December 25, 2025 • 60 mins
Steven Rinella talks with chef Jesse Griffiths, Janis Putelis, Clay Newcomb, Brent Reaves, and Randall Williams.
Topics discussed: How everything is from around here; buying truck loads of ingredients in season; eating while podcasting; nilgai and hog hunting and field processing; and more.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome everybody to the third and final flop from the
Meat Eater Live Christmas Tour. Today finds us in Austin, Texas,
at the esteemed restaurant Die do Way, owned and operated
by Jesse Griffiths, who I argue, not only is America's
greatest chef. I mean, maybe I don't know that's a
big claim. He is definitely America's greatest wild game cook
(00:22):
and chef. And we're in his restaurant. What I used
to like about this restaurant.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
But I used to like about it, I.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Need you know. Last night some people came up to
me and they were from somewhere far away, like Massachusetts
or something, and they had recently come to Austin to
eat at the restaurant. They came to the show and
told me that story. Why I liked, Why I liked
I used to like Die where we're sitting right now
(00:49):
is you'd get to the menu and you encounter this
very intriguing line down here. Now. You think most restaurants
would put the line up here in big letters, but
Jesse had a line down here that said everything is
from around here, and he was a master of subtlety
and just left it like that. I was shocked and dismayed.
(01:09):
Today I asked for a menu so that I could
reference everybody to the everything is around here line, And
what did I find is a broader explanation backing up
the claim that everything is from around here. The premise
that died due is that when you come here, you're
eating Texas food from Texas, and that is not an
(01:35):
easy thing to do. I know that. When I've had
Jesse on the podcast before, we've laughed about I remember
Jesse and I were somewhere and he ran into a
citrus stand and bought a truckload of citrus because when
citrus is ready, that's his year long chance to get citrus.
I've been with you buying a truckload of pecans, because
(01:56):
when pecans are ready, it's time. You're not going to
get them from somewhere else. Things like, give me a
thing that you'll just never have here. Tell me the
thing that's the biggest bummer that you'll never be able
to have.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Pineapples. Okay, I love pineapple.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Okay, but since you can't get a pineapple from Texas,
you're never gonna get a You'll never see a pineapple
in here. Barring some kind of agricultural innovation.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Pretty much. Yeah, you could conceivably grow a pineapple in
far South Texas.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And if they did, you would buy.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Oh, I would buy. I'd drive down there and get it.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Jesse buys people bring things. I hesitate to say this
because I don't want to have people just showing up
at your door. People will show up at Jesse's door.
You tell its, I want you to. I don't want
to say anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I mean, yeah, we get some kind of sketchy sales transactions.
I mean we don't participate solicitations, thank you. Usually it's
in the form of a of a dead farreal hog. Okay,
maybe some mushrooms, which I will buy, but faral hogs
I will not, okay.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
But other things, a purveyor would just call and say
I happen to have a bunch of and you'll go
go for it and do it. Uh. Jesse's been on
the podcast before. I'm big like, I love his restaurant.
If you were to ask my wife about her favorite restaurant,
she's gonna say this is her favorite restaurant. It's it's
(03:25):
far none, far and away in my favorite place to eat.
What we've never done with Jesse if you've never sat
down to eat. So we're gonna try to eat with
headphones on, which is which is complicated. But the main
thing we want to do is in trying to capture
this essence of like Texas food. Can you tell us
what we're looking at and and prove to me that
(03:47):
everything is from around here?
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Sure? Sure, we'll start right in front of you. So
those are some flout us made with shredded wild boar.
All right. Farrell hogs come from either the hill country
or east of Austin.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
And these are real wild pigs, real.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
So they're they're trapped live and then they're brought into
a licensed facility, at which point they're inspected and then kill.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Who did that?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
What's the there's a phrase for someone that cannot tolerate
the sound of other people chewing.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I don't have that.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
They're not gonna like this. They're not gonna like this episode.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
If you move your thing, if you move your thing
way away and then move it back when you have
to talk.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
So shredded Farrel hog, these tortillas, we buy them from
a very specific place in San Antonio. Shredded cabbage. So
cabbage is in season right now, when cabbage is not
in season, we will pickle or fermn it so that
then we can use it. On top of here, I
got a question already.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
If you buy a tortilla, you then I'm assuming you
then need to call that tortilla to find out.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
The source of their corn. You do, yes, hum, So
not for everything though, And I want to be really
transparent about it too. So like we will carry We
have a bottled lemonade that we serve, you know, mostly
because we love the company. You know, it's just this
little girl started to like basically a lemonade stand, and
so we buy that that's a local company. But our
(05:23):
fresh ingredients and I wouldn't go one hundred percent on it,
but are going to be very diligently sourced from Texas
to the point where we we we will often get
shipped lettuce this butter lettuce right here. The company we
source it from. Some sometimes are often just throws whatever
in there. If it comes in the back door and
(05:45):
we see that it is not from Texas because there's
a there's a company that grows these hydroponically, we ship
it right back. Really, and that confuses the hell out
of the driver, He's like, what are you talking about? Like,
this is not what we met. He's like, it says
butter Lettuce, Like yeah, well talk to the rep. Not
the right butter Lettuce, not the right butter Lettuce.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
One time I think we were in here.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
You were telling us that at one point you got
eggs that were like five from five miles away, and
then you found out that you could get eggs that
were from like a half a mile from here. Do
you still sort of roll with that ethos too, of
like the closer to this restaurant, that stuff has grown
and made the better.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
There's going to be a lot of different things that
determine where we get things. Now, proximity would be would
be one, but really it's going to be it's probably
going to boil down more to how those businesses are run.
I mean, what you know, land stewardship, what there, how
they operate, you know, especially with eggs. You know, we
want a pasture situation. We don't want a warehouse, and
(06:45):
we want chickens to be able to live on pasture
freely and feed on insects things like that. So we
will do the research and if we have so so
I mean to that point, if we had to get
something from farther away that fell more within our standards
than we would apply do that, right.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
There's people that came up to me and they were
telling me about how they'd come a long way to
go to your restaurant. He made a comment, he says, Man,
it's pretty expensive, though, I'm like, dude, do you even
know what those guys go through to put that stuff together.
I'm like, they take basically all that money to go
buy the stuff to make like it's complicated.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
It is complicated.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
It's like it's like you're doing things. You guys are
doing things that make the least business sense.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's the cost of real food.
How much it really costs when there's not a subsidized
you know, agribusiness standard that's producing these things. It's just
it's just how it really costs to operate like this.
And if we want to ensure that we keep farmers
that are doing the right things, you know, in these
smaller and we're going to throw the word family farm
(07:51):
out there, and I mean that for real, like a
family's run in this place. If we want to really
ensure that they are in business then we have to
buy from them, and then their their product is more
expensive almost invariably.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Let's let's back we talk about what Randall's eating.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Oh yeah, I just want to do a quick recapture
mm hmmm, quick recap on this first place, and then
we'll try to get through without all the interruptions. So Texas,
you buy tortillas from a Texas outfit, the tortilla is
filled with a kind of braised down, cooked down. I
haven't eaten it yet. Faral hog. Yeah, wild pig that
(08:26):
was trapped in the wild and brought to you on
the bone.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah yeah, I mean sometimes sometimes we'll buy trim, but typically,
like especially these days, for probably the past years or so,
we've really trended towards whole carcasses on faral hogs.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So in the back door of this restaurant, wild pig
carcasses come in.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
We have a rail system which is really cool because
we can just hook them up on a rail and
it's like a little railroad goes from the back door
into the walk in on a big loop and then
it comes out, goes down the hot line and into
the prep area right here to our.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Rightep, meaning those inedible wild pigs that can't be eaten
come into this restaurant and every day get eaten by
people who then say that that's the best wild pig
they ever ate. Very edible, very very doubt Okay, let's
move on.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Well, speaking of inedible, part two, that's our Addad.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Meatball, right, the inedible added.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
The inedible is here. Odd Dad gets more inedible the
farther across that canyon that people shoot it, you know,
and all said that guide is like, yeah, man, you
can't eat those things. You know that, you know, so
they go chop the head off, and you know, I
I love Audad. I think Oddad is objectively good. I
(09:49):
think that it's oftentimes cooked improperly and you kind of
need to aggregate it. Much like the feral hog is
slow cooked and shredded or ground or made into sausages.
