically, you should say like I'm going to boil up a bag of ground meat. That's what you're basically doing is like steaming. Yeah, you could put your broccoli right on top and steam it at the same time. Yeah, you never done that, Danielle? You never gotten like that lazy? No, I've been done a lot of lazy things.

I've gotten to the, you know, I've gotten to the point where I, this is a famous line my father-in-law told me a long time ago, and I'm stealing it. Be careful what you introduce your taste buds to. Because once you start doing things the right way, you just can't go backwards. Yeah. You know, like once, it's hard, like, when I know what something's supposed to taste like,

taking a bag of half-frisen meat and just being like, I'm just going to throw it in. It's not that I wouldn't do it that way. It's just I wouldn't say I'm going to go brown the meat. I would just say, why don't we just slow cook this with a bunch of liquids? Because it's already got a ton of liquids in there. So just skip the browning step. Are there any exceptions to it? Or do you do this when you're doing chili tacos you know it's not that you have to do it that way it's just think of it as a better way to introduce more flavor a deeper richer flavor of more

meatiness to to what you're eating as opposed to you think about you know there's some you're going to cook an onion, there's a difference between sweating an onion and there's a difference between caramelizing an onion. So that reaction, when those sugars and the proteins mix, they caramelize. That's the crust that's happening. That's that flavor. If you are sweating, steaming, introducing heat, you know, think about onions that are just constantly mixed and they taste so much more mild in flavor

than are not as sugary. You don't have the same. So it's not necessarily that I'm going to say one way is right or wrong. I'm just saying there's ways to make it better. You can have rich, full, meaty flavor or boiled meat. Exactly. So what's the next step in the process?

You've patted it dry. Heat your pan. Ripping hot. Yeah, I'm back and forth on how hot to do things. Do you grease it? Once the pan's hot, then I add oil. And you know when the pan's hot and the oil's hot? What's your oil these days?

Your avocado oil, grape oil, something high heat? Yeah. That Costco avocado oil is hard to beat. Is it? Really? Yeah, I use ghee a lot. So that's another thing. I just got a Costco membership,

and I feel like I'm just on a full-blown path to being a yuppie. A one-man household. I've never shopped at Costco. Can we back up a second? I don't like buying in bulk. What was your father-in-law talking about? Be careful what you introduce your taste buds to. Yeah, what was he referring to?

I know, like, that really resonated with me. Eating, okay, he said that to me when I was still dating my now husband. He took us out to eat at his nice steakhouse. I'd never had foie gras before. Oh. And before, and it was a nice bottle of wine. And before we ate it, he's like, be careful what you introduce your taste buds to. And I'm like, oh, I'm officially ruined.

Anyway, but I just like saying that. No, that's good because, you know, I had never had a lot of exposure to cultured, moneyed people until I moved to Montana. And I didn't know about good coffee. I didn't know about high-end coffee. We just drank coffee from the gas station. Totally happy with it. Never thought there was any problem. Yeah.

Then I found out about fancy coffee. It's hard to go back. And then I recognized the gas station coffee, but I never realized the problem with it. And then the hot dogs on the rollers in gas stations? Yeah. Never had any problem with those hot dogs? Yeah. Then you find out about other hot dogs. I still don't. I love them. Yeah, but I mean, there are like... But you know

there's a difference. Yeah, there are other hot dogs out there in the world. Right. I think it's one of those things... It's a really great, it's a good observation that your old man had, or your dad, your husband's old man. Yeah. I think it's just something that the more I cook, the more that I just enjoy relishing the way things are supposed to taste, and I want to make it the best every time. And sure, there's plenty of times where I'm really lazy, but if I'm going to do something the lazy way,

then I'm just not going to cook that recipe. I'm just going to cook something simpler. Can you tell something to your father-in-law when you see him next is he still alive uh-huh tell him uh when he says that next say not necessarily and then tell him that i've actually kind of like over time i used to be i got for a while really interested in really like complicated good food then i got kind of sick of it yeah and now i'm like now i got sick of it now i just like things that look like i just i now i like food that looks like it grew out of the ground or just got chopped out of an animal yeah that's like my normal that's

like how i like it to look i like to look like it looked like it was alive a minute ago and i got away from stuff that's hard to make i think that that's true for anybody. The more that you cook. When I started cooking, I wanted demi-glace on every time I ate a steak. And just everything got so rich and so heavy. And then I kind of scaled back to just eating food the way they're meant to be in a pure form. Yeah, where you can recognize. And you just really appreciate the naturalness. And when you start eating that way, everything becomes more bolder flavors without the need of salt. I'm really sensitive to salt now.

I don't like to have really salty foods. But no, I get what you're saying. It's kind of scaling down to the basic natural Yeah, like if you went to my house at dinner time any jackass could come in and look at the table and be like and he would tell you everything that was on the table like everything that was in everything

just be, oh, that's like some lettuce you know, that's like this, that's like that Yeah, it's not like a bunch of sauces it's just a bunch of ingredients It's just stuff that came out of the dirt, man I'd be like, where's like this, that's like that. Yeah, it's not like a bunch of sauces. It's just like, it's just a bunch of ingredients. It's just stuff that came out of the dirt, man. I'd be like,

where's the demiglass, dude? No, you know what I'm saying, man? Like, but for a while, I was into really making stuff that was complicated

because I just thought it was fun to make it. It was fun to eat it. It's really good, but it just got burned out. So tell them, tell them like up to a point, but then people get old and they go the other direction. I will tell them that.

And then there's like the whole category of nostalgia meals too you know it's like we didn't the bulk of what we ate as far as like day-to-day growing up as a kid was not anywhere near super thought out or gourmet you know like the whole genre of casseroles helped by campbell's yeah like back when i don't know i imagine people still do it but um like where there's certain meals your mom would make and they were almost patterned like your mom made like eight things and they were they sort of repeated yeah would you like this like there's There's like meat, like, that you make, there's like, you know, like, there's meatloaf, and then they make a sheet pizza, and then they make this,

and then, like, next Tuesday, it just kind of starts over. Yeah, next Tuesday, it's going to be a casserole. My kids claim that there's a little bit of that going on in my house now. Like, you circle back around. Again? This is all we're having?

Again? That's so funny. No, but back to your father-in-law's advice, I don't think that necessarily means fancy over-prepared food because in the case of foie gras, like that's usually served very, very simply. That's a good point, yeah.

