The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 812: The Best Grub in Texas

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with chef Jesse Griffiths, Janis Putelis, Clay Newcomb, Brent Reaves, and Randall Williams. Topics discussed: How everything is from around here; buying truck loads of ingredients in season; eating while podcasting; nilgai and hog hunting and field processing; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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best chef. I mean, maybe. I don't know. That's a big claim. He is definitely America's greatest wild game, cook and chef. And we're in his restaurant. What I used to like about this restaurant. What I used to like about it. I need you know, last night's people came out to me and they were from somewhere far away, like Massachusetts or something. And they had recently come to Austin to eat at the restaurant. All right. They came to the show and told me that story. why I liked why I liked Di Dewey.

I used to like it. Why you used to like Di Dewey where we're sitting right now is you'd get to the menu and you'd encounter this very intriguing line down here.

Now you'd think most restaurants would put the line up here in big letters but Jesse had a line down here that said everything is from around here and he was a master of subtlety and just left it like that.

I was shocked and dismayed today. I asked for a menu so that i could reference everybody to the everything is around here line and what did i find is a broader explanation um backing up the claim that everything is from around here the the premise that died you way is that when you come here you're eating texas food from texas correct and that is not an easy thing to do i know that when i've had jesse on the podcast before we've laughed about i remember Jesse and I were somewhere, and he ran into a citrus stand and bought a truckload of citrus.

Because when citrus is ready, that's his year-long chance to get citrus. I've been with you buying a truckload of pecans. Because when pecans are ready, it's time because you're not going to get them from somewhere else. Things like, give me a thing that you'll just never have here. But tell me the thing that's the biggest bummer that you'll never be able to have. Pineapples. Okay. I love pineapples.

Okay. But since you can't get a pineapple from Texas, you're never going to get a pie. You'll never see a pineapple in here, barring some kind of agricultural innovation. Pretty much. Yeah, you could conceivably grow a pineapple in far south Texas. And if they did, you would buy it.

Oh, I would buy it. I'd drive down there and get it. Jesse buys, people bring things. I hesitate to say this because I don't want to have people just showing up at your door. People will show up at Jesse's door. You tell it, because I want you to, I don't want to say anything wrong. I mean, yeah, we get some kind of sketchy sales transactions.

Sometimes we don't participate, solicitations, thank you. Usually it's in the form of a dead feral hog. Okay. Maybe some mushrooms, which I will buy. Yep. But feral hogs, I will not. Okay. But other things, a purveyor would just call and say,

I happen to have a bunch of. Yeah. And you'll go for it and do it. Jesse's been on the podcast before. I'm big, like, I love his restaurant. If you were to ask my wife about her favorite restaurant, she's going to say this is her favorite restaurant. It's far none, far in way my favorite place to eat.

What we've never done with Jesse, if you've never sat down to eat. So we're going to try to eat with headphones on, which is complicated. But the main thing we want to do is in trying to capture, this essence of like Texas food. Can you tell us what we're looking at

and prove to me that everything is from around here? Sure. Sure. We'll start right in front of you. So those are some floutis made with shredded wild boar. Our feral hogs come from either the hill country

or east of Austin. And these are real wild pigs. Real. So they're trapped live. and then they're brought into a licensed facility at which point they're inspected and then killed crunch who did that move your thing away

there's a phrase for someone that cannot tolerate the sound of other people chewing I don't have that I don't know they're not going to like this episode they're not going to like this episode if you move your thing if you move your thing way away and then move it back when you have to talk

so shredded barrel hog these tortillas we buy them from a very specific place in San Antonio shredded cabbage so cabbage is in season right now when cabbage is not in season we will pickle or ferment it so that then we can use it on top of here I got a question already if you buy a tortilla you then I'm assuming you then need to call that tortilla place to find out the source of their corn you do yes so not for everything though and i want to be really transparent about it too so like we will carry

we have a bottled lemonade that we serve uh you know mostly because we love the company you know this this little girl started like basically a lemonade stand and so we buy that that's a local company but our fresh ingredients um and i wouldn't go 100% on it but um are going to be very diligently sourced from texas to the point where we we will often get shipped lettuce, this butter lettuce right here. The company we sourced it from sometimes are often just throws whatever in there. If it comes in the back door and we see that it is not from Texas because there's a company that grows these hydroponically, we ship it right back. Really? And that confuses the hell out of the driver. He's like, what are you talking about?

This is not what we met. He's like, it says butter lettuce. We're like, yeah, well, talk to the rep. Not the right butter lettuce. Not the right butter lettuce. One time I think, we were in here you were telling us that at one point you got eggs that were like five from five miles away and then you found out that you could get eggs that were from like a half a mile from here do you still sort of roll with that ethos too of like the closer to this restaurant that stuff has grown and made the better there's going to be a lot of different things that determine where we get things out now proximity would be would be one but really it's going to be it's probably going to boil down more to how those businesses are run

I mean, you know, land stewardship, what their, how they operate, you know, especially with eggs. You know, we want a pasture situation. We don't want a warehouse. We want chickens to be able to live on pasture freely and feed on insects, things like that. So we will do the research. And if we have, so, I mean, to that point, if we had to get something from farther away that fell more within our standards, then we would absolutely do that. Right. There are people that came up to me and they were telling me about how they'd come along.

way to go to your restaurant. He made a comment. He says, man, it's pretty expensive, though. I'm like, dude, do you even know what those guys go through to put that stuff together? I'm like, they take basically all that money to go buy the stuff to make, like, it's complicated. It is complicated. It's like you're doing things. You guys are doing things that make the least business sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the cost of real food. It's how much it really costs when they're there's not a subsidized, you know, agribusiness standard that's producing these things. It's just how it really costs to operate like this. And if we want to ensure that we keep farmers that are doing the right things, you know,

in these smaller, and we're going to throw the word family farm out there. And I mean that for real, like a family's run in this place. If we want to really ensure that they are in business, then we have to buy from them. And then their product is more expensive, almost invariably. Let's back up a minute. about what Randall's eating. Oh, yeah. I was wanting to do a quick recap.