Things like that. Odd again needs to be aggregated. So
we're going to slow cook that or we're going to
grind it, and that's what that is.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Just me understand that word to use and aggregated.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
But like so faral hogs especially so if we I
can't pick up the phone and say, hey, can you
bring me five sixty five pound faral hogs tomorrow. I
can say, can you bring me some faral hogs tomorrow?
And he's like sure. I mean one of them is
going to be one hundred and thirty eight pounds. Two
of them, you know, probably siblings out of the same sounder,
(10:29):
are going to come in at forty seven pounds and
so forth. So it's very difficult to achieve consistency in
size and fat content. So if I want to run chops,
we got to get a little bit lucky. And so
you know what they are. Our processor either selects certain
animals of size and quality or or we just get
(10:52):
lucky with what the trapper got. And so it's the
much more easier thing to do would be to aggregate that.
Meaning we're going to just pull every thing off the
bone and grind it and then make something out of it,
or we're gonna shred it off the bone and make
something like that. It's an equalizer, got it? Uh?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And on this this odd ad here that we're looking
at as we discussed, this dish has been ground. But
these I imagine too. You don't say like I want
a bunch of one hundred pound carcasses or whatever.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
You just get and what you get. Yeah, we get
what we get?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Got it? So yeah, and how do these odd ads
show up to you?
Speaker 3 (11:25):
So that's either that's probably going to be a coal.
Sometimes they're trapped, you know, so sometimes they'll go into
hog traps things like that, at which point they're fair game,
you know, and they might be coals off of high
fence places as well. Coming for complete transparency, you know,
but I think that at that point we're kind of
(11:45):
towing the line between eating an invasive and also trying
to demonstrate that that invasive is edible as well. You know.
So it's also like a it's an object lesson right there,
you know, like, well you can you can eat it?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Hey, what about the what about the combination?
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Excuse me?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Like what were this is a I don't know, flata.
What would we call that.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Let's a it's a it's our flatbread. So we make
a flat bread and then it's got grilled meatballs on there.
Those meatballs are bound with rice. The rice comes from
out near Houston and anawak.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Really Texas rice.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
But then the French fries is really like.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, well that's you know, if you go to Europe
and you get these like donor kebabs and these these
these classics in the Middle Eastern pet of sandwiches. A
lot of times they'll put French fried.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Okay, so that's.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, I like that. So what's in the flatbread? Is
it a flower based flat bread?
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Flour? Flowers flower, So we use some it depends on
the bread. Some flour we do get from larger mills,
but we use a lot of Texas grown flour from
bart and spring smell.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
And then you're able to get taters from Texas.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yes, sometimes most of the time and off season. That's
one of the COVID provisions that that we made was
that we that's kind of our our our cheat ingredient
is potatoes and.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
So we just have to have them.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah, it really hit hard during COVID and that we
and it's really funny because I think, you know that
potatoes represent like one of like two hundred ingredients that
that we get and it's and it's the one that's
not consistently from Texas and can always end up there.
And I always ended up talking about it too long.
But during COVID, I mean, people I don't know, we
(13:28):
were just like, we really need to provide some comfort
we need French fries and mashed potatoes and things like that,
and we kind of went down that path. We're very
conscientious about how we source them. They have to be organic,
prefer uh preferably we get them from Colorado and New Mexico,
so we're able to do that. But again, if they
hit the back door and they're not organic, they what
(13:51):
do you feel like.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
You're getting from an organic potato versus a non organic potato?
Speaker 3 (13:56):
You know, I don't. I mean, at one point years ago,
I had on some research on it. I don't know
how the standards have changed, and so maybe it is
a fool's errand to think that I'm doing anything. But
at the same time, I just, you know, whatever that
standard means these days, I support it, you know. I
think it's just better. If we're going to make a concession,
I want it to be the best possible.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Okay, what's next. We haven't talk about this one yet.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Yeah, So that's our pastrami sandwich. So that is beef.
That's some Logu beef brind smoked and then steamed a
rye bread and then sour kraut. I think the real
start of the show here would be the sour kraut,
and that you know, we had to pull this off
(14:43):
of our menu for about three weeks and then people
were really upset. It's a good pastrami sand and we
had to pull it off the menu because we ran
out of sour kraut because we didn't put enough away
the previous spring. Like this spring, we just we didn't
do enough. We should have shredded more sour kraut. It's
(15:04):
about a three week process of fermenting the sour kraut
and then we can sit on it in the walk
in for months and months and months.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
But when you get how much might you shred? Like
how much cabbage might you do when a cabbage is available?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Hundreds and hundreds of pounds. We make our own paprika,
So we bring in hundreds of pounds of sweet peppers
during peak pepper.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Season, which just make paprika.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
It's amazing. Our paprika is like probably one of my
favorite things that we make, and it has one ingredient
and it's a pepper. We bring in just beautiful, thick walled,
late season ripe red peppers and we're in this is
going to kind of mess with y'all because you're from
the north. We're in the tail into pepper season right now.
(15:44):
So November, maybe the first part of December is when
we really just started get a lot of peppers in.
We got to walk in full of them and we
smoke them over post oak and then we dehydrate them
and then grind them into a powder. And when it's
fresh and made with a really nice pepper, it's it's
(16:04):
it's incredibly good.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
So that's all paprika is, is the ground up pepper.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So you make it smoked pap You make it smoked paprika, correct, Yeah,
post predominantly what you use is post o Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
I mean, you know, when we do off sites and
fun other things, you know, we mix up that wood.
But uh, you know, post oake pecan another favorite. And
then when we go south, I almost invariably amusing mesquite.
And I mean there's this whole thing about wood, and
you know what what those different styles of wood and
direct heat cooking, off offset cooking, and you know, it
really has influenced the cooking culture here. But where this,
(16:40):
where this restaurant sits in Austin, post oak should be
the fuel, right, It's the most prevalent thing it you know,
it has influenced our barbecue culture incredibly, Like like we
are in central Texas, it is that offset indirect heat
of barbecue. Whereas you get further south, they're kind of
cook king over mesquite. But there's just a lot of distance.
(17:02):
It's it's really fascinating to me because these woods burned differently.
But where we're sitting right now, post stoke would be
would be the wood.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
How many cords of would do you think you go through? Oh?
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Uh one a week? Not it's not incredible, Like we're
just we're burning in the in the grills and then
our smoker. We have a we have a rotisserie, uh,
solid fuel smoker which is really cool and so it
burns whatever would we want to put in.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
But your week sounds like a lot.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah wow, Yeah, your cooking fire is running all the time.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeah yeah, I mean Friday, Saturday, Sunday all day and
then then you know, five six hours a night. Rest up.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Let's back up cabbage for a second. As you walk
through this, who.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
Made that.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
The pickle? Yeah, I don't know. I'm to find out it's.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
The only thing it was made here.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
And your kids, Oh I thought you wanted a name.
I was like, it's gonna be Hector or I don't know. No,
we made that of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
That's the cool thing about being in here is like
down to the smallest detail, like the pickle. When you
eat this pickle, you're like, oh, this it came in
as a cucumber and then right there it turned into
a pickle.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Oh, I got a good one for you.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So yog I went back up to the because we
left behind the crowd, and I had a crowd question.
So it comes the day when cabbages are ready to
come into Die do a October. Okay, and now it's
not like you're prepping for tonight, but you're prepping for
the year. How do you handle staffing to say, hey, everybody,
(18:35):
come in, we're going to go through a truckload of cabbage.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Well, it's no, it's we were buying it. I mean,
in total, we're buying hundreds of pounds. So we'll bring
in ten cases, and then a week later another ten cases, and.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Then the season and see you still spread it out
throughout however long the window of opportunity.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Still that's I mean, I guess you've got people here
that all. Their whole job is just making.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Stuff pickles, I mean, like ferments, things like that.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
They're not there. Their job isn't even to make something
for a customer tonight.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Absolutely, it's very heavy on preps. So we have a
lot of staff because every single sauce, every pickle, every everything,
the paprika has to be made, the yogurt on that flatbread.
So years ago, one of our years ago, we had
an employee and she was from India and her family's
(19:28):
yogurt starter had been going for over two hundred years continually,
and she brought us that yogurt starter and so we
still use that yogurt starter to create our own yogurt.