Seared, salt and pepper. You're right. You maybe may or may not have a little sauce on it. That's true and so it could be something like for me i never really had good seafood until i was well into my 20s and when i first started eating i was like holy shit this is i need more of this yeah that's a great point necessarily as a gourmet perspective as it is as it is um learning to appreciate things um like what i was saying brown properly browned meat adds so much flavor and once you start doing it that way

i appreciate it so much that i can't not brown it if i'm cooking ground meat like that again just be careful what you what you're introducing yourself to because now every time you go to cook, you're going to have a level of expectation. Yeah, I think I was guilty of trying to jam in an unrelated point. No, it's still, I mean, it's still applicable. Because if you went and properly browned some ground venison and then did the old like boil, the accidental boil, and then just put a little salt on each and had a fork full of each, the browned with like the nice crisp and everything is a whole other world. Yeah. Not even the same thing.

Definitely. not even the same thing definitely but have you gotten so particular that you don't like to just freeze up 100 pounds of grind like you're pulling the damn grinder out i don't expect anybody to okay so it's different because now this is my job and so i get to be at home and i get to do this and i think if anybody wanted to go this route, I would just say make time on a Sunday or whatever day you have off and grind three pounds, four pounds of meat and just eat it throughout the week. Instead of like every night, got to get the grinder out, if that makes any sense. I mean, it makes a difference to me, and I like doing it that way,

but it's just not really practical. It's not, but it does make a difference. I read that somewhere too once and tried to do it. I think for something like if you're really going to serve some burgers to guests, it might be worth it, right? Yeah. But if you're doing tacos and chili for the kids. Yeah, something like chili that's already going to be braised in a lot of liquids, I don't think it matters that much.

So this brings me to my second way of browning. So the first way. Well, I don't know if we finished this one. Yeah, I know. It's been a lot of. You've got it. Oh, we haven't finished it? No, no, no.

We should make an edited version of this show. Phil, take note. Got it. Maybe we make an edited version of this show. Phil, take note. Got it. Maybe we make an edited version where all the dumb shit's cut out. And it's just like the actual stuff that matters. So you get a five-minute version of the podcast, which is like what matters. And then you get your 90-minute version with all the stupid shit in it. Yeah, million-dollar idea.

So far, you've got the meat that's patted dry, a pan that is piping hot with oil, and then what? Yeah, so I was just saying, like, if it's a fresh grind, you can actually separate, like, each meat strand that's extruded. You can separate it, and you get lots of teeny tiny crispy bits. But when you defrost it from the freezer, it's all sort of mashed together. So I put it in the pan in one flat layer, smash together, let it whole brown, as if you're browning a giant patty, and then take a spatula and flip the whole thing over.

Lit on or lit off? Definitely off. On will trap the steam. You want to release the liquids. Anyway, that's it I'm done with the browning of the meat you satisfied with that? yeah but that's part

that's like the one way to do it that's the second way lots of individual pieces crisping up I'm just saying if you can separate it out if it's like fresh grind if it's not a fresh grind then you can form a flat patty to cover the whole pan. But you got to leave it alone, let a nice crust develop, and then flip the whole thing and brown it all on the other side.

Then break that like a giant thin burger. It's a giant, yeah. Yeah. I would like to say that with my Ketchum kitchen, I had a hand grinder. That would be a good name for a show, the Ketchum kitchen. The Ketchum kitchen. All sorts of connotations. With Ryan Cal Callahan.

But I had a hand grinder that was there all the time, just lived on the counter. And it, I mean, it takes less than 10 minutes to grind burgers for six people. As long as the meat's pre, you know, in a, in a good place to grind it. Was it a grinder or a paster? Grinder. It was a grinder. It ground it. What's a paster? Oh, like a grinder that doesn't work.

That's, yeah, yeah. Or it like puts out like a it puts out like a baloney paste yeah no like a bronze swagger whatever whatever you like we growing up we had like what we called like the grinder it was a hand grinder in hindsight it was like it was like if you'd like put all your meat between a couple steel plates and then drove a car over to handful of times and then like put that in a bag and froze it that was ground that was our ground oh no no but yeah hand grinder it and you know the beauty of the hand grinder is that it is very simple to clean too and i think

they're small enough to where mentally you're not thinking that you're taking on some big endeavor. Dude, I might just start keeping a hand grinder. It's great. No, because then my kids will put their hands in there and they'll grind their hands off. Makes a serious, serious difference. I think fresh burger. What fat content are you guys going with? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a good question for you, Danielle. Yeah, you know, I think if you're going to make a sausage, you definitely need fat 20%. Is that what you do? Is that all you do? I, if I had to pick one for the rest of my life,

I would do 15 for burger and I'd do heavier 20 for sausage. You do more than 20 for sausage? Yeah. Yeah. Like, we've done- Is it still wild game? We've done 50%.

That's not wild game. And getting fat, getting fancy fat. That's wild game flavored meat. Yes. I'm glad you're bringing this up. I was going to a chef buddy of mine. I was just in town a couple weekends ago and I was lamenting to him how the first time I made Steve Kendrott's fennel sausage recipe.

It's not his, but he shared it with us. I call it his. Same way I call theel sausage recipe. It's not his, but he shared it with us. I call it his. Same way I call the marriage thing yours. It's 50% pork fat. Pork fat or like pork? Pork fat. Dude, this is some good... 50% pork fat to 50%

venison. And the recipe actually calls for venison. It's not beef or whatever, veal. Yeah, veal. Which is still but uh it's 50 50 and it's wonderful sausage but when you cook it no matter how slow and carefully you do it because the slower lower temperature you do you shouldn't shouldn't lose as much fat you still end up with like i mean a, a solid, if you're cooking six links in a pan, there's a solid inch of fat when you take them out, right? So I'm like, dude, this sucks.

Like, I'm losing something. But the sausage is still so good. Like, I didn't want to change anything. I like it because you're like poaching the meat in fat. That'd be called frying. Yeah, but you do it inside a tube. And if you do it at low enough temp, you really don't fry. But he was saying the quality and the type of fat.

