The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 405: Don't Believe Them

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Jesse Griffiths and Corinne Schneider.  Topics include: "Almost everything is from around here"; Jesse driving 17 pounds of lemon from South Texas to Dai Due in Austin; burning money; ricks and cords as measurements of wood; when a guy in dreads shows up and wants to show you something in his car; pronouncing coyote; more Chettiquette questions; Steve opposing Michigan's unlimited take of turkeys in the fall; wrongly maligned critters; cooking in fat; how "dry brine" is oxymoronic; Chinese meat washing; the long window of doneness in slow cooking; rendered fat prices; achieving tenderness; the overabundance of BBQ sauce in the Rinella household; the merits of eating boiled meat; mostarda; how "The Hog Book" won a James Beard Award; you're either cooking it too long, or you're not cooking it long enough; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go go farther stay longer all right everybody joined today by uh wild hog apologist jesse griffiths perfect i love it that title stuck dude uh we didn't have any wild hog at your restaurant the other night but when i took my my wife and daughter to your restaurant in austin Texas. Died, do you weigh? Mm-hmm. Holy shit, was it good, man. Oh, that's good to hear. My wife said it was the best meal. I'm not kidding, unprompted. She said it was the best meal she had had in years. In years.

I love that. Which I shouldn't really point that out because I cook dinner every night. I'm sure she meant restaurant meal. I know that's what she meant. Absolutely. Yeah, I didn't think about it now, but it was like a dig. She was making a dig at me. No.

It wasn't building you up, dude. It was knocking me down, and I didn't even realize it. No, I think it's categories. You've got your at-home meals, and you've got your dining out meals, and we must have excelled in that. I'll take that. Yeah, you excelled selling the dining out well my brother danny um he'll he'll often say that when he eats at someone's house or whatever he likes it he says because it just doesn't taste

like something i made right well it's like the whole sandwich rule you know like if somebody else makes you a sandwich it's better than if you made yourself a sandwich. Yeah. 100%. No, so good. We had your nilgai. We had the tartar. Right. What is that exactly? I mean, I know what it is, but tell people what the preparation is. Oh, it changes a lot.

Act like you're going to do it with a deer or something like that. A deer? Or whatever. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's all pretty much, if you can eat it raw, it's pretty interchangeable.

I prefer the tenderloin or a muscle off the leg. If it's a, if it's a tartar, then we'll, we'll finely dice it and then we'll give it a nice hand chop with a real heavy, sharp knife. And then. So each piece of meat is how big? Well, they start off like smaller, you know, probably like a one centimeter dice. Okay. And then it gets hand chopped until you get that perfect, like not ground, but consistency. So you make a little cube. You slice a little cube. Correct. And then you whop, whop, whop, whop, whop.

That's the noise it makes. Well, the chef's knife. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what it sounds like. That's exactly the sound it makes. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what it sounds like. That's exactly the sound it makes. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, just go over it until it's nice and fine, and then the sky's the limit there.

You get creative and add something. You want to put something maybe acidic in there, something textural, whether that's arugula or an onion or a caper or something like that, something bright like lemon, salt, obviously. It needs a lot of salt, I always feel like. It's one of those things like avocados and potatoes that's relying on having the right amount of salt on it.

Yeah. And then what? I mean, you can go traditional, put the egg yolk in there. I want you to tell me. I mean, I know you weren't there, but I want you to tell me what I ate the other night. In all honesty, I don't know what the current set is because she might have changed it. So Janie's the chef at the restaurant.

And she, if I recall correctly right now, there's a piece of grilled bread. Yep. Okay. Arugula. Yep. Okay. And then a fermented sofrito vinaigrette. Does that sound familiar?

We're just going to nod and say yes at this point because this is borderline embarrassing that I don't know what's going on. I told everybody you weren't there. Right. I think, yeah, so what we've got there is those same components. You've got texture, especially the grilled bread being slightly warm, a little bit of smoke, so you get a nice texture there arugula texture and then the fermented sofrito which sounds kind of you know slightly fancy is basically just our way of preserving summertime vegetables in sofrito form which would be onion garlic tomato pepper for using as a cooking base. I mean, it's a very traditional way

to like start a lot of dishes. And since we're relying on having stuff out of season because we don't, you know, source anything that's not available, what we'll do is we'll make a liquid out of that. We'll puree that to a paste and then add salt and then ferment that. And so we have it year round.

And it's super delicious. You're doing that all in your restaurant correct yes you know what you didn't take my advice on here we go i'll tell you i knew you were gonna tell me when i ate here okay you're when i ate your restaurant i think last time i was in there i got to notice in that in the fine print at the bottom of the menu right like where someone would normally write shit like parties of six or more will have an automatic 15 percent gratuity or whatever bullshit's in the bottom of a menu and super no one ever in a million years would read right you have down there i love the the wording is wonderful you it says almost everything

is from around here correct we had to change that that caveat almost because it used to be everything and then there's a couple ingredients kind of snuck in like what what snuck in uh we get potato we get organic potatoes from colorado for it it's almost like it's just really funny because this always comes up it's like the restaurant's probably 99 locally sourced but for some reason that one percent that i'm a little bashful about always rises to the oh because because because yeah because well it says like almost everything it says almost but i would have that in big ass letters at the top of the menu right well i think well first off i think subtlety goes a long way and the server's job is to explain that okay you know if you ask about you know a limit and i

pressed i pressed her on it sure and when pressing her on it she was saying like well there might be a situation where we'd have something i can't remember what it was something would be from new mexico well we from new mexico that we get uh pistachios and uh we do occasionally source one of our sparkling wines from there that's what you told me yes i forgot about that and that's probably to my she said the reason you guys don't have a cocktail program is because it's too difficult to get it all from texas right yes because it's like the citrus and shit you'd have continuous it would be it wouldn't be impossible but it would be it'd be onerous you know it would yeah it would be

tough it'd be easier now that there's more spirits coming out of Texas too, which has changed since we opened eight years ago. That's been drastic. But specifically speaking of citrus, and we're down here in South Texas, and I got the text, you know, don't come back without 70 pounds of lemons because this is where they are. Like if we want lemons, I have to put them in my truck and bring them to Austin.

I just hope that everybody appreciates those lemons because they're going to want to ride. Almost everything is, I felt like, the best way to put that. Yeah. That's so good, man man i'm glad you liked it i mean to be clear too we did have feral hog on the menu yeah and i didn't get it right i got that big ass pork chop i love our pork chop yeah so the ranch the that we do our classes at is actually a domestic pig farm also so i mean he's got um you know thousands of acres and part of it is an all

outdoor operation where he's raising these just beautiful gorgeous domestic pigs and uh i think that's that's step one it's just having the best possible pork and it is just a gorgeous product it goes into a brine olive oil honey um after it comes out of brine and then we grill it over post oak and then we put salt from uh padre island so far south texas like the hypersaline bay down there they they make salt that's where you harvest salt that's where we get some of our salt you know for like finishing steaks and pork chops and so forth uh and then it just gets a sprinkle of that on top and that's it oh it's good man it's a good one i like it a lot how much wood were you saying you guys go through there because you cook over wood yeah about a quart of post oak every probably five

days or so you know that blows my mind yeah we burn a lot in the smoker and then the two grills you know these things are going you know burning hot for many hours a day because i remember you know when i used to sell wood might be typical for a family to buy four or five cords to heat their house for the winter but yeah we're yeah you some i mean if you do the math, you know that a log is maybe a dollar, maybe more. And so you're literally burning money. But it tastes good. And it's part of it, just that heart, the heart of the hearth there.

And so much of the things that come out of that kitchen are cooked over that wood. So it's worth it. and so much of the things that come out of that kitchen are cooked over that wood so you know you were talking about the the different like for cooking woods talk about your favorite wood well for because you use post oak that's true yes well i mean in texas too it's very regional um as far as what the predominant fuel would, or not fuel would, but cooking would be. And so in Central Texas, we have Oaks. In South Texas, where we're at right now, it's Mesquite. You know, Mesquite is king down here. But I mean, what's notable, too, is that that changes a lot of cooking techniques. So like barbecue in central texas is this offset

like slow heat where when you move south into mesquite country it starts to become it's a hotter wood and so things are grilled hotter there's not as much smoking going on down here and that's because of the wood you know so, so that the, the, the slower burn on Oak in central Texas makes barbecue, but the South Texas Mesquite fire, which is hotter kind of that's that makes fajitas, you know what I mean? And so I find that to be fascinating, but you know, we're, we're right on the border between the post Oaks and the Mesquites. And, you know, we have plenty of Mesquites in central Texas asas as well but i would give the edge in my preference uh for grilling to mesquite i love it it just it burns very hot it has a very distinct flavor to it but mostly what i enjoy is that that constant heat

once that thing burns down to coals like a nice cured mesquite log burns to like red hot coals you've got it for a long time and it puts out a ton of heat for quick cooking and searing for smoking i don't love it as much i prefer post oak or pecan uh are you familiar with the measurement like i used to sell wood in this measurement a rick no never heard of that have you ever heard of a face cord nope so a cord of wood is four by four by eight so it's what 128 i used to know this yeah real well 128 cubic feet um 16 inch so it's it's and firewood is traditionally cut at 16 inch lengths so three logs stacked end to end is 48 inches the stack goes 48 inches high and it's eight feet long and that's a cord of wood but we used to sell a rick, and that was a face cord, meaning one log wide, so 16 inches wide,

four feet high, eight feet long. A third of a cord. A third of a cord, a rick. A third of a cord is a rick. But you never heard that measurement? No. No. Now, if you need as much wood as you need, why do you not just have a staff wood chopper?