Sure. Mm-hmm. Quick recap on this first point. Then we'll try to get through without all the interruptions. So Texas, you buy tortillas from a Texas outfit. The tortilla is filled with a kind of brazed down, cooked down. I haven't eaten it yet. Barrel hog.

Yeah. Wild pig that was trapped in the wild. 100%. And brought to you on the bone. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes we'll buy trim, but typically, like, especially these days for probably the past year or so, we've really trended towards whole carcasses on feral hogs. So in the back door of this restaurant, wild pig carcasses come in.

Yeah. We have a rail system, which is really cool because we can just hook them up on a rail. And it's like a little railroad goes from the back door into the walk in on a big loop. And then it comes out, goes down the hotline and into the prep area right here to our right. Yeah. Meaning those inedible wild pigs that can't be eaten come into this restaurant and every day get eaten by people who then say that that's the best wild pig they ever ate. Very edible. Very, very edible. No doubt. Okay, let's move on. Well, speaking of inedible, part two, that's our oddad meatball. I knew it was an awedad meatball.

The inedible oddad. The inedible oddad is here. Wow. With french fries. Audad gets more inedible the farther across that canyon that people shoot it, you know? And also that guide is like, yeah, man, you can't eat those things. You know that? You know, so they go chop the head off. And, you know, I love Audet. I think Audet is objectively good.

I think that it's oftentimes cooked improperly. And you kind of need to aggregate it. Much like the barrel hog is slow cooked and shredded or ground or made into sauce. messages, things like that. Audet, again, needs to be aggregated. So we're going to slow cook that or we're going to grind it. And that's what that is. Help me understand that word you use an aggregated.

But like so with feral hogs especially. So if we, I can't pick up the phone and say, hey, can you bring me five, 65 pound feral hogs tomorrow? I can say, can you bring me some feral hogs tomorrow? And he's like, sure. I mean, one of them is going to be 138 pounds. Two of them are, you know, probably siblings out of the same. same sounder are going to come in at 47 pounds and so forth.

So it's very difficult to achieve consistency in size and fat content. So if I want to run chops, we've got to get a little bit lucky. And so, you know, our processor either selects certain animals of size and quality or we just get lucky with what the trapper got. And so it's the much more easier thing to do would be to aggregate that meaning. we're going to just pull everything off the bone and grind it and then make something out of it or we're going to shred it off the bone

and make something like that. It's an equalizer. Got it. And on this this odd ad here that we're looking at as we discussed this dish has been ground. But these I imagine too, you don't say like I want a bunch of

100 pound carcasses or whatever. You just get what you get. Yeah, we get what we get. Got it. So yeah. And how do these odd ads show up to you? So that's either, that's probably going to be a coal.

Um, uh, sometimes they're trapped, you know, so sometimes they'll go into hog traps, things like that, at which point they're fair game. Um, you know, and they might be coals off of high fence places as well. I mean, for complete transparency, you know, but I think that at that point, we're kind of towing the line between eating and invasive and also trying to demonstrate that that invasive is edible as yeah. You know, so it's also like a, it's an object lesson right there. You know, like, well, you can, you can eat it. Hey, what about the, what about the, what about the Combination, excuse me. Like what we're, this is a, I don't know, a flata, what would we call that? I'd say it's a, it's our flat bread. So we make a flat bread and then it's got grilled meatballs on there. Those meatballs are bound with rice. The rice comes from out near Houston and Anahuac. Really?

Yeah. So Texas rice. But then the French fries is really, like, whose idea was that? Well, that's, you know, if you go to Europe and you get these like donor kebabs and these, these classical Middle Eastern. pita sandwiches a lot of times they'll put french fry okay okay that's yeah i like that so what's in the flatbread is it a flower based flatbread flower flower texas flour east so we use some it depends on the bread some flour we do get from larger mills okay uh but we use a lot of um texas grown flour from barton springs mill and then

you're able to get taters from texas yes sometimes okay or most of the time and often and often season that's one of the COVID provisions that we made was that we that's kind of our our cheat ingredient is potatoes and so we just have to have them yeah it really hit hard during COVID and that we and it's really funny because I think you know that potatoes represent like one of like 200 ingredients that that we get and it's the one that's not consistently from Texas and always end up there and I always end up talking about it too long but during COVID I mean people I don't we were just like we really need provide some comfort we need french fries and mashed potatoes and things like that and we kind of went down that path we're very conscientious about how we source them

they have to be organic um preferably we get them from uh Colorado and New Mexico so we're able to do that but again if they hit the back door and they're not organic they what do you feel like you're getting from an organic potato versus a non-organic potato you know I don't I mean At one point years ago, I had done some research on it. I don't know how the standards have changed. And so maybe it is a fool's errand to think that I'm doing anything. But at the same time, I just, you know, whatever that standard means these days, I support it. You know, I think it's just better.

If we're going to make a concession, I want it to be the best possible. Okay, what's next? We haven't talked about this one yet. Yeah, so that's our pastrami sandwich. So that is beef. That's some Wagyu. beef, brined, smoked, and then steamed, a rye bread, and then sourcrow. I think the real star of the show here would be the sourcrow.

And that, you know, we had to pull this off of our menu for about three weeks. And then people were really upset. It's a good pastromy scene. And we had to pull it off the menu because we ran out of sourcrow because we didn't put enough away the previous spring. Like this spring, we just, we didn't do enough. We should have shredded more sourcrow. It's about a three-week process of fermenting the sourcrow. And then we can sit on it in the walk-in for months and months and months.