No, you're kind of wrong, Danielle. Go on. Yeah, but it was a funny joke. We're having a side joke. Yeah, I appreciated it. But he was saying the type of fat from where on the pig and the quality of it will have a lot to do with that. Yeah, but this dude that Yanni's talking about, can I quick? This dude Yanni's talking

about is so next level that he okay if he's making coffee he takes a filter and runs hot water through it first to get out the flavor of the paper

factory. Like a regular old brown paper filter or a white one. He gives it like a yeah. He was not careful about his taste buds when he produced. No, he did not heed your father-in-law. He has not met your

father-in-law. No, he's been eating truffles and all that stuff. It's legit, but I'm saying this is next level food prep. It goes beyond the aspirations of this show, but it's valuable to know anyways. Yeah. Yeah. But I'll do zero fat, additional fat in my burger. It's just like whatever that turns out to be and i've had

incredible luck and served that to lots and lots of folks that eat nothing but beef burger with a lot of fat um but when you're making your different sausages and you know obviously like the world's your oyster as far as like what you want to put into a tube. But yeah, I think some like doing like coarse ground linked Italian sausage with a bunch of fat in there. And with the going into it with like the way I'm going to prepare these is very slow, lower heat. And you get that meat to like poach in that fat it's very very good and then and you're also the end result isn't a greasy sausage either because that that fat is getting away from from the meat i'm sure it's not not for all things all the time, just like most of the stuff we talk about, but I don't go, oh God, I'm wasting this wild game. Yeah, no, I know, man. It's like, it's a little bit aesthetic. We've talked about it. I don't even talk about it. Well,

you and I got pretty heated when, uh, on our, uh, Idaho trip, um, when we were cutting up your buck because I was like, Hey, this, this meat's really good. This Idaho mule deer is going to be really tasty. And you're like, listen, I need to make sausage. So I'm going to grind this deer. And basically every chunk of meat that I'd come up with, I'd be like, yeah, but don't you want this? And you're like, no, I need to make sausage. Um, are you guys familiar with the, a cut that, that we named after Callahan called the Callahan Throat Roast? I am.

And I didn't know that you knew that. I called it Throat Loin. It looks like a tenderloin on the throat. Who can take a stab at explaining what a throat roast is? You had to break it down in the written word, so. I haven't done it yet. I'm going to. On either side of the

trachea. Yeah, like if you were to extend your chin up to the ceiling right now and then put your two index fingers on either side of your Adam's apple, that big chunk of meat that should be on that in, but going to the outside.

You're doing a great job. Of your neck. That's your throat roast. Those are your throat roast or throat tenderloins. We were cutting up a moose and, and someone got to digging around in there when we were cutting it up and found those big and the moose are sizable yes and i remember cal was like just saying like he thought he discovered a previously undiscovered roast and you were supposed to report back to us

yeah it tasted like moose i don't think there was any major discoveries there what did you find danielle i haven't messed with it yet i have some ideas but i don't think there was any major discoveries there. What did you find, Danielle? I haven't messed with it yet. I have some ideas, but I don't want to disclose them yet. Oh, okay. Yeah. But you're going to do something special with the throat roast. Yeah, I've got them separated.

So I've got a trial batch and then a fix the error and then do it again, second batch. It's got a unique grain. It's a a unique grain. You know, it's a very long grain. Yeah, so if you were to cut it crosswise and look at it from the side, there's... It's like a tube inside of a tube, but there's a sheath of silver skin in a circle. Yeah. Does that make sense? It almost reminds me of like a shank, except there's no bone. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I got you. Danielle, imagine that you're dying. Okay. Trying to think of what? What's killing you? You're dying of congenital heart failure. No. Very common in the U.S.

No. There's no way. Okay. Name something. A bite from a daddy long legs. Okay, imagine you got bit by a daddy long legs. There you go. And it turns out that you read Spencer's thing.

You're like, oh, it doesn't matter. You started being careless around them. You're out blood trailing a buck, and they're all over the blood, as they're wanting to do. And you lay down and take a nap and one gets you and you're dying. And as you expire,

someone asks you, like, what's your last wild game tip? What would you say? You could pass along one wild game tip. Salt your meat in advance. So you'd be like...

How far in advance? Can you do it as you die for me? Like, salt your meat. Salt your meat. Salt your meat. Say, come to me, child. I'm leaving this world. Just for me, do it.

I can't. In the dying. Not too much. Just for me, do it. I can't. In the dying. Not too much. Just a little. Come closer. And do you rub it in? Do you just sprinkle on top and call it good? Or do you get your hands in there?

Yeah. Salt your meat. Watch out for that daddy. And it's bad. And it's bad. Watch out for that daddy It looks bad It looks bad Do this You gotta do it all in the voice Dude I almost brought myself to tears I was imagining myself dying so clearly

Come to me Alright I wanna know Ahead of time That's a broad notion What ahead of time is Cause it could be 10 seconds before you cook it. It could be a day. That's a good point because I am back and forth on the debate on how far in advance I've gotten to the point.

Either I do it like 30 minutes, an hour in advance at minimum, or wait to do it after? I'd rather do it like a very painful death where you're otherwise screaming in agony. Can you do that version for me? No. Go on. version for me no go on um so salt is probably the most important thing in your pantry and your best friend when it comes to wild game cooking because, like, the way you would brine a turkey before Thanksgiving, it denatures the protein strand. So the actual structure, you've got these long fibers that are sort of intertwined together.

It can actually unravel and untwist them, and it has sort of an osmosis effect. The longer it's sitting in salt or a brine, the more the meat is able to sort of reabsorb those juices so that when you go to cook, less juice is lost through the cooking process, so your meat is juicier. But it takes time for this to happen. When you're talking about strands of protein, you're talking about like on a microscopic level.

This isn't something you can see. Well, I mean, if you were to look at a brisket or, you know, you can see like how there's long fibers. But I am talking about. Yeah, the throat roast has long fibers. Exactly. But microscopically, yes. Protein strands, you're not seeing that happening. No, you don't.

No, you don't see it happen. But if you do it right before, it kind of releases a lot of liquid. So that's where I'm on the fence of, I don't want to salt right before I cook because I want a really nice sear. So it's like I'd rather just. Oh, so you salted enough for it. I was going to bring that up. I salted it like I'm about to season. Like the way I would season the meat.

It's a healthy sprinkle. And I salt and pepper. And I would do that the morning I plan to cook. And then you can let it dry out again. Before I cook. I mean, the longer the better. I mean, I haven't really explored extremely long times doing it other than I think two days for Jackrabbit. I've done that. But yeah, doing salting it in advance does so much

for helping wild game retain juice. And one of the reasons why we lose so much juice when we cook, obviously, the heat, you lose juice, but wild game is so lean. So if you're thinking about like a domestic animal, not only are they having fat on the outside of a muscle, but inside there's little pockets of fat embedded in between those fibers of muscle. And so whenever you're cooking, fat acts as a barrier to heat transfer, so it's slower to cook. Wild game cooks a lot faster. You lose more juice, and you don't have that mouthfeel of fat juices when you're biting into a meat of a wild game.