A woodsman, a woods person. Yeah. That's a great question, but that would delve into the kind of the boring topic of modern staffing issues. I'm telling you, it's hard enough to find a line cook than a- Not a wood tick. Yeah. As we call chop wood, yeah yeah man i think you need to have an ad in the paper that says wanted staff wood chopper oh yeah be like dude here's

your job here's like a truck we're gonna put some beaver springs on it we're gonna build some sidewalls it's gonna be able to carry 5 000 pounds we're gonna put a quart of wood in there and your job is i want that sun bitching truck here full three times a week i don't care how you do it i'm gonna get the weirdest messages now from people be like i heard you're looking for a woodsman uh i would like to send in my resume well listen if you look can we say is this fair to to say? If someone's listening and they live in Austin and they have a great wood supply and they want to sell some wood,

is it fair to say they should be getting a hold of you? Possibly. We try to foster a consistent relationship with... Do you want a dude just dropping off straight loads of wood now, man? No, because we need because yeah we need it when we need it and uh what the the goal is to have somebody that's out there bringing you quality wood consistently like a staffer right right i mean it's kind of like the uh the grass-fed

grass-fed beef uh producers like a lot of times you'll, you'll, we'll be contacted by someone who raises grass-fed beef and they'll say, Hey, we can, we would love to supply the restaurant. It's like, Oh, okay. And it's like,

well, we'll have one cow available every five weeks. And it's like, well, that doesn't, that doesn't help us. Like we can't really do much with that. And then,

you know, like the thought of like aggregating multiple vendors uh together to try to make that happen is is it's just not gonna happen it would be i might have told my wife a lie and i'm just gonna tell everybody the lie now i was when we're sitting there i was telling my wife i said man sometimes people just show up with with people will show up with produce and shit and these guys and these guys can just buy it and serve it yes that's not that is true okay that's different not loads of wood or my favorite was uh this guy uh knocks on the back door and he asks for me he's got dreadlocks and he's he wants to talk to me and he's got

something in his car to show me sure and i was like i could not get out to the parking lot yeah like i gotta see what's in the car and it turns out it was a it was like, I could not get out to the parking lot fast enough. I'll take it. Yeah, I'm like, I've got to see what's in the car. And it turns out it was like a Honda and the whole back area, like the little cargo area in the back, just loaded with chanterelles. And I was like, I'll take it. I'll take it. And tell all your friends that I'll take it, too. Sometimes it does work out.

It's the guy that's like, hey, can I drop some hogs off? And you're like, no, I can't do that. That's not how we do it here. Yeah. Oh, remember, I got to talk about a couple things real quick. And it's not like a horrible. It won't be. It'll seem like a rough segue to people who weren't privy

to our conversation before we started recording. Because we were talking about what making a lot of noise last night. Foxes. No. Owl. No. Coyotes. Yep.

Or coyotes. Coyotes. Well, no, that gets into the problem. Not a problem. Guy wrote in. He's got this question. He says he has a potential discussion point that I'd love to hear the opinion. Regarding the pronunciation of the word coyote.

Oh. How do you say it, Jesse? I'll say coyote oh how do you say it jesse uh i'll say coyote but i mean down here you would be just as apt or likely to hear coyote oh this guy says i grew up in rural area kansas where the word coyote was pronounced in the two syllables form coyote okay i would only hear the three-syllable pronunciation of coyote from television or media. You know what? He already has his answer. He already has his answer.

He just doesn't realize it yet. I always made the inference that the three-syllable pronunciation was used in urban areas by people who did not hunt, trap, or otherwise interact with the animal in any way. To be honest, I would internally discredit anyone who used the three-syllable pronunciation as a city slicker that only knew coyotes from Saturday morning cartoons. That was me. However, recently I have to question my previous dogma. As an avid listener to the Meat Eater podcast, I've heard on several occasions both the crew and guests using both the two and three syllable pronunciation. Not me.

That was me. I was editorializing when I said not me. These are people that are much closer to the land than I spend more time outdoors and of whom I respect their opinions. He wants to know about the proper pronunciation. Can I address this address this yeah but i'm

going to do it too if you want to start that's fine i'm going to start okay um that's a spanish word like i said earlier it's coyote and i think that just like in texas you're going to have these mispronunciations of spanish words but you're going to kind of see a segue between the Spanish word and then where we're going to say coyote, which is where we're pronouncing that E. But then if you looked at it from an English language standpoint, that E would be silent and make the O a hard O sound. So it'd be a coyote. So I think that, you know, the closer you get to the origin of the word spanish down here and i mean you know we we go to the rodeo you know we we eat a burrito uh you know but all these words

are slight americanizations are you know english pronunciations of spanish words and i think coyote adding the e on there and then further north you get, you're probably going to get more into a linguistic version that's reflective of English. Yeah. Coyote. Hmm. I have never heard in my life someone who has killed a coyote called a coyote. What about where you've spent a lot of time meeting those folks who've all over damn place okay now we put this question to dan flores who is the author of what he would call coyote america

i would call coyote america um and and I threw it to him, and he's basically either or. He says probably the first English-speaking people that encountered that word would have been mountain men trapping around in New Mexico and Taos. I think I'm getting this right about what his history was. They were hearing it from Spanish speakers. They were English speakers.

He said, you know, you could see how they would have run off of that in various directions. Um, from coyote that it would just have travel its own little path. But I think the person's right that you do like in media it's always coyote in in like vernacular of uh people of the land seems to me it's always uh coyote like who chases the roadrunner saturday wiley coyote no cartoons no wiley coyote see yeah no it's

it's not wild coyote here's it can i hit you with the chetaket question that's etiquette okay why did you call it chetaket because our guy chester oh yeah yeah oh yeah um we're interested in pursuing a project where chester on cheticate chester on etiquette just for sure to be cheticate okay here's a guy a self-declared late onset hunter recently moved from the seattle area to richmond williamsburg area of virginia it's a big change what's that that's a big change big change i run a small farm that's tucked about one quarter mile back off a rural road this is a great question the property on either side of the driveway is owned by a hunting club so let's get this

he's got a quarter mile mashie's got a quarter mile driveway that ends at his farm but as he's going down his own driveway a hunt club owns either side long story short he says if there are turkeys on said driveway do you feel like they would be fair game for me to shoot as long as I'm respecting all other rules including proximity to actual road and buildings etc I do hunt the actual 43 acre farm property as I like the act and process of hunting and thoroughly miss going out in the Cascades for days chasing elk but was still a lot to learn wouldn't mind an easy harvest from time to time

there's only one way you're going to get the right answer to this i'll tell you in my mind like i'm not standing there and i don't really i can't see the lay of the land and all that in my mind it would just be a matter of like is it illegal or not right Right. It sounds legal to me. And then there's what you call trespass with projectile too. So meaning that the rifle bullet or more likely shotgun, like not a single pellet could trespass over the property. Yeah, but different states have such different attitudes toward that stuff.

Think about it, man. Let's say you're hunting squirrels let's say you got 20 acres and you're hunting squirrels and you take a shot at a squirrel up in a tree you've just trespassed and you missed them i mean there's like of course you projectile just trespassed sure like no one, you know. Well, I mean here, that's what the issue I think would be. But on your road, you're turkey.

Well, what I'm saying, I mean, I would, I feel like it's probably okay, but there's only one way you're ever going to really feel comfortable doing it if you want to be like

a totally law-abiding dude. Call your game warden. Just be like, I got a question. But then, I would advise this. This is not a hack on game wardens um if you find someone who indulge you and they tell you no press them on why they're telling you no. Are they saying it doesn't seem like a good idea? Or is it actually, because that's your decision to make.