So we make our own we make some of our
we make our own cream cheese, we make our own
sour cream, we make our own yogurt here. So anything
like that that we can make will make it and
(19:50):
there's just fun stories.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Is there anywhere else that does this like you do?
Speaker 4 (19:57):
You know?
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I'm sure, and I think that there's a more proliferation
restaurants like kind of what we're doing, like really kind
of taking deep dives and just definitely more focus on
locality and support of things like that. But I would
I would like to say no to an extent. You know,
like we we've been doing it for a long time.
We've been in business for nineteen years, and so we
(20:20):
am with the same ethos and the same functionality.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
There is distinct differences between everything I have tasted so far.
There's nothing like all that kind of tastes like that,
or this has similarities. Everything is so far different.
Speaker 7 (20:35):
Commonality though, is that it all has a ton of flavor.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yeah, there's an amazing it's very bold. Yeah, as my
grandfather was saying, this tastes like more.
Speaker 8 (20:45):
Yeah, oh no, I love that. The burger was the
burger was like shocking yeah into it.
Speaker 5 (20:50):
There's definitely like top fifty burgers.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I've ever had awesome Top fifty.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
I mean it might be the best one I've ever had.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
You by the wag, how does that work?
Speaker 3 (21:03):
That's Mariana Peeler just south of San Antonio. We've had
a great relationship with her for years and we settled
on that. It's like a it's a It was a
kind of a compromise between grass fed, which what I
am fascinated by, and grain fed, which is what the
customer is fascinated by they.
Speaker 5 (21:24):
So it's not hip anymore to eat grass fed. The
customer likes the corn finish.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Is it even though it's like a breed, there's like
an expectation about how it's been a lock it into
a shipping container and starve at half to death and.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Right, well, yeah, I mean you you can definitely get
almost obscene amounts of fat in there. She pastures her,
so they live on pasture. They have an opportunity to
like a free choice grain source, so they are still
eating grain. But most importantly to me is that her
processing facility, which she owns, is seven miles from the ranch.
(22:04):
So on their bad day they get loaded up, they
got a quick trip over there and it's all done
and there's no feed lot in between.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
And then how do you buy that?
Speaker 3 (22:13):
We buy mostly big rib primals like you saw on
the way in that we dry age and then a
lot of that trim from those rib primals goes in there.
I'm sorry, I completely misspoke. There's only a little bit
of waggu in the burger, the pistromius waggu.
Speaker 4 (22:32):
We buy.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Grass fed longhorn from a ranch in South Texas, the
one that you've been to where we turkey hunted. Uh
so he has just completely pastured long rangy longhorns that
and we buy older animals from those and then we
mix that with some of that wagg you and then
some of the age walks.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So your burger's long horn burger mostly yeah, huh.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Yeah, I mean, and it's like you get a really
incredible flavor. I tell it spoken, I said WOGGI, uh
it is, but.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Over here I might have directed you in your own direction.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
The brisket for the pastrami is is woggy. But this
is a grass fed longhorn. And by grass fed, I
mean that thing just lives out there that that eastern
peninsula and there's no I mean, it's just eating whatever
it can.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Is that expensive for you to buy, because like the
longhorn market collapse, does that make it less expensive for
you to buy?
Speaker 3 (23:26):
It's about average as far and and and often don't
I don't know what like commodity pricing is on these things.
We're unaffected typically in meat prices because we don't have
the variations and markets because we're you know, I'm buying
from a guy that I'm he's one of my best friends.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Understand you, you're not out shopping for the cheapest stuff
in the marketplace.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
And I started hitting them up for these older animals
that had kind of naturally developed more fat and more flavor,
just beautiful, bigger animals. And and we started using that
for the burg because I thought, we thought that that
would be the best platform for it. The steaks didn't
go over well. People just weren't into them, you know,
and they caught. They cost us just as much, and
(24:09):
so they cost the customer.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
People didn't want to rangy long horned steak.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yes, it would be like do you like the wild cows?
I love them. We ate a big old steak when
we were down there, right.
Speaker 6 (24:22):
A wild long horn It just tastes like a Western
sizzler buffet steak.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
No, No, I mean it is. It's got that intense
iron flavor and it's I mean it would be if
you put it on the same like linear spectrum of
of a of a of a deer that have been
farm raised, and then you know that's going to be
taste like kind of a sweet corn fed deer versus
(24:48):
like a real like a sage brush eating deer. And
then the same thing with the with the with the
cattle you know, they're they're eating just corn, and they're
getting the kind of bland and sweet and fat and
just easy versus like the real nature of what but
beef tastes like, and beef has a lot more character
than what we collectively remember it to taste.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Like those longhorns eating like mesquite beans or whatever kind.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Of August September, they're eating mesquite beans. They're eating just
all those native grasses down there, and then there's there's
invasive blue stem anything. They're just in there just grazing
and they are they never get pellets or corn or
anything like that. Tell you about those wraps around, yeah,
to tell us about the.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Sauce, the red sauce and the color of a boiled beat.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
And that's yes, so that's our beat ketchup and that
that's kind of a that came down to more of
an economic decisions, like we could potentially buy enough tomatoes
and to make ketchup year round, but when we tried to,
our ketchup was exorbitantly expensive. Like if somebody wanted a two.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Ounce too hard to make ketchup?
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Too hard once you cook me, because you you're cooking
tomatoes down to a tenth of their volume, and you're
buying tomatoes at four dollars a pound, and so it's
a real reflection of how these markets actually work. And
so we had to find a solution, and that solution
was beats. We could buy beats more cheaply and then
turn them into a ketchup. But you know, like if
(26:18):
you said, oh I love this tomato ketchup, can I
get a side of it? It'd be like, okay, it's
six dollars and then then people get really up.
Speaker 6 (26:26):
It's interesting that tomato ketchup would be the thing that
was too expensive. Yeah, for people's taste, there's a lot
you would think it would be something else.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, it's it's well, you know, there's we are in
our culture. We have very decided ideas about what's cheap
and what's expensive. You know, a taco cheap. Uh, you know,
chips and salsa free always yeah, yeah, they're not. It's
never free. You know, you're paying for it. But and
and things like ketchup or you know those, Yeah, they
just they're supposed to be. And it's like, well, you know,
(26:56):
in a real system that that that you know, everybody
wins from the far on down. Tomatoes they're not cheap.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
You know, interesting things. But I don't know about ketchup
till I started getting into like the aesco fia of
the old French cookbooks. Is you would go into the
index and there's the ketchups, mushroom ketchup, onion ketchup, and
the tomato Ketchup is just one of many ketchups. But
it won. Yeah, it like very much won, you know,
(27:26):
it became ketchup.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's I mean, that's that's us
kind of trying to play within the markets, you know,
and just trying to figure out how to give people
what they want, but still within the context and within parameters,
economic parameters.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
How do you get the vinegar that you use to
make ketchup?
Speaker 3 (27:45):
We buy dry goods, you know, vinegar and sugar and
spices and things like that. It's kind of like a
little house on the prairie mentality, you know, it's like
we can go to the mercantile and get these dry goods,
but fresh ingredients or we're going to prioritize is coming
from within this system and then whatever else we can
(28:05):
within that, you know, like like flowers, we get Steen's
cancrup from Louisiana, you know, and it's like, instead of
buying molasses from who knows where, we get this beautiful
canesrup from our neighbors over here. We buy pistachios from
one farm in New Mexico. You know, it's just their neighbors.
And I got tired. I mean, pecans were the only
game in town.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
You know.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Here it's the only nut. We have maybe an odd
walnut here and there, but nothing cultivated and nothing easy
to crack. So I was finally I was like, let's
let's just get pistachios, you know, but like let's do
our research and get them from a great place. Same
thing with our coffee. You know, obviously we're not growing
coffee here. We need to have it, but we do
the research. We're like, who's making the best you know,
(28:48):
who's paying their people the best, best processes and all
these things, And so.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
What about the burger bun? We didn't talk about the
burger bun. Then we got to talk about the fat
you fry and your fries and beef towels, so how
you make that? But what's the burger bun all about?
Speaker 3 (29:00):
You know, like all of our breads, you know, we
have a pastry chef in house, and she makes everything anything.