So I think adding salt beforehand makes a huge, huge difference. That is my dying wish to give. Dying piece of advice. Yeah, dying advice. 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.

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

But yeah, they will have. We talked about this with Jesse Griffiths, the Texas chef from your home state there. But not in this subject. We're just talking about why do people, when you're frying fish, why do they season the breading? than just seasoning the fish yeah like get the piece of fish exactly how you want it seasoned and then put your cornmeal on it rather than trying to like figure out how the hell much seasoning to put into the cornmeal and how much is the fish going to pick up with the actual seasoning just season the fish yeah then put cornmeal on it and then you have the perfectly piece of seasoned fish with the cornmeal for the crispiness that's a good point i think that's like a pre-salted

cornmeal i did a double double i still season the stuff but now i'll put well now it's like i did double batter so you get like lots of extra crunchy extra crunchy and you can put cayenne in it. So it's like I taste that cayenne on the breading. I'll tell you why I would put, I put paprika in there now and it's got like the color. Yeah. It's a nice color, but I like that. And I also like that when I do pre-salt meat, like you're talking about, it does, moisture comes out of it. I never thought to do it and then let that son of a bitch dry back out again.

It's not that it's going to really dry back out. It can reabsorb juices, but I mean, it does pull moisture out. So there's if you're adding a ton of salt, then that's a little different.

I'm not talking about adding a whole layer of salt. If you're going to add a bunch of salt, then that's a little different. I'm not talking about adding a whole layer of salt. If you're going to add a bunch of salt, then that's a different effect. That is curing and that is drying out meat. So that's a little bit different, which is something I do days in advance for birds. If I want crispy skin, I'll put salt on it a few days in advance. Really? And set it out on like a wire cooling rack so that there's air breathing. In your fridge.

And just let it sit in the open for a couple days. It gets a lot crispier that way. My brother, Danny, he likes to just take big chunks of moose meat or whatever and just sets them on a cooling rack in his fridge and leave them in there for a week. Yeah. Just letting them get a crust on them. Yeah. So I used to do a lot of this stuff.

Then I had too many kids, and now it's just like everything's chaotic, man. You don't have control over your fridge. It's just, ah, it's just. Just boiled meat for Steven okay Yanni how would you like to die

oh my last final wild game yeah but I need no causes it's helpful for me to know cause or die oh how I'm gonna die

people moving a piano above you but he wouldn't have oh as he sees it coming as he sees it I. As he sees it, I'm watching it come. And you have to spout out one last wild game too.

No, it's the end. Hmm. I can come back to you. Oh man, the piano's coming loose. Hope nobody's underneath us. Yeah. There's Yanni.

What's he saying? Something about Wow Game. Dramatic music on the piano plays. Yes. Man. This is heavy duty. We can pass you by. Come back to me.

I can't give you just any old tip. Phil, you probably don't have one. No. You asked me if I heard anything stupid on the show yet, asking me about wild game. That was the first stupid thing anybody said. Spencer, do you want to go? I can go if you're not ready yet. I can go.

Okay. So there you are. What's the cause of death? Probably. Congenitive heart failure? Because of recent events, earthquakes. Okay. A lot of them events, earthquakes. Okay. So.

A lot of them going on here. Well, you don't die from an earthquake. You die from a situation surrounding an earthquake. Right. Well, we're like a few days past the 60th anniversary of Hebgen Lightquake. Okay. So you're camping in a large mountain that's falling on you. Camping down at Hebgen Lake.

It fell on you and you're under hundreds of feet of rock. Suffocating. And you know that there's no survival. Yep. But you probably have a long time. Okay. You're grabbing something out of your car. The car's protected you.

You have no way of moving. There's nothing to eat, but there you are. Right. But somebody's fished a tube down to you that you can talk into. A rescuer. Sure. I would say, and I used to be, like, pretty stubborn about this, is using a meat thermometer when I wasn't, like,

super competent with my wild game cooking. I thought it was, like, admitting defeat almost. If you use a meat thermometer, you're, like, showing your ignorance for I don't know how to get this to medium rare. And like once I started doing that, it made me a way better cook. Like for that specific piece of meat and then future pieces of meat that I would cook as well when I didn't have to use that meat thermometer. So I would say like that would be my dying wish. If you're not confident, if you feel like you're constantly overcooking or pulling something out that's underdone, just use a meat thermometer. It's so easy and it makes like a big difference in the long run.

Let's say I was passed out in the backseat of that car that got crushed under the earthquake rubble. I would wake up and I would say, you'd say your thing. And then I would say, but only if it's a halfway decent meat thermometer because i've had a lot of meat thermometers over the years dude you pull it out of the counter you pull it out of the the drawer and it's like oh that's weird my house is 110 degrees it's like there are a lot of meat thermometers out there that are useless yes you have to check it there's like all kinds of ways to calibrate them. Yeah, I was going to say, you could just calibrate it. I never did any of that.

I now have what I call a Steve Kendrot, which just as I like to credit him with the sausage recipe, I credit him with basically manufacturing the meat thermometer that he told me to purchase. What is that thing? I didn't buy one. That thing is slick as shit, you're not talking thermo pan are you yeah that one no is it red with a poker that poker like turns on that little lcd screen every time yeah yeah that i think that's what you're talking about yeah that's a yeah i've taken i've i've done my when my kids didn't feel well i made them suck on that thing

see if they had a fever i've had to calibrate that though too. Yeah, but it's a trusty thing once you get it dialed. Yeah. Anyhow, that's what I would say from the backseat. Yeah, but overusing that. I'd be like, probably if it's a good one. Like on my roasts, on my steaks, on my burgers, it just made a big difference in the long run

of like making me a more competent cook. Yeah, because why have it be that you don't know if you overdid it until you go to the table and cut into it? But I think there's a lot of people, I think to my family specifically, I've never seen them use a meat thermometer. And I think there's a lot of people like that that just, I don't know, don't realize how great of a tool it is. Well, if you look at my buddy,

Pooter, Andrew, Chef Radulowski, he walks around with a meat thermometer stuck in his pocket. He's a professional chef. So if he's willing to admit his... Yeah, you know the other thing that pro chefs usually walk around with

in their pocket? Come on. You want to take a guess at it? Anybody? Phone? Tongs. Salt. Well, that would be used in the cooking application or in the kitchen application, but as a Sharpie

because they're always freaking marking shit and what it is and putting a date on it. And masking tape. Yeah, and that's not going to be my last dying advice, but that's a pro move to always do that. I hate looking at leftovers and being like, was that last Wednesday or the Wednesday before that we

had the taco meat? Cal, you want to go? I'm ready to go. I think my dying advice on wild game cooking is just. Cause of death, real quick? I don't know, plane going down? Okay, so you survived the initial impact, or you're spiraling to the earth?