Are they telling you it doesn't seem like a good idea? Or are they telling you it is illegal? I've had, I one time asked a game warden a question like this, and they turned back to me like, why do you feel that you would need to ask about it like pressing me to see if i somehow felt funny about the situation it's sure but i'd be like that's not what i'm here to talk about what i'm here to talk about is am I breaking a law?

I'm trying to understand. I'm not talking about what it feels like. I'm saying, is it breaking a law to hunt a Turkey on this road? Not like, is this really the kind of hunt you want? Yeah. Yeah.

Contact the game warden. It's not a cop out, but let me hit you with another turkey thing i don't know i haven't contacted i don't know anybody that has contacted michigan to find out why in the world they're doing this michigan allowed this past fall, speaking of turkeys, Michigan allowed the unlimited take of fall turkeys this past fall. You could shoot a turkey, go get another tag,

shoot another, and so on until there were no tags left. Meanwhile, they only allow one time in the spring. Wow. That's... meanwhile they only allow one time in the spring wow that's my buddy those guys who killed multiple gobblers this fall legally not to mention how many hens oh hens as well yeah i think it's like like i haven't heard the logic on it that shit is ridiculous is that statewide yeah well it's in his in's in his zone in the south. I haven't heard the reasoning, but let me tell you,

there are so many places that you got good turkey numbers and they take that shit for granted and then you don't. Right. There is no, if, go hunt all the other shit you can hunt in the fall. Right. I would be hard pressed to think of a of an instance where you just have too many turkeys no someone might think they do right but it ain't hunters

right i don't understand like you get a tom turkey in the spring and turkeys are for spring hunting right it's like if if if god didn't want you to hunt turkeys in the spring he wouldn't have made spring and to have it be that you're just waylaying like you can get one in the spring season but in the fall you can just pile up hens yeah it's like you're you're you're you're taking you're taking your situation for granted. I wonder how many hunters took advantage of that. Folks who typically pursue in the spring were like, well, I'll just bag them all, or didn't,

or kind of respected the... How much is a tag? That I don't... I mean, very cheap for residents. Probably eight or 10 bucks. I would like... Having some level of fall hunting that you could get a turkey in the fall,

I'd be like, okay. I really think that states would not regard having good turkey numbers as just a given right after the all the reintroductions that were you know starting in a lot of places but in that area in the upper midwest all those turkey reintroductions that really took off in the 90s like that's not gonna last right having it's not gonna last and if you just take if you just shooting shit loads of hens all fall i don't think it's just not smart man there's not that much to hunt in the spring so protect the spring hunt

or just increase the tag number like let everybody shoot four in the spring well two two is a great number of turkeys it's great when you get more but like two is a great number for turkeys i think if a state could sit there and say man we like our residents can across the board get a couple turkeys a piece in the spring? I would view that as a wonderful turkey policy and protect the spring hunts. Go hunt something different in the fall. Save your turkeys for spring. I wonder when they'll have population data.

Like next year, you know, zero turkeys or not, you know. I'm sure someone will write in and i i look forward to hearing i look forward to hearing what did you notice one of the a person that wrote in we're not going to cover his letter right now but his name is anders chippendale oh yeah i wonder if he's the original um uh tells our time out writing in you got distracted i got distracted what the hell was I talking about writing in you got distracted I got distracted when I saw that

oh I'm sure someone will write in and explain why they think it's a good idea to kill to let people just waylay tons of hens in the fall

yeah and that begs the question, should we start waylaying tons of hens in the spring? Yeah, what's the difference? They're laying eggs. That's who lays the eggs? Yeah, in general. It's like the hen doesn't care.

You can kill the hen whenever you want. You're still preventing. You're removing your reproductive females. Killing it in the fall, it's a little more roundabout. You could be like, well, I don't know if she would have been alive in the spring. But I'm normally all for if there's a species and there's a human desire to harvest it, and it's a sustainable species i was kind of like let people harvest the resource if it's sustainable but i don't think places should

be doing this well i guess the insinuation would be that that if if there's an overabundance of them they have to have some sort of negative impact what no i mean this is what i'm asking what could possibly be the negative impact of too many turkeys on the ground what are they eating it's not crop depredation i mean maybe slightly but they scratch around oh it's what i'm yeah i'm just playing it's they poop on my house they poop on my house they chase my dog well i mean here in texas the major uh criticism i hear about turkeys is they'll eat all the corn at a feeder they'll come in and hoover it all up um and that's about as bad as they get as like impactful as as an abundance of turkeys can be here to my recollection i can't remember of anybody ever saying anything otherwise

and then that instance doesn't even exist in most other states and so what could it possibly have been for them to decide that other than like oh we're going to provide our hunters with something more there i mean what could the impact be to make them make that choice yeah i don't know i'm sure we'll find out if i was doing a good job i would have found out before i brought it up but here's my thing i'm like i'm 90 sure i'm 90 sure that when i hear the rationalization for it i'll say uh i'll say i that's not a good idea saving for spring 100 have they ever done this before well a lot of places have you know a lot of states have fall turkey hunts and when states turkey numbers look like they're going down it's kind of the first thing you do is you it's like when turkey numbers are great one of the first things that seem

States do is they start killing them in the fall when turkey numbers start going down they tend to not want to kill them in the fall but the idea of having that an individual could just keep renewing and renewing and renewing until they consume up a certain pool of tags, you're going to create like fall turkey killing specialists. And the potential waste that would come from that, people that might just enjoy the hunting of them and the breasting of them out and hens. I mean, because then also your yield is

40 50 60 percent of what it would be on a tom and so just like even even worse but then the impact of you're killing a dozen at a time every time you take out a hen and that's just for the next season uh you know potential turkeys that's it's stunning that's stunning to me another thing that happens like uh in some states in montana in the fall you can kill them with a rifle yeah kill them here with a rifle you can hear them kill them with a rifle in the spring here yep one wyoming can kill with a rifle in the spring i know a guy that they hunt them scope in the they hunt spring turkeys they hunt spring turkeys with the ar on a bipod which is isn't isn't that kind of blown to smithereens

no no i mean you can precision shoot them you can precision i mean the thing is try to precision shoot them in the head just feel like i've a very high-powered rifle. I've certainly shot turkeys. I'm sorry, but I've shot them with a rifle before. And because at that time, I valued turkey meat more than the spring hunt, but now I am fully on board with the spring hunt. Yeah, I want to be extra careful here and explain where I'm at on this. It's like, hate the game game not the player okay and i don't even hate like i don't i'm not saying i

hate the game if i thought that you could just always have shit loads of turkeys i'd be like yeah hunt them in spring home in the fall whatever right to make my point clear i think that people are making the mistake of of thinking that they're in a static situation with turkey numbers but then you go look at what's happening in Arkansas, what's happening in Missouri, what's happening in some other places where it's like the good old days of the 90s, the good old days of the early 2000s, ain't here anymore. The turkey numbers, and then everybody's sitting around

lamenting the loss of turkeys, questioning the loss of turkeys. What happened of turkeys what happened to the turkeys it's the meat it's like mid-sized predators it's avian influenza it's killing shit loads in the fall it just isn't i think you're like uh what's i'm trying to think of how what you'd say It's not cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're dicking yourself over. You're dicking yourself over.

Prove me wrong. In the future, I'll be like, told you. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps,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

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if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. Welcome to the, to the on X club. Y'all talk about how you cook those ducks. Jesse, talk about your ducks and how you make them.

Those are so good. They came out. Wonderful duck recipe. They came out wonderful duck recipe they came out great uh jesse's gonna tell you jesse's gonna tell you how to make the best and don't be all wishy-washy like with the with the tartar how was i wishy-washy like get in there like you're talking to a five-year-old okay like you're talking to a five-year-old or ten-year-old you're talking to a ten-year-old here's how to cook your ducks here's how i cooked the ducks the other day we shot uh we were we were really knocking down some hen spoonies uh for some reason

not even a single drake in the bunch it was uh i think we had six spoon bills five or six i wasn't part of this but one widgeon no yeah well it doesn't really matter uh we plucked them uh and we dry plucked them uh i'd brought i think you better get in to talk about the northern shoveler the northern shoveler is a maligned duck very much often maligned duck let me back up. And we did a private class years ago, and we aligned it on this weekend where turkey, it was fall season, quail, dove, and duck were all in season, and we kind of did this almost scavenger hunt for the clients where they would just go out and, you know, on a certain day,

we'd be like, today is duck day. You guys go out and shoot some ducks, and then we would do a little class and then we'd cook them we did a blind tasting between a model duck which is i would say pretty close to a mallard as far as flavor uh they're smaller probably less fat and then also uh a spoony a shoveler and we we blind taste and we brined them and then grilled them. Medium rare, sliced them, put them on a plate, labeled them A and B. And between probably about the 10 people that tried them, they universally preferred the Shoveler over the Model Duck.

