00:00:00 Speaker 1: If you listen to the Meat Eater podcast, and obviously you do because here you are listening to it, or watch the show Meat Eater on Netflix, you have seen and kind of met our buddy, Remy Warren, who is I'll say, I've said it before and I'll say it again, one of the most just skilled, accomplished hunters I've ever had the pleasure of spending time out in the woods with. We are launching a new podcast with Remy called Cutting the Distance and then Cutting the Distance is not like a conversational show. Cutting the Distance is an educational show where Remy walks you through situations and scenarios from his life and gives you like actionable, usable information, instruction, intelligence, inspiration about how to become a better hunter. And there's no one more suited to give you this information than Remy Warren. So go find it Cutting the Distance the same place as you can find the Meat Eater podcast. Give it a listen, give it a review. Caughting the Distance with Remy Warren. This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, vote bitten in my case underwear listening hunt podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on x Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on x uh, Jesse Griffith, are you interested? Um? You okay? If we talked about death, death, dead folks for mint, Sure you don't mind starting out that way. That's it's nice, That's that's a good icebreaker. We're sitting here in your restaurant. Tell people where we are. We're in Uh, We're on the east side of Austin, Texas at die Do a uh early in the morning, just about to get ready for life service some to talk about death. Tell people about the name die is Uh. How you kind of regret it? Yeah, it's it's part of a spot on part of an Italian proverb that means from the two kingdoms of nature, choose food with caret. I saw it in a book along. That's good, though, man, just name the damn restaurant that the whole well in Italian, I should have just done the whole thing and insisted that everybody always say the entire name every time. Um No, I just doesn't done it In English? Oh tell me the title again from the two kingdoms of nature choose food with care. Oh it's good. Yeah, they mean plant animal that See that's contentious because that's what I would take it to me nowadays, could be land at sea, could be planting animal. It wasn't specified in the book. I mean, I like, I kind of like that ambiguity too. Um. When you stumble across that, oh years ago, you look real Italian? Yeah, thanks, yeah, yeah, it doesn't look remote with your town. No, no, it looked like a Scotsman, Welsh, Welsh, Welsh. Yeah, a Welshman, a Welshman. Yeah. To be clear, I'm a Welshman that owns a restaurant with an Italian name that serves mostly Mexican in German, the old Mexican German. Yeah yeah, um so yeah that we came across that, and I really liked it and settled on that for the name of that hypothetical restaurant that I wanted to always own, and then I stuck to it. So we got corrected. Sure, everybody does politely here in the capital city of Texas. We mentioned to a press officer that isn't it who squared what we calling we're calling it? Died way. I guess, and he said, you say it again, I do a yeah, that slight. It was a slight correction. It's a slight correction. You pronounced it like my mom does to this day. Your mom doesn't know how to say it. She's gonna listen to this, so I'm gonna say she just says it her own way. Okate. On the sobering stories I was gonna tell you about we uh, just to bring up speed. I know you're busy, man. We did a podcast recently with our good friend Pat Durkin, and Pat Durkin is Ah. He's a great admirer of obituaries of hunters, and he was telling us about this obituary he read where a guy had died hunting and in the obituary that said that it was and otherwise successful hunt. But this guy wrote it was It's kind of this crazy story where he said his dad like this guy. He's in New York and he said his dad had always joked that if he can never get a ten point buck, he he knows he'll die like his death prophecy, he'll shoot a ten point and die. So one day he's hunting and shoots a buck and walks over there and counts and there's ten points and he stands up and he thinks himself, oh boy, now we'll come. But nothing happens, and he lives. And his kids an always joke when he made his prophecy that he would kill a ten point buck and die, his kids always joke that we're gonna drag the buck out of the woods and then we'll come back and get you. Eight years goes by from when he gets a ten point and they're all out hunt in the woods. Their mothers there, kids are there, dad's there, and they're checking in with dad on the radio. The dad shoots, um, they check in, you've got one. They're gonna check back in a little bit. And eventually keeps trying to get his dad on the radio, but he can't raise him. So eventually walks over and finds his dad land sitting against a tree, stone dead, just like heart attack just killed him. Calls the mom and brother, everybody comes over the tree and they have a big cry. Then they're trying to figure out because he did shoot, and they go fine, where he had shot a buck and it was an eight point buck and he shot at eight point buck, had dragged it a little ways had gutted it most not been feeling good, went back and sat against his tree and expired. And they called the medical you know, called and everything, and they came out and they were going to load him on this little gurney thing to carry him out of there. And the kids grabbed the buck and they said they had the buck back to the truck before Dad was it's a good story. It's a good story. You like that one. He left out that little detail about where he drug it from. You do that purposely? No, tell me about how it was on the neighbor. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, I read the email. He dropped it off the neighbors, remember that far So I sort of in my mind I was kept thinking like, it wasn't really like shooting the buck that did it. It was the fact that he had like shot on the neighbors just slightly. Because remember he goes, the sun goes and kind of backtracks because I think he ends up finding the heart and the liver maybe. Um. Anyways, he backtracks and he goes, oh, he shot it just onto the neighbors. Oh so you're confusing Another story. The same dude told I'm gonna come back to that story because it tells the character of his old man. Well, go ahead, No, I know, but that was a whole other story, right about the hearts and the livers. It was, But he still backtracks his dad's dying buck to the neighbors. And so I felt like it wasn't really necessarily just the killing the buck. It was the fact that, like it was on the neighbors and all of a sudden, there had to be this great this excitement and you know, exertion of quickly dragging it, you know, under over offence and you know, if you're not used to doing that kind of stuff. Back to head down the hill and find a blood trail. I take it to where I can see where the deer had fallen, about forty yards onto the neighboring property. I see where the buck had been dragged guts in up a steep hill to our side of the property line. There it was gutted. Here's the thing that speaks to the character of his old man. He says, he's out hunting with his old man and they're hunting just north of Syracuse and uh throughout the woods. He's twelve, even though he wasn't supposed to be hunting at that age, and he here's a shot behind him. His dad's sitting somewhere. He's sitting here, and the kid, the guy that's right in here's a shot, I am behind him and he gets cold and wants to wander around. So he goes back to investigate what happened at the shot and realized the guy had got it a deer um and left the heart and liver, So he takes the heart out of the gut pile and later winds up back at the truck to meet up with his dad, and his dad explains, you know, I found some gut pile and the guy only took the heart, so I grabbed the liver. That's a good one. Uh. The other dude rolled in. Let me check this one real quick. Here's not one about guys dying. This kid his uncle's got type one diabetes and dies some complications of type one diabetes, and he had had the lower part of his right leg amputated at the knee down. Did I make clearly this is his kid's uncle. There's a hunter. There's a dude. Okay, there's this mug who's a kid kidd ish his uncle dies. His uncle dies of complications from type one diabetes, and not only that, but in his struggles with the disease, had had his right leg removed from the knee down. He dies a few days before deer opener. They have the wake on the opener, so he can't go out hunting in the morning. Gets through the funeral deal, runs out to go hunting. Here comes a nice buck, shoots the buck, buck falls over, and he comes down and realizes that the buck is missing from the knee down of the leg. That's that's bizarre. I think that he speaks to Yann because Yanni believes in like summoning stuff and whatnot. I also believe it just amazing coincidence. You're comfortable with amazing coincidence? Yeah, we should we get into the corner cross. He thinks it's been started to be taking up all your time here, Jesse, right there, no more stories about death. I got more. But once you're sad, I'll tell you. We'll talk about court. No, I'm gonna tell you the super sad one. It's just like it's it's like it's almost like you shouldn't even bring it up. Well, maybe you shouldn't really you want to hear a quick one where uh, no one dies. But it's an injury. Fine, it's not a bad injury. I was sharing a story about my brother in law. You're familire with barefoot skiing, you skier? How old are you? I'm not a skier. But you remember when people used to water ski a lot before they all start wakeboarding, and you are you familiar with barefoot skiing? No? But if I said, hey, man, we were out barefooting for the weekend, No, I have no idea what you're talking about skiing with no skis, just standing there barefoot. It's not something I ever learned how to do, nor tried. It's no skate, no man water skiing. So like my brother in law used to be into this. He you let you put a wet suit on, and you lay on your back in the water, and you got the rope and the ski handle rope handle in your hands, and you take your bare feet and imagine like you're stretched out feet towards the boat and you take your feet and and you're like holding a rope between your feet and you angle your toes like a little ramp and the boat just there. He goes takes off and you eventually get where you're skimming along the water surface. Then in a dramatic move, you spring up and then you're skiing with no skis, just toes curled up haul and asks, you gotta be going fast that kind of Am I mistaken that you gotta goal? Like, uh, I'm not gonna know that speed or something like that. And people a lot of people ski at twenty five or some them either way, you're holding asked, well, my brother in law I was telling about on this here digital radio program. My brother in law what hits a sunning bluegill and drove the dorsal fin up into his foot and had to have surgically removed. Well, this guy is right. And then they used to have this big high dive. You see where this is going? What fish? Just I feel like you hit a yellow perch? Yeah, hit a yellow perch. Drove the dorsal fin up into his foot. Took him a while to figure out what happened. No, no, not his head, his head. He dove and at first he thought he had just opened up his hand. If I'm bringing up, why don't you bring up the damn stories? You know him so well? I told I just told you. They're all sitting in a stack. I'll print it out, highlighted and ship on my desk. But I didn't know that we were doing this thing at You're like Joe, story about tell the damn stories hits in his head. That's why he calls his His email is called the Bluegill Top fin story Topper. Maybe it's pretty good. It's good, but it's not as good as mine. His isn't as good as mine? Well, yes, because it happened to him. That helps Mine just happened to my brother in law and I wasn't even there. But mine's better. Something about barefoot skiing makes it better that or maybe they had to be surgically removed. This guy's dad, I think just got it out with a pair of pliers or something. You're right needing those players? What else we got? You got one more second? Yeah, let's see if I know this? Next one? You don't. You don't one last one? This is this is gonna be You ready for a touching one? Is it injury or death? No? Just do. Someone wants me to say hi to his kid. Oh yeah, we're saying how I do. A little kid name Mac McDonald mc McDonald mc McDonald nine years old likes to hunt deer. Okay, ready, tell people what you're going to do tonight. I'm going flanner gigging tonight. Talk about that for minutes. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, it's uh, it's probably my favorite outdoor activity if I had to name one, because it's it's um, it's fish hunting. I think, go out and boat. It's got a big bank of lights on the front, and go out right at dark, get there when it's uh as just as the sun is going down, he put the lights out and you start cruising around and about sharing with people what state this occurs in Texas? Yeah, so we're gonna be in the rock Port area. A lot of flowner gigging happens on the middle coast kind of that rock Port, Um, Mexico. What's it's. Yeah, it's on the bay side and so there's it's on the bay side of the Barrier Islands. Uh, and there you you don't do it out in the Gulf per se, but like in the in the base and uh go out there and just cruise around to you see a flounder that's uh kind of buried itself. In the in the sand or in the oyster shell, and you just look for a flounder shape and after a while you get good at spotting it. It's like it's like spotting anything, like a moral or or BlackBerry. You know what. It takes you a minute to that's point. He was just writing some voiceover for a show about slight image and he's he's the moral example. Once you see one and you see more. Yeah, not the other day. The other day I saw one, wham, and then I never find the second one. Man, there's always the second one. Huh. Yeah, we're going on. Well, I mean you it's the same thing. You just you're looking for that shape, um and just some false alarms and sometimes they're really buried in there. But then you have a airboat. Yeah, you're in an airboat. The only the only downside of the whole thing that the only thing that I don't really enjoy is the noise from the air but drives me nuts. Man. Yeah, you wear earpro right. No, it's not that it's just an it's an annoyance. But it's so beautiful with the I mean the clear water and you see all the sea life. You see there's blue crabs and stingrays and redfish and drum and cheep's head and mullet and you know there's certain months that you can't um. I have um, I'm I'm pretty sure the Statute of Limitations is up on that one. So big. I was just fishing down out of rock cord for redfish. Yeah, there's some big mullet down there's some freaking giant mullet. Word to the point where I would see him up ahead and think I was looking at the red fish coming our way. Right. Yeah, that's some big throwing awake and ship, you know. Yeah. Now, I stuck a mullet and we uh and we we filate it and smoked it. It's actually pretty good because most of the that's one of the trash fish Ley'll tell you can't eat. We also start like white mullet. Is that you jumping mullet? Yeah? Yeah, me my brother Danny's when we when we used to backpack in Mexico fishing a lot. We would catch them just to eat them, cook him out of campfire, you know. Yeah, they're fine. Yeah, they're fine, and guard too well. When we've gigged up in the way into the Colorado River, from the bay up into the river and you'll see a lot of car up there. And we've gig does as well. I want to talk more about the flounder gig. And but why why why do some guys use why don't people use bow rigs? Bow fishing rigs? You can't absolutely as a gig more effective, I think it is. I mean, the guys probably prefer that. I mean, that's just been less time chasing arrows and ship you know what they do. And because when you're moving in an airboat, what we found with bows is you shoot and then you immediately go over the and then your things, your arrows stuck in the bottom of the damn lake. The boats fifty yards down on the are not that far boat, you know. Yeah, moving pretty slow in this boat. And uh he he carries the captain carries a gig with him up in the front of the boat. When he sees a flynder, he jabs it into the ground and stops that boat. And that's real quick and just I mean you just come to an immediate and harsh stop and then he points and you gig. Sometimes you can't see it and he's just like it's right there, like where and uh, I mean, and then you and it'll just like it'll it'll just appear, um, and then you dig it and you have like a real kind of graceful swooping motion to get it back into the boat, into a big metal box, and then get the gig off and then keep going after him. And it's just it's a lot of fun. I mean, it's a limit of five fish, five for a Person's a big one is I mean, I think a big flounder is over sixteen inches. I mean people might disagree with that, but that's I mean, that's a sizeable flounder. Um, A really big one is you know, three or four pounds pushing, you know, twenty plus and shoes. And the biggest one I've ever gig was eight and a half pounds and it was I don't remember the length, but probably in the twenties six and strange was a monster. Are you reluctant to share the name of the guy you like to go with for fear that he will become overbooked and you will have a hard time getting a slot? Generous? Are you so generous? I'm generous, but I've named him before, and I'm not telling you I don't. I don't want you to name because I might go with him. I getting mixed. I'm getting mixed signals here. You know, Ni is the fairest person I know. Ask Johnny what about this? I have a suggestion, Johnny is the most reasonable, fairest person I've ever met. What if? Wow? Thanks, we go flounder gigging with said captain, and then after that you released the name of this captain. I like, you mean like we as in the people here at this table, I mean you and your daughter tonight. Yeah, it's being my daughter to night. He's not gonna he's not gonna like, nothing's gonna change the next tonight. He's not going to cancel you to take some other hoser. He wants to know that I'm thinking into the future. I am. I mean, but he's he has booked solid and he also does late trip. It sounds like he couldn't be any busier anyway. Yeah, but what are you going to do he catches wind? What if he catches wind that you did not were presented with an opportunity to plug his business and declined. I'm I'm not only getting mixed signals now, I'm starting to feel trapped. Well, what I would do is I would say this. I would say, uh, you should say this. Say over the years of ficiing with this gentleman, I've developed a deep love for him and concerned for him. And since I can't vet and control the kind of riff raff that might come and book a trip with him and potentially put him in a compromising situation, I wouldn't want to do this because what I'd rather do is spend time hand picking alliance that I send his way who I know are good tippers. Uh, he'll if he heard that, he'd know as full as ship. So you're not gonna stay. You're not just gonna say that. Let's not name him because I want to go. It's just about name because the name of his charter service is so good. It's a Captain David Duke Nick with surrender at sunrise out of Ransa's past. Surrender at sunrise. Surrender at sunrise. I don't think you should have done that. Man, Come on, I think it's Jesse. He was just telling me, Man, the guy only takes off, only doesn't work in November, and that's because gig and seasons closed. He works every other day of the year. So and he takes two trips to night. He'll take a late trip tonight, Like when we get back. He has people on call and they'll show up at midnight and go back out and he'll take two trips. He's a mania. But here's the deal. When you me go down there to go do this, which we're gonna do. Um, is he gonna give whoever he's got lined up? Is he gonna boot him? No? To make room for us? Well, I mean, I actually I can't speak for him, but I doubt that we're gonna have to. Let's just we're gonna have to book a little further in advance now, even though he's gonna know what, we sent a ton of business his way. It's the right thing to do. Johnny was right. Uh, he always gets his limit. Yes, he doesn't like to go home. No, No, he doesn't like to go surrender at sunrise. Yeah, he doesn't like to go home until he gets his limit. And he's adamant about it, and he's he is good at it. I call him the human egret, a man fish in the mud. Uh. You know, fet to your left and you're standing to his left. It's it's uncanny and that big flounder that I that I gigged. I'm not gonna say I saw. He said it was so buried in the saying that all he saw. And this was in a this was in December during the cold front, and we were in deep water, probably two to three ft of water, um, and it was windy, and he said all he could see where the eyes, and he could tell from how far apart those eyes where that was a big flounder. But he he told me that, I mean, so it's it's it's real. He said, that is a big flounder. And I looked down. All I saw was white sand and waves. And he just grabbed the gig and said, push down here. I mean, my my big trophy. Flownder was more of just like me um applying gravity to a pole. And that's what we laugh about with guides and clients. It's like there's a lot of there's a lot of guide clients situations where the guy would have honestly done a lot better, had the client like, oh my god, you're adding nothing. Yeah, you're detracting. It was like a contracting joe. Remember someone said once is Um in describing a bad employee, he said, having that guy here is losing too good. Guys remember that one. Oh, I'm sure that probably comes up right now. And then the kitchen so that, um, did you feel you were described that way when you went back when you were Long tang Yanni used to be a man. No, No, I feel like I did a good job. He was hustle, he was a kitchen man and he uh they called him long tang Yanni because he had apparently long tongues that he used while working the grill. Well, that's you're working smarter. Why would you get your hands all hot and burned? You know, He's like, yeah, he's he's a longer tongue. I mean, it's not like ridiculously long, just like you're you're I'm trying to say, what's the standard. It's probably like an eight inch tongue, right, maybe twelve, and you're probably talking about this eighteen inch yea long yeah, Because that grill was deep and it was tall. It had like the slider is underneath it, you know, so even with my height, you know, when you'd reach over it, you know, I had no hair on, not that I have much now on the on the side of my forearm, but I had none on my forearms, and then yeah, yeah, nothing to prove just by burning your arms. You ever think about just being just being in the kitchen here and seeing all this kitchen activity in the course of three years. I came in there not knowing almost anything. I had some kitchen experience, but really almost none. And we started off at how do you say garment, Yeah, salad station, basically running the fryer, doing salads, maybe a little bit of dessert work, and then work through. We had like a fake wood fired pizza of him, so there was fake there's logs burning, but there's like a big gas element in the back, you know, shooting. Are you kidding me? No? I mean I think that's pretty common really. Um. And then uh, we did all kinds of apps out of that station, and then you come back over to the main line, and uh, I think I went to Saute and then I ended up at Grill, and then maybe for a little bit I did some expediting right there. At the end, we're basically you're you're just kind of helping everybody out, and you're just calling tickets and and just making sure that all the food that is on one ticket is going to be coming out together. Like you look down the state saute guy and you're like, hey, dude, I need you know to Linguini's in the Capellini and Orechietti coming up in two. And then you look at the grill guy and you're like, you've got those two hanger steaks coming right yep. And then on down the line and just make sure that it's all coming together and you're working with the front of the house expeditor that's then kind of doing that and making sure that their waiter is there to then move that food out to work. So as a true restaurant man, Jesse, when you hear him saying that, you are you thinking like this guy knows what's up that spot on spot. Absolutely. I mean that's a bigger restaurant than ours. I mean that's he's got an inside Expo and outside Expo. And you on a really busy night we sat I think just over a hundred and I think on a really busy night we could we would really busy we do fo. Yeah, you need you need all that that, or there's people organizing to get food out on either side of it. Are you getting nostalgic sitting in a restaurant here and like the clanking and clacking and whatnot when we we gotta say a little tour last night through the restaurant. When we walked down the line, I said, just automatically went behind some people and just said behind you. You know, at that moment I felt a little nostalgia. You did. Yeah, one day I was I think I might have talked about this, But one day I was with Yahni. We were pulling out of a coffee shop and a guy drives by, pulling a drift boat, like a youngster pulling a drift boat, and it was clearly like a guide headed out in the morning. And yeah, I was like, oh, here he is, you know, heading out for a day of the client. And I asked, Johnny, I said, does that make you nostalgic for your guiding days? Thinking that it did, He's like, no, taking some other asshole out for flowing the same stretcher ever you've floated for the last two days. I mustn't feeling a little better that morning. So the guide the human egret talk about I want you to cover the regulatory structure, and I want you to talk about how he's also a commercial gigger. And what that all means. Yeah, I mean flounder is a pretty interesting topic, I think too, because there was a real problem with their populations. A few years ago, Parks and Wildlife went in and implemented a November moratorium on gigging um during their main spawning run um and run. That implies a movement. Yeah, they they supposedly run from the shallow bay and a flounder I mean, if you if you're familiar with this, this is the Southern Flownder, the Southern Flownder, if you're familiar with, I mean the way it's it's structured, it's it's a very flat fish. It can I've I've gigged him in probably three or four inches of water before. But so they're in really shallow, marshy bays maybe five or six ft deep at the most, and then they run out into the gulf to spawn in really deep water. So why are they vulnerable out spawning in deep water because they go in as far as I know, really deep water and they're hardly ever fished for in the actual bay. Um. You'll hear about people catching them off of jetties and piers a little bit, especially ones that are are a jetty that leads out into the bay. They'll have to run through there to get into the gulf. But they spawn supposedly in very deep water, and they're just not really fished for out there. You know, the vast majority of the fishing happens in the bay for them. But people hit them hard when they're moving them hard in November during the run with Rod and Reel and also with UH with gigging, and they're migrating out right, and they're they're just more active and they're they're in big numbers and you can target them at passes, so like where they're there's water moving out into the gulf, and so there was so they become vulnerable that way. So they closed down gigging and they took the I'm sorry, the recreational limit down to two for rod and reel for the month of November, and then there's a lower limit in the first two weeks of December as well, but gigging opens back up. For those two weeks, we can only gig two flounder. So Captain David offers, he offers discounted trips during that two weeks, and that's a I was gonna say, it's a really good time to go. Anyway, it's a horrible time, right, Yeah, it's a horrible time to go. Yeah, it's windy and cold, and the flounder a really small charges a lot more charges a ton, yeah, charges that December rate. Uh. But it appears that the Parks