Well, that wouldn't make it. I must have survived the initial impact. But you know now that this is not going to happen for you. Right. Yeah, that makes more sense. Like your legs, your back. Yeah, nobody dies easy in my family. Everybody lingers on.

So probably just for this reason. So it's just your head, like your torso is elsewhere, and your head's like, make sure to. Yeah, make sure whatever you do to just keep trying keep cooking that's what i would say that's your wild game tip if you can produce food that somebody in your family or circle will not eat then you don't need to hang out with those people it's a good litmus test either way so it's a two piece of advice it is yeah go into each for a little bit just just so one you're only going to expand your repertoire if you just keep trying things don't get stuck in a rut doing the same old

things but like try something new yes uh and if you're nervous about producing something that could potentially like somehow ruin a relationship that's a good thing as well because if it actually does ruin the relationship those people aren't worth hanging out with exactly get them out of get them out of your circle yeah i saw someone recently saying that their wife doesn't like wild game. I'm like, you need to get a new wife. And I'm like a pro-marriage dude, right? Yes.

I'm like a spokesman for being married. You are a spokesman for being married. I can't be around, certainly can't be around your wife without hearing about marriage. That's for sure. Like her thinking you ought to be married. Yes. Yeah. Yanni?

I'm going to go pro grill tip. Just got into a fight with the grizzly bear. I did rip his jaws apart, so he's dying as well. He's with you. He's going to give a wild game tip. He's going to be like, I love huckleberries. Yeah. When they're ripe.

After the first frost, when there's sugar spikes, that's the best. Blueberries are good. But one of the swipes. Or he'd be like, we don't really eat a lot of honey. Contrary to popular opinion. One of the swipes got me across my abdomen, and my guts are hanging out. A lot of blood. So we're beyond the piano.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That wasn't that exciting. So we're beyond the piano. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That wasn't that exciting. He sidestepped the piano. But no, I got this tip because I saw on your Instagram, I forget what kind of meat you had on the grill, but somebody or a couple people remarked how you had your grill grates in upside down.

Yeah, and they were right. They were right. Well, I noticed that, and they were right. They were right. Well, I noticed that, and then like a week or two later. I think that most people in America's grill grates are out and on. You're right, because check this out. We buy, my brother-in-law buys a brand new Weber from Ace Hardware. And listen, I love Ace. I'm not bashing Ace.

It's like Ace is the place. I believe it. I get such good service. What do you like about Ace? Good service. Because I feel like I walk in there with a freaking random bolt or light bulb or whatever, and I

just hold it in the air, and somebody walks up to me and goes, follow me. Every single time. Yeah, it's not like going into a Home Depot or whatever. Oh my god. No, nothing. If I can get it at Ace, I'm going to Ace. Anyways, he bought a brand new Weber grill, and that day you could get it assembled and delivered.

Shows up. And next day, I'm out there flipping burgers. And I'm like, God, freaking burgers are just like sticking. And like my burgers are like in the grates. Like what in the hell is going on here? I look down like, son of a bitch. Those grills are upside down. Those grates are upside down.

I think it's an epidemic, man. I'm sure. Because when you look at it, it looks, you think. For grills are upside down. Those grates are upside down. I think it's an epidemic, man. I'm sure. Because when you look at it, it looks, you think. For some reason, your mind. So like one, this grill happened to have two grates, and they sit side by side. And when you pick one up and look at it, one side sort of has like a triangular shape to the grill bar, I'm going to call it, right? And it sort of comes to a point almost.

The other side, if you flip it open, the bottom of that triangle is like the bottom of the triangle, and it's flat, right? For some reason, everybody's brain thinks that the pointy side- Is going to burn lines into it. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is. Where, in fact, when you do that, like in the case with these burgers,

the burgers sink in between those holes and those pointy edges push too much. And then when you run your spatula underneath that burger, you're not going to get underneath that burger really. And then you need to take the corner of your spatula and scrape it along there to get that stuff out. Yes. Or in my case, what I did is I transferred all the burgers over to one side and just flipped those grates and let that stuff burn off. And yeah, so when your grates are flat, you can run a spatula and stuff sears and you don't have to be scraping all that stuff off all the time.

I'm glad I did that post on Instagram. And normally when, like, there's people who, like, you on Instagram, you want to share something that you like or that you feel, whatever. Like, something like it'll be of interest to people. It'll be, you know, provide entertainment to people. And no matter what you do, there's always the, like, critic. Yes. They'll zoom in to find things in the background to say negative things. If it's not readily apparent what they could say negative, they will like zoom the image until they can find something that they can say negative about what's in the background.

They'll find some negative thing about it. It'll be like, yeah, great job on those burgers. They look perfect, but I see you're wearing flip-flops and that's not very safe. Or I see a plastic water bottle in the background. Um, you know, you say you like conservation, but

obviously your whole life's a lie. Cause I zoomed and someone had left, you know, there's like that guy. Normally the noise that those people make in my mind is it makes this noise when i'm reading their comments it sounds like this right it's like that noise but the dude that noticed the grill was like hey man you know in a super cool way was like you know your grills are upside down and i was like i initially wanted to be like don't you tell me how to set my grill up but then when i looked i was like god damn he's

right he's right i have two cents on this but i don't think it really applies in your situation because of the way that the grates are pointed at one end sometimes they're made to be flipped both ways because some ways... Are you complexifying right now? Sometimes you can get higher over the coals and if you flip it around, you get low on the coals for hotter heat.

So sometimes they're meant to be flipped. Really? I like it. But the grate would be the same way. The height doesn't change on mine. Yeah, the grate would still be the same, right? It would just adjust the height. Like the shape of the surface would still remain the same if it was reversed.

If you had a flipper style, yeah, you would have it. You would notice that one side would be just barely on top of the coals versus another side would be raised up higher. Yeah. I like throwing the cast iron on the grill too. Like with, you know, the Traeger where you got a lot of smoke going around. So you get indirect heat, but so you get like the, the pancake griddle flat top cooking, but you get

some smoke in there too. I like that a lot. That's just another grill surface for you. In recent years, like those pink Himalayan salt blocks, seems like it become real sexy to cook on and stuff. Have you ever used one or do you have any thoughts on it?