And both were good. But I think that it's one of those things, and I could probably talk for hours about all the things that are maligned or where you've been told they're not good you know wild pigs being one of them everything on the every wild game item with a couple exceptions right someone's gonna tell you how it's no good right and a shoveler but that said i've had them before where they were pretty strong uh so we we dry plucked them um instead of we i i i want to say a couple more things about spoonies um spoon bills northern shovelers it's we're taught that's two words for the same thing but they have like a bit i mean their bill look is shaped like a spoon right goes out narrow and

has this wide sort of thing on it and if you ever watch them feeding they sit on the surface and they basically sieve out they sieve stuff off the surface of the ponds and they're they catch a lot of larva insect larva other invertebrates and a general thing this is like speaking very generally a general thing is that things that eat a lot of ducks and waterfowl eat a lot of animal matter they don't taste as good as ones that eat a lot of plant matter right with the pinnacle of like universal acceptability being ducks that are feeding on grain right would be if you ask people like what's a great duck be like a mallard feeding on barley a goose feeding on or a mallard feeding on corn right like lots of fat mild flavor um a mallard in an estuary in southeast Alaska

feeding on invertebrates. I was staying there a night. Tastes like the Loch Ness Monster. Yeah. If you could get a steak off him. And spoonies have that animal matter. Ducky can have that animal matter taste which is how would you describe it mud mud muck musty um i mean i obviously i'm going to avoid the the the gaming

because it's just a ridiculous term for describing game. Well, you know what's funny is we used to describe like any of that kind of muddy flavor, maybe like a big bore. We used to describe it as spoony. Oh. Yeah. So you were using the spoon bill last time. I mean, because sometimes they can be pretty strong. And I want to be really clear that i don't think that my

preparation conquered that i think that these also happen to be on the good you think they were good spoonies i think they were good spoonies but you know i will say that the first duck i cleaned was the widget and then cleaning it holding it in my hand opening up and having the the organs in my hands was different than when we cleaned the spoonies they i was like oh that's a spoonie like that i could smell them yeah like they were they smelled stronger their guts smelled stronger everything crops full of bugs right and so i my anticipation of cooking them was like well this you know i'm gonna do it uh but i i don't know how well it's going to turn out but i do think that um if we're ready to move on to that first step is the the pre-seasoning step and that's either going to be a a a dry

no you're ahead of yourself now because you didn't explain how you cleaned them. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. We dry plucked them. I brought some wax down, but I feel like for, it was six or seven birds, so I wasn't going to fire up the waxing pot for that. And it would have taken too much time. So we just sat out and we dry plucked them and they worked really well.

Meaning you walk out into a field and pluck it. Correct. Yeah. You know, we plucked them all the way. It took, spent a lot of time and then we saved all the hearts and livers to clean the gizzards uh they look pretty good you know there's some pin feathers on there but you know a lot of times i just ignore this like i'm not super like like fastidious about getting in there and getting those little pin feathers off sometimes or just burn them off the wax works great though if you have the time if you've ever seen do you wax ducks i have but like you said it's got to be a pile of them yeah before it's it's just there's so much like go

there's so much goes into it right that sometimes by the time you do it and then clean up you could just done it sure or like not you could have done it by the time you get it going do it clean up you're like i would i would have had them done in a third of as much time it's like making sausage it's better with a organization and a team so like if you're on your way back from a duck hunt like we are at some of these at the classes that we're doing like i'll be back at the processing shed and the guy that took the clients out to duck hunt that morning called me 45 minutes and i turned the burner on and i'm waiting there with three pairs of bird shears when they show up and they just start going into the into the wax and i think that's obviously that's very efficient And you're just using paraffin. A specific blend.

My friend Jonathan from Black Duck Revival, he turned me on to this specific blend wax. I cannot remember the brand of it right now. I would, well, I think it's Traub, T-R-A-U-B supply. I think that's the one he recommended, but I'd have to go back and look and see what he specifically recommended because that was the best duck wax.

And it was a blend of paraffin and another type of wax. I'm not familiar with the waxes. So we plucked them. We let them cool in the refrigerator uncovered, got them a little dry, and then I halved them by taking the breast bones out. And they've come down on either side of the breast bone, cracked through it with a heavy knife.

So then you've got a half duck. I know a lot of times you like to cut the breast off and the leg. I love that. I was going to give you a little feedback about that. Yeah. Oh, just still having the rib bones on there? Yeah. Yeah.

A little unsightly. Unsightly a little feedback about that. Yeah. Oh, just still having the rib bones on there? Yeah. Yeah. A little unsightly. Unsightly. I'll take that. The reason I do that is I need that structure. Otherwise, they're going to fall apart during the process that I'm going to talk about next. Okay. So I need those rib bones in there to keep them. I mean, they could be removed after cooking.

But if it was just the boneless breast attached to the bone in uh leg quarter which is your preference i do believe they would have fallen apart or the potential for falling apart could have been there so next up would be i disagree okay if there's a good layer of fat and skin it holds everything together if it's if the skin's real thin then i agree with what you're saying well you're just taking these when you when you're cooking like that you're typically just taking them from raw straight to the grill or the broiler or no i'm saying if you got a good heavy hide on it no you can slow cook it you can do like what you were talking about and wind up with an intact piece okay if

it's got a good heavy hide on it okay that that's needed here or there so next up would be the pre-seasoning and i feel like this is probably where you're massaging some of that that more intense flavor out of these ducks. And that's going to either be in a brine or a dry cure, which is these days euphemistically known as a dry brine, which I think is pretty funny because a brine is a liquid. Oh. Well, you know where I use that term?

We'd be like, let's say you're doing fish and you just pack it in salt and sugar in a couple minutes or a couple hours you have a liquid brine oh because it's exuding well that's known as i mean yeah technically that's a cure yeah no i'm with you but i think that that's why i think of it because in the end when you dig them out of there when all that moist when you dig them out of there, when all that moist, when you dig them out of there, it is a liquid. Certainly. But yeah, you're right.

That's a funny term, dry brine. I just felt like it euphemistically came about a few years back. And I remember the first few times I heard it, I'm like, dry brine. That sounds almost exactly like- Dry water. Pre-seasoning.

Yeah. Or dry rub or a cure. Like it's, there's, we already had all of that, these terms for it, but either way I chose, uh, the, uh, I chose the dry brine technique for these dry cure. Yes. Um, and, uh, just, you know, going through the cabinet, and I found some of our coffee cure that we sell at the restaurant here. And I used that. I was like, I mean, why not? So I hit them with a little bit of that,

which has got some coffee, salt, sugar, a few spices in there, seasoned on both sides, and let them sit for about four hours, which for that size duck duck I thought was appropriate. And then they went into pork fat, like rendered lard. Over very low heat, I melted the lard and put them in there to make, essentially this is a confit.

The whole process is confit where you're adding salt, kind of lightly curing it, and then slowly and gently cooking it in fat. I want people to understand what he's saying he just said slowly and gently cooking it in fat and covered in fat so a copious amount of fat so I'm afraid people are going to be like hear it and they're going to be like oh that sounds complicated it's not and then you can reuse the fat as well and so even the from a cost perspective it's not as as bad as as you might think it's not like and if you're oh yeah and also people are still on the thing that like fat's bad it's gonna do something bad to them it's

not it's not it's not absorbing so i mean traditionally a confit was a preservative so you would you would use more salt and you would salt it for longer so it was the salt was preserving it and then you would create this indelible layer of cooled fat on top so even the word larder is a cool place where lard would be congealed yeah you make an anaerobic environment by putting on in fat exactly so it's salted at the bottom your larder was full of meat packed in lard correct and if it was cool enough just where the lard would congeal and set which probably would happen in i'd say the maybe the 50 degree mark you know it just is cool enough to where it was becomes a solid uh then you're protecting that meat under there. So it's a very old preservation technique.