and Wildlife moratorium has worked. I mean, at least that's from my perspective. You know, I'm not a biologists and I'm not a flounder guide, but the stocks seem to be up there seemed to be a lot more flounder now. Uh so kind of a success story as far as that goes. Um And I think that the the gigging guides down there, they do all right without having November, you know out there. I mean they can also go out and if they have their commercial licenses, they can go and get uh flounder to sell it into the wholesale markets, and they I believe the boat limit is thirty flounder day and they can also gig sheep's head and black drum, and so they go down there and and uh, they'll they filled boats with that and that. You know, we we buy some of that, not necessarily from Captain David, but we buy some gigs flounder here and there, but it goes into fish markets and along the coast. Uh. What do you do with the How do you like to fix the ones you get flounder? My favorite way is to stuff them, scale them. Captain David showed me the best trick. But and this, this is an amazing trick for scaling any fish. Is he uses what's called a curry coming from I was told I was told to ask you about this and had it in my notes. I had in my head. Yeah, he uses a curry comb, which just Miles Nolt. He was telling me to ask you about this, But I said, a curry comb. He's like, not just any curry comb. Huh. I'm not familiar with the varieties. But explained to me what it is because I don't know. Doesn't horse. It's got those jaggedy it's got those jad It looks like a souped up hack saw blade kind of bent four of him stacked on top of each other in a half circle, kind of concentric circles with a handle on it. Um and that that'll take the scales off of a fish with so much speed. It's incredible. And any any fish that scaled like spiral. Yeah, that's the one firl steel horse curry. Yeah yeah, well, Miles Nulty, much as I love him, that's just the regular Joe blow curry comb. He was he thought up some job. Curry comb like an artisn't only made hand craps. So he likes to scale fish with that. Absolutely, it's incredible. Probably a little bit too big to just run that on a hand fish. No, you could do it. No, I've done it. Of those young use your company card. You got to use one of those gloves as cheap like fish cleaning gloves, you know that are kind of like cut gloves. I used just for gripping fish because they you know, any slimy fish or just being able to grip. But if you were using the curry com it's really nice to have that glove in case you miss, because I mean, it's not gonna hurt you, but we will scratch your hand out. So he likes to scale a Southern flounder for well, you asked me how I like him. I don't like to stuff him, but when you scale him, he's they got like little mini MENI scales densely packed. But you don't. I mean you gotta take those off. Always skin them. Oh, we used to catch them. We used to catch them, uh, just fishing the Gulf coast of Florida. We would catch them kind of in a mixed bag with all this off, just casting out in the troughs between the beach and the first sandbar. Just lay bait out there. We'd catch, you know, now and then you catch southern flounder. But I never did anything but skin them. You cut them off in quarters. Oh no, just talk about how you do it. Just scale the fish. I mean, I like, I just I got it. I like to leave the heads on um because when you cut the head off, you expose the tops of the filets too. I think, too much dry heat, And so I just prefer to leave the head on. You pull the gills out. Yeah, gil and got this easiest fish in the world to get. They have just tiny intestinal cavagies. It's for for how big that fish is. It's remarkable how small their digestive system is. Because you just go in there and got him, gill him, scale him, and then you just run your knife along the um, the lateral line which is on the top the kind of the dark side of the dark dark side of fish. And then come in with a file at knife and just run along the rib bones that run. This is a this is a exercize and like manual riding along the rib bones that run, you know, parallel to the cutting surface, almost almost to the fins on either side, and just open up a big pocket in it. I leave the bones in. I know some people will try to will pull the bones out and make it kind of bonus and then just stuff that which uh usually crab, blue crab, and lay it back on there. Lay lay so sorry that you're stuffing between ribs and top fil a or ribs. I got an idea for the listeners. For the listeners which put your hands together, or they could buy my book and look at the pictures. Let's do that. There you go, plug your book. Man. Yeah, it's the everything I just described. I just realized, I got I got pretty picture. You've already written it out with captions. Yeah, bok a field it came out in two thousand and twelve, came out a long time ago. Uh and uh A Field a chef's guide to uh Preparing and cooking wild game and fish and so flounder is covered along with blue crab and and uh to be cleared. Captain David is mentioned by name in that book as well. Okay, so there you go. Um but yeah, and there's pictures of him, but looking like you are. You stuff in the belly side to when the top side and then you just leave it in any oil a pant so it doesn't stick to the pan. Oil the fish, season it and stuff it with you know, just tons of butter. I like to put fresh herbs in there in the time, crab meat Bay, all the crab meat you can afford or catch and uh, and then just roast it in a hot oven. It's incredible, or filet it and you get the four filets off of it. And uh, I mean fried. I'm sorry, but you know, when if you ask me what the pinnacle for most fish, like the best recipe is gonna be fried. I'm sorry, it's just it doesn't apogize. Yeah, I love fried fish with a passion. And it's like, I'm hardly ever inspired to you, like, I'm not gonna fry that, dude. I'm so like. One of the things that just like pains me about the world is this sort of idea that that there's something sort of wrong or that needs to be apologized about in certain circles. About frying fish, Uh, tell us about the your breading, because I think that's you know, it varies a lot. It's gonna depend on the fish. Now are you moving on to frying? Oh? Well? Can I ask him one last quick? Do you think it would work to take your strategy? Have you handled hell abit much? I'm sure you have to arrest that man. Yes, I have. It's been it's been years. Could you take a ten pound halib it, say, and do some big, super dramatic version or would you never get that thing to roast throughly? You can? In fact, it's been done. There's a really beautiful cookbook by Francis Maman called Moman on Fire and he stuffs uh all of it, probably about a ten pound halibut with I believe it's peppers and onions cuts the same way you're talking about. Absolutely, then wires it shut and then roasted over a fire. So I mean, yeah, it's like phenomenal preparation. You could you could completely do that, and you should. But on your stuff, flounder, you're probably gonna end up eating the scaled skin. Yeah right, we're on that a little sticky, but I mean I like that. Yeah, it's a good way of describing it. Yeah, it's sticky, it's like yeah, a little bit thicker. Yeah, it's it doesn't really get crispy um. But I'd like to leave it on as an insulation. And I like the way it tastes, and I like, you know, I like chicken feet and things like that a lot, So like that. Sticky textures is fine for me. You like sticky bones, Yes, that's that's different, a little bit different. But on the pound halib it, you probably wouldn't be chewing through that skin. I'm guessing. I'm not sure you know what you can do with that skin, and I've done it. I stole this from Jack Peppen jes Pepine because he does it with some other fish. But Jack pepping hes he like makes little crispies. So you take the halbut skin and just cut it and you start to do a flounder skin. Basically you're making Uh that's the word I'm looking for. Man. No, there's like a there's like a snack product that I'm trying to think of. It's the dimensions. No, I'm trying to get the dimension of the cut quarter inch wide strips two three inches long. You can see. Yeah, you can season them. You can season them and fry them and put them on salads. Uh, there's a there's a little strip of fried fish. Uh No, no, I'm thinking it's like it comes in a container that comes in a container like uh is it? It's not like shoestring fries. No, it doesn't matter, but it's nicely to do with the skin. Like you know, if you if you, let's say you broil a salmon file a on the skin and a lot of people when they go to serve themselves they just sort of remove their piece of fish and leave the skin. And so when it's all done, you got a piece of foil or whatever with the whole damn skin from a broiled fish stuck to it. You can take that off, put it on your cutting board and just cut it into quarter inch strips and then cut those down to two three inches or whatever and just throw them in hot season them, salt them and just throwing hot oil and they curl up and turn into a little chip. That's a pretty good little chip. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. I mean, like kind of pig would be a cheacher owner or crackling. Yeah, exactly, but you don't understand. You understand everything I'm saying except this, there's a snack product that is the dimensions of what I'm talking about. Nothing to do with the taste or appearance. It doesn't matter if I don't know if it is actually sold as like a salad garnish, or if it's just sold as like a potato child be kind of a thing. Yeah, you don't also be exactly that long. It's got like a little wave to it. I can't even tell you what the hell it's made out of. It doesn't matter potato or corn. I described it so clearly. Yeah we get it. I got it. Okay, ask your stuff about Bryan Breading. I mean it's gonna it's really gonna depend on the fish like catfish, um, a lot of fresh water fish, like crappy white mass and specifically catfish. I do a mustard batter where I'll take a batter well, I mean not about it. Well, it's it's mustard and buttermilk and dip it in that and then dredge that in corn meal. So technically I guess it would be a dredge. Okay, so home and back up. No here here, I am. I got a dead catfish laying here. Let's just get serre is there's a dead catfish? Yeah, flopping around still not even dead. Come on, we can't even skip can't skip ahead to I got a catfish flay? Here we go. Do you trim them nice? I will. If it's big, I'll take a fat and bloodline out of it. But if it's small, I won't. And I love the bellies. Like if catfish is bigger than two or three pounds, I do what I call like a three filet method, where I pull off the filets off the sides and I flip it over and I take basically everything from the throat to the to the anus skin that on both sides because it's got that crazy silver on the top side. Um. And then you'll get two really nice big chunks off of that that I think I have the best texture on them. And if you if you get a flathead, absolutely like chicken tender sex of fish flathead belts, it's amazing. I think Parker described as white gold, not not like chicken tenders had sex of fish. It's white gold well either either way you should. You should attempt it. And uh so catfish, Yeah, so mustard, buttermilk, hot sauce if you want, and then straight in to find corn meal from there. And then because you're making a little like, uh, you're combining your hot sauce. Yeah, like I'm a child. Okay, Um, the hot sauce and about equal parts buttermilk and yellow mustard, um in a bag in a bowl whatever, and you take your prepared mustard not powder correct? Yeah? Um? And I like catfish too, I cut into strips. I don't like to do whole filets. I like a lot of a lot of crispy, like a thin layer of crispy breading to them. But I don't I don't prefer to do whole filet's. Cut that into strips, go into the buttermilk, mustard potentially hot sauce mixture. And what's your hot sauce? You like the one that we make here, also the mustard we make here. But um, you I don't know, you could use anything you want. I think, what is that crystal that Louisiana That that hot sauce out of Louisiana is really good? What do you think about Frank's yeah, fine, Frank's. It's good on chicken wings. But I'm saying, like, is that. Let's say a guy was just down at at at the local rural grocery store, Frank's and Frenches all the way. Yeah, Frank's and Frenching. I'm trying to cover for that feller. Yeah, And and he's like, ship, they don't have butter milk here, Just just use some milk, man, Just like, use some milk to thin it out. You're fine. Just he got some Francs, some Frenches, his kids milk. Yeah, equal parts. Yeah, season your fish with a little bit of salt, toss him into the mustard buttermilk mix, and then you it's really imperative that you have fine corn meal because because coarse corn meal is not gonna stick very well, it's gonna come off. And that's that's let me let me tell you the real problem with coarse corn meal that turns black and is bitter. Yes, yes, yeah, it's it's up being like you get little pieces in your mouth. Yeah, it's good for I guess some corn breads and things like that where you want that texture and you're adding a lot of moisture and fat into it. But no, no good for frying. But you know what also works really well is massa like massa arena, which is dried uh massa that is then turned into a flower and it is by nature very very fine and it's I mean it's it's a corn meal product that's been next to mealized, so it's a slightly different flavor, but it's very good. And sometimes we'll do a mix of fine corn meal and massa. Um. But if you're in a pinch and you're in a place that sells Massa arena and you can't find fine corn meal, get that you're familiar with that brand Red Mill, Yeah, Bob's Red Mill. Yeah, they sell a fine corn Yeah. That's say, if you're in your grocery store and you see like a little they'll kind of always keep it all together. But he's that combany is like the company that has all the crazy flower. Yeah. Yeah. Another one I like to use that used for the squid is uh rice is a nice breading, super light and airy. It compliments that squid nicely. But I still feel like even with them, it's like they always have the course in the medium, but finding that fine ground, I don't know what the deal is I have to I ask and just have them like order in six bags and buy it. When I see it, I buy a bunch. And there's actually there's a there's a grocery store here in town that has very fine corn meal and bulk, and so I go there and bolt and I'd buy big bags of it. And then if I can't find it like that, then I would check around and see who carried that Bob's red mill, because he's got medium man fine yea um, but regular run of the mill corn meal is not great for frying fish. So there we are. We got our little mustard hot sauce. What about this tone I got off you about the batter? Is something wrong with the batter? It's not a big batter, guy, man, all battery and then like like it holds so much oil and then the batter comes off and there you are just like a naked hunk of fish because the batter fell off. I mean, it just makes me feel like I'm at Long John Silver's. But can Long John Silver's you get through all that bad and realize it's not a fish in there. They just they like bad or batter they like get up driving a batter and batter that and then fry that and you open it up and it looks like like a fried pancake. That's just yeah. I like it sometimes. I think I kind of really like fluffy white fish, you know, like what the big old greasy. I think it has to be done right now. I mean about it. When you make a batter, it has to be a little thinner than you than you think it needs to be. It needs to be ice cold before it goes into the fryer. The batter has to be super cold, and the fryer has to be super hot. What's hot in your mind? I would say pushing three, like really hot and cut your piece of fish. Do you think that's really hot? That's my that's my goal to town. Yeah that's hot. Yeah, I mean yeah, because man, make you they're they're nice like perch flats everything like that. Yeah, it's a small I mean it's a smaller you get it's like yeah crispy you open it up, is still like nice on the inside. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get like a minute in the fryer. You can't go. You can't go like wander off and do something else. I mean you're standing there staring at it. Sure, yeah, but I think you have a good batter. And I mean we make ours here with just I mean beer and choose a good flavorful beer, flour and baking powder. And the baking powder makes it expand and it helps with the crunch a lot on too. You gotta fry it hot, and you gotta fry it long enough and then it will you'll get it. I mean, you'll get a good textual experience out of it if it's done just right. But that said, I totally prefer my corn meal. Uh. Sometimes I will bread fish with flour, eggwash and breadcrumbs and do it that way, especially if I'm gonna serve them sauce, like put a sauce on top of the fish, like when I served it, Like one of my favorite dishes is a very cruise on a sauce, so like a tomato, olive, pepper, some chilies, garlic, um cilantro, parsley sauce. And I love to do fried fish that's been breaded and bread crumbs and then it's got that sauce on top of it. It holds up really well when you can use panco or dried bread or whatever you want. But Uh, there was. There's sometimes where I will like what we call standard bread and caceedar of fish or flour egg and then bread crumbs that's good too well, or flour egg, then corn meal because if we're doing like calfish sandwiches, like where it's a big flame because see when you cut it, like if I had had to do it one way, I'd always cut them up small pieces and then cut at that angle. Mhm on a bias. Is that what I'm trying to say, to create edges, right, so they crisp up nice, But when you're doing a whole piece, you have less surface area and so you feel like you're not getting the the amount of breading you deserve because the service areas bigger. So then we're doing like big chunks of catfish to make a sandwich. Then season the flay egg I'm sorry, flour, and then you have some for the egg to stick to, then the corn meal and then fry and then you get a hardy crisp to help because it's such a big piece like a shell. That's a good way of putting it. And then you put some pickles and shipped on that sandwich. Yeah, well we make a little tartars. Yeah, basically chopped up pickles, make them make it like tartar and it but put more pickles on it and tomatoes on it. Had some francs. I'm in the fish sandwiches. I love fish sandwiches a lot. So yeah, yeah, you got my attention. Fried catfish sandwich. When when you're doing your cor meal to fry fish, do you like to put some paprika stuff there to make it look nice? I usually don't. If I anything, I'll put black pepper in there. I do like a good amount of black pepper in the season the flare, season the mix. That's a great question. You season anything that you're gonna fry? This is this is a pet pever mind is your seasoned the thing you're going to fry? You don't season the powder that you're going to then dust onto it. Get some approximation of seasoning on it, Like well, I mean, how much how much if you put a handful of flour into our handful of sault in a couple into a couple of cups of flour, how much salt is going on in the flay? You have no idea? Why don't you just season the damn thing you're gonna fry like it. Yeah, just just put the salt on there and then put the flower on it, and you then you're done. That's it, and that's it's a good way to make me angry. Here. Another fella point out too is too if you do that method where you have your branding seasoned, is that the seasoning is bigger pieces than the flower, right, And so when it's just sitting in a bowl or a bag, it's naturally like the bigger stuff, heavier stuff is kind of going to the bottom. So your earlier filets are getting less seasoning, and then as you get through your breading ship getting stronger and stronger, and salt here and salt here gravity Parker Hall, you want to talk about killing some pigs? Is that a question? But I don't know. Do you ever just yes? Uh? Do you ever just go fish like seasoned and then corn meal into the fryar like that? Simple? No? Never? No, I have trouble making the corn meal stick appropriately. Um, I've seen that. I just think having that little light coating of mustard and that mustard brings acidity and that's just nice. Was fried fried food? You want something to cut that and you're you're just you're starting with a with a little thin layer of acidity, and just it just gives the filet itself a lot more like a spectrum of flavor. I'm having Saturday night fish fry tomorrow night when I'm home, I can tell you I was some fish to fry. I got a lot of you more miles man, we just brought a bunch back from Michigan. Oh yeah, my wife has brought something back from I got bluegills, channels, what else I got? And flats, old flats, but fresh channels and bluegills. Uh. While we're on one huge freaking small mouth. That's a good fish to eat. Yeah, not like his trash. He calls him the large mouth. I don't know. Small mouth is legit eating fish. See, I've never really eaten him until I was in Canada and we were on like her on and started catching his big small mouth and out of state nonresident I could keep I think too a day and uh we're all I was catching was that and pike. And I was blown away by how good a small mouth was. Bike too. I mean they're painting the ask to clean, but they're really good. But also I mean that's cold water. I mean, you can talk about the trashy large mouth, but I think it's just I'm just joking about large I think in Michigan that we're fantastic. Yeah, they we we used to eat them. I mean we we just it was just like you didn't throw them back. But I feel there's a weed we used to have in the lake where I grew up on when we had a lot of large mouths off we had three species of weed seaweed. Uh, you know it's not the sea lake weed, milfoil, which is an invasive a weed that I don't know the name of. My brother and I, who knows the name of every damn thing in the world, he didn't even know the name of it. And we made a note to find the name of it. We still haven't gotten around to it. And the third weed was skunk weed. And skunk weed would be like almost girls, like a carpet, like a grass. Once you get out too deep for the other weeds, there's not enough sun light than there's a skunk weed to grow down there. And when you ate those large mouths, and skunk weed smells like a skulk, unmistakable. And when you eating large mouths. There's some part of me like I can taste when I eat large mouths, I get an aftertaste of skunk weed, even if it hasn't lived around skunk weat. It's like, I don't know if it's like psychosomatic now, but a small mouth it might as well be a walleye. Yeah, I agree with that. Small mouth is good. It's also just titilating to talk about eating large mouth bass in Texas because it's so people get so upset about it. You use that word titilating often. No, Well, I mean I think that favorite words. Using the word titilating to describe eating large mouth bass is like exponentially upsetting to two people that they don't like to eat large Yeah, because they don't like eating large moth bad. They don't like to hear that we don't like that word. Yeah, they don't think. They don't think anybody should use throw around. Yeah. Yeah, It's like when I'm watching the bass Masters, no one says titilating. No, no, no commentators never. I think I might just like publish a recipe like titillating fried bass. What else on fish? Have we covered everything we want to call around fish before we get out of frying. Really interested. Uh, how how do you how would you treat a shrimp shrimp that's gonna make it go to the fryer fried shrimp. Um. Yeah, as far as the breading process, you can I mean batter, not really, I don't prefer about it. I think, uh, breadcrumb like flower egg bread crumb is probably my favorite. Butterfloer egg bread crumb shrump. Yeah. Um. You can also do the mustard butter milk not to be you know, it's like a two trick pony. But that's that's also very good on trump. I like to butterfly them that. I think that extra surface area it's really good fry. I'm super hot man. It's like it looks like you double your yield when you do that. Yeah, I love fried Trump. My daughter also it's a big fried shrimp fan. Do you look down on people who make coconut trimp? Oh, I've had it before. It's fine. Um, I love that stuff. It's good. I mean, yeah, it's it's it's I love coconut though, so yeah, it's kind of cheesy, cheesy. Yeah. I've worked at a in a place on a place called the Idler river Boat. You're ago there South Haven, Michigan. I was in South Haven, but I was spitting distance in South Haven last week. Yeah, I bet that thing is still floating. It's a really cool don't know about barge, Vincent Price you stole in. It wasn't like the nineteen o four World's Trade to Price. Yeah. Do you know what's weird story? Man? There's this guy that uh was up in southeast Alaska and looted a bunch of told him poles long time ago people would go up in the twenties and stuff, and loot told him poles. Um. I remember they like really tried to track down one of these told them poles. They realized was just outright stolen and it want to be in the possession of Vincent Price. Of course mentioned him, but go on, um, I think they We felt like we had a fairly sophisticated menu for South Haven, Michigan at the time, and this was probably like nineties four ish, um and that coconut shrimp man, it was like a top seller. It wasn't an appetized It was like it was an entree that we had there at the time. And we sold the ship out of it. People loved it, so you look down at it? I can tell no, No, I mean, I'm not gonna order it. I'm gonna take just a regular you know, standard dreaded shrimp over that probably, But I mean a little coconut Shrimplet's that some kind of sweet, sour, hot little sauce, some kind of like chunky jelly. Uh, yeah, I get it. I would. I would eat it, absolutely, I'd eat it, and I don't look down on it. I got one more fry question for you. Are you like a peanut oil man? Well, okay, it kind of depends on where I'm at now. For years here we fried everything in pure beef fat, and I am I'm a big fan of, if not all beef fat in the fryer, at least some for flavor and texture. It's like, I can't really describe what what texture that import? Absolutely, frank donuts, we would do them in beef fat. Now. Once that cool. If you get a little bit of that, you know that wax just similar to like what you get off of deer fat. Are you buying that volume of beef fat? Uh? We get it from our beef producer. Just there's no other place for them to sell. It renders that you render it. We render it. It smells amazing, No it doesn't. So you're buying, you're buying rendering it out, and then megan rendering out gallons of be fat. Yeah we still yeah, we still do. And pork fat, but I mean pork fat, beef fat, and then some kind of high temperature oil. Any of those works. Like if I'm how hot can you get be fat? Not that hot? Not not I mean three seventy five is really pushing it. It'll darken it. Yeah. Yeah, So peanut oil I think is is great for frying. Expensive, man, it is expensive. Uh. And then for frying here these days we use a non GMO canola oil, which works pretty well, less expensive. The peanut well, we have to consider peanut allergies. So you know, even if it's just a one person in thousand, it can they can kill them dead. You know, many restaurants won't won't use peanut oil. That's interesting, just the the tenacity of that allergy. What's the when you're using bee fat, Like if someone fills up there deep frier with beef fat. Deep sorry, they fill their deep frier with bee fat and he cook some fish for their buddies and then they put it on a shelf somewhere. It's kind of it's if you fried a lot of fish, it's cash. It's volatile. Yeah, it's just like peanut oil where you can strain it and then store it away and cook more fish next week. Definitely one of the downsides to that. I mean you can strain it and use it a little bit, but a lot of the time for frying fish specifically, I will use a mix of beef fat and at home if I'm trying to be fat, and peanut oil, which I like a lot. And then how hot can you get the bee fat? Pretty much like seventy five because the peanut oil really helps bring that that smoke point up on the bee fat. So it works for