A long time ago and every time I see one, I say, I need to buy that. And then I'd look at my cart and say, oh, I have the handheld cart. I don't feel like carrying it. You mean like people cooking on salt blocks? Yes. Like the size of your laptop and like that thick.

Yeah. A buddy of mine just mentioned cooking some stuff on one of those. I have one, and I've done, like, white meat and fish on it and stuff, but I don't know that it's, like, that much better. I don't know that it would go out of my way. A lot of stuff's just kind of fun, though. Yeah, it adds salt. It looks cool. Yeah. For sure. It looks

pretty. Don't over-salt your meat before you put it on there. Oh, yeah, because the block, like, sweats kind of with the meat you're cooking in salt. So that's neat, but I don't know that it's an advantage. So if you were down under that rubble, and you're like,

and P.S., I've been meaning to try. I'd say don't. You'd be like, and P.S., what do you guys think about Himalayan salt blocks? I don't think I buy the hype. That's what I would say don't you'd be like a PS what do you guys think about Himalayan salt blocks I don't think I buy the hype that's what I would say I'd be like but what about

Himalayan salt blocks yeah I'd say I don't I don't buy the hype quite yet but maybe there's the right piece of meat or right recipe that it's like

this improves the end product it's been a really long time since I've done it we did some flat rock cooking I don't want to give an answer the end product? It's been a really long time since I've done it. We did some flat rock cooking. I don't want to give an answer. Hot rock cooking.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. Remember that, Yanni? No. Did you go to New Zealand with us? No. God. It's always hard for me to picture not being with Yannis.

I just assumed that everything that happened to me, Yannis was there. I watched a buddy of mine I was guiding with forget he forgot a fire pan, right? Which fire pan is an apparatus that works real good as a grill for like wild and scenic river designations. You can't just have a fire wherever you want to have a fire. So you have to have a fire pan. Well, he forgot the fire pan and then i just sat back and quite honestly did not utter a word as i watched him explain

this very intricate story to this family of five on why he was going to grill their steaks on top of river rocks uh the reality is he just forgot the fire pan no but he's like boring you in for a treat yes it was great it was really great we one time were um hunting mountain goats in alaska and you couldn't for a couple days you couldn't hunt at all it was just too fog, you couldn't hunt at all. It was just too foggy. You couldn't see anything. And we stumbled into an abandoned plaster mine that had been abandoned long ago. And they were doing suction dredge mining for gold. And they'd left wetsuits. It was like they walked away from the place. So their wetsuits had been torn apart by bears, like bears like neoprene for some reason.

And the wetsuits are just everywhere in little pieces. And we're kind of digging through all the debris and rubble. They probably brought it in, I don't know, in snow machines or something in the winter, flew it in, and then left it laying. And we found a 20-pound propane tank with a weed-burning torch head. And we lugged that back to our camp and we were staying in a little a teepee tent that didn't have a floor in it and we would just set that

propane tank up aiming at rocks so we just turn it on full blast because just sitting out no one's gonna get out of the mountains anyways we just turn on full blast and set a rock in front of it until that rock got hot as shit and then carry the rock and set it of the mountains anyways. We just turned on full blast and set a rock in front of it until that rock got hot as shit. And then carry the rock and set it in the middle of the tent.

And it'd keep, it'd like radiate some nice heat for a while. And then meanwhile, we'd have another one out there. Getting ready. Yeah, getting ready and just having like rock heaters. And I happened to have my leather chopper mitten

so I could carry the rocks back and forth. Apropos, very little. My wife saved my tomatoes by doing the hot rock trick this year. No. Yeah, because I planted tomatoes like mid-June thinking, by golly, that's plenty late enough. And then like five days later, we had like four or five inches at the house. Of snow. Yeah.

And she just took like a, we had some leftover visqueen from the remodel. So she covered the, you know, already had the cages up. So she just laid that over the cages and then just threw the oven on like 400 and threw a couple of giant rocks in there and ran the rocks down to the tomatoes, stuck them in there

and it made a little greenhouse. No good. Tomatoes made it out fine i don't have any red ones yet man but dude i do not have a red tomato it's killing me because i know they're they're coming in when i'm not gonna be here okay here's my dying thing um i forgot i had two it was a slow it was a slow death. One of them was, um, one of my dying ones. Oh,

I remember the two. Can I give two? Why not? Yeah. Why not? One is, if you cut deer steaks, just take a break for a while.

I'm not saying they're bad, but just don't cut deer steaks for a while. Cook whole muscle chunks. Cook one, two pound chunks of meat that you that you sear all surfaces and then finish it in your oven or that you just put in your grill give it a good sear turn the grill down close the lid and cook it till it's you know 125 130 with your meat thermometer and then cut it take a break from deer steaks you get that you know i like it as a youngster we always cut all of our large muscles into steaks we froze it like that everything you never froze a block of like a block of meat

you know if you freeze the block of meat when you thaw it out, you can choose to cut it for steaks. That's exactly right. Then for a long time, instead of writing deer steaks on the packages, me and my brother started writing venison S slash R. People would think it was my initials, but it was steak roast, meaning chef's choice. Stop cutting steaks and cook some whole

muscle meat. Then if I still had a little, that was like, it was like one of those things where doctors are like, oh, we're losing them. But then like, like I came back, right. And, and, and then, then I flatlined again, but I'm still kind of hanging in there. Then I would go, uh, never cook a separate

meal for your children. Hmm. Then I would go, never cook a separate meal for your children. Then I would die. Yeah. That goes beyond wild game. That's just life. If they said, yeah, they're like, okay, but what about any last just general life

advice? And I'd say, unrelated to wild game. And they're like, yeah, just just whatever anything helpful for the universe i would say don't cook separate meals for your children stop stop doing that stop making them like noodles that goes right into just making life easy for your kids. Yeah. Stop doing that. Don't do that. Make it easy because you're exposing them to variety.

Sure, whatever. Making them eat what you're eating, taking them out into a rainstorm, setting up a tent in the rain, letting them be cold a little bit. I might make those guys stop even having access to the children's menu in restaurants. But that leads to food waste. Oh, yeah. Because the smaller portions are helpful. I don't think you told us what was killing you. Congenitive heart failure. Oh.

It's flatlining. 119. 119. It could be coincidence that it's after lunch, but I feel like this podcast has made me hungry. Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. Concluders, Danielle, wild game.