So when you get, how much might you shred? Like, how much cabbage might you do when a cabbage is available? Hundreds and hundreds of pounds. We make our own paprika. So we bring in hundreds of pounds of sweet peppers during peak pepper season, which is just make paprika. It's amazing. Our paprika is like probably one of my favorite.

favorite things that we make and it has one ingredient and it's a pepper we bring in just beautiful thick walled late season ripe red peppers and we're in this is going to kind of mess with you all because you're from the north we're in the tail end of pepper season right now so November maybe the first part of December is when we really just start get a lot of peppers in we got to walk in full of them and we we smoke them over post oak and then we do dehydrate them and then grind them into a powder. And when it's fresh and made with a really nice pepper, it's, it's incredibly good. So that's all paprika is, is it ground up pepper.

Yeah. I didn't know that. So you're making smoked paprika. Correct. Posto predominantly what you use is posto. Yeah. I mean, you know, when we do off-sites and fun, other things, you know, we mix up that wood, but, you know, post-oakon, another favorite. And then when we go south, I almost invariably am using mesquite.

And, I mean, I have this whole thing about wood and, you know, what those different styles of wood and direct heat cooking off offset cooking. And, you know, it really has influenced the cooking culture here. But where this restaurant sits in Austin, Postoak should be the fuel. Right. It's the most prevalent thing. You know, it has influenced our barbecue culture. Incredibly. Like we are in central Texas, it is that offset indirect heat of barbecues.

barbecue, whereas you get further south, they're kind of cooking over mesquite, but there's just a lot of distance. It's really fascinating to me because these woods burn differently, but where we're sitting right now, post oak would be, would be the wood. How many cords of wood do you think you go through? Oh, one a week. It's not incredible. Like, we're just, we're burning in the, in the grills. And then our smoker, we have a, we have a rotissory, solid fuel smoker, which is really cool. it burns whatever wood we want to put it. But you're... One quarter of week sounds like a lot.

Yeah, a lot. Oh, yeah. Your cooking fire is running all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, all day. And then, you know, five, six hours a night. The rest of time.

Let's back up the cabbage for a second as we walked through this. Who made that? The pickle? Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to find out. You only think it was made here in your kitchen? Oh, I thought you wanted a name.

I was like, it's going to be... Hector or I don't know. No, we made that, of course. Yeah. That's the cool thing about being in here. It's like down to the smallest detail, like the pickle. When you eat this pickle, you're like, oh, it came in as a cucumber. Yeah, yeah.

And then right there, it turned into a pickle. Oh, I got a good one for you. So the yogurt real quick. I want to back up to the, because we left behind the kraut and I had a kraut question. Oh, okay. So it comes the day when cabbages are ready to come into Di-Diway. Do you then have to like. Okay.

And now it's not like you're prepping for tonight, but you're prepping for the year. Yeah. How do you handle staffing to say, hey, everybody come in, we're going to go through a truckload of cabbage? Well, it's, no, it's, we're buying it. I mean, in total, we're buying hundreds of pounds. So we'll bring in 10 cases and then a week later, another 10 cases. And then throughout the season, yeah, I see. Okay.

So you'll spread it out throughout however long the window of opportunities. But still, that's a, I mean, I guess you got people here. that all, their whole job is just making stuff. Pickles and ferments, things like that. They're not, their job isn't even to make something for a customer tonight. Absolutely. It's very heavy on prep. So we have a lot of staff because every single sauce, every pickle, every, everything.

The paprika has to be made. The yogurt on that flat bread. So years ago, one of our- Made the yogurt? Years ago, we had an employee and she was from India. and her family's yogurt starter had been going for over 200 years continually. She brought us that yogurt starter.

And so we still use that yogurt starter. That's amazing. To create our own yogurt. So we make our own, we make some of our, we make our own cream cheese. We make our own sour cream. We make our own yogurt here. So anything like that that we can make, we'll make it.

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to get dialed before your next trip. Is there anywhere else that does this like you do? You know, I'm sure, and I think that there's more of a proliferation of restaurants like kind of what we're doing, like really kind of taking deep dives and just definitely more focus on locality and support of things like that. But I would like to say no to an extent, you know, like we've been doing it for a long time. We've been in business for 19 years. And so we, and with the same ethos and the same functionality. There is distinct differences between everything I have taste. it so far. There's nothing like, oh, that kind of tastes like that, or this has similarities.

Everything is so far different. The commonality, though, is that it all has a ton of flavor. Yeah. There's amazing depth. It's very bold. Yeah. As my grandfather would say, this tastes like more. Yeah. Oh, no. The burger was like, the burger was like shocking. Oh, my gosh. I'm like, there's a lot going on here. There's definitely like top 50 burgers I've ever had. Awesome. Top 50? I mean, it might be the best one I've ever had. That's so good.

How does that work? It's Mariana Peeler, just south of San Antonio. We've had a great relationship with her for years. And we settled on that. It was kind of a compromise between grass fed, which what I am fascinated by and grain fed, which is what the customer is fascinated by. So it's not hip anymore to eat grass fed.

customer likes the corn finish stuff. Yeah, but the whole point of Wagyu is that even though it's like a breed, there's like an expectation about how it's been raised. She raises hers. But you can take a Wagyu and lock it into a shipping container and starve at half the death.

Right? Well, yeah, I mean, you can definitely get almost obscene amounts of fat in there. She pastures her. So they live on pasture. They have an opportunity to, like, a free choice grain source. So they are, still eating grain, but most importantly to me is that her processing facility, which she owns

is seven miles from the ranch. So on their bad day, they get loaded up. They got a quick trip over there and it's all done. Got it. And there's no feedlot in between. And then how do you buy that? We buy mostly big rib primals like you saw on the way in that we dry age. Okay. And then a lot of that trim from those rib primals goes in there. I'm sorry, I completely misspoke There's only a little bit of Wagyu in the burger. The pastrami is Wagyu. We buy grass-fed Longhorn from a ranch in South Texas, the one that you've been to where we turkey hunted. So he has just completely pastured, long, rangy longhorns that, and we buy older animals from those.