a while, right for may your gear change? Yeah, how we were talking last night when we're eating in this restaurant. Um, First off, tell people what we ate last night in this restaurant. Um. Let's see, we had a it's it's beginning of summer, so we were we started off with some tomatoes. We had a tomato salad with avocado with the venison machicado, which is a dried venison. Uh, with access finished and shanks that have been shredded and then dried are salted and dried, and some chilies, mint and cilantro and lime. We had the cork cheese with the grilled mushrooms and bread and a little ginger marmalade. And we had the bread to the mosquite sour dough which is made with ground mesquite flour, sour dough and pecans and served with whipped large domestic pork fat with orange zest in it. Um. I'm trying to remember now. One. Uh, there's some rhubarb and something. I'm sure I don't remember that. Yeah, there was some rue barb and the whip lard. Oh that was with the bread. Yeah, I think you just covered all the apps though. So the parissa, we had the raw the raw axes with the fresh chilies, lime, onion, and cheddar. That's all. It's ground and then kind of mixed up and served with the buttercrackers. And uh. That's that's a real Central Texas dish, right. There is a raw meat. Usually it's beef, but I love it with with venison. Your menu has my favorite sentence of all time on the menu where it says everything is from around here. Talk about that. Well, O our sourcing here and is it's pretty strict. And I think these days you hear a lot about local foods and sustainable and this and that. And we, since we've been in business, which was thirteen years, sourced entirely. I mean, we could say locally, but I'll say within the boundaries of Texas, much of it coming from much much closer than that. So all of our even all ofs allives, olive oil, all the dairy, the butter um, Texas wine to all Texas wine list um, and all the Texas wines are made with Texas grapes, which is an issue here. There's a lot of wineries here that use grapes from somewhere else, which I don't consider to be a Texas wine. M Our beers are all made here. Um. All the meat um, and we're very selective about where we get meat, whether it's domestic or wild. UM. And then seafood comes from the Gulf or some fresh water when we have access to the you know, the very rare wholesale catfish trot liners you know there they don't have websites. You know, it's it's really hard to get ahold of wild caught freshwater fish anymore. There's a few fisheries I think up north and you know where you can still get crappie and walleye and yellow perchons. It's not like that. Um so freshwater fish is tricky, but you know, trimp and blue crab and and goldfish is widely available. And then all of our fruits and vegetables are whatever is in season or whatever we've been able to preserve. And uh so, like we won't have lemons or onions certain times of the year and we just deal with it. But it's fun. It's a really fun way to ride them innu and a really fun way to serve food. And it just makes it simple. And we uh talked about this before, but it's confusing to people when you say that you serve wild game because people know that, for the most part, you can't sell wild game. But Texas has so many feral has so many non natives. Yeah, so talk about like the path of how a deer would wind up here in this restaurant and access deer or um guy or whatever. Yeah, and I think you know, I mean to speak a little more to that, is that these are invasives, and I think that these are great things to eat as when whenever you eat a Ferrell hogg er and access, you're not you're not contributing at all to anything that had to be fenced in or have a vet bill or anything like that, or or be fed corn or anything like that. It's just you're you're just using something that's that's detrimental to our environment or you know, our region right here. And so the way we get the hogs, I'll start with those is they have to be trapped live and then they're brought into our processor live. An inspector sees them, sees that they're healthy, they're killed, he does another inspection liver, kidney um inside of the rib cage, the membrane there, he looks for spotting things like that. And at that point, uh, they get a blue stamp and their stayed inspected. And so at that point they are just a swine carcass and we can buy that and then sell it and so we get uh three or four hundred hogs equivalent of about three or four hundred hogs a year between the two restaurants. Let let me stop you on adamant. Yeah, you remember the name of the episode we did where we hung out with the Texas hog trapper. He does commercial hog trapping the podcast or the TV show Lone Star Pork. This is the title. It's on Netflix. Let me check this, Yeah, just to see that process of trapping hogs. We ate all of ours, but he sells them to go on. So that's how that's a hogs path to the restaurant. And you buy it. When you buy it, uh, give me a ballpark, like on the carcass if someone wants to buy a wild pig meat, what's the what's the value that stuff? It's expensive? I mean you're paying the same rate that we pay for heritage hogs, like really well raised bargain basement ship. I wish it was, I really do. And and ironic that it's not that somebody goes up in a helicopter kills sixty and lets them lay in a field, and then we're paying a premium price for the ones that have entered the food system. But I get it. I mean there's people got you know, they got gas money to get out there and check the traps and and do all that. So there's a there's a pretty inefficient system out there to get these hogs out. But I mean, one of my goals is to like come up with a more vertically integrated system where we can you know, trap pigs, process pigs, and turn them into food that's more readily available to people. And he could feed a lot of people with the three million hogs that we have here in Texas, especially since we're supposed to kill two million o from every year to keep their population static, of which we're not doing um And so I think there'd be there's a there's a lot of conversations that can happen about that. The deer um that that's really cool, and that there was a very a pioneering company called Broken Arrow Ranch and they started years ago by taking an inspector with them and they had two shooters shooting suppressed rifles. I believe now they do most of their shooting at night, and they have a refrigerated trailer with the guy that follows them, and they go out into the field and shoot these animals inspectors right there. They do this crazy electro stimulation where they basically hook him up to a car battery. I've got one of those machines. Man ever opened it bleeds them out really quick, and then the inspectors there for the whole processing and then they chill it down. They have X amount of time to get it back to their their big processing hub outside of Kerville, which is west of here, and uh, and then it's sold all over the country from there. And there's another business now and the shooting no guy, the shoot access. There's also a psycha follow any of the any of the invasive, any of the exotic species. No white tail. To be clear. I mean sometimes some of you will come in here and be like, you can't serve venison. That's illegal, and I'm like, it's not a white tail, and it's perfectly legal. Trust me. I'm like, I haven't been flying under the radar for for their teen years on this one. You know, there's I'm sure in game Woard would love to nail my ass if if I was selling white tail, then I am not, sir. So it's uh, it is all exotics and invasives, which is uh, which is great. I think, you know, I think it's like you, what you're also getting is a really natural protein. I mean, these animals are out there living and on these big properties and in the case of Access and nil Guy. These are mostly free ranging. These are not sequestered beneath are but behind a high fence, even a huge ranch. Most of these are because they're all over the place now it's spreading. Um And and the nil guy live a very natural life. They don't. They don't eat corn out of feeders or anything like that. They're grazing just like they should. And uh, it's a it's a really good pro protein and we're able to get quite a bit of it. You know. The big animals too, Yeah, a big one, a really big bull, and they're monsters. They're so I was eating some of that the other days, some body's mind. I was over at the first light and they had a little wild game deal. Um and one of those boys have just been down to Texas and had some some Neil guy meat. It's good, man, it's really good. And even the big ones. It doesn't you don't see a real drastic difference between a mature cow and a mature bolt. Don't that mean? The things? I mean, they're like, you'd be just as happy to have that as elk. Yeah, you know, no, I think it's I mean up there with Elk Elk Access and nil guy, But I think access being is the best that I've had. I really like it. Um. There big body deer for this area. Um, I mean they're way bigger than the hill country deer. Uh. And so you get a lot of meat off of them. And there they tend to be pretty fat, and they're just they're so just naturally tender and delicious, very mild. They're also really good for restaurant applications and that your general customer is not gonna be put off by the flavor of an axis. It's very approachable. Do you have you had seka deer? Yeah? Or sick? Yeah? Yeah? You like those? Yeah, I think it pretty good man. I mean follow um pare David's dear, don't know what that is. It looks like a big goofy white tail, like a monster. Uh. We got all kinds, you know. Our our guy in Fredericksburg just call us and be like, hey, I've got this carcass hanging. And sometimes even elk, you know, they'll they'll be an overpopulation of elk in an area and they'll go out there and trap a few and and bring him in until we were able to serve olk. We're a native here one. Yeah, we just had a big conversation about it'll be on this Uh you can listen to that episode with the Texas Parks and Wildlife director Carter Smith. We talked about the controversy around how Texas manages and handles ELK, which is legitimately, in my mind, controversial. I don't know much about it. There's, uh, here's one for you. We talked about this. What is Texas cuisine? Yeah, that's I mean, that's a good one. And I think, I mean, you get different answers from different people. Of course, Um, I think that you know, we we cook with all Texas ingredients, And I mean most other cuisines in the world have been defined by their ingredients. So like if you're in an example, well in southern France, like let's you you're gonna eat duck, Um, you're gonna cook with duck fat or walnut oil. Um, You're gonna have some pigs, you can have some freshwater fish. You're gonna eat beans, um, onions, herbs, things like that. So I mean the cuisine is very defined by that. And just to put that into contrasts, let's go to let's go to Vietnam and there you're gonna have a lot of fish, a lot of rice, a lot of herbs, a lot of vegetables that grow in a hot climate, and a lot of fermented and preserved things because it said hot climate. And so that really influences the cuisine there. It's it's spicy, it's pungent, it's very bright, it's very flavorful, versus something in in France, which is going to be a little more austere but equally delicious. But the place really is influenced by what's available there. So in this country, are you know, in Texas, I think we went at it in reverse. And you know, for the past hundred years we've been able to get whatever we wanted, so we could we cooked with whatever we wanted, and so we lacked a super definitive cuisine and that our ingredients never forced us into anything. Uh. And it's like defining our cuisine here and there. That's not to say that we don't have things like barbecue or more importantly, the in the influences of immigrant cuisines here, which I think are the most important thing about what our food is. So in Central Texas specifically, where I mean we're in Austin right now, and so that's almost kind of dead center and the mass of Texas. UM, there's strong influences from German UH culture, Czech culture, because there's a lot a lot of immigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia came here in the eighteen hundreds. UM, and then really Mexican, you know, Mexico being three and a half hours to our south, uh a huge influence also as far as just the weather and what we can grow here. You know, the peppers, the tomatoes, onions, things like that thrive here. So we we used to be part of Mexico, I mean it was we were, I mean until Texas independence, you know, in thirty six, you know, we were part of Mexico and then became a state nine years later. And it's that that influence is very, very profound, which is why I was joking earlier that we're a text Mexican and German restaurant. You know, it's kind of just vacillates between the two, but I think it's good to, you know, give respect to both of those. And if you go south of here an hour and a half to San Antonio and then it's your you really feel that influence a lot more and it's beautiful. It's in the architecture, it's in the food, it's in it's in every aspect of the culture. But there's also German beer houses, our beer gardens down there, and like uh Men's choirs, which is a thing in German community. It's like you'll you'll see the ancient buildings that you know, men still get together and saying and there's a bar something like that. I've done a lot of it. Yeah, it's it's amazing. I mean, it's amazing to be there. And then next door is a mariachi band. That's what I think Texas is, I mean, and that's not to Negate and the other cultures that have come here. Also, you know, Vietnamese cultures is really strong. Um there's you know, just like with any metropolitan area, you get people from all over the world, and I think that's really important to embrace that. And then what we do here is we just use the ingredients that we have and then take any idea from anywhere else, because I think that's like that's open source right there. We we we can use any idea that anybody ever had about food and just apply it to the ingredients we have. Because those are our resources. I'm not I'm not at all trying to imply that