You're protecting it from oxygen. Yeah, and it's also an incredibly useful technique for cooking game because it's a very slow, gentle heat that adds in a little bit of fat. But then once you achieve that tenderness, so let me go back and say I came up short on lard too. I brought a quart of rendered lard with me and for those 10 halves of ducks i guess it was five by my math um i was barely able to get them covered so i threw a couple sticks of butter in there uh because i had to and that's

and it worked of course i just have a question about the salt in there is there any kind of in this cooking process like uh pulling out the mucky flavor um or is it that the slow cook is having with the salt the coffee the, the spices permeating the fat and the flesh of the bird? So is it kind of a going in versus pulling out if we're eliminating or reducing the mucky flavor? Right. That is an excellent question. I think that i don't i will be real honest and say i don't know how the magic really works but what i what i do know is the whole spice trade hundreds of years ago was based on covering up the flavor of rancid right or spoiled meats pre-refrigeration and And so you've got people traveling to China

mainly to bring back these things that are going to help their food taste a little better. Right, right. Not necessarily because they were refining their palates. So the cloves and the cinnamon and the star anise and all these things. I always say in the context of feral hogs, I've always said it this way, is like the gaminess of a feral hog when you put it into a brine.

We use a star anise brine, very specifically salt, sugar, bay, and star anise in water for feral hogs, although that said, it works great for ducks as well. But the star anise would be like if if the pig if a big boar kind of stinky and a little bit musky and gamey was a piece of plywood the the star anise is a fine grit sandpaper that comes in and just rubs it down a little bit and there's something about that flavor where it rounds it it meets that gaminess and massages it to where it's it's way more palatable for some reason kind of it somewhere on if you were like looking at a chart and the spectrum of flavors the anise or the clove or the cinnamon inhabits the

same spectral area i think as these muddy flavors and so it's really helpful in that way as a side note have you heard of like the chinese i don't know if it's really a technical term but my friend um who's a chinese chef mentioned to me this like chinese meat washing technique which which does use actually all of or most of these spices. So I had old elk in the freezer from a friend. Maybe it was like three years old and I'm not really sure how well processed it was to begin with, but I didn't want to waste it. And she told me that I should, in a pot, ginger, cloves, star anise, cinnamon, kind of, I guess, brown the meat.

And then add water and bring it to a slow boil. And then dump everything out. You know, the blood, if it hasn't bled well, that like foamy, kind of bubbly yuck comes to the top. Instead of skimming it, dump everything out and then do that process again. And you can do that process as many times as you want and that the impurities are, I guess, sucked out and you're just dumping that out. You're not really using the flavor of that broth to start with.

Well, then what the hell are you doing with that boiled ass piece of meat? And then you braise. Oh. And you add fat. I don't think that sounds like a good idea, man. I think it's fascinating. But I'm telling you, it didn't taste, it tasted fresh. You would not have known because that meat had a funk to it

when it was defrosted, you know? And she'll do that with a lot of meat that she feels, even, you know, meat from the grocery store, like if it just hasn't bled out enough. And with wild game um often cases you know the blood is still in there if you feel dress cut apart and then kind of package or freeze instantly maybe it hasn't dried out it hasn't hung for long enough there's the blood is still in the flesh so i'd like to hear of a remedy for when you got

when you left fish in your freezer a little too long like a fatty fish and it gets that kind of skanky oh i just eat it because i'm like we gotta eat it now the fat going rancid it happens on feral hogs as well like if they sit in the freezer for too long, the fat starts to, they can be way stronger. You can make a sausage and then like a year later, it's totally changed in the freezer. It's the fat. Yeah. Here's a red alert for people that have had bad bear meat. Bear meat, if you want to freeze bear meat, you got to get all the fat off the bear meat.

The fat comes off the bear meat. If you want to make lard, off the bear meat the fat comes off the bear meat if you want to make lard render it now because the lard's good put in your freezer you can can it whatever but don't freeze that shit with fat on it because the fat spoils right right same with pigs in the freezer but i want to get back to these ducks i want people i want people to really understand this yes jesse has taken his spooners he's plucked them cut them in half improperly cut them in half properly cut them in half okay rib bones sticking out rib bones just jabbing out everywhere put a coffee cure on them yeah it could have been anything it could have been salt you know what i would a component i would really want to have in there

would be a little bit of sugar into the the cure or the dry brine uh a little bit of sweetness in there um and then some sort of spice but in this case i just saw the coffee cure up there and i'm like coffee duck sure it was from your restaurant try it out yeah then he put in the fridge four hours four hours in the fridge then he took it out did not rinse it correct now not with without going off on a tangent too far but traditionally confit would be a heavier salting like a very heavy salting and so when it comes out of the cure and it's about to go into the fat oftentimes you're going to want to rinse the excess for a short-term cure for a non-preserving cure for confit season to quote-unquote taste like season it like you would if you were about

to throw it on the grill that's a good way of putting it yeah so you just you're applying the amount of seasoning that you actually want yep now if you're going to go for something where you want to come back to it in four months i would go a little bit heavier cure it very well and then possibly remove some of that excess salt once it has absorbed into the meat but in this case we were we're going straight into the pot so i just seasoned it to taste and then put it in the melted lard and butter and if you're if you're intimidated about this whole lard thing i'm talking to listeners not you i was just doing this as a little research project uh listening intently but while while listening i did a research project um you just i mean if you don't if you can't find it or you're kind of intimidated by the whole thing i mean i just i went to amazon and typed in yeah i mean you can

buy the shit on amazon yeah pork lard yeah but beef lard pork lard it's like it's not hard to find right people often ask about you know i see you guys sell it at your restaurant. We sure do. If you're in Austin, just go buy it from Jesse. That's right. We sell tallow and lard. I would say lard and duck fat are pretty interchangeable for making a confit with duck. We're using lard because that's what we got so right now 42 ounces of um 42 ounces of hog lard 25 bucks wow there's another place where it's 100 usda organic pork l, 14 ounces for 23 bucks.

I'll say we're going to beat those prices down there at Dai Dui on 2406 Mainer Road in Austin, Texas. You can go down there and get a, I don't remember what the volume is now, but it's going to be cheaper than that. Wagyu beef tallow, 42 ounces, so two and a half pounds, 30 bucks. That's, you know, Wagyu beef towel mm-hmm go on okay so then in a low okay hey one more deal one more deal let's beef towel just let me know if this beats your prices just get yeah 24 pounds uh-huh 24 pounds of beef tallow 109 bucks i don't i can't do that math i'm so

sorry well let's think it through no let's think it through let's say it was 25 pounds for 100 bucks okay i got that at about four bucks a pound. That's cheap. It's a screaming deal. Let's just say it's not as good as yours. It's definitely not as good as yours. So head down to Jesse's restaurant and buy his lard. Right. Well, you can often find lard, too, in Mexican and Central American specialty, not even specialty, but like grocery stores.

Yeah. Well, haven't you gotten into that, the little manteca? No. Well, yes. stores you know well haven't you gotten into that the little man take no well yes so i personally i would advise that you avoid shelf-stable lard at all costs because it's hydrogenated oh yeah and it's it's as bad as shortening is for you and get the freshly rendered stuff that's at the at the at the meat market which will typically be room-temp'd, sitting on top of the counter. But I will say also that the rendering process is really important

with lard. And a lot of times I find that the lard there might be a little hard-cooked. And the more brown that you, when you cook it, the more you actually fry it and the more color that comes out of it, the stronger the pork flavor is is and so when we're rendering lard we're our goal is neutrality we really want it to be as mildly flavored as possible and so we're not taking it to a deep golden brown we're taking it very gently until it's what i always tell people it's like a straw color it looks like a light beer It's got tiny bubbles in it. And it looks like you poured a Miller Lite into a glass. It should be kind of that color with the tiny bubbles.

And they're indicating that all the moisture is cooked out. I want to point out that a lot of these products I'm looking at are non-hydrogenated. Yeah, they'll be refrigerated. So yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say just do not get shelf stable lard it is hydrogenated and it is it's quite bad for you so we are i'll tell you one last thing let's do it it's killing me it's killing me i didn't know you could go on amazon for 52.99 and buy a nine pound bucket of bacon grease which would work great also so all the people throwing out their bacon grease dude these people have thrown into a bucket and they sell it yeah

for 53 bucks bacon fat would work would work equally well it's just a bucket that says bacon up bacon grease oh that's great man all right we're going into the oven now oh so yeah hold me back up he's plucked the ducks oh my luck the ducks we've have them though they've been seasoned they've for four hours now they're in they he went on amazon he bought fat i bought the fat uh i layered the uh half ducks into the fat made sure they're covered and then put that into a pretty low oven i put it in at 275 uh just so that they very gently cook so um you know if you're going to slow cook something typically it's going to be browned and then and slow cooked so there's going to be like two distinct phases like the the crisping phase and then the slow cooking phase and you can do that in