And then we mix that with some of that Wagyu fat and then some of the aged wogging. So your burger's a Longhorn burger. Mostly, yeah. Yeah, and it's like you get a really incredible flavor. I totally misspoke when I said waggy. But the wagoo is over here. I might have directed you in the wrong direction. No, no.

The brisket for the pastrami is waggy, but this is a grass-fed longhorn. And by grass-fit, I mean, that thing just lives out there. And the range. That eastern peninsula and there's no, I mean, it's just eating whatever it can. Is that expensive for you to buy? Because like the longhorn market collapsed, does that make it less expensive? for you to buy it's about average um as far i and and often don't i don't know what like commodity pricing is on these things we're unaffected typically in meat prices because we don't have the

the variations in markets i see because we're you know i'm buying from a guy that i'm he's one of my best friends yeah no i understand you know you're not out shopping for the cheapest stuff on in the marketplace and i started hitting them up for these older animals that had kind of naturally developed more fat and more flavor just beautiful bigger animals um and and we started using that for the burger because i thought we thought that that would be the best platform for it the steaks didn't go over well people just weren't into them we know and they caught they cost us just as much and so they cost the customer people didn't want a rangy longhorn steak yes it would be like did you like wild cows i love them we ate a big old steak when we were down there right but that's a wild longhorn

It just tastes like a Western sizzler buffet steak. No. No, I mean, it is. And that's what's good about it. It's got that intense iron flavor. And it's, I mean, it would be, if you put it on the same, like, linear spectrum of a, of a deer that have been farm raised. And then, you know, that's going to be, tastes like kind of a sweet corn-fed deer versus like a real, like a sagebrush eating deer. and then the same thing with the with the cattle you know they're eating just corn and they're getting

the kind of bland and sweet and fat and just easy versus like the real nature of what but beef tastes like and beef has a lot more character than what we collectively remember it to taste like so those longhorns are eating like mesquite beans and whatever kind of like August September they're eating mesquite beans they're eating just all those native grasses down there and there's there's invasive blue stem anything. They're just in there just grazing. And they are, they never get, uh, pellets or corn or anything like that. Tell us about those wraps around. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about this sauce. Yeah. The red sauce is the color of a boiled beet. And that's on the burger, right? Yes. So that's our beet ketchup. And that's kind of a, that came down to more of an economic decision. It's like,

we could potentially buy enough tomatoes in to, to make ketchup year round. But, when we tried to our ketchup was exorbitantly expensive like if somebody wanted a two-ounce it was too hard to make ketchup not too hard expensive to make ketchup once you cook I mean because you're cooking tomatoes down to a tenth of their volume and you're buying tomatoes at four dollars a pound and so it's a real reflection of how these markets actually work and so we had to find a solution and that solution was beats we could buy beats more cheaply and then turn them into a ketchup But, you know, like if you said, oh, I love this tomato ketchup, can I get a side of it? It would be like, okay, it's $6, and then people get really upset with you.

It's interesting that tomato ketchup would be the thing that was too expensive for people's taste. There's a lot of things. You would think it would be something else. Yeah, it's, well, you know, there's, we are, in our culture, we have very decided ideas about what's cheap and what's expensive. You know, a taco cheap, you know, chips and salsa, free always. Yeah, yeah. I'm telling you, they're not, it's never free. You know, you're paying for it.

But, and things like ketchup are, you know, those, they just, they're supposed to be. And it's like, well, you know, in a real system that, that, you know, everybody wins from the farmer on down, the tomatoes, they're not cheap. You know, interesting thing that I didn't know about ketchup till I started getting into like the Escophiae, the old French cookbooks, is you would go into the index and there's the ketchup's. Mm-hmm. mushroom ketchup onion ketchup and the tomato ketchup is just one of many ketchup but it won yeah it like very much won you know it became ketchup yeah yeah yeah so that's i mean that's that's us kind of trying to play within the markets you know and just trying to figure out how to give people what they want but still within the context and within parameters economic parameters

how do you get the vinegar that you use to make ketchup we buy dry goods, you know, vinegar and sugar and spices and things like that. It's kind of like a little house on the prairie mentality. You know, it's like we can go to the mercantile and get these dry goods, but fresh ingredients are we're going to prioritize this coming from within this system. And then whatever else we can within that, you know, like flowers. We get Steen's cane syrup from Louisiana, you know, and it's like instead of buying molasses from who knows where, we get this beautiful cane syrup from our neighbors over here. We buy pistachios from one farm in New Mexico.

You know, it's just their neighbors. And I got tired. I mean, pecons were the only game in town. You know, here's the only nut we have. Maybe an odd walnut here and there, but nothing cultivated and nothing easy to crack. So I was finally, I was like, let's just get pistachios. Yeah. But like, let's do our research and get them from a great place.

Same thing with our coffee. You know, obviously, we're not growing coffee. here we need to have it but we do the research we're like who's making the best you know who's paying their people the best best processes and all these things and so what about the burger bun we didn't talk about the burger bun then we got to talk about the fat you fry in your fries and beef tallows so how you make that but what's the burger bun all about yeah same deal you know like all of our breads you know we have a pastry chef in house and she makes everything um anything that's so she makes your burger buns all of our breads we make in house okay on this table right

over here. We butcher all the feral hogs on one side and make the breads on the other side. There's sourdough starter. When we signed the lease for this building in 2013, we were parked over in that alley over there, went over there, picked a big bunch of wild Mustang grapes, took them home, wrapped them in cheesecloth, mashed him up, and put them in a slurry of flour and water, and captured that hyper-local yeast. And that's our- Were you pointing to? Right there in the alley over there. We had to park over there.