we define Texas food. But I think that since we are, for lack of a better term, such a melting pot at this point, that it's it's nice to just give in and say that's what Texas food is. Now. You know, we've got some distinct dishes like chicken fried steak um, which is basically a schnitzel. You know, I'm sure that's where that came from. Barbecue things like that, um. Crawfish boils you know, come from a little east to here. You know, that's Cajun, but it's a big thing here. Fried fish um game, I mean cooking game. I think it's also a really key ingredient to that. But you mentioned in schnitzel reminded me of something I wanted to mention earlier and forgot to mention. When we're talking about seasoning meet for you before you fry it. We're making turkey schnitzel um for Bo Jackson, the athlete who's a he likes to cook. He's a very opinionated cook, and I made him a piece of turkey schnitzel uh and he ate it. That's would you like some more? And he said that he would, and I go to make some more, and he goes, but here's what I would like you to do. And one of the things he wanted me he noted that I had salted his schnitzel after it was prepared. And one of his three requests was that I assaulted before. And he had some other things. What were the other things? I gotta know now? Because number one was valid that he felt that the oil is a little too hot, which which we know from the last hour of talking that Steve likes to run hot oil. He thought that I can't. I can't remember what the third one was. You gotta remember the third one. This is pretty fascinating. I really can't remember, man, I can't remember what the third thing was. But he had like several suggestions that the to the turn turned the burner down slightly, salt his first But it was like just unusual, um to be cooking someone something I usually am watching and when I see something I don't like, I just keep in the back of my head. Unless it's someone I know very well. Then I would say, like, you know what, y'all, You know, fella could try I appreciate how forward he was and what I'm knowledgeable about schnitzel he was. I had no IDEA very opinionated cook knows how to cook. The next morning I missed the inner because I was out hunting. Still um, but the next morning he whipped us up some scrambled eggs, man, and scrambled egg is one of those things where a lot of people can really butcher them. You end up with some dry you know, and uh bowmates, some nice silky you know, like proper moisture level you know eggs. Did you know that I make the best scrambled eggs ever? Didn't know that. I didn't know that either low and slow and slow the best ever, not for everyone, the best, but the best ever. Yeah. Do you stir constantly? Or oh yeah, I learned it from the greatest scopier. Yeah, yeah, that's that's what I said, French style. Yeah, that's exactly like that. It's almost like a lightly cooked egg custard. We just keep it moving. Yeah. Um. You gotta have a rubber spatulor that conforms, that easily conforms to the contours of one's pan, because you can't be having it and you gotta have a good hand. Yeah, I my main eggpan I hide from my family. I keep it with the I keep it and then they're not that ambitious. I keep it in the Dutch oven section of the cupboard where no one they just don't go. Well, why would they ever need to go in that area? Just not. You know, my wife hates to cook, so she's never gonna wander over to the cupboard that has like Dutch of any stuff in it. So I keep it there because when she carelessly scavenges around for a pan, she naturally goes over to where the pans are and then ruins those pans um by like cutting stuff in them and whatnot. And I keep my scrambled eggpan secret. Tell us about this scrambled eggpan. You know Diamond, I've heard of company Diamond. It's a good pan. Expensive, that's why you gotta hide it from people. Can't be having What do you think of Scoffier used I don't know for a pan. I don't know, not that because yeah, he's not a rubber bachelor. You know what, here's the weird thing. You know, the opera singer um Bernhardt I think Sarah Bernhard's her name. Oh turn of the century, turn of the last century. She didn't believe in eating garlic brightening no, no, um damnit, yeah any one sec Yeah. Bernhardt was a French stage actress. Oh, stage actress. He had probably had an affair with her. He was married, but maybe he had an affair with her. She wouldn't eat garlic. People had like a garlic phobia. And the Scofier was a proponent of eating garlic. And he kept secret from her that he would pierces, uh, take a big clove of garlic and put it on the end of a fork and stir her scrambled eggs using a garlic tipped fork as a spatula. That's amazing. And she would love his scrambled eggs. And he would never tell her that he used a garlic clove to move it around the pan. Think of that deceptive. But yeah, what's your favorite animal protein? And why? Uh, it's either well, I guess I have to have a favorite. You don't have an opinion on this, well, I mean, I'm I've got a top two that I'm trying to determine right now. I'm gonna have to say, what are your two favorite animal proteins? Appreciate M. Farrell hogs, and but everyone knows Farrell hogs no good. You can't eat the Biggins. They're all right, Yeah, I feel like you're baiting me. Uh, you can absolutely eat the big ones. One of the best ones I ever had was three pounder. Uh. The reason that people think you can't eat the big ones just because nobody tries them. It's it's funny how how that works. How when you just announced that if they get over a hundred pounds or whatever, this arbitrary number, this line in the stand that you've drawn with Farrell hawks eyes, once they get over that, then you don't try them, and then you tell other people that they're no good to eat. In all wild games, there could be multiple generations that haven't tried to hog over a hundred pounds because somebody back there said that ones are over a hundred no good, and so their sons and daughters didn't do it, and then that information was passed on. And I feel like that's something that we battle. Absolutely, people have a brand and the people that are trying to like explain ship is that we're just battling, like, uh, what do you call that? Um? Misinformation? And I don't know. Yeah, but bullshit. That's like like cultural Yeah, been with us for generations. Yeah, it's because people are inherently lazy, so if you tell them a thing, it allows them to be lazy. We resually heard about a antelope guide, the American prong Hard Okay antelope guide Wyoming, who guides about a hundred antelope hunters a year, and they're wine to people is that it's not good. And I can't remember the number, but I think close to one hundred of these clients food bank it. Don't use it themselves because the outfitter doesn't want to deal with it and just tells him it's no good, and they accept that it's no good. The fact it's one of the finest things running around. I mean, like I think tons of stuff is good. Anything with the hoof on is pretty damn good. It's like a good hooved animal that tastes like a hooked animal. It just means that they don't have to take it home and pull it out of their freezer in a year and a half after it's been freezer burned and throw it away. Yes, I mean, I think that's what happens to a lot, a lot a lot of fish too. That's when guys, there's a guy who's actively trying to like establish the value of the wild game economy. Um uh, and look at the resource, like the resource of wild game in Canada and wild game in America and what it does the food system and how valuable it is. And I keep wanting to ask him if he's throwing in all of the all of the lazy sons of bitches who bring it home, don't take care of it, knowing they're eventually going to throw it away, and then throw it away because it's now quote freezer burned, right, which is a little bit of to you, which is also a myth. But because you can say or well, instead of calling a freezer burn, we could say that one it's not or two you didn't wrap it right, right. But not to steer it back to hogs. But when when people were here to talk about when people are given open season on something, and when you're when they're told that killing them is a good thing, you know, it's it's an altruistic act at this point here in Texas to kill a hog, And so they become I don't know, they're like they're like zombies and Nazis, Like it's you have, you know, all the go ahead that you can possibly get to, just like Ben says, man, you have permission to take the gloves off. Yeah and so, and at that point it's it's just become it's it's fun to go out and kill them, and and a big bore and if the slightest justification not to physically lifted after you've killed, it's, you know, it's great. Oh, I just I just did some good, not like I went down to the homeless shelter and cooked for everybody today. Good, but you know I I still did I did my part today. And that's the only really laugh about it is like dudes who uh go prairie dog hunting, like, well man, you know, you know I do it for the you know, do it for the ranchers. And like if you went and asked the rancher, if he said, hey, man, um, I'm here, what do you need done today? Fix that fency that's gonna be slow on the list of yours. Yeah, like you don't see that, don't see that, barnkie clean that all out? Yeah, shoot, A ninth of a percent of the prairie dog population on my on my land or clean my house. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a thing, and I mean it bugs me to no end, you know. And I understand that all hogs can't be kept. You can't retain all of them. Uh, if you're going up and you're controlling them from a helicopter, absolutely there's no way. But um, but if you're if you're gonna tell me that you're not eating because they don't taste good, then I mean, I've got a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. But you've got a restaurant to the contrary. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's something you can do with them, and we and it just so happens that we shoot I mean most I mean mostly boys. Like I'm trying to think of the past few hogs that I've killed personally, they've all been boars. You know. It's just it's I'm selecting for boars. No, absolutely not. I'll select a sow every time if but you know, those solo boars just tend to move around a lot more. If we're hunting at night, we see boars. If one pig comes into a field, that's a boar. Um, it's gonna be rare that a sow is going to be on our own. Um. But if if there's a group that comes in, absolutely I'm picking out a sow, And absolutely I'm picking out a pregnant sow because they have the most fat on them and they tend to be the best. You know, that's the thing. You hear people say a wet sow. But man, uh I got one one time, and there's two problems with it. Two problems happened to me. Uh. One was social, and that I was with a friend of mine and she wasn't big hunter, hadn't been around it much. And here I am gotten it and it's getting kind of dark out and I'm gotten it and I'm getting into it and I'm kind of like, nothing to see here, right, Oh, look over that way, because that could be unsettling someone. The second problem is that this thing must have gotten into it. Like I was all excited because I knew this thing, like a wet soile was good, right, this thing must have been eating something dead. I found it tasted, you know, like sometimes you get you get black bears, like and when we're hunting black bears on the coast, you'll get black bears that they have so much they eat so much rotten salmon. I have no references. Yeah, I imagine it's it's like you'll eat it and it's taste like fish. Yeah, to the point where you smoked hamd that one time. Remember that told of thousand times. I'll tell one more. I'm smoking a bear him at my cabin in Alaska, and I go to and I we shot it like it was early June. We shot and so salmon run, sam run hadn't happened yet, right, so not this year salmon. We get a bear and uh. And I go to my neighbor to borrow a smoker and smoked the bear ham in his smoker. When I return the smoker, I said, man, you need to clean the clean that smoker. It's got so much like old salmon oil in it that it made my bar him taste like like rotten fish. He said, I've never smoked a fish in that smoker. There's never a fish has never been in there. And that was the first time I had that experience of a bear that has tastes like fish, which a little bit has gradually turned me off a coastal black bears. But anyhow, this thing tastes like he had been eaten, like I feel like he had gotten into something, you know, and it does. It definitely happens, and I'm not I'm not. I would never say that all hogs are are delicious, but that's the only one I had that ever had any problem. I find it to be very rare, and like I said, you know, we're we're going through hundreds a year, and it's it's pretty it's it's very infrequent that you find one that you would pacify as inedible. I tell the story a lot about snaring a sow one time, um and simultaneously, while while that snare was running, we we shot one of the same exact size I could have come out of the same litter one was there. They're probably about eighty pounds, both styles, same fat content and everything, and we butchered them both. Ate the shot one the next day, took home the snared one and ate some of that the next day. And the one out of the snare it was inedible and just had to be stressed. Yeah, I was gonna suggest that. I mean, it was definitely and I think that affects him a lot as well. But when you're snaring him, are you buying snares are making your own out of garage cable. I won't snare him anymore after Yeah, it was you know, I don't I don't need to um and I just it wasn't for me. I just didn't like she. She was just like so tired and worn out when I got up to it, and I was just like, you know, we did it because we needed a hog on the ground. We were filming something and had to absolutely get a pig down, and we were just heading our beds with the snares. But I wouldn't do it again. I met someone in Hawaii who snares wild cattle. I don't know if it's legal or not snare cattle. Yeah, that's a heavy cable. I made sausage out of a South Texas ferrell cow one time custom water. This guy came in. He had his doctor told him he couldn't