either order you can slow cook and then brown or you can brown and slow cook which is typically a braise or you can cook something until it's tender and then put it on a grill or put it under a broiler or something like that at the end after it's tender and that's what we're doing here so we cook those ducks until they were tender but not falling apart but i wanted them to be intact intact you know and that's why i left those rib bones on there yeah i want to point out this is a tricky part for people cooking right is slow cooking can like when you're doing this it can feel like oh it doesn't really matter i can let it go for a bazillion years right there is a long window of doneness but it's not an

infinite window of doneness that's so well put this is oh i get it it's okay i always feel bad about going off on a tangent but no but you then i talk to you explain this to 10 years old you're explaining to 10 year olds i i uh i do a i do a kind of a challenge for my employees every month and it's it's i i send them what i call them a mission and then this year there this month being well this is december uh at the time of the recording uh my my my project for them all this is all the back of the house employees at the restaurant was to come up with three uh that go like food ghosts so past present and future and so it's like a memory something they're excited about now and a goal for the future um and i i kicked it off by telling them my stories and i'm not going to go into depth here but what you just said is very appropriate because my my current focus and what i'm really trying to

do is in slow cooking nail the texture of something that's been slow cooked with the attention that i would give a steak oh you know what i mean like i want to have it come out perfect where it's not shredding and falling apart but it's quote-unquote fork tender where you where it's just right i screw this up all the time it's very easy because of what you just said but the thing is is when it goes too far uh especially a braise or a stew or something like that it's just like well that's okay you know but if it's not far enough obviously it's tough you know so absolutely we cook these ducks um i would say about four hours and four hours at 275 yeah and it would be intact enough that you can grab the end of a drumstick and hoist the duck out lightly with gently tenderly where you would you would okay hoist

might not be the hoist no it's definitely implies like pulling out with a truck or something yes i think you will just going in with a knife and if it goes through with with no resistance wiggling that that leg and seeing that it's starting to to be it's it's tender but it's not falling apart but knowing also that there's still a little bit of a cooking process I in this case I cooled the ducks in the fat, which I think really helps them because it gives them kind of a, they kind of coast out of that heat and the fat congealed all around them. And I put them in the refrigerator and let them sit overnight. Now you could pull them out immediately and go on to this next process but

my preference and what timing wise i wasn't serving it that day i was serving it the next day i just threw the pot i let it cool down a little bit and threw it in the refrigerator where the it covered them and congealed in fat the next day come back and very gently because you don't want to fry them you know i very gently melted the fat and remove the ducks and let them kind of drain most of their fat off and then let's address the fat because we've gone extensively into rendered fat prices and it's not cheap right and so we don't want to discard this fat and so here's what you do with that. And oh, I will say, I'll make note, something that I've never done before. I took two heads of garlic, cut them in half and threw them in the fat and essentially

made like garlic confit along with it. And that was awesome. I mean, you could just smell just like this beautiful, like really slow cooked garlic infusing into them as well and so now my fat is infused with that garlic so i strained the fat out uh not boiling hot but you know let it cool off a little bit where it's still liquid and i strained it into um i don't know how to put this a container that one could easily scoop the congealed fat out of. So don't put it in a mason jar that has a neck on it.

Put it in something that's either straight-sided or convex? Convex, I think. Yeah, that you can convex. Not a lab beaker, but the other way but the other way yes like the lip is wider than the base correct and so and then I put that in the refrigerator so what you're going to have now is your your fat's going to your pure fat because I strained it your pure fat's going to rise to the surface and congeal and then at the bottom you are going to have a bit of this kind of seasoned gelatinous liquid that has come off of

the ducks and then at some point after it's been totally cooled you're gonna want to go in and scoop the whole thing out and scrape the that gelatinous liquid off the bottom and that will at that point that fat is good for years and then you could take that little bit of liquid that it's like a highly concentrated gelatinous stock it's highly seasoned also and you can use that in small amounts in a soup or something like that you could you could add that into something there would be probably from this project we probably would yield about a half a cup of this gelatinous liquid at the bottom that's going to be like kind of concentrated cured duck flavor you know uh i have a little witch's hat with those filters you can pour it

through yes to pull a bunch of the shit out of it yes but you still get the layer yeah you're going to have it no matter what um and then that that fat is going to be good to go for several more rounds if you treat it the same way every time um and then so that initial investment will be diffused by being able to reuse it hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Okay, so now you got your ducks. Your duck halves have been cooked for four hours, submerged in pork lard at 275 degrees. degrees right the listener has pulled his ducks out and he's finding he or she are finding that they're intact you can gently lift the half of the duck it's not falling apart it's not like how my mother used to cook squirrels in a crock pot and cream of mushroom soup where when she was done, there was a layer of bones in the bottom.

Yeah. And everything else floating on top. Right. They're intact. And here we are. Here we are. I put them on a little sheet tray or a baking sheet. And then I started a very gentle mesquite fire.

Because I don't want to grill them over really high heat but what i just want to do is just i want to let them kind of cool off a little bit and then i just want to cook them skin side down on a grill oh and only on the skin side i'm never going to flip them to that cut side ever never never and i just want to gently crisp up the skin and give them a little bit of smoke and the nice, beautiful charcoal, burning wood flavor. So that process should take about 20 minutes. The fire is that gentle under them, or there's that much space.

However, you're going to achieve that. Just a few coals, you put them down, and they're going to achieve that just a few coals you put them down and they're going to make just a little bit of a sizzling sound and you want them to kind of gently brown up from there and just get that skin crisp and i i did a little glaze just because the brad the guy that owns this place he was cleaning out a cabinet and he was like here's some pepper jelly and i was like perfect yeah that shit was good yeah so uh a little bit of something sweet uh just like brushed that on the skin after the fact and that's it pepper jelly pepper jelly and it could. And it could be anything.

It could be a mix of vinegar and honey, which is classically my favorite. Like literally just a 50-50 mix of any vinegar and honey. I mean, it could be rice wine vinegar, balsamic, apple cider. You can write that shit down. White wine vinegar. It doesn't really matter.

Sherry vinegar, very good. Something sweet. if you did that would you need to heat that together uh yeah that's a good go-to duck glaze that's a good glaze that's a good like uh i don't have a lot of available things or really just anything sweet and anything like oh all i've got is uh the juice out of a jar of pickled jalapenos and some blackberry jam okay i'm not advocating that specifically or saying it's my favorite but if that's what you got you're probably going to make that work i mean it's probably going to be good it's sweet and it's sour you know just find something you know i've got a lime and coconut

i mean you've got a lime and uh some molasses i mean again i'm not advocating that specifically but that's the that's the general idea yeah and then a little bit of a glaze on them so vinegar and honey vinegar and honey is beautiful i mean and you can embellish that you know like garlic uh is very good in there um and then you could put spices in there my preference is brush net on ducks birds quail yeah yeah i mean i think i can't remember which book i have oh that's in it's in my in a field uh there's a glaze and it's 50 50 honey and vinegar with a little bit of anise seed and um and garlic and it's it's a wonderful glaze that sounds so good yeah it works really well especially with sherry vinegar for some reason um and that was it. And then we served the ducks. And, you know, I was a little like,

oh, how are these going to be? And then I cheated and tore a little piece off. And I was like, I kind of nailed that one. Oh, it was good. It was good. You nailed everything, man. I've never had you make anything that wasn't good. No, I don't.

Well, that's super kind of you, but I don't. You know, there's failures out there. But I think that just, I like to try to make spoonies taste good. I like to give them a chance. You gotta kill them. Let's just treat them with an ideal that they're gonna be great. And then it just comes down to tricks.