And there was some wild grapes. And so our sourdough starter to this day is from a grape starter. Cross the road. From the yeast, from a wild yeast that we got from across the road. You kidding me. And you kept it going that time. Yeah, every day it has to be fed. What do you feed it with?

No, you backslop. You're like putting sugars in there. Flower and water. No sugar. Oh, no, you don't put sugars in it. I never done that. I don't know about it. Yeah.

Yeah. And then you're talking about the fat, the beef fat. Yeah. So every Monday, which is. today is a rendering day and so we buy as much beef fat mostly from Mariana

and there's another butcher shop that sources all local and sometimes we take their excess beef fat and we grind it and render it all day long on Mondays to stock the friar with beef fat for the week. So you guys grind when you render?

I think it's best. You get the most service area. Yeah and you and it and it And also, I think you'll see a lot of times people overcook their lard or tallow and get it too, like, brown. Because you will have, when I'm cleaning a feral hog, I pull by hand the leaf fat out because if you cut, you get bits of meat in there. I don't know why you have a whole thing based on animal fats. Oh, I've got a question for you. No, you know more about it for me.

I have lots of questions. If I pull it by hand, then I only get the fat, like that big sheath of leaf fat. So you know, like, you're skittish about having little hunks of meat in your ground, in your tallow fat. 100%. Well, more so in lard, but yes, also in the tallow, but it, well, and I'll tell you why. I didn't know this about lard. I always saw it. It's just whatever.

Well, it makes it taste different. It gives it more of a pork or beef flavor. And in cooking fats like lard and tallow, I want some neutrality. and I don't want it to taste so savory if we're going to use that application for a dessert or if we're going to fry donuts in it on Saturday and Sunday mornings

we don't want it to taste like beefy but then when you eat that donut you're like I don't know why this is so good but there's something or like fried fish I should have brought you jar in my new coon grease hell yeah

I got nobody's ever spoken those words to me before I rendered out I rendered out you're not going to believe me when I tell you this You're not going to believe me when I tell you this. I rendered out one raccoon.

And this wasn't even picking it clean. I rendered out one raccoon and it yielded three full court jars of lard. One raccoon. Oh, my. I could prove it. I believe you. Three full court jars off a single raccoon. That would be a good yield from a big pig.

I gave a court to him, him. and maybe I'm going to give my last court to you I would love that oh raccoon lard Hey I've got a serious Thank you for that Steve That wasn't serious about what I'm saying No

I just have a very serious question Kind of weird deal What What temperature I thank you in our social media relationship Like I addressed you on social media As if I wasn't going to see you the next day I was like hey thanks Steve

And you didn't watch it okay he doesn't follow you what temperature are you rendering your your beef tallow out so they're going to be popping it in the oven well yeah tell us about the whole process well it's it's all all hands on deck

by that I mean any heat source is utilized so the the four burner range but you've got to be having you've got to be watching the temperature yes I don't know I could ask him real quick what before we never do it in the oven I really want to know.

But if you're doing it's stovetop, it's low. You know, just as low. But you have any sense of the temperature, like 180 or 225? I don't. Oh, it'd be over. Well, no, I don't, honestly. Just to be, I don't know what the temp would be. I have a tendency to burn my grease a little bit.

But $2.25 is what I kind of stay. That's water. You think $200? $200. I believe that that's perfect. Perfect. Because if you look at like confi and like French cooking confi and rendering duck oil and stuff, I've always read the 200. That sounds right.

So that's what I shoot for is 200. Yeah. And I'll do it in my oven. But I like kind of doing it on a burner so I can watch it. I may have really embarrassed us with Ted Cople. I rendered bare fat with Ted Cople the other day. Well, we didn't have a, we didn't have a thermometer. And I just burned it because it was going slow.

And he started going, wow, Clay, this is really slow. And I was like, whew. Oh. And I found the green grease I sent you? I didn't. It was, I didn't have it. But I would have. You grind it up.

He ain't telling nobody about it. Get rid of as much meat as possible or just all of it. Yeah, no, we go in and they're trimming out anything red. And then it goes to the grinder. And then it goes into, we have induction burners that we put on the butcher tables we have the range and we also are popping everything in the oven at the same time just any way we can do it because we need so much of it okay and then we put it in these big pans and then you know solidifies and then we're able to um but tell me how long it usually takes from start to when you pull

it out of the oven and you're like that looks good it's going to depend on the volume i mean a couple hours that's what would be the max if i told you you know what i spent a whole day jessie i was rendering my bare fat for eight hours would you be like man you overdid it big time and there's no wonder it's a little ground yeah what i always tell people is so when you when you start to to cook it you have these large bubbles coming out and that's you know the water coming out of it what you want to shoot for is and you'll know this what a coer's light looks like oh he knows for a minute i was going to get pissed i thought you were going to hit them with you'll know this as a rendering man.

And I was going to be like, hold a minute. You want, you're a beer man. Are you gossiping? He was gossiping. I was telling him about our, you know, about our life on the bus tour and about how you can very easily fall into like the life of a rock star. And the only

person really carrying the flag of a rock star has been Randall. I appreciate that. Jesse later, if you need to have talk hot dogs, you can also point to him and say, you'll know this. I just made a big batch of venison hot dogs, and they are. Really? We've got to try one.

We're like, we've got a project. We're getting off topic. I really need to know about the business. I know if I got to make a business deal. We've been fixing to make a video about how to make venison hot dogs. Oh, really? So for gas station, if you can think about this, we'd like to have you come up. On the rollers?

We want to make not fancy dogs. Not like a thinking man's hot dog. we want to make take your venison and turn it into a gas station hot dog Joe Blow hot dog every man's Joe Blow no bend in it that you can put on a gas station roller and have it be like a little kid would eat it

and he'd go that's a hell of a hot dog yeah collagen case needs to keep them flat and straight yeah classic no fancy nothing roller dogs coriander garlic paprika and nutmeg And that's your, that's your classic. But I think the most important part is the consistency of the inside. It's an emulsified sandwich.