need any fat or salt, and he brought me these grocery bags full of frozen bit to like bone and meat from a feral cow in South Texas and asked if I could make sausage for him but no fat and no salt, which the answer would be no. Well, I was like, well, I mean I mean, I was like, I'm gonna just be up front and tell you the sausage isn't gonna be good. This guy is just he was so desperate for anything. He's just like I don't care. I just want sausage. I mean, I can't eat anything now. And I was like, all right, I made it for him, and it was it was awful. What did you cut into it? We just put his men like spices and he didn't try to put some kind of like substitute for fat or binder in there. We just we just made a round ground meat sausage dry. The flavor can be good, but the texture and the dryness gets tough. Flavor flavor might have been good with a little salt, Yeah, there was none of that in there either. So wet sow that's the right word, right, pregnant sow wan they call him wet? Is wet not nursing? Oh no, okay, then what's what's the word for one? Because what I've heard is you want them before they start nursing. I was calling them a wet sou. That screws my whole story of pregnant, damn South pregnant. Yeah yeah, yeah, Like like if I see a sounder and there's a there's a a nursing sound that's obviously trailing some some little pigs. Then and there's a pregnant one also, which there's typically gonna be one or the other or both. I mean there there there's only twenty three days between when they give birth and when they go back into their extracycle, and they're gonna get bread. I mean, if there's a population of them around, they're gonna get bread almost immediately. I mean, I feel like, I mean it's kind of bad. I mean, it's just like what a life. I mean, that's the I mean, the break that you have with piglets is twenty three days before your bread again, and then a little less than four months later you're giving birth again. And those first ones are just you're weaning those first uh pigs off too. So but I'll pick a pregnant one. I mean, it sounds, it's it's harsh, but they have better fat and I just think they eat a lot better. So number two next to pigs access access, Dear, I think that you know, again from a invasive perspective, they're they're the best thing to eat around here. There we've seen a real explosion in their populations in the last year or two here. And I mean, to really put that into a perspective is the fact that I get invited to shoot access. Now I've had a couple of people be like, hey, there's just so many of them on our property, we come out and shoot one, Whereas if you go back five years, it would be like eight, you want to come shooting access? It's OK. But also, I mean that's where how we got into this problem is the vast amount of private land that we have here in Texas. And then when people either stocked access on their land or the access showed up one day, it was very valuable commodity to the point where they didn't hunt them down into a manageable size population. And then one day it's like, oh, we should have been shooting a lot more of these and maybe not charging as much. This obviously my perspective on it. But now we're I mean, we've gone from charging to inviting. And if you drive west of here, there's one highway that goes out to kind of the epicenter of where they were initially brought and you'll see two or three road killed. Um, just in a in a thirty forty mile stretch of highway there there, and you'll see big herds of them and they they they can be in huge groups and they outcompete the white tails, and they're starting to spread south and west, and so I think it's definitely time to get in front of those two. I mean, they're never gonna, never gonna have the impact of a hog. But I think that it's like, should I shoot a white tail or should I shoot an access? Uh? If I'm gonna be out there, you know, getting meat for myself, it's like, think it access is the answer right now for your own personal Yeah, Um, what do you like when it comes to butcher and what do you like working with the most? Um? Hogs are fun because they're all they're all different. I like that because you know, I'm my second book is almost complete, right and and we're it's all about Farrell hogs. And the approach that we've taken on it is how to what do you do with the hog that you've got on the ground, you know, without overcomplicating it because you can't. There's no recipe for Farrell hogs. It's like, well, how big is that? Pigs that eight pounds, there's you know, there's a huge difference in that, and applying the same concepts to every size hog or are the different fat contents that they can have, is gonna lead to mishaps in the kitchen and then you're gonna be less app to eat them in the future. So I think like clarifying how to eat pigs, it's really important, and I think that's also a lot of the fun of it. What I really enjoy is that when you know, you get a pig, whether you've shot it or they are or they've brought it in here, you don't know what it's gonna look like. It could be a hundred pounds and lean, or it could be a hundred pounds and have two inches of pure acorn fat on it. And how that hog looks is going to inform the decisions you make and cutting. Are you gonna cut chops off of it? Are you gonna throw the whole thing in the grinder? Uh? Never get bacon off them? You can really uh you know, this is a very common question in my in my the Ferrell hog butchery classes that we do, is that can you get bacon off And the answers yes, But I've probably seen less than ten hogs ever that I'd say you could get legitimate slicing bacon off of to be clear, like bacon that you could cut into a strip and fry and serve with eggs um if you want bacon flavored product than even a smaller thin belly. If it's only an inch thick or three quarters of an inch stick, you can take that off and still cure and smoke that, and then you can have bacon bits absolutely if it's got enough fat on it. But if you want like a legitimate slice a strip of bacon to wrap around a dove breast or whatever, then it's going to require a very very large, very fat pig. And so that's typically gonna be a sow. And you don't see sows in the Yeah, you know, live weight you probably two fifty plus, I think before you start to get bacon that's gonna be worth it. And so it's kind of rare to see a sow that size, although they are out there. For sure. You came in to hunt. You were into food first and then hunting second, So like food brought you into hunting. Yeah, I always fish to be always fish going up. Yea and for me like hunting brought me into food, right, what h what are your feelings about the intersection of those two things. Well, I mean, I'm I'm really excited about where it is right now because I think that it's like it's it's come so far, and that people think about food when they're hunting and fishing a lot more than they did even three years ago. You can go back to him and it's I don't agree, but go on, Well, I I think I'm coming from a perspective of being here in Texas, where I mean, everything was treated in the same way, and Farrell Hoggs maybe eaten, doves maybe eaten, but they're only eaten one way. Venison backstraps are eaten cooked one way. M just from looking at the divergence of recipes alone, Okay, I'll agree with that variety, like the variety of preparations, but I think it's happening in a specific demographic certainly the variety of preparations. But but we go on. I'll talk about my view on it some day and you'll probably know a lot more about that specifically. Um, I feel like people are I feel like they're keeping more of their animals at least experimenting a little bit more, which it's great. Um I hope that you know the same thing applies to fish. But you also hear a lot about you know people, you know, you talk to guides and they don't think that their clients eat their fish either. They want a limit and then they don't eat fish. And I think that's you know, it's real shame not to eat eat fish as as much as you can while it's fresh, eat it it just just don't stop eating it until you have to freeze it, as you know my policy. So that's the intersection. Well, um, like, do you think the two like do you think the food sort of like the food community and the hunting community are in dialogue. I do. I think that there's I mean just think you guys come in here. Let me ask this. Do you guys come into your restaurant who are long hunters and they come in they just want to get a better sense of what can be done with the stuff they hunt. Is that like a client? Yes? Absolutely, doing research? Yeah, when we get people we I used to do a lot of different classes, you know, domestic park butchery, uh, seafood. Now I only do a ferrel hard butchery class just because it is the one, it's in such a more extreme high demand than anything. Absolutely, and we we sell about two a month here at the restaurant, and then we I travel around and do that same class um over and over. How many students come into each class here at the restaurant we have ten. Uh so you're running twenty people through a month on average and just just here. Really yeah, And it's and we sell that out no problem because that's I mean, it's elephant in the room. That's what everybody wants to know about. And uh they it's it's just cutting. Is it mostly hunters? Are mostly people who would like to go hunting? It's a d but I'm sorry, okay. Is it mostly people who are like, man, I've been hunting pigs my whole life. I'm gonna go find out how to better handle them? Or is it mostly people who are thinking, I would like to go get a pig. Before I go get it, I want to learn how to handle it. I'll say that the people that come to the class are in one of those two categories, and then it's kind of a split between new hunters and then established and established hunters. I ask everybody at the beginning of class who here hunts or has access to be given Farrell hog, and nine out of ten people will raise their hand. It's very rare that somebody shows up just to watch a Farrell hog butchery. And then I ask where their land is, just because I like to know what kind of hogs we're talking about, and like, is it on the coast, is in South Texas? Is it in the congreves northwest to here? Um? To kind of get an idea of what you're dealing with. Um, And almost all of them have, you know, our hunting, and so I'd say it's a very high proportion of those people are hunters, and a very high proportion of those hunters have been hunting for a long time. Do you feel like with the restaurant and with the classes, is there, um the thing you're getting at, like if you die, they'll chisel something on your tombstone. Like this man taught demonstrate pigs. Man did he love pigs with? You know? This man would never shut the funk up about wild pigs? I think, uh, yeah, I'm pretty you know, I think that's my The feral hogs are are really a cause of mine. You know, I really like to promote the eating of them, and I just see them as a resource and I it's a it's like it's a resource, and then the more we use of that, the less of another resource. We use less of someone else's source for use. And it's it's just a when when when you know, And it's like, I'd love to debate a vegetarian on the ethics of eating farreal hawks because I would like to hear the arguments, like we do we put them in a big farreal hog preserve. Well, yeah, that's what we do with wild horses. And they would argue that it's a that you're ending the life of a sentient being and causing it suffering, and that that sentient being shouldn't be blamed for the fact that we turned its ancestors loose on the land. Now you get here, there's a prep Yeah, so then that's where it gets tricky. But here we are, so we gotta reckon with this, and that's where people are, Um, that's what those arguments start to fall apart because they'll be like, well, yeah, because they're overpopulated, yeah, because they're non native, And you're like, well, what about the sentient part, because I don't think that you feel that way about grizzly bear hunting, right, And they're sentient too, and and so they're like, I'll end that sentient life because I don't like that one. Um. We're talking about eating crickets last night and the movement to eat more insects, and I was like, a bite of crickets, you're killing so many things at each bite. It's too much. Death has a lot of weight. Yeah, it's like all those little soul, hundreds of them, hundreds of them in one piece of cricket. Flower. What about caviare? Yeah, that's just death, death upon death. So plug plug, um, wrap it up. If you gotta leave to go fishing, plug, plug your double, plug your book, plug your restaurant, and plug your class. Yeah. Um, and then plug that guy again. No, don't plug him again. Yeah, I'll see him. I'll see him soon enough. He's gonna be pretty excited about this just mentioned. Yeah, he's he's a really wonderful guy to um. He's one of my you know, if you are guides and they're just not they're not fun, you know, it's the worst. Uh, He's he's just generally nice. And he obviously loves what he does. So that's another plug for well, you'll have to hit rewind to hear the name of the guide's service. Uh, the book is a field like, like I said, we put that out best seven years ago that that came out, and you know, I look back on that as being you know, when you look back on anything, you're like, oh, I would have done that differently. But what I like about that I was fairly new to it, and I think that having a perspective of being fairly new to something gives you, um a good deal of empathy to other new people that are new to it. Um. I'm really I'm I'm proud of it. And uh, the the next book, I think is is much more refined. We know a lot more about our audience with this one, um, and it's all ferreal hog um and we're you know, we're in the final kind of designed stages of that book and we're real proud of it. It's got a lot of recipes, it's got a lot of detailed butchering diagrams, and a lot of information about what to do with pigs. What are you gonna call it? It's called the hog Book. There you go, yeah, that's not the Wild Hog Book. No, well, a Chef's Guide to Hunting, Preparing, and Cooking wild Pigs because the subtitle so just trying to keep it simple. And you know, like I