And then when we draw out the cooking process over 40 minutes i hope people aren't intimidated but it's really not that hard if you if you distill this down let me do a quick version there you go okay pluck your ducks cut them in half uh put some seasoning on them let them sit a few hours get a big pot of lard pork lard stick the ducks in there put it in your oven for a few hours at 275 four hours at 275 pull them out smoke them for a while throw a glaze on how's that i love it that's perfect so you can listen to that or you can listen to everything else we just talked about yeah just yeah scroll back and listen to my voice over and over yeah yeah they turned out great and it would apply to other ducks um you can do the same process we we use this confit and grill process extensively at

the restaurant we do chicken hearts that way i mean i've i've stole that from you so i mean just to look at i stole that for duck hearts right the how useful it is like the two main things that we do in that manner at the restaurant would be chicken hearts and beef ribs so like a three or four pound full cut beef rib uh that is cured and then slowly cooked in this case in beef fat until it's tender and then grilled at the end and that's our way of achieving tenderness and then when the order comes in we can cook the beef rib over the grill and it can get that you're you're you're getting it tender first and then you're coming back later and getting the smoke the char and the texture now that's my favorite venison rib preparation but i haven't done it in the lard it would be quite good you do it in water

i do it in water part of the thing is this i'll be curious to get your take on this part of what i'm trying to do when i do it in water is i'm trying if it's a real fatty deer that's great a lot more meat i'm trying to get all that deer fat yeah out of the meat right so i slow cook it right and then when you set it when you get it up to set it and let it cool all that fat it's tallow right which just doesn't taste that it's it's super waxy unpleasant so i'm trying to get all that waxy fat out of there right and it floats up to the surface of water a thing i might be afraid of or maybe it wouldn't matter is if i took my little deer ribs and imagine you got like just listeners like imagine you got a deer standing there and you got all of its ribs in the end i like cut the ribs off i take a sawzall and run them into slip strip cut them

into strips uh so that i got chunks of three inch rib because so i'm going against the grain of the ribs with my sawzall and i'm just cutting the rib slab into three strips and then i take a few bones cut it a few bones cut it and i got like if you went to a restaurant and ordered pork ribs two or three ribs per piece the ribs are not three maybe the ribs are four or five inches tall uh i cook them until tender in water are you seasoning the water no i season it after i'm done i would because and i want all that deer fat to liquefy and go away right then i do a dry rub then i grill them but here's my question to you let's say i'd cooked them down i tenderized them in pork lard uh it would probably uh diffuse carry away the deer fat waxiness my feeling is yes it probably

would it would probably serve the same exact purpose as the water but it would incorporate but it could incorporate some less waxy fat back in that's this is a hypothetical would then have wax your other fat would have wax fat integrated into it is my theory that is also true but probably such trace amounts and it doesn't matter i mean to full full disclosure i also cook the venison ribs like this in water. But what I like to do is highly season the water so that I'm getting, because what I've always found is that when you cook them, you've got the outside seasoned only,

and the inside tends to run a little bland. So I will season it with bay leaves and garlic and onion, and there'll be some salt in the water or if you do have time before they go into the water season them at that point like so dry brine them yeah and then go into the water and so that that that there's they're fully seasoned and then when they come out you don't have just like that outer layer that's got the nice seasoning on it but they're seasoned throughout and then you grill them correct oh it's so good and that's and that's my 50 50 uh honey vinegar glaze that's we we we do this very often just make venice venison ribs like that exactly like you're saying you know park hook

and then based on the grill with that vinegar and honey mix let me tell you something that's real good you probably already know about is uh what i like to baste them with on my grill 50 cider vinegar 50 mustard oh mustard you know and i slop them in that my kids it's so weird i mean they love it that they like to have little dipping bowls of it too oh cider vinegar and mustard brushed on the ribs nice you can brush them barbecue sauce but it tastes like every damn thing in barbecue sauce we we eat no shortage of barbecue sauce in my house it's just like such a like oh the hell we gonna do with these leftovers well i'm gonna mash them up put barbecue sauce and put it on sandwiches right uh we made for thanksgiving this year we made a big italian mixed boil uh-huh

yeah blito me stone in the end i we just got so sick of the leftovers in the end i just wanted ball and barbecue sauce on sandwiches all the shanks and everything you know yeah what went into it what did i do the blitz blito me still yeah i did uh a friend of mine that raises cattle gave me some beef tongue nice my kid's buddy uh his family raises chickens so i had a chicken and then i realized i needed another chicken so then i had to buy a chicken i had uh a moose brisket this is like a classic composition right here a brisket i had a chicken piglet a wild piglet shoulder from hawaii so the whole pig shoulder i had a couple antelope shoulders that i corned where i just sawzalled a whole

antelope leg into three pieces and corned it i had pronghorn shanks that were just braised what else they're putting there and then like rutabagas turnips white beets taters kid is it oh can we talk about this yeah like for a minute you don't like it no I I really I really enjoy this topic. Okay. And there's a couple, and I'm going to ask you questions now. And going back to the, well, let's start here. Poached or, well, it's a mixed boil. I mean, that's what it translates to.

It's a mixed boil. But it's not boiled. It's poached. Well, yes. You're not cooking it in not you're not i never once in the process had a rip and boil correct now if i had the if i had really devoted my brain to it and had the large enough vessel and really sat and looked at everything and thought it out i could have been like okay i'm putting we're gonna eat at six i'm putting that in at 9 a.m i'm putting that in at 10 a.m i'm putting that in at 5 p.m right but i didn't do it that way because i was too lazy to think

about it all because i wanted i was gonna get there in a second but i had a few things going right i had a few things going that all got combined in the end okay okay because the staging was going to be my second question my first being more not really a question but more of an observation is that like poached or meats that are slow cooked in water not widely accepted here like um we we really crave i think in in this country in many other countries uh the texture of a sear from a grill or or being fried or put under a broiler yeah they weren't getting that in my house this year no but uh i love things like that like a poached chicken or a poached shank or a tongue or something like that. I think there's a lot of value to it. And how do we go about normalizing that as a preparation?

Because it's really cool. I think it's really cool. You need to feed it to your kids when they're young. And if everybody did that in a generation or two, the problem would be over. But what if you're an adult and you're like, boiled who eats that oh i don't even care it's like i don't care i used to i used to years ago care about all this stuff you know i don't care about people i just don't care i don't want to hear about it anymore no what if we're trying to hear about people's

minds yeah we're trying to we're trying to convince people to eat mixed boils yeah i just kind of like you know i just don't i don't need to hear about what you don't want to eat it's just like don't don't come over so if you were so next question let me hit with it let me hit with a quote from a friend of mine okay so my wife if we're meeting new people my wife will often uh if their kids are coming over my wife will often be like just so you know we have guns in the house they're locked up but we have guns in the house you know uh she just feels this has occurred it's because there's some you know whatever she doesn't apologize about it she's letting them. I think she's been asked enough maybe. But a friend of mine was like,

if they don't like it, don't come to my house. And I just a little bit like, I just can't, all the people that don't want to eat all the stuff, I just, I can't argue with them anymore. I'm right there. but i do think that educate educating and opening some minds but there's still time and people listen they listen to what you have to say they listen they're interested in the fact that you had the mixed boil for thanksgiving yeah i've talked about three times i mean i think it's i think that's amazing

i love that my wife was a little miffed but in the end she conceded that it was better than what you normally eat at Thanksgiving if you were to can I get it onto my technical question oh yeah please if you were to stage it did you cook it in the same broth in the end no I had a few things going on a couple different pots go ahead and ask your questions unless you want me to elaborate let's say hypothetically you've got a big pot where you're going to cook everything how would you have how would you have staged it what order would you have i would have woke up in the morning and i would have gotten my unkeered raw ass shanks in there let's say I'm eating let's say we're gonna eat at 6 I would have I would have gotten my

pot and because I wouldn't want to sit there keeping an eye on it I would have just put it in my oven at a certain temp and put my shanks in there then i would have gone my corned meats oh you know what else i put in there forgot about this i made a bunch of venison garlic sausages and threw a dozen of them in there i'm sorry the sausages are going in this early no no no no oh i've forgotten my big what all was in there that was in there they went in late i would have done my raw ass uncured shanks okay then later i would have put my corned in my corn and i corned my mousse brisket and i corned some of the uh bone-in venison pieces i would have waited a while my tongue was already you know it's not a raw tongue my tongue had already been smoked oh okay so it's just vac sealed i made it i made three saved one for thanksgiving in a vac bag so

it's like recipe ready it just needs to be warmed up like you could it's just ready to eat as soon as i thought it out so i would have waited and then at probably like uh four o'clock maybe i would have put my tongue in there five o'clock i would have got my harder to like big beets, big white beets, turnips and radishes. I would have got them in there to make sure that they were ready. Radishes? No, I'm sorry. Rutabagas. Rutabagas.

Got it. At 530, 515, I would have done my chicken and my sausages. Okay. And by now now the broth is just it's phenomenal it's phenomenal so i say i you know when i was all done the next day because i strained it off when it was all done the next day i jarred it all in my pressure canner so now i got that shit on my shelf and canning jars nice so the meats are coming out they're getting sliced yeah a little bit part of the appeal is it's some caveman looking business yeah i bought two giant platters on amazon with pumpkins and stuff on them because like none turkeys and pumpkins and shit yeah yeah because

we're not having any of that stuff and so i was like it was a little throw to people that were all miffed little job certain unnamed family members yeah they were like where's the turkey stuffing it's right there on the cornucopia look you'll notice it's all portrayed there on the edge of my giant platters that i don't know you know where i'm gonna put them until next thanksgiving and i made two mountains mountains yeah of boiled assorted meats and root vegetables okay and oh and a lot of carrot uncut carrots oh just whole carrots whole with the, nastiest carrots you can find. Whole ass carrots. Got it. And then what is, did you do condiments?