Here's the thing. A lot of times when guys go, so I've made hot dogs and we use sheepcase. Like, anybody can do that. And they can make a thing that they'd be like, well, this is my version of a hot dog. I want to make hot dogs. Amosified. Like, you get at a baseball game. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I feel like really, you talk about making venison hot dogs. end up with something that's what I would call a broad shape. Yes. And it has a different spice mix than what they call their brots. It's a hot dog flavored sausage. Exactly. But it doesn't have, it's an emulsification. You know how to do it.

Five parts, lean, four parts, fat, and three parts. So you'll walk us through it. Right now? No, I mean, no, when we make our video, when we come back. We're going to make gas station hot dogs. Then we're going to buy the roller. We've already in shopping for a roll. We're going to put them on a roller.

He's getting excited. I mean. And then we're going to put mustard and ketchup on them. And then we're going to be like, that's deer meat, gas station hot dogs. I ate seven venison hot dogs over the weekend. Oh, you've got them right now. I made a batch of 72 of them. Randall had.

Did you see eight, seven? Uh-huh. I love it. They're so good. They're very, very good. It's a recipe. What color are they? Are they hot dog colored?

Well, they're a little grayish. They don't have. I didn't smoke them either. So you could do a cold smoke on them. We're getting way off. They don't smoke gas station hot dogs. They might be a little. cold smoke, but they're also going to have nitrite

in them. So, you know, real pinked out from that. I did put some insecure number one in there. But they didn't take on a ton of that pink color. They're a little on the gray side. My worry would be that you would have to add so much other filler that it'd

be hard to still call it a venison hot dog. Well, it's going to need five parts, venison, lean, four parts of some kind of fat. That's going to be beef or pork. And then three parts ice. And so it's going to be 33% by weight, other fat, but then it's going to be whatever that five parts is of pure venison.

If we can publish a recipe and have an instructional video of how to make a gas station hot dog that your kid would be excited to eat and have it be 50% venison, that is success. Okay. Let's move on. We can move. We need to move on because there's some, yeah, yeah, there's some nuanced. I was starting. Sure.

You have some IP that he needs and it's very valuable. Know that. Yeah. I was starting to get a little sluggish from the meal, but I haven't perked right up with the talk of hot dogs. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade.

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Big country demands better intel. Download on X hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. He had cheese coat he's brought from Ohio. Probably. So my whole point was, as soon as it looks like a really light beer, and this is what I teach in my classes, it's like as soon as you get a straw color in tiny bubbles, you're done. And at that point, you need to strain. So how much solids will you get, will you scrape off, you know, the cracklins?

Depends. Just a little bit? A lot. A lot. And that's one of the things that gets me is, like, we still haven't found a consistent home for those. I hate throwing anything away. I got one. But we have, like, I mean, weekly, we're probably 50 gallons.

I throw them on my roof. Oh, for the birds. Magpies. Magpie. They go nuts. We have no magpies. I need to mellow. I need to think about what you're telling me because I have looked at it.

I've done it wrong I'm not paying attention to the bubbles I'm looking for like when I feel the crackling is this spent is it's going to get and that the energy I'm putting into the production

has hit like any sort of reasonable efficiency meaning I could go and go and go and go and go and maybe get a little more but the crackling is spent diminishing returns I never look at the bubble okay plausible yeah well i'm gonna say i don't i don't do it right you do it right i feel like it there's

there's a lot of signals in the grease that tells you it's done you know i mean in bubbles could be one of them which i i wouldn't have thought that either i would i would be watching the crackling because it it's just like a lot of movement early when it's rendering down and then finally it just starts to slow and so you're like we're not gaining anything yeah and i don't want it to get too dark yeah you know i want it to be blonde yeah yeah because then you start to develop that toasty flavor in there. And so that's going to affect your pie crust or your donut or the other things you're going to do with it.

Would you have any possible way to legally use bear grease? No. Got you. When you get really good at something like for you making grease, making tallow, lard, you get to a point where it talks to you. Do you know what I mean? Like you are seeing a thing that you can't really explain, the doneness. Sure.

it becomes a little bit like a dark art yeah i always say that ice talks to me walking on ice oh i can look at i don't speak that language yeah i look at a pond and it talks to me about it tells me what condition it's in huh but you probably get with the grease i never get like i don't do it enough to when i'm making lard or grease i don't i always leave it like, I don't know, man. I suppose that's probably good. The bubbles will tell you. That's what the bubbles are saying.

Real technical question. This is a batch of bear grease that I made. Okay. That looks great. It's really clear and pale. Right. But, okay, that's the color of a lot of them. Uh-huh.

It never solidified. Oh, this is cool. When I took bear hog hunting out there to that property, he killed two hogs. killed one a couple, maybe a month or so previous to that, and I killed one on that property two days ago. And there's a big pecan orchard on one side, and there's a big pecan orchard on the other side. The whole river bottom is nothing but pecan. And the fat that we render off these hogs does not solidify in the refrigerator. It stays almost completely liquid. So I reached out

to one of our customers here as a doctor. And I was like, what's happening? with this. It's like canola oil viscosity in the refrigerator as polyunsaturated fats from eating a diet of probably only pecans, which are really high in polyunsaturated fats. And that's what you told me too, right?

Yes, that's what I'm... Clay would probably tell you it's predicting the weather and there's bad weather coming up. Yeah, I need to look at this. That's what you said. That means it's primarily unsaturated fats, lots of 18 to 1 carbon bonds. That's good. Bear diet. Clay unknowingly

came up with his second book title earlier when he said signals in the grease. I like it. That's the grease signal. All right. So that is, do you feel like it's a good product? I like that. Like that. Well, yes and no.