That's all of our breads we make in house. On
this table right over here, we butcher all the feral
hogs on the on one side and make the breads
on the other side. Their sourdough starter. When we signed
the least for this building in twenty thirteen, we were
(29:22):
parked over in that alley over there, went over there,
picked a big bunch of wild mustang grapes, took him home,
wrapped them in cheese cloth, mashed him up, and put
them in a slurry of flour and water and captured
that that hyper local yeast. And that's all right there
in the alley over there. We had to park over there,
there were some wild grapes, and so our sourdough starter
(29:44):
to this day is from a grape starter, the throat
from the yeast, from a wild yeast that we got
from across the road.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
You kidding me? You kept it going that time.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Every day it has to be fed.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
What do you feed it with?
Speaker 3 (29:58):
You regenerated every day?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Put sugar, flower and water, No sugar, don't put sugar
in about it?
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Yeah? Yeah, And then you're talking about the fat, the
beef fat. So every Monday, which is today, is rendering day,
and so we buy as much beef fat, mostly from Mariana,
and there's another butcher shop that sources all local and
sometimes we take their excess beef fat and we grind
(30:27):
it and render it all day long on Mondays to
stalk the fryar with beef fat for the for the week.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
So you guys grind, you guys grind when you render.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I think it's best you get the most service area. Yeah,
and you and it and it. And also I think
you'll see a lot of times people overcook their lard
or or tallow and get it too like brown and
because you will have when I'm when I'm cleaning a
feral hog, I pull by hand the leaf fat out
(30:58):
because if you cut, you get bits of meat in there.
I don't know why you have a whole thing based
on animal fats.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
I got a question for it.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
You know about it.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
If I pull it by hand, then I only get
the fat like that big sheath of you.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
You're you're skittish about having little hunks of meat in
your in your towel fat.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
One hundred percent well more so in lard. But yes,
also in the tallow, but it well. And I'll tell
you about lard. I always saw it's just whatever.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well, I think it makes it taste different.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
It gives it more of a pork or beef flavor.
And in cooking fats like lard and tallow, I want
some neutrality and I don't want to taste so savory.
If we're going to use that application for a dessert,
or if we're going to fry donuts in it on
Saturday and Sunday morning, we don't want it super beefy.
(31:50):
But then when you eat that donut, you're like, I
don't know why this is so good, but there's something,
there's something or like fried fish.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
And then it brought you jar my new coon grease.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Hell yeah, I got nobody's ever spoken those words I.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Rendered out. You know, I can blame me when I
tell you this. You know I can blame when I
tell you this. I rendered out one raccoon, and this
wasn't even picking it clean. I rendered out one raccoon
and it yielded three full court jars of lard. One raccoon.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Oh my, I could prove it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
I believe you, three full court jars off a single raccoon.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
I mean, that's that would be a good yield from
a big pig.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
I gave. I gave a court to him him, and
maybe I'm gonna give my last court to you.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
I would love that little raccoon lard.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Hey, I've got a serious thank you for that.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
That was serious about what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
No, No, I just have a very serious question weird
dealing before I thank you in our social media relationship,
like you on social media as if I wasn't going
to see you the next day. I was like, hey,
thanks Steve, and you didn't watch it.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Okay, he didn't follow you.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
What temperature are you rendering your your beef tallow out?
Speaker 3 (33:17):
So they're going to be popping into the oven.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
But yeah, talks about the whole process.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Well, it's it's all all hands on deck. By that,
I mean any heat source is utilized, so the four
burner range.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
But you've got to be having You've got to be
watching the temperature.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Yes, I I don't know. I could ask him real
quick before we do it in the oven.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I really want to know.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
But if you're doing in stove top, it's low and
you know just as low.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Do you have any sense of the temperature like one
or two twenty five.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
I don't it'd be over well, No, I don't, honestly.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Just because.
Speaker 6 (33:52):
I have a tendency to burn my grease a little bit.
But but but two twenty five is what I right
over stay to say. Do you think two hundred? Two hundred?
Speaker 1 (34:07):
I believe that that's perfect perfect because if you look
at like confee and like French cooking confee and in
the rendering duck oil and stuff, I've always read the
two hundred. That's what I shoot for is two hundred. Yeah,
I do it in my oven, but I like kind
of doing it on a Burnercond.
Speaker 6 (34:27):
May have really embarrassed us with Ted Copple. I rendered
bear fat with Ted Copple. Would you tell you the
other day?
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Well, we didn't have it.
Speaker 6 (34:35):
We didn't have a thermometer, and I just burned it
because it was going slow. And he started going, wow, Clay,
this is really slow.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
And I was like, oh, and did I sent you? I?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
I didn't. It was it was I didn't have it,
But I.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Wouldn't you grind it up? He'll get rid of as
much meat as possible or just all of.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
It, yes, going and there they're trimming out anything red
and then it goes to the grinder, and then it
goes into We have induction burners that we put on
the butcher tables, we have the range, and we also
are popping everything in the oven at the same time.
Just any way we can do it because we need
so much of it, okay, and then we put it
in these big pants and then you know, it solidifies
(35:18):
and then we're able.
Speaker 5 (35:19):
To But tell me how long it usually takes from
start to when you pull it out of the oven
and you're like, that looks good.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
It's going to depend on the volume. I mean a
couple hours.
Speaker 5 (35:30):
You know what would be the max If I told you,
you know what, I spent a whole day, Jesse, I
was rendering my bear fat for eight hours, would you
be like, Man, you overdid it big time.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
And there's no wonder it's probably a little grinding.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah. What I always tell people is so when you
when you start to cook it, you have these large
bubbles coming out and that's you know, the water coming
out of it. What you want to shoot for is
and you'll know this what a Coors light looks like.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Oh, for a minute, I was gonna get you're going
to hit him with You'll know this as a rendering man, like,
hold a minute, man, are you gossiping?
Speaker 5 (36:13):
So I was telling him about our you know, about
our life on the bus, and about how there's you
can very easily fall into, like the life of a
rock star, and the only person really carrying the flag
of a rock star has been Randalls.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
I appreciate that, Jesse. Later, if you need to have
talk hot dogs, you can also point to him say
you'll know this.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
I love I just made a big batch of venison
hot dogs and they are really That's like we've got to.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
Topic. I really need to know.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
I got to make a business, make a business deal.
We've been fixing to make a video about how to
make venison hot dogs. Really here, if you can think
about this, we'd like to have you come out on
the rollers. We want to make not fancy dogs, not
like a thinking man's hot dog. We want to make
(37:05):
take your venison and turn it into a gas station
hot every man's joe blow no bend in it that
you can put on a gas station rollery. Have it
be like a little kid would eat it and he'd go,
that's a hell of a hot.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Dog, collagen cases to keep him flatten straight. Ye, classic,
no fancy nothing, roller dogs, coryander, garlic, paprika and nutmeg.
And that's your that's yours.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
Is the consistency of the inside.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Here's the thing when guys go, so, I've made hot
dogs and we use sheep case like anybody can do that,
and they can make a thing that they'd be like, well,
this is my version of a hot dog. I want
to make hot dogs. The baseballs.
Speaker 8 (38:01):
Making venison hot dogs, they end up with something that's
what I would call the rot shape. Yes, it has
a different spice mixed than what they call their brats,
but it's a hot dog flavored sausage exactly. But it
doesn't have it's an emulsification. Five parts lean, four parts fat.
So you walk us through it right now.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
No, I mean, when we make we come back, we're
gonna make gas station hot dogs. Then we're gonna buy
the roller. We've already shopping for a roll and we're
gonna put them on a roll. It's getting excited, I mean,
and then we're gonna put mustard ketchup on them. Then
we're gonna be like, that's deer meat. Gas station hot dogs.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
I ate seven venison hot dogs over the weekend.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Oh you've got them right now.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
I made. I made a batch of seventy two of them, Randall,
I love it. They're so good. There's they're very very good.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Are they hot dog colored?
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Well, they're a little grayish. They don't have I didn't
smoke them either, so you could do a cold smoke
on them we're getting.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
They don't smoke station hot dogs.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
They might be a little cold smoke, but they're also
going to have Nightrite in them, so you know, real
pinked out from that. I did put some Insecure number
one in there, but they they didn't take on a
ton of that pink color there.