Mustarda, which I just bought. You went like full on traditional with this. Oh yeah, well I'm 23% Italian. There you go. 2% North African. And then a whole bunch of Western Europe. Okay. I was digging into my 23% Italian. you go i bought mustarda um and then we made two a red salsa and a green salsa like a raw green

herb sauce yeah all right yeah this is phenomenal salt and i had a couple little salt tubs laid out any special salt or just some flake sea salt flaky sea salt then now if you really want to know then i made a horseradish sauce uh creamy yeah you nailed this yeah i got i got my own horseradish patch too i'll.0 oh so which is frozen and locked under dirt but i had cured you know i had made some with vinegar and all that and that was for the corned meats phenomenal yeah that answer all your questions it did it did i'm really glad we took a turn down that route this is a food episode okay yeah good anything else you need to know no no i mean we can we can move on but i i like i said i i think that this is this is a topic that really needs normalizing uh we had a guest on talk about boiled meat we had a guest on seth kantner he was raised um outside of kotzebue he was brought up in a sod igloo

living off the land dirt floor sod igloo sled dogs feeding them off caribou he's an author he wrote shopping for porcupine he wrote ordinary wolves he wrote a thousand trails home about caribou reading his book about caribou like they eat a lot of um a lot of boiled like that style of cooking which is like very influenced by a new piat culture and stuff but they eat a lot of just like a moose knees you butcher your moose you get the big chunks off the big muscle groups off and then they like take the knee joint and they just boil it and they eat all that tendon gelatinous stuff marrow yeah a lot of boiled meat you'd have people over and it would just be like the like the pelvis okay so you butcher a caribou

you take that whole pelvis whatever just any chunks of anything that like you'd normally be like okay it's clean like let's say you're butchering a elk out in the mountains all the shit that's laying there when you walk away with your backpack full of meat boneless meat or quarters or whatever everything that's laying there they would saw up and boil and serve that and you go in there to go to the pot and you grab out a moose knee and you sit down and pick it yeah everything down to the everything down to the bone makes sense and reading that it's like man you know it's like salt and boiled joints yeah so they they have it very much so of an appreciation for just that boiled meat yeah i think many cultures do you know i mean just soups and pho you know or you know and you know france has its own version of

of that i mean italy famously so but i i particularly enjoy it especially when you play with all the condiments and it's like a choose your own adventure over there and you've got these like sharp bright condiments that are going with this like kind of like stodgy yeah almost unidimensional preparation it's delicious but still and then you get the broth the sauces really make it right the mustarda fruit it's fun yeah and that jelly inside the mustarda yeah all that stuff really makes it what is mustarda he could probably explain it mustard fruit but there's no mustard in it there should be mustard seeds in it okay yeah sorry yeah so i mean mustard being like one of the most preservative

of the spices i mean it lasts almost indefinitely and so mostarda uh is an italian like sweet condiment that's also got a bit of spice to it so okay picture a maraschino cherry yeah because it'll have some of those in it but you've made picture that you've made maraschino cherries out of kiwis cherries oranges pear slices that sounds great and then it's packed in a how do you describe what it's packed in it's a it's a a jelly okay or a syrup it's expensive as shit yeah and it can be made with any fruit it's kind of it's uh i would say it's in the chutney family oh okay okay and i don't work i gotta point out man i got no i don't work at amazon um i bought mine off amazon because you get it from italian i mean if like you know we live in

montana it's hard to find some stuff sure if you were in new york you just go down and probably go to like 18 stores within five blocks and buy mustard fruit but i wouldn't know where to begin i just ordered and it comes from it's like all made in Italy, and I just buy the jars on Amazon. There's probably a better way to do it, but that's just how I do it. You could make it. It'd be a fun, it would be a project akin

to making jam or jelly, anything like that, or a chutney where you could can it, and you could use whatever fruit it is. You could make a choke cherry mostarda or something like that or an apple mostarda you know they're being dumbasses but my kids do not like it they do not like it they like the look of it sure you like white claw a kid can look at a can of white claw across the room and they are in huh everything about it the color of the can the size of the can little design it's like they

see that and they think i would like that beverage from 100 yards away they know they're gonna they like everything about the presentation you bring a jar and we start in the home and they're fired up like what could you know don't they like what could be more exciting than what's in that jar and they taste it they're just out it's like they're like someone ruined it it's too spicy but it's a great wild game accompaniment across the board man yeah on duck yeah it's phenomenal on duck does it have a kind of vinegar in it as well is there a sour element or is there a fruit that's sour that's in it like like a tang is it is there always a tang or it's not quite it's gonna come from the fruit and then a copious amount of mustard okay m-o-s-t-a-r-d-a

it'll be like fruta it's in italian it'll be fruta mostarda i'll have to try it one day yeah when you're searching up beef fat you search up a jar of that get yourself a jar heading over prepare to pay for it right i mean i think chutneys too are you know again a universal condiment and like uh there's i put a chutney recipe in the hog book and i feel like you can put anything in there from an apple to a zucchini and it's going to come out great it's just it's it's a method okay uh which is always appealing to me it's just to like put out methods rather than strict recipes and so but what at the end of the day, what it is, it's that it's, it's sweet and it's sour. And like there's that,

those two flavors go so far with like enlivening game because it's just that richness. It's the, the old EQ on the radio where you've got too much base and you need to bring in a little bit of treble. And that's exactly what, what those flavors are with that, like acidic punch and mustard seed ginger things like that i want to close with uh i want you to i'll

do mine first i get to do three but you only you only get to do one well your best like your best message like if you could have a message to wild game cooks broadcast into outer space. Okay. So that all life would hear it. What would it be? I go first and I only got one. No, I'm going to go first. I get three.

Okay. One is go eat at Jesse's restaurant. Two is get, if you like to hunt wild pigs get jesse's hog book what's it called the hog book yeah i knew it was something real simple i met more people coming about that book people people that are exposed to pigs and they got all the stupid shit like you can't eat this guy yeah you can't eat the boars you can't you can't eat the sows whatever the hell you hear it all uh phenomenal it's available on the meat eater store it's a phenomenal book thank you people come to me all the time about how blown away they are about that book we won the james

beard award since i saw you last oh i didn't know that that hook won the james beard award did it really yes sir you're me no for the single subject category the hog book won the James Beard Award. Did it really? Yes, sir. You're shitting me. No. For the single subject category, the hog book is the winner. No way. I think that's a win for, I'm not trying to be, I don't know. I don't know what the word would be. But when the, just getting that recognition for a book about hunting and specifically about pigs that's hyper graphic there's uh we self-published it so we could put whatever pictures we wanted in there there's a lot

i mean there's guts there's blood there's there's death there's dead piglets all that stuff i think that uh the recognition from the culinary community about a book like that was really significant to me. And I'm not trying to be, to turn this into something like, it's a win for us all, but it's a win for us all. I felt like that was, it was very cool to see that.

I didn't know that. Son of a bitch. It was pretty cool. I got to go to Chicago too and hear my name. was cool that's great my daughter said that my nose was sweating um so here's my final tip so let's go to your restaurant get your hog book here's my final tip uh i've said this before you're either cooking it too long or you're not cooking it long enough you nailed it you nailed it you nailed it uh i'll i'll

mine mine is don't believe what they say don't believe what they say because when they are telling you talking that a gaff top catfish is not edible or that an odd ad is not edible. You can't eat a pig over, pick your weight, 90, 100, 120, 140, whatever it is. Can't eat them from February to August or whatever. Don't believe them. Don't believe them.

You can't eat a shoveler. You can't. Boiled meat's not good. Just don't believe them. You can't eat a shoveler. You can't, you know, boiled meat's not good. Just don't believe them. That's my advice. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Lying sons of bitches.

They are. All of them. You know what? And they've never tried it. They just heard it. It's just that generational misinformation. I think we got to remember to call the cream we got to remember to call the episode don't believe them okay love it we come up with a lot of good titles and we kind of forget them

it's best to just record that just yeah we workshop it and just put it right we do record it and then we need something different we right we do record it and then we name it something different we ought to call this episode and then we like then it gets a different name and the listener is really confused this one by god is going to be don't believe them you can check my work by going looking what it's called all right thank you very much jesse griffith yeah thank you die due way in austin texas yes sir d-a-i-D-U-E. Yeah, he should have named it something different.

It's too late now. Yeah. It's way too late. That ship sailed. Yeah. My daughter, I'm not even going to tell you. No. No, when she was reading it, I was like, it's Dai Due.

Dai Due. Yeah, that's an italian coming out yeah you you genetically knew how to pronounce it all right thanks a lot man thank you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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