I mean, first off, those hogs are very, very good to eat. Yeah. Very sweet, mild, but still have that nice bit of like barrel hog flavor to them. The fat was worthless for sausage. You couldn't use the back fat for sausage. Once you ran it through the grinder, it'd, liquefied on the way out like just frozen chunks of fat into the grinder liquid on the way out just because it was so soft wildhawk even the harder fat off the back not just the leaf fat

and then for uh something like a confi where you need that solidified protective cover wouldn't work because it never solidified yeah that's a good point but for general cooking sauteing things like that it was great but anything that you needed like a i try to make pie crust with it right total disaster because you couldn't get that solid fat incorporated in the farm you can never cut it in exactly now there a day i noticed he had he never mentioned it to me but he had the jar of coon grease i made next to a jar of bear grease in the same area and what i thought was interesting was indistinguishable well and how they were predicting weather like the amount of like solid the late where the line was liquefied the kung grease was totally solid no no no yeah it was it was it 100%

i thought you didn't see that he didn't mention it but i saw it oh okay yeah he didn't say like hey thanks for that but i was looking at him i thought oh wow it's remarkable how similar in appearance they are i think you misinterpreted that because the kung grease was completely solid and the bear grease was basically 60-40, you know, olive oil-like and then the saturated fat. Okay, never mind. Reba, can you cut all that out? No, Reeva, don't do that.

Makes me think like an unreliable reporter, dude. Well, I think maybe over time, it's possible that your Coon grease, when it's not been shook up and everything, would kind of solidify. But basically, I had some barrel oil analyzed by one of the best things. lipid labs in America.

And basically, the short version is, is that the clear olive oil colored liquid is unsaturated fat, 181 carbons like olive oil. The heavier stuff is saturated fats, and it's a variety of different carbon chains and stuff. But anyway, this barrel oil that I submitted was like 60% unsaturated fat, 40% of, you saturated but apparently but i think it's different based upon the bear's diet sure there's a lot of hand lotion natural hand lotion in that bear meat well so so they they analyze this bear oil and there are species of lipids like if you have any jar of oil that there is animal fat or

like olive oil there there are multiple if not hundreds of species of lipids that make up that oil. And this lab person, she said the most surprising thing about the barrel oil was that it had, oh my gosh, it slipped my mind what it's got, seramides. The barrel oil is 3% seramides, which if you go to a drugstore and look for skin lotion, it'll say seramides, because seramides are a species of lipid that is like 40% of your skin. skin and so anyway but pork fat didn't have nothing else that she had ever seen had seramides in it but very little off topic but what do you mean and it's for my book yannis yonis is one what book is constantly wants me to talk about my book that's coming out a year

and a half be ready very good book what's it called i read the first half called american bear very good book wow first half is could go to shit after that how this works claim get this guy talking about it. You're going to put a big old chapter in there about that grease I gave you? Probably. It'll be the apple. I'll put it in the front.

I'll be like, my dear friend, Steve Bernal. How much time do you spend on Bear Fat in this book? I don't want to give it all away, but... You're not going to... I'm telling you, you're not giving anything away. Give them a taste. Man, it's...

Let me just say the opening of the book will be unlike any book you've ever read, probably. Because it opens with the discussion of bear grease. It wasn't written before. Yeah. And we do have right now in the structure of full chapter on me going to Atlanta. I went to Emory Labs in Atlanta and saw the machine, the most technical lipid analysis machine in the world. We did novel research on bear grease, never before.

They want me to publish, and they want me to somehow be involved in a published article about it. Well. And I was like... That would be great. Let's do it. I'm getting a little jealous. There you go. 18 months out.

Yeah. Where are we on our walkthrough? Have we gotten to your lettuce wrap yet? No. No. No. Let's tackle the lettuce wrap. Yeah.

And then we'll tackle the salad. Let's just talk vegetables first. So the lettuce is a hydroponically or aquaponically grown butter leaf lettuce. Actually, the company owned by another friend of mine. And then right outside of Austin. So we get these super fresh, really beautiful. You will notice a little bit of lime on there. That is a South Texas organically grown line from G&S orchards down near Carrizo Springs.

We've got fresh herbs because we are in season for things like mint and cilantro. Some red cabbage and radish is also in season. But then the, you know, the real star of the show there is the ground nilghai. And these are coming from that band along the Texas coast south of Kingsville all the way to the border where the Ataria is, and then kind of extends over to the west to Falferius and a little bit farther, but then where the Nilgai range. And so we get in a lot of Nilgai. I like Nilgai a lot, doesn't hit corn feeders, has a really nice, very natural diet. They're invasive. They're very, very sustainable. And these are harvest from helicopters,

one shot, sniper shot from a helicopter, broken arrow ranch out of Ingram, Texas, and then they have inspectors there. They'll do 80 in a day, and they have these trailers set up, and they process them all, take them back there, age them, cut them, and distribute them. Where do they hit that thing from the helicopter?

Head shots only. They hit them in the head from the helicopter. Wow. Buckshot? No, these are rifles. No kidding. This guy's got to be good, man. They're doing 80 a day,

and they're doing a lot of days, you're not the only one serving nilghai. That is correct. They don't do 80 a day. They do a batch of 80. Correct. Not 365, but when they go down there,

they will do 80. Yeah. No, they distribute, and for the longest time, Broken Arrow has been the preeminent source of like real wild game like this, Farrell Hogg and Nil guy.

And then they have a lot of other stuff like Axis, Red Stag, things like that. but they've really like led the industry in that field harvesting technique. They're very, very good at it. Their distribution is amazing. Their customer service, great people. That's got to be some high overhead for them, man.

You get a helicopter involved in something. Yeah. Things start getting expensive. Yeah. And then all the people on the ground, you know, trailers and, you know, inspectors that have to go with them. And they're shipping overstate lines. So they're USDA.