said, we've we've got the different categories of hogs that are going to be in there that you will come across, from a tiny pig to a big boar. What to do with all of that? How to combat the gaming nous um? Is it organized tiny pig, small pig, medium pig, large style, large boar? Yeah? Yeah, which is what I find to be, like the general categories that make it more approachable. So if you get a big style down, flip to that chapter and it's gonna go over what you need to are, what likely you'll you'll want to do with that hog? You ever here with dude Clayton Saunders. No, he's an interesting guy. Yeah, okay, yeah, I know. Well, I mean I didn't know his name, but definitely they're a huge processors, say export processor for wild hog. Yeah, man, I do can cook a pork shoulder though, Man, holy ship, that stuff is good. Remember that. Yeah, I mean that is a clearinghouse for pigs. Sound Texas, We hung out with him. We brought we brought some of our own pigs there. We caught him up and then he cooked with some cooked the sow shoulder on his pit with a mop. We actually put his mop on our cook book, Clayton Saunders Divine Meat Mop. That was good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I mean they could be great. He knows a lot about pigs too. You should hang out with him someday. Yeah, I definitely want to connect with him. So you plug your book. It's like your next book. Tell people about your restaurants. Uh. In Austin's we've got the two places where we're sitting right now is Di Do, a butcher's shop and supper club. We've got a little meat counter here and then as we kind of discussed, like our our focus on local ingredients, menu changes daily. Here we're open for lunch and dinner. And then downtown we have a little tacorea uh like dead center downtown, kind of close to the river. It's in a food hall and it's a small little spot. It's got a little woodburning grill and we just serve a pretty small menu of tacos um and a couple of little sides. But access deer and Nil Guy and wild pig in there there. It's a Farrell Hog and Nil guy down there. We don't have any beef on the menu at all. It's uh, we do a venison taco. It's it's like I said, this tiny little menu. We've got some some good chicken on their shrimp mushroom to Farrell Hog tacos in Venison Taco and that's pretty much it. I do a taco area. Yeah. So the Italian word followed by a Mexican. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I've doug, I've made my bed. I gotta lie in it now. So uh yeah. Those are the two restaurants, and then we have are the third branch of the business is the New School of Traditional Cookery and that's mostly what I focus on, and that's classwork butchery demos um kind of like hunting cat camp catering services where we will come out for however long you want a couple of nights and we cook every meal. If you want to provide the venison to the hog or the turkey or the fish or whatever, we'll we'll just we're ready to improvise and do anything. And then we do classes during the day between hunts typically, you know, like what do you want to learn about, Well, we got you know, we caught eight bass out of the pond and somebody shot a turkey. Cool, bringing on, that's what's for dinner. And we'll sit there and do as much as we can. We have a van that's basically just a road show that's got anything that we'll need in it, and we can provides based on what you've got, and we'll just try to bring our perspectives and help people and improve their cooking and processing things like that. And so that sounds like a full day at work is the best. It is absolutely the best. And then we do some public stuff too, where people can just sign on and we'll take them to a ranch that's a partner and our guide out there. And so I mean that that's an amazing day. You get up, you guide somebody, maybe they shoot their first year, their first pig, and then you you cook them lunch, and then you do a class and then they sit down and eat with all the GUIDs and have a big dinner at the end of the day. You know, based on what we've got. It's a it's an amazing job. I'm very lucky. But that's primarily what I do now besides kind of bounce between the restaurants and um is organizing these things, and we go all over the state and probably next season even beyond. So it's a it's a lot of fun. How do people find that it's all on the did A website? Da I d u Uh? If you google that, it'll come up and all three of those businesses are on there and all the information and uh, you know, press and and different packages that we offer. Hit us with the proverb again, the Italian proverb from two kingdoms and from the two kingdoms of nature choose food with care? Like that got any final thoughts? So many? I don't have any organized. The final thought is we should induce Schneider been sitting here, yeah, patiently, Yeah, not saying a damn thing. I was trying to figure out, you know, the best way to slide in. Don't want what did you want me to do? Like a flat out intro early I just wanted to all of a sudden, have your voice come in and surprise people, like where there was an intruder Creends our new podcast producer. You know, We're going in all kinds of stuff, yeah, including what I now think is the Have you listened to Cal's weekend review. It's the best thing on the internet, all right. It's the best thing that a person could possibly get for free, and it's better than nine cent of the ship you could buy in this world. I will I will listen to it on my way to the All you need is you'll be able to burn through is twenty minutes long. I got three and a half hours to kill your daughter. Like, well, there's what seven episodes? Yeah? Twenty minutes long? Yeah? Or so it's the weekend review. My kids love it. I'm on it. It's my kid's favorite show because they like the sound effects. There are those who would have you believe that the sound effects are annoying, but they're not because it makes kids like it. Okay, Cal's weekend review, Col's weekend review. I'm gonna binge it. Best thing on the internet, all right. I did have one follow up question. We got enough time? It's like eleven right, now, what Tith, Now that you've been intro don't don't waste your time? Alright? Would you like your supper? The supper was exquisite. Do you use the word supper supper, Yeah, more likely dinner, but yeah, appropriately supper. Um. It was, it was incredible. It was like a whole explosion in my brain. I did I did she hit the table and use a dirty word. I did a little did a little happy dance. Um No. I mean I think what you're doing here, Jesse is incredible. It's like it's like a an artist's studio combined with the laboratory. And I mean, for me, it's just everything on the menu, or so many things on the menu. You know. I think the average person doesn't know you can you can eat that, and that's kind of what that exposure is. You know that it's not just the standard stuff in the grocery store. There's just so much more that is um edible and you know, delicious um. And it's just a whole kind of education. I think it's really inspiring. Should be inspiring for people to look around to see what more they can consume instead of you know, the standard Iceberg lettuce. Not to knock Iceberg lettuce, but I mean I really appreciate that and that is goal here for people to just realize what they've got around him. Yeah, I mean, you have a root that grows around here that you said, is you know you make tea out of I mean, there's just they grow mangoes in Texas. I don't know if people knew that. I didn't know that, but holy sh it, get the mango sorbet. That's the whole all your mind. Well you got for concluders. Bring it back all the way back around. You're bringing it around to take in uh around, I'm going to because you know, I could be setting it up never down in my mind. Um talking about educating people and using more of the animal and bringing back around to you. In the beginning, we were talking about taking hearts and livers at a gut pile. Is there anything else that you take out of that animal? That's you know, forget about the shanks and meats and bones. Anything else is hard. Yeah, And then what do you do? What would you do with that? Call fat? For sure? I love call fat. In fact, we cooked a boned out Ferrell hog country rib yesterday. And then part of my interruption, have you also heard it called uh lace fat or leaf? No? Leaf is different? Leaf is different? Leaf is the is the waxy fat, the solid fat on the kidneys and stuff around the kidneys got it and that that's rendered into large We definitely if you get a big pig that stuffs pure gold. Um, and it's a it's a really useful softer fat. It's not waxy. Uh, the call fat sure and that I mean if if we can get it, if it doesn't tear, or if I need some them. And then sometimes the kidneys, we'll pull the kidneys out we make boot in. I mean, it's it's funny because like our almost our entire oval cooking game is it's sent around boodin. If you're familiar with that, like that spicy rice and oval sausage, it's that's from East to here, right, that's like a Cajun dish. It is um my director of operations, uh, for the for the school Morgan. She's from East Texas. She's from China, Texas, so they grow a lot of rice there and so the rice based sausages factors in pretty heavily. And she is the master at making really awesome boot in with any any liver guts whatever from from any animals. So we'll take the heart, the liver, kidneys, and then maybe a little bit of like fatty meat and boil that down and then grind that and add that into the rice and uh it. I love that part of the class because people are like, I'm not gonna eat that, and then they eat that like this is fantastic. Yeah, kids will eat it, you know, if don't make it too spicy and so yeah, it's just funny. But like almost a percent of all the o fal that we we pull just goes into Buddha because it's it's just I think the best way to I gotta try that out. Yeah, it's good. What about the call fat? I like it for wrapping stuff. In fact, my favorite way to use call fat is to cook something until it's tender, like a shank, uh, and then completely chill it down. Maybe rub that down with something that's delicious that's like sweet or sour or fatty or whatever, and then wrap that and call fat and then grill that until the call fat is crispy and so you've got free tender meat on the inside. I'm giving away one of the best recipes in the book right now to um, the one we tested yesterday. UM. And then you and you uh and you just cook that until it's nice and brown. But there's one secret step that you have to take otherwise it will be disastrous. See to make sure to not have a big sip of ice water after along those lines. Yeah, but yeah, it'll be included in the back. You have a secret to cut the waxenus No, I'm just full of ship. There's no secret. So you're just trying to lure people in. Oh, we found that with that call fat. You can definitely overdo it. You put too much on there and like you'll never get it to crispop, you'll never get to really cooked through. But you gotta but I mean you gotta cook and cook and cook and cook it. I mean it'll eventually kind of render out. But yeah, it's easy to over apply the call fat. And it's fun to wrap stuff or that. Yeah, but you're doing two things right because you're sort of basting then the internal meat with that the jippings. Oh, it works like a charm. It was really good yesterday. You know that. That trick of it's not something a lot of people do is cook something one way, like braise something down until it's tender and then put it on a grill. Yeah, we do it all the time because like deer ribs like leave more leave the whole damn thing on the bone, caught it up with a haxaar or whatever, and then cook them, braids them till their tender, crack pot them till their tender, and then take them out, put a mop on them, and grill them. Oh my god, it's good my first book. There's a lot of work, right, people like, oh my god, you know it's not that much. It's nice too. I've realized you do it ahead of time. That happens with that method is that, um, if you'd like take them once they're done brazen, you take them out at liquid pretty quickly. A lot of tallow is being left behind, so then you're not dealing with that waxiness so much. Yeah, that's a recipe in my first book called Cheeta Ribs, where we just poach off Farrell hog ribs that are kind of lean and then grill them and mop them with called Cheeter ribs. Yeah. Uh, we start doing them the pressure cookers too. You get done quick, but you gotta be careful because if you like, if you go five minutes too long but fall a part of the girl, yeah, and then you can't get them out. So I kind of like would rather take a little bit of time. My brother, man, he's got pretty dialed with this pressure cooker. But I'd take a little bit of time and get him at just right because a lot of times you sort of lifting them out with a slotted spoon and trying to grill them and ship because they just want to cool him off fall apart. Do it ahead of time, pull them out like whatever you're doing, and just cool them all the way down and then they get they get they get firm, and then you can just slap them on the ground handle them. That's a hot tip man. You know we're gonna do a hot tip off. I don't know if you know this. I didn't suser were dumb. We're gonna do a hot tip off. You should have saved that. I should have saved that for I bet you this has got one or two also because my curry come that we're gonna do a hot tip off and you already wasted all your hot tips. I'm a little there's no reason that you can't do these things in this hot tip off. These two items, they can appear twice. Sure, Okay, we'll do a hot tip off right now. They'll go on Instagram later and people will get to see, they'll scrawl back through the feed I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do a totally new one, and they'll get to see if you're like, if you're like a one trick pony, or now I'm gonna I'm gonna crush you at the tip. Alright, thank that was unwind, Jesse, Jesse Griffiths, thank you for joining us. Thank you. If you liked hearing from Chef Jesse Griffith's on our podcast, you have an opportunity to watch him on our new fishing series on YouTube. It's called dos Boat. Stay tuned for Jesse's episode of dos Boat on August twenty se