Speaker 5 (39:14):
A little on the migra would be that you would
have to add so much other filler that it'd be
hard to still call it a venison hot dog.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Well, it's going to need five parts venison lean, four
parts of some kind of fat that's going to be
fine poor pork, and then and then three parts ice,
and so it's going to be thirty three percent by
weight other fat. But then it's going to be whatever
that five parts is of pure venison.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
If we can, if we can publish a recipe and
have an instructional video of how to make a gas
station hot dog that your kid would be excited to
eat and have it be fifty percent venison. That is success.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Okay, we we can we can move We need to
move on because there's some yeah, yeah, there's there's some
nuanced I was starting.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
Sure you have some ip that he needs, and he's
very valuable.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
I know that.
Speaker 8 (40:10):
Yeah, I was starting to get a little sluggish from
the meal, but I haven't perked right up with the
talk of hot dugs.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
He had cheesecat, probably so. But my whole point was
as soon as it looks like a really light beer.
And this is what I teach in my classes. It's
like as soon as you get a straw color in
tiny bubbles, you're done, and that at that point you
need to strain.
Speaker 6 (40:35):
So how much solids will you get? Will you scrape off?
You know, the cracklings and just a little.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Bit a lot. And that's one of the things that
gets me is like we still haven't found a consistent
home for those I hate throwing anything away, but we have,
like I mean, weekly we're probably fifty gallons.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
I throw them on my roof off the birds, magpies,
mag we have this. I need I need to metal.
I need to think about what you're talking because I
have looked at I've done it wrong. I'm not paying
attention to the bubbles. I'm looking first, like when I
feel the crackling is is spent? Is it's going to
(41:15):
get sure? And that the energy I'm putting into the
production has hit like any sort of reasonable efficiency, meaning
I could go and go and go and go and
go and maybe get a little more, but the crackling
is spent, diminishing returns. Yeah, I never look at the bubble. Okay,
that's possible. Well I'm not say I don't.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
I don't do it right. You do it right.
Speaker 6 (41:37):
I feel like there's there's a lot of signals in
the grease that tells you it's done, you know. I
mean in bubbles could be one of them, which I
wouldn't have thought either. I would I would be watching
the crackling because it's just like a lot of movement
early when it's rendering down and then finally it just
starts to slow and sudd You're like, we're not gaining anything.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah, And I don't want it to get too dark. Yeah,
I want it to be blonde. Yeah, because then you
start to develop that toasty flavor in there, and so
that's going to affect your pie crest or your donut
or the other things you're gonna do with it.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
You have any way to legally use bear grease, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
When you get really good at something like like for you,
making grease, making tallow lard, you get to a point
where it talks to you. Do you know what I mean?
Like you are seeing a thing that you can't really explain,
the dumbness. Sure, it becomes a little bit like a
dark art.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
I always say that ice talks to me walking on ice.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Oh, I can look at it. I don't speak.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Yeah, I look at upon and it talks to me
about it tells me what condition it's in. But you
probably get with the grease. I never get, like, I
don't do it enough to when I'm making lard or grease,
I don't. I always leave it like, don't know, man,
I suppose that's probably good that the bubbles.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
That's what the bubbles were saying, real technical question. This
is a batch of bear grease that I made. Okay,
that looks great, it's really clear and pale. Right, but okay,
that's the color of a lot of them. Uh huh,
it never solidified.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Oh, this is cool. When I took bear hog hunting
out there to that property, he killed two hogs. I
had killed one a couple maybe a month or so
previous to that, and then and I killed one on
that property two days ago. And it's a there's a
there's a big pecan orchard on one side, and there's
a big pecan orchard on the other side. The whole
(43:43):
river by the bottom is nothing but pecans. And the
fat that we render off these hogs does not solidify
in the refrigerator. It stays almost completely liquid. So I
reached out to one of our customers here as a doctor,
and I was like, what's happening with this. It's like
Nola oil viscosity in the refrigerator as polyunsaturated fats from
(44:05):
eating a diet of probably only pecans, which are really
high in polyunsaturated.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
And that's what you told me too, right, Yes, that's
what I'm Yeah, Clay'd probably tell you it's predicting the
weather and there's bad weather coming out.
Speaker 5 (44:18):
I need to look at earlier that's what you said.
That means Saturday lots of eighteen to one carbon bonds.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
That's good Bear diet.
Speaker 8 (44:28):
Lay unknowingly came up with his second book title earlier
when he said signals in the grease.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
I like it.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
That's the grease signals.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
So that is do you feel like it's a good
product like that?
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Like that? Well? Yes, no, I mean the first off,
those hogs are very very good to eat, very sweet
mile but still have that nice bit of like barrel
hog flavor. To him, Uh, the fat was worthless for sausage.
You couldn't use the back fat for sausage. Once you
ran it through the grinder, it liquefied on way out,
like just frozen chunks of fat into the grinder liquid
(45:04):
on the way out just because it was soft wild
howk even the harder fat off the back, not just
the leaf fat.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
And then for.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Something like a coned feet where you need that solidified
protective cover wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Work because it never solid Yep, that's a good point.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
But for general cooking, sauteg things like that, it was great.
But anything that you needed like a I tried to
make pie crust with it came total disaster because you
couldn't get that solid fat incorporated.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
You never cut it in exactly now their day, I
noticed he had. He never mentioned it to me, but
he had the jar of congrease I made next to
a jar of bear grease in the same area. And
what I thought was interesting was indistinguishable well, and how
they were predicting weather, like the amount of like solid
(45:55):
the late where the line was liquefied.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
The congrease was totally solid.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
No, no, yeah, it was was it thinking that you
didn't see that. He didn't mention it, but I saw it.
Oh okay, yeah, he didn't say hey, thanks for that,
but I was looking at him. I thought, oh wow,
it's remarkable how similar in appearance they are.
Speaker 6 (46:17):
I think you misinterpreted that because the coon grease was
completely solid and the bear grease was basically sixty forty
you know, olive oil like and then the saturated fat.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
That it makes me think like an unreliable reporter.
Speaker 6 (46:39):
Dude, Well, I think maybe over time it's possible that
your coon grease, when it's not being shook up and
everything would kind of solidify. But basically, I had some
barre oil analyzed by one of the best lipid labs
in America. And basically the short version is is that
the clear olive oil colored liquid is unsaturated fat eighteen
(47:05):
to one carbons like olive oil. The heavier stuff is
saturated fats, and it's a variety of different carbon chains
and stuff. But anyway, this bar oil that I submitted
was like sixty percent unsaturated fat forty percent saturated but apparently,
but I think it's different based upon the bear's diet.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Sure, there's a lot of hand lotion, natural hand lotion
in that bear meat.
Speaker 6 (47:35):
So they analyze this barre oil and there are species
of lipids, Like if you have any jar of oil
that there is animal fat or like olive oil, there
are multiple, if not hundreds of species of lipids that
make up that oil. And this lab person she said
(47:59):
the most surprising thing about the barrel oil was that
it had uh, oh my gosh, it's slipped my mind.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
What it's called Sarahmid's.
Speaker 6 (48:08):
The barrel oil was three percent Saramid's, which if you
go to a drug store and look for skin lotion,
it'll say Sarahmid's because Sarahmid's are a species of lipid
that is like forty percent of your skin and so anyway,
but pork fat didn't have nothing else that she had
ever seen had saramids in it.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
But a little off topic.
Speaker 4 (48:32):
But what do you mean?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
And it's for my book, You're honest, Jo honest want me.
He constantly wants me to talk about my book that's
coming out a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Be ready, very good book.
Speaker 4 (48:43):
What's it called?
Speaker 1 (48:43):
I read the first half called American Bear very good book. Wow,
first half is could go to ship after that.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Get this guy talking about it.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
You can put a big old chapter in there about
that grease I gave you.
Speaker 4 (48:56):
Probably it'll be it'll be the apple.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
I'll put it in the I'll be like my dear friends.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
You spend on bear fat in this book. I don't
want to give it all away. But you're not gonna.
I'm telling you, you're not giving anything away. Give them
a taste.
Speaker 6 (49:11):
Man, it's the Let me just say that the opening
of the book will be unlike any book you've ever read, probably.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Because the discussion before.
Speaker 6 (49:22):
Yeah, and and we we do have right now in
the structure of full chapter on me going to Atlanta.