They have to have a USDA inspector with them. so it is quite an operation but they do it so well i mean and i think arguably this is some of the best meat that you can possibly purchase because uh it is harvested in this way and then immediately treated in the field uh you know they have this shocking technique where they hook them up and they zap them i know about that yeah and to kind of speed them through rigor mortis what steve thinks about that and and then they're they're getting them skin gutted in chilled and distributed and I just I think they do a wonderful job we had a meat scientist it was delicious per due I'd like to get him back on it's been long enough now oh yeah he had

quite a lot to say about the shocking there is a I'll have to revisit the podcast he had quite a lot to say about it there is a very specific moment when that needs to occur okay it is not a later in the day thing. Yeah, I don't think that, I don't know the end's announcement, but I do know what it's called, and I love this, the tender buck electro-stimulator.

We, let's move to the next salad. This is just a salad. I wanted to throw a salad out there. We've got some romaine and watermelon radishes and herbs and a vinaigret. There's probably some egg in there. It's very good.

I don't know if it's as exciting as the other topics, Yeah. So, I mean, all of it. And that'll change. What goes into that salad will change. You know, the dressing and all these things will change. What is the dressing? This is a onion dressing.

So it's like a charred onion. We grill them and then puree that up with some egg yolk and olive oil. Oh, we didn't talk about eggs. Who you get your eggs from? We get eggs from two different sources right now, one of which we've been using since we were at the farmer's market together. Like we both sold at the farmer's market and this would be 2006 through 2012. His name is Chris

and he runs an amazing operation. He just has very, very good eggs. That's what the only thing he does. Okay. Is raised chickens for eggs. And then we also get, we sell a few eggs retail and that's from another farm out in the hill country called Hat and Heart.

And that is also another fantastic egg. that's the egg I eat at home because they send them in 12-back cartons. And so that's the ones that I steal from the restaurant to take home. How many jobs do you create here at Dai Duay? We probably got around 40. That's great, man. Yeah, between front-of-house staff and everybody in the kitchen. And so, yeah.

This got to be the fun. If you were in the food business, this has got to be the most educational, funnest place to work. If it's your thing, you know, if you want more refinements, and in truffles and different ingredients. And, you know, you might find a home somewhere else. But this is very refined. This is like way, that's just like how, that's just, it's a demonstration of buying power.

It's not a, it's, some of that's a demonstration of buying power. It's not a demonstration of creativity and elbow grease. Well, I appreciate that. I can only say that because there are people that sometimes that will come here and they're like, this is not what I'm looking for. I want, I want to go to this place where. We played things, and it's a little fancier. We use some tweezers and this.

Yeah, I get that. And that's fine. You know, I mean, everybody's got their place. We have a wonderful crew here. You know, it's just, it's so much fun to come in here because everybody, they get into it. You know, we try to educate them as much as possible about what these things are. And, you know, like, pull the curtains back and let them see and just and understand how important it is to support, you know, Lonsito or the, you know, the supposed erratic of Audat or why we use beets or why this olive oil is so valuable and all these things.

So we try to really, you know, inculcate that in them so that they understand what they're doing. Yeah. When you come down for your Alladad Hunt, Randall, you might want to incorporate stopping by here and doing a little beat about eating Al-Dad. I've been thinking about how to suggest that myself in a way that didn't seem self-serving. Like you're trying to take advantage of them? So I appreciate you saying that. I'll go ahead and improve that right now. Can I have a concluter?

Yeah, I was about ready to do one. Go ahead, let it rip. I've got two. I'll make them very short and sweet. One, every time I eat here, I'm very inspired. It's very inspirational when I eat here. I'm like, I need to go home and do a better job and, like, put more effort into cooking at home. Because even though it is, like, there's a lot of stuff going on there.

I don't need to get that. I don't even want to call it fancy. You're just trying to not call your food fancy. So now I don't want to use that word, but like, I need to do a better job. Number two, I feel like what you do as a restaurant tour, you're making the world a better place. Oh, man, that's very kind. You really are. Like, I'm almost emotional about it.

Like, the whole thing that you just explained, it's only making everybody around you and you're involved with. Yeah. It's better because of what you're doing here. Thank you. So appreciate it. Very cool. Yeah, man. I get a lot of pride out of being your friend.

um i love the stuff you do the way you carry yourself the way you treat people around you i love this restaurant i think people should come and check it out man it's like you've created something of a lot of beauty and also you just play by your own rules you know what i mean like like you didn't you just did things the way you can just tell that you just did things the way that made sense to you and when someone's like oh it doesn't work that way you can't do it that way you just like oh figure it out see what i can do true and land it in a cool spot man oh thank you so when you come to austin you guys can feel free to say whatever you want but i always tell people whenever i talk someone that's coming to austin i'm like you got to go to die duet man that's what i've

heard about forever and from everybody that's come down here says if you get the chance to go you got to go or if you ever down there just regardless if it's work or vacation you got to go and it has me to do some more stuff with with the game at home to do some different things you know we get you get in a rut and I don't guess it's a rut because I like the way the things that I cook the way that I do but there's so much more potential to make it different I like it and this is thank you Jesse it's a great oh yeah thank you for being yeah I mean it's everything I tasted was exceptional but um you know oftentimes feels like a vision is sort of tacked on to a to a restaurant and this there's like a very honest there's like a there's indeed this is like a very clear

honest concept that carries through everything with great clarity and um it's so good Awesome. My other concluder after Clay is how do we decide

who gets the I've been watching that's like I've been watching now I'm going to get more serious about eating

in a minute I've been trying to steal a man what these guys said I cannot add anything to it

but just I just want to say the food is incredibly good thank you it's incredibly

good and you're you're such a generous person so thank you Jesse it's the community

it's a community and it's really good. Ladies and gentlemen, Jesse Griffith. Now tell me who made this pickle. The heart of the season is here. The heart of the season is here when comfort zones disappear. The right layer change.

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