What's in your freezer? What do you got going on? I have some good stuff in there. I have some stuff saved for special occasions, and I have some stuff that are just a little weird that i'm have ideas on like a snake i do have snake oh i was joking you got a snake i have a couple snakes um you know when we did the when i was at rendezvous i got to be a wild game judge contest the contest yeah yeah yeah did you find it was hard to do?

It was difficult because everybody wants to serve you like five different things. And I just want to judge you on one thing because I can't remember 20 people cooking five different things. It's like I like two out of your five and the other three were just average. So now you're just below average. Had you just focused on that one good thing, you would have been... Let's write

a co-email to whoever runs that because I've been saying it for years since Steve and I did it that they need to tighten up the rules a little bit because the playing field's just rough and rumbly and people are getting screwed out of that

deal. What we're talking about those backcountry hunters. When you go to the backcountry hunters and anglers annual rendezvous, they have a wild game contest where different people

from different state chapters team up and cook wild game dishes and they bring in a bunch of judges. Right. Handful of judges. And they usually

pick judges who have the right to have an opinion. Yeah. I'd like to think I have the right to. No, you do. I'd like to think I have the right. No, you do. But it's hard. It's hard.

I feel that I would like to tweak out their system for them. Go on. Yeah, I kind of wanted to, but I was just happy to be there. So no complaining. You were one of the judges too. Remember the snake? Was that Arizona? I think that was Arizona, yeah.

Yeah. I thought they served a snake, and I thought it was very good. They did a very good job. It was like a texture of a shrimp. It was succulent. Really? But it was like chickeny flavor. Yeah.

So it gave me a lot of ways to spin off cooking with snake. Where have you been getting these snakes? They had jackrabbit, rattlesnake, javelina, and they fried the cholla buds too, right? They won the last year that I was a judge. And they won this year too. They crushed it. They did.

One of those was the same crew. Was it two women? No. Spearheaded by two women? No. I think you're thinking Nevada. Because they did the bighorn sheep testicles. Oh, that was Nevada. I think so. Yeah, you might be right. I forgot.

That was a long time ago. Anyway. That's an anti-hunting organization. Did you know that? What? BHA, man. Oh. Green decoys, bro.

Oh, yeah. Oh, you green decoys out there. Anyway, so yeah, I've got some snake to mess with and I've got some

balls of boar. Boar balls. Boar balls. Is that what you're saving for the special occasion?

That's a special occasion. That's a big ball. So I've got a game show that I like. Oh,

shoot. I almost just gave away something. I can't tell you. I'm going a game show that I like. Oh, shoot. I almost just gave away something. I can't tell you. I'm going to stop talking. I already know what it is. You got people you watch a game show with, and you're going to sneak them balls. I figured that out that fast. Am I correct or am I wrong?

It's called, yeah, but dang it, I messed that one up. I can't. Well, I won't serve balls. So heads up, if you're invited over to Danielle's house to watch some kind of game show, whatever you're eating is balls. So B4.1. No, I was going to do it with you guys. I was going to do a game show called Name That Game, where I serve a series of small plates, and you have to figure out what animal it is. I like it.

Not what cut it is, out what animal it is. I like it. Not what cut it is, but what animal it is. Well, I think there's some that's going to be a little clearer to know what animal, and it would be harder to distinguish the cut in there. It's just vice versa. I think you just get bonus points for one knowing. You get points for knowing the animal and extra for knowing the cut. Yeah. So if I was like, boar balls, I get two points.

Well, I'm not going to do that one now because I just gave it away. That's a big ball off some pig. I've seen some doozies. How big? Like golf ball? Baseball? What are you talking about? Rihanna, you know what I'm going to talk about.

That time we castrated that boar? You ever had a kolache in Texas? Yeah. That's how big it is had a kolache in Texas? Yeah. That's how big it is. Yeah. A kolache. Like the round ones, not the hot dog ones. Yeah, it's like the weird rolls that are everywhere.

Like a very German thing, too. Yeah. I think they're... Out in the woods? They're like breakfast kolaches. I thought you were talking about something you find out in the woods. They're like pastries.

Oh, no, maybe I have. They're really good. I might have eaten one without catching what the name of it was, but it doesn't... Yeah, if somebody handed you like a breakfast sandwich at some point, kind of an odd breakfast sandwich. Like a round, ball-y dough, and in the middle, there's some sort of meat, cheese. Yeah, Yanni calls those pierogies. Yeah, in Michigan, they call them pasties.

No, not pierogies, pea-doggins. That's how you say it in Latvian. Pea-doggy. I have a substantial amount of carp fillets, boneless Asian carp fillets. And in my... Did you vaccine them? Yeah.

Did you pick the bones? Yeah, there are no bones in this stuff. Huh. Silver or big heads? Predominantly silvers. Huh. Good for you. My experience with this stuff, though, is it is as flavorless. It is beautiful fish, but it's as flavorless as you can possibly get.

So I'm thinking about doing some miso stuff or making some buns or marinating it in soy sauce and stuff like that. Because it needs flavor. I didn't realize carp was so bland. Well, common carp

is not bland. Common carp is like, common carp has a loud, common carp is not bland. Common carp is like, common carp. It's different. Yeah. Has a loud, common carp wears a loud hat. But a common carp is also an invertebrate eater. And it isn't as specialized as like the silver carp and the big head carp. Which are filter feeders. They eat zooplankton from the day they can eat to their last day, which turns out can be like 117 years down the road.

So. I don't think you properly emphasize though, like how difficult to clean they are. A Northern pike, for example, a lot of people avoid like filleting because they have the set of Y bones. Yeah. Asian carp like big head and silvers have three sets of Y bones. Yes. So it's really tough. Like you have to be surgical.

Would you cut strips around all the Y bones? So the way, yeah. I mean, that's really what, what they're doing. Um, the interesting thing and interesting technique is the direction that the bones run. They actually run, they kind of slightly angle from the tail towards the head. Okay.