I went to Emery Labs in Atlanta and saw the machine,
the most technical lipid analysis machine in the world.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
Study.
Speaker 6 (49:41):
We did novel research on bear grease never before. They
want me to publish and they want me to somehow
be involved in a published article about it. Well, and
I was like, that would be great, Let's do it.
I'm getting a little jealous.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
There you go eighteen months out. Yeah, where are we
on our walk through? Have we gotten to your lettuce
rap yet? No? Nopet's tackle the lettuce wrap. Yeah, and
then we'll tackle the salad.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
We're gonna let's just talk vegetables first. So the lettuce
is a hydroponically or aquaponically grown butterleaf lettuce actually the
company owned by another friend of mine. And then right
outside of Austin. So we get these super fresh, really beautiful,
uh you. We'll notice a little bit of lime on there.
(50:29):
That is a South Texas organically grown line from gns
Orchards down near Karizo Springs. We've got fresh IRBs because
we are in season four, things like minton salatro, some
red cabbage and radishes also in season. But then the
you know, the real star of the show there is
the ground nil gui so and these are coming from
(50:50):
that band along the Texas coast south of Kingsville all
the way to the border where the aeteria is and
then kind of extends over to the west to Felfurious
in a little bit farther. But then where the where
the nil guy range. And so we get in a
lot of nil guy. I like nil guy. A lot
doesn't hit corn. Peters has a really nice, very natural diet.
(51:13):
They're invasive, they're very very sustainable. And these are harvest
from helicopters.
Speaker 5 (51:19):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
One shot sniper shot from a helicopter broke broken arrow
ranch out of Ingram, Texas. And then they have inspectors there.
They'll they'll do eighty in a day. And they have
these trailers set up and they process them all, take
them back their age and cut them and distribute them.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Where do they hit that thing from the helicopter headshots?
Only the hit him in the head from the helicopter.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Wow, buckshot, No, those are rifles.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
This guy's got to be good day.
Speaker 5 (51:47):
And they're doing a lot of days. You're not the
only one serving nil guy. That is correct that they
don't do eighty a day. They do a batch of eighty, correct,
not three sixty five. But when they go down there,
they will do eighty.
Speaker 3 (51:58):
Yeah, they no, they distribute and they for the longest
time Broken Era has been the pre eminent source of
like real wild game like this farreal hog and nil guy,
you know. And then they have a lot of other
stuff like axis red stag things like that. But they've
they've really like led the industry in that field harvesting
(52:23):
technique and they're very, very good at it. Their distribution
is amazing, their customer service great people.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
That's got to be some high overhead for them. Man,
you get a helicopter involved in something, yeah, things start
getting expensive.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
Yeah, and then all the people on the ground, you know,
trailers and you know inspectors that have to go with them,
and they're they're shipping over state lions so they're USDA.
They have to have a USDA inspector with them. So
it's it is quite an operation, but they do it
so well. I mean, and I think arguably this is
some of the best meat that you could possibly purchase
because it is harvested in this way and then immediately
(52:59):
treated in the field.
Speaker 7 (53:01):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
You know, they have this shocking technique where they hook
him up and they know about that, yeah, and to
kind of speed him through rigor Mortis thinks about that,
and and then they're they're getting them skin gutted and
chilled and distributed, and I just I think they do
a wonderful job.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
We had a meat scientist, Can Purdue. I'm about to
get him back on it has been long enough now.
He had quite a lot to say about the shocking.
There is a I'll have to revisit the podcast. He
had quite a lot to say about it. There is
(53:39):
a very specific moment when that needs to occur. It
is not a later in the day thing.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Yeah, I don't think that. I don't know the ENS announcement,
but I do know what it's called. And I love this,
the tender Buck electro stimulator.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
We let's move to the next out.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
This is just a salad. I wanted to throw a
salad out there. We've got some romaine and watermelon, radishes
and herbs and a vinaigrette. There's probably some egg in there.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
It's very good.
Speaker 3 (54:12):
I don't know if it's as exciting as the other topics,
but yeah, so, I mean all of it. And that'll change.
What goes into that salad will change, you know, the
dressing and all these things. Well, what is the dressing.
This is a onion dressing, so it's like a charred onion.
We grill and then puree that up with some egg
yolk and olive oil.
Speaker 1 (54:33):
Oh, we didn't talk about eggs eggs from.
Speaker 3 (54:35):
We get eggs from two different sources right now, one
of which we've been using since we were at the
Farmer's Market together. Like we both sold at the Farmer's Market.
And let's be two thousand and six through twenty and twelve.
His name is Chris, and he runs an amazing operation.
He just has very very good eggs. That's what the
(54:58):
only thing he does is raised chickens for eggs. And
then we also get we sell a few eggs retail. Uh.
And that's from another farm out in the Hill Country
called Hat and Heart. And that is also another fantastic
egg That's the egg I eat at home because they
send them in twelve back cartons and so that's the
ones that I steal from the restaurant to take home.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
How many jobs do you create here at Die Doue.
Speaker 3 (55:23):
We probably got around forty, that's great man. Yeah, between
front of the house staff and and everybody in the
kitchen and so yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Dude's gotta be the fun if you were in the
if you were in the food business, gotta be This
has gotta be the most educational, funnest place to work.
Speaker 3 (55:40):
If if it's your thing, you know, if you want,
if you want more refinement and and and truffles and
different ingredients, and you know, you might find home somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (55:50):
This is like way, that's just like how that's just
it's a demonstration of buying power. It's not a it's
some of that. It's a demonstration of buying power. It's
not a demonstration of creativity and elbow grease.
Speaker 3 (56:05):
Well, I appreciate that. I can only say that because
there are people that sometimes that will come here and
they're like, this is not what I'm looking for.
Speaker 1 (56:11):
I want.
Speaker 3 (56:11):
I want to go to this place where we play
things and it's a little fancier. We use some tweezers
and this. Yet that's fine, you know, I mean, everybody's
got their their place. We have it. We have a
wonderful crew here. You know. It's it's just it's so
much fun to come in here because everybody they get
into it. You know, we try to educate them as
much as possible about what these things are and you know,
(56:33):
like and like pull the curtains back and let them
see and just and understand how important it is to
support you know, loncito or the you know, the supposed
eradication of add ad or why we use beats or
why this olive oil is so valuable and all these things.
So we try to really you know, inculcate that in them. Uh,
(56:54):
so they understand what they're doing.
Speaker 5 (56:55):
Yeah, when you come down for your our dad hunt, Randall,
you might want to incorporate stopping by here and doing
a little beat about eating out of dat.
Speaker 7 (57:04):
I've been thinking about how to suggest that myself in
a way that didn't seem.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
Like you're trying to take advantage of them.
Speaker 4 (57:10):
So I appreciate you saying that.
Speaker 1 (57:11):
I'll go ahead and improve that right now.
Speaker 4 (57:14):
Can I have a concluder?
Speaker 1 (57:15):
Yeah, I was about ready to do one. Go ahead,
let it rip.
Speaker 4 (57:18):
I've got two.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
I'll make them very short and sweet.
Speaker 4 (57:21):
One.
Speaker 5 (57:21):
Every time I eat here, I'm very inspired. It's very inspirational.
When I eat here, I'm like, I need to go
home and do a better job and like put more
effort into cooking at home. Because even though it is
like there's a lot of stuff going on there. I
don't need to get that. I don't even want to
call it fancy. You were just trying to not call
your food fancy, so now I don't want to use
(57:42):
that word. But like, I need to do a better job.
Number two, I feel like what you do as a
restaurant tour you're making the world a better place. Oh man,
that's very kind, but you really are, Like I'm almost
emotional about it. Like the whole thing that you just explained,
it's only making everybody around you and you're involved with
(58:02):
ye better because of what you're doing here.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
You appreciate it. Very cool.
Speaker 1 (58:08):
Yeah, man, I get a lot of pride out of
being your friend. I love the stuff you do, the
way you care yourself, the way you treat people around you.
I love this restaurant. I think people should come and
check it out. Man. It's like you've created something of
a lot of beauty. And also you just play by
your own rules, you know what I mean, Like you
didn't you just did things the way. You can just
(58:31):
tell that you just did things the way that made
sense to you. And when someone's like, oh it doesn't
work that way, you can't do it that way. You
just say, oh, figure it out, see what I can
do and landing in the cool spot.