And so when you, you can do a top fillet is what they were calling it, which is basically filleting the meat off the tops of the Y bones. Yeah. Which would be like your dead center along the backbone kind of traditional fillet cut. But what they're doing is they go from the tail towards the head and they're not, you know, getting a lot of depth. It's maybe a quarter inch max on like a big carp. Yeah. But by going from the tail to the head,

your knife is actually pushing the bones down. Oh, that's interesting. The direction they want to go. I'm with you. And you get a deeper fillet and no bones. But if you were to try to go from the head to the tail, then you're, you're hitting bones the whole way and you're basically just getting like meat

putty off of them. Got you. Yeah. Yep. So you got like your backbone pieces, like your loin strips and they're like carp strip. And then you have a center fillet, which is that one I just talked about coming off the tips of the bones. And then you have a center filet, which is that

one I just talked about coming off the tips of the bones. And then there's a belly meat piece that's totally boneless. Um, and then some of these guys I was talking to, like they, they don't care about the bones at all. And they're just chopping up that whole filet,

throwing the whole thing in the fryer and you're like eating around the bones. Yeah. I've had it the bones. Yeah. I've had it like that. Yeah. Man, I went to a place where they were trying to use them to make, this guy was trying to start up this place to make fish oil out of them and drank some of that oil out of them.

He was trying to, like, incinerate them, you know, and then you get, like, an oil from them. Wild. He was trying to find a way that they could sort of get some economic, some byproducts off of them, you know, in order to encourage harvest. Yeah. Well, that's what the.

This is a long time ago. State of Tennessee, Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency is actually putting a 10 cent per pound, not a bounty, but basically like a state incentive, which brings the market price of Asian carp up to, uh, you know, right in the ballpark of catfish. Oh, I got you.

Wild caught catfish. Yeah. So they're subsidizing the, subsidizing the commercial harvest. Yep. They're even supplying nets to folks that want to get into the catfish gill netting game. The carp gill netting. Yep. They're even supplying nets to folks that want to get into the catfish gill netting game. The carp gill netting.

Yep. Or sorry, carp gill netting. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty wild, but. The way it was explained to me when I was looking into this about that netting is when they first came in there, they would have like

nine inch square gill net in order to let all the game fish through. And you could pretty quickly eliminate like certain size classes of fish out of waters. But as that with them being filter feeders, that the idea that they put forth to me, what we're talking about is like these, these invasive carp species in the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

What they're saying is that you could eliminate size classes and be pretty strategic or pretty surgical with your mesh size, what size carp you're catching. But even if you removed all of the large fish, so let's say you even drop down to a four inch mesh, right? You'll remove all of the carp that are of a certain size, but the river will still support X pounds of carp. It's just achieving its poundages through different sized fish. So by removing all this higher age class, size class fish, you're still going to have the same number of pounds of filter feeding carp.

You're just not going to have any big ones. You just got shit loads of small ones and they're eating the same amount of food. Was that explained? Because this is an old idea. I don't know if it's still current. carp, you're just not going to have any big ones. You just got shit loads of small ones and they're eating the same amount of food. Yeah. Was that explained? Cause this is an old idea. I don't know if it's still current. I think it is still current, but you know, the way you measure any sort of life in a river is

just by biomass. Yeah. And so, so if you're a big trout person, you could go to a river that's got six, 80 pound trout, let's say. Right. Never happened, but unless you're talking Taman or something. Anyway, you could have like six 80 pound trout

or you could have, you know, 800 six pound trout. Yeah. Right. Being that that's what, that's what they're saying the problem with, with gill netting carp is. Yeah. You're not going to reduce the poundage of

carp that are in the river eating plankton. You're just going to change the size structure. And what they need is like, uh, other fish in that game's fish category to have like booming population years that could outbalance that biomass equation. Yeah. which just pretty much isn't going to happen because the carp are so good at reproducing. And, you know, a huge carp is going to create a hell of a lot more eggs than a tiny carp

will. Oh, yeah, I got you. Maybe over the long term, you can wind up driving down the biomass. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the issue with specifically these filter feeding carp is they eat the same thing as they do, uh, when they're 90, as they do when they're a juvenile fish, um out eating is zooplankton then they they move on to you know other uh foods but the issue is right you could have tens of thousands of 90 pound

filter feeders that are eating the same thing as, you know, your one inch fingerling bass or pike or whatever walleye crappie. Um, so they're going to out-compete those tiny, tiny fish. Yeah. That's the fear. Yeah. Well, not even fear.

I think it's demonstrated now. Yeah. You're seeing a decrease in game fish in some of those areas. Isn't that true? Um. Or is that not true yet? Man, according to the data, it's not true yet.

Like not seeing the repercussions in the game fish. But what they're seeing is they're seeing a reduction in game fish that anglers are bringing in. And a lot of it is just trying to figure out how to fish around the carp. So like one of the guys that we went out with,

he's a big time crappie guy. He was very frustrated with the fishery um there's carp everywhere um and your you know traditional ways of fishing for the crappie would be to get like right on top of structure and fish down to it but what he found out that you were doing because this guy was really into the side scan sonar and could really see what was happening is he'd go over the top of structure. There'd be a bunch of carp above the structure, the carpet freak out and bail. And then he'd get like maybe a crappie off of the structure. But if he sat 30 yards back and cast to the structure, making longer casts for crappie guy, um, the carp would remain there on top of the structure.

His little tiny crappie baited fall through the carp and he'd be able to pick off, you know, half a dozen crappie off of that chunk of structure. Got you. Cause they. They weren't blown out when the carp blew out. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Or feeling the disturbance in the force, if you yeah i'm with you yeah interesting spencer you got any concluders uh just like piggybacking off of what danielle and and cal said is just like try stuff for yourself i can't tell you how many times i was a kid that I had in my head because someone said it that like a rutting buck tastes bad or antelope is gross. Just stuff like that. And you need to just try it for yourself. Like Danielle cooked a turkey sponge, right? That's really strange. Yeah.

But it was good. I hadn't heard of anybody cooking it before, but knowing what it was made me wonder why do we throw it away and i i'm willing to eat something that could be horribly horribly terrible just to know for myself that it's bad instead of just hearsay of ah throw the sponge away it's worthless yeah and recently in the office we we've cooked things as extreme as like crow and badger and it tasted like red meat, or it tasted like dark meat from a game bird. So just don't let those misconceptions kind of muddy your view of a different wild game. Yeah, I mean, my whole life people were like,

oh, you know, panda bear burger isn't great, you know. Really slowed you down. I know, and you get that in your head, and then later you realize. Yanni? Should have been hunting these things my whole life. You realize you could have got a really pretty jacket and a great burger. A lot of what we cover here,

you can go find out about at themeateater.com. Tons of information there, food stuff, Danielle's writing, Spencer's writing, all kinds of stuff. We'll touch on greater detail there. What else? Plug away. Follow me on Instagram, Stephen Rinella,

at Stephen Rinella. And then you can look and find stuff and be like, do, do, do, do, do. You're real great. No protective eyewear. Yep. You're splitting wood in your bare feet again. All right.

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