Speaker 3 (58:42):
Man, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
So you come to Austin, you guys can feel free
to say whatever you want. But I always tell people
whenever I talk to someone that's coming to Austin, like,
you gotta go to die do a man. That's what
I've heard about forever and from everybody that's come down here.
It says, if you get the chance to go, you
got to go. If you ever down there, just regardless
if it's work or vacation, you got to go. And
(59:06):
it has inspired me to do some more stuff with
with the game at home, to do some different things.
You know, we get in you get in a rut,
and I don't guess it's a root because I like
the way the things that I cooked, the way that
I do, but there's so much more potential to make
it different. I like it, and this is thank you Jesse.
It's great.
Speaker 8 (59:28):
Yeah, I mean it's everything I tasted was exceptional. But
you know, oftentimes it feels like a vision is sort
of tacked on.
Speaker 7 (59:40):
To a to a restaurant, and this there's like a
very kind of render there's there's, indeed that there.
Speaker 8 (59:49):
This is like a very clear, honest concept that carries
through everything with great clarity, and.
Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
It's so good.
Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
My other concluder after Clay is, uh, how do we
decide who gets the watch? I've been watching. Now I'm
going to get more serious about it. I'm been trying
to steal man.
Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
These guys said, I cannot add anything to it, but
just I just want to say. The food is incredibly good.
It's incredibly good, and you're you're just such a generous person.
So thank you, Jesse.
Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
It's the community and it's good ladies and gentlemen. Jesse Griffins.
Speaker 4 (01:00:34):
Now tell me who made this pickle.
Welcome everybody to the third and final flop from the
Meat Eater Live Christmas Tour. Today finds us in Austin, Texas,
at the esteemed restaurant Die do Way, owned and operated
by Jesse Griffiths, who I argue, not only is America's
greatest chef. I mean, maybe I don't know that's a
big claim. He is definitely America's greatest wild game cook
(00:22):
and chef. And we're in his restaurant. What I used
to like about this restaurant.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
But I used to like about it, I.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Need you know. Last night some people came up to
me and they were from somewhere far away, like Massachusetts
or something, and they had recently come to Austin to
eat at the restaurant. They came to the show and
told me that story. Why I liked, Why I liked
I used to like Die where we're sitting right now
(00:49):
is you'd get to the menu and you encounter this
very intriguing line down here. Now. You think most restaurants
would put the line up here in big letters, but
Jesse had a line down here that said everything is
from around here, and he was a master of subtlety
and just left it like that. I was shocked and dismayed.
(01:09):
Today I asked for a menu so that I could
reference everybody to the everything is around here line, And
what did I find is a broader explanation backing up
the claim that everything is from around here. The premise
that died due is that when you come here, you're
eating Texas food from Texas, and that is not an
(01:35):
easy thing to do. I know that. When I've had
Jesse on the podcast before, we've laughed about I remember
Jesse and I were somewhere and he ran into a
citrus stand and bought a truckload of citrus because when
citrus is ready, that's his year long chance to get citrus.
I've been with you buying a truckload of pecans, because
(01:56):
when pecans are ready, it's time. You're not going to
get them from somewhere else. Things like, give me a
thing that you'll just never have here. Tell me the
thing that's the biggest bummer that you'll never be able
to have.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Pineapples. Okay, I love pineapple.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Okay, but since you can't get a pineapple from Texas,
you're never gonna get a You'll never see a pineapple
in here. Barring some kind of agricultural innovation.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Pretty much. Yeah, you could conceivably grow a pineapple in
far South Texas.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And if they did, you would buy.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Oh, I would buy. I'd drive down there and get it.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Jesse buys people bring things. I hesitate to say this
because I don't want to have people just showing up
at your door. People will show up at Jesse's door.
You tell its, I want you to. I don't want
to say anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I mean, yeah, we get some kind of sketchy sales transactions.
I mean we don't participate solicitations, thank you. Usually it's
in the form of a of a dead farreal hog. Okay,
maybe some mushrooms, which I will buy, but faral hogs
I will not, okay.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
But other things, a purveyor would just call and say
I happen to have a bunch of and you'll go
go for it and do it. Uh. Jesse's been on
the podcast before. I'm big like, I love his restaurant.
If you were to ask my wife about her favorite restaurant,
she's gonna say this is her favorite restaurant. It's it's
(03:25):
far none, far and away in my favorite place to eat.
What we've never done with Jesse if you've never sat
down to eat. So we're gonna try to eat with
headphones on, which is which is complicated. But the main
thing we want to do is in trying to capture
this essence of like Texas food. Can you tell us
what we're looking at and and prove to me that
(03:47):
everything is from around here?
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Sure? Sure, we'll start right in front of you. So
those are some flout us made with shredded wild boar.
All right. Farrell hogs come from either the hill country
or east of Austin.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
And these are real wild pigs, real.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
So they're they're trapped live and then they're brought into
a licensed facility, at which point they're inspected and then kill.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Who did that?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
What's the there's a phrase for someone that cannot tolerate
the sound of other people chewing.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I don't have that.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
They're not gonna like this. They're not gonna like this episode.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
If you move your thing, if you move your thing
way away and then move it back when you have
to talk.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
So shredded Farrel hog, these tortillas, we buy them from
a very specific place in San Antonio. Shredded cabbage. So
cabbage is in season right now, when cabbage is not
in season, we will pickle or fermn it so that
then we can use it. On top of here, I
got a question already.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
If you buy a tortilla, you then I'm assuming you
then need to call that tortilla to find out.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
The source of their corn. You do, yes, hum, So
not for everything though, And I want to be really
transparent about it too. So like we will carry We
have a bottled lemonade that we serve, you know, mostly
because we love the company. You know, it's just this
little girl started to like basically a lemonade stand, and
so we buy that that's a local company. But our
(05:23):
fresh ingredients and I wouldn't go one hundred percent on it,
but are going to be very diligently sourced from Texas
to the point where we we we will often get
shipped lettuce this butter lettuce right here. The company we
source it from. Some sometimes are often just throws whatever
in there. If it comes in the back door and
(05:45):
we see that it is not from Texas because there's
a there's a company that grows these hydroponically, we ship
it right back. Really, and that confuses the hell out
of the driver, He's like, what are you talking about? Like,
this is not what we met. He's like, it says
butter Lettuce, Like yeah, well talk to the rep. Not
the right butter Lettuce, not the right butter Lettuce.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
One time I think we were in here.
Speaker 5 (06:05):
You were telling us that at one point you got
eggs that were like five from five miles away, and
then you found out that you could get eggs that
were from like a half a mile from here. Do
you still sort of roll with that ethos too, of
like the closer to this restaurant, that stuff has grown
and made the better.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
There's going to be a lot of different things that
determine where we get things. Now, proximity would be would
be one, but really it's going to be it's probably
going to boil down more to how those businesses are run.
I mean, what you know, land stewardship, what there, how
they operate, you know, especially with eggs. You know, we
want a pasture situation. We don't want a warehouse, and
(06:45):
we want chickens to be able to live on pasture
freely and feed on insects things like that. So we
will do the research and if we have so so
I mean to that point, if we had to get
something from farther away that fell more within our standards
than we would apply do that, right.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
There's people that came up to me and they were
telling me about how they'd come a long way to
go to your restaurant. He made a comment, he says, Man,
it's pretty expensive, though, I'm like, dude, do you even
know what those guys go through to put that stuff together.
I'm like, they take basically all that money to go
buy the stuff to make like it's complicated.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
It is complicated.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
It's like it's like you're doing things. You guys are
doing things that make the least business sense.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's the cost of real food.
How much it really costs when there's not a subsidized
you know, agribusiness standard that's producing these things. It's just
it's just how it really costs to operate like this.
And if we want to ensure that we keep farmers
that are doing the right things, you know, in these
smaller and we're going to throw the word family farm
(07:51):
out there, and I mean that for real, like a
family's run in this place. If we want to really
ensure that they are in business then we have to
buy from them, and then their their product is more
expensive almost invariably.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
Let's let's back we talk about what Randall's eating.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Oh yeah, I just want to do a quick recapture
mm hmmm, quick recap on this first place, and then
we'll try to get through without all the interruptions. So Texas,
you buy tortillas from a Texas outfit, the tortilla is
filled with a kind of braised down, cooked down. I
haven't eaten it yet. Faral hog. Yeah, wild pig that
(08:26):
was trapped in the wild and brought to you on
the bone.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah yeah, I mean sometimes sometimes we'll buy trim, but typically,
like especially these days, for probably the past years or so,
we've really trended towards whole carcasses on faral hogs.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So in the back door of this restaurant, wild pig
carcasses come in.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
We have a rail system which is really cool because
we can just hook them up on a rail and
it's like a little railroad goes from the back door
into the walk in on a big loop and then
it comes out, goes down the hot line and into
the prep area right here to our.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Rightep, meaning those inedible wild pigs that can't be eaten
come into this restaurant and every day get eaten by
people who then say that that's the best wild pig
they ever ate. Very edible, very very doubt Okay, let's
move on.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Well, speaking of inedible, part two, that's our Addad.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Meatball, right, the inedible added.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
The inedible is here. Odd Dad gets more inedible the
farther across that canyon that people shoot it, you know,
and all said that guide is like, yeah, man, you
can't eat those things. You know that, you know, so
they go chop the head off, and you know, I
I love Audad. I think Oddad is objectively good. I
(09:49):
think that it's oftentimes cooked improperly and you kind of
need to aggregate it. Much like the feral hog is
slow cooked and shredded or ground or made into sausages.
Things like that. Odd again needs to be aggregated. So
we're going to slow cook that or we're going to
grind it, and that's what that is.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Just me understand that word to use and aggregated.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
But like so faral hogs especially so if we I
can't pick up the phone and say, hey, can you
bring me five sixty five pound faral hogs tomorrow. I
can say, can you bring me some faral hogs tomorrow?
And he's like sure. I mean one of them is
going to be one hundred and thirty eight pounds. Two
of them, you know, probably siblings out of the same sounder,
(10:29):
are going to come in at forty seven pounds and
so forth. So it's very difficult to achieve consistency in
size and fat content. So if I want to run chops,
we got to get a little bit lucky. And so
you know what they are. Our processor either selects certain
animals of size and quality or or we just get
(10:52):
lucky with what the trapper got. And so it's the
much more easier thing to do would be to aggregate that.
Meaning we're going to just pull every thing off the
bone and grind it and then make something out of it,
or we're gonna shred it off the bone and make
something like that. It's an equalizer, got it? Uh?
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And on this this odd ad here that we're looking
at as we discussed, this dish has been ground. But
these I imagine too. You don't say like I want
a bunch of one hundred pound carcasses or whatever.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
You just get and what you get. Yeah, we get
what we get?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Got it? So yeah, and how do these odd ads
show up to you?
Speaker 3 (11:25):
So that's either that's probably going to be a coal.
Sometimes they're trapped, you know, so sometimes they'll go into
hog traps things like that, at which point they're fair game,
you know, and they might be coals off of high
fence places as well. Coming for complete transparency, you know,
but I think that at that point we're kind of
(11:45):
towing the line between eating an invasive and also trying
to demonstrate that that invasive is edible as well. You know.
So it's also like a it's an object lesson right there,
you know, like, well you can you can eat it?
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Hey, what about the what about the combination?
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Excuse me?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Like what were this is a I don't know, flata.
What would we call that.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Let's a it's a it's our flatbread. So we make
a flat bread and then it's got grilled meatballs on there.
Those meatballs are bound with rice. The rice comes from
out near Houston and anawak.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Really Texas rice.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
But then the French fries is really like.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, well that's you know, if you go to Europe
and you get these like donor kebabs and these these
these classics in the Middle Eastern pet of sandwiches. A
lot of times they'll put French fried.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Okay, so that's.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, I like that. So what's in the flatbread? Is
it a flower based flat bread?
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Flour? Flowers flower, So we use some it depends on
the bread. Some flour we do get from larger mills,
but we use a lot of Texas grown flour from
bart and spring smell.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
And then you're able to get taters from Texas.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Yes, sometimes most of the time and off season. That's
one of the COVID provisions that that we made was
that we that's kind of our our our cheat ingredient
is potatoes and.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
So we just have to have them.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah, it really hit hard during COVID and that we
and it's really funny because I think, you know that
potatoes represent like one of like two hundred ingredients that
that we get and it's and it's the one that's
not consistently from Texas and can always end up there.
And I always ended up talking about it too long.
But during COVID, I mean, people I don't know, we
(13:28):
were just like, we really need to provide some comfort
we need French fries and mashed potatoes and things like that,
and we kind of went down that path. We're very
conscientious about how we source them. They have to be organic,
prefer uh preferably we get them from Colorado and New Mexico,
so we're able to do that. But again, if they
hit the back door and they're not organic, they what
(13:51):
do you feel like.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
You're getting from an organic potato versus a non organic potato?
Speaker 3 (13:56):
You know, I don't. I mean, at one point years ago,
I had on some research on it. I don't know
how the standards have changed, and so maybe it is
a fool's errand to think that I'm doing anything. But
at the same time, I just, you know, whatever that
standard means these days, I support it, you know. I
think it's just better. If we're going to make a concession,
I want it to be the best possible.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Okay, what's next. We haven't talk about this one yet.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Yeah, So that's our pastrami sandwich. So that is beef.
That's some Logu beef brind smoked and then steamed a
rye bread and then sour kraut. I think the real
start of the show here would be the sour kraut,
and that you know, we had to pull this off
(14:43):
of our menu for about three weeks and then people
were really upset. It's a good pastrami sand and we
had to pull it off the menu because we ran
out of sour kraut because we didn't put enough away
the previous spring. Like this spring, we just we didn't
do enough. We should have shredded more sour kraut. It's
(15:04):
about a three week process of fermenting the sour kraut
and then we can sit on it in the walk
in for months and months and months.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
But when you get how much might you shred? Like
how much cabbage might you do when a cabbage is available?
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Hundreds and hundreds of pounds. We make our own paprika,
So we bring in hundreds of pounds of sweet peppers
during peak pepper.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Season, which just make paprika.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
It's amazing. Our paprika is like probably one of my
favorite things that we make, and it has one ingredient
and it's a pepper. We bring in just beautiful, thick walled,
late season ripe red peppers and we're in this is
going to kind of mess with y'all because you're from
the north. We're in the tail into pepper season right now.
(15:44):
So November, maybe the first part of December is when
we really just started get a lot of peppers in.
We got to walk in full of them and we
smoke them over post oak and then we dehydrate them
and then grind them into a powder. And when it's
fresh and made with a really nice pepper, it's it's
(16:04):
it's incredibly good.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
So that's all paprika is, is the ground up pepper.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
So you make it smoked pap You make it smoked paprika, correct, Yeah,
post predominantly what you use is post o Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
I mean, you know, when we do off sites and
fun other things, you know, we mix up that wood.
But uh, you know, post oake pecan another favorite. And
then when we go south, I almost invariably amusing mesquite.
And I mean there's this whole thing about wood, and
you know what what those different styles of wood and
direct heat cooking, off offset cooking, and you know, it
really has influenced the cooking culture here. But where this,
(16:40):
where this restaurant sits in Austin, post oak should be
the fuel, right, It's the most prevalent thing it you know,
it has influenced our barbecue culture incredibly, Like like we
are in central Texas, it is that offset indirect heat
of barbecue. Whereas you get further south, they're kind of
cook king over mesquite. But there's just a lot of distance.
(17:02):
It's it's really fascinating to me because these woods burned differently.
But where we're sitting right now, post stoke would be
would be the wood.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
How many cords of would do you think you go through? Oh?
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Uh one a week? Not it's not incredible, Like we're
just we're burning in the in the grills and then
our smoker. We have a we have a rotisserie, uh,
solid fuel smoker which is really cool and so it
burns whatever would we want to put in.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
But your week sounds like a lot.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah wow, Yeah, your cooking fire is running all the time.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Yeah yeah, I mean Friday, Saturday, Sunday all day and
then then you know, five six hours a night. Rest up.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Let's back up cabbage for a second. As you walk
through this, who.
Speaker 4 (17:44):
Made that.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
The pickle? Yeah, I don't know. I'm to find out it's.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
The only thing it was made here.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
And your kids, Oh I thought you wanted a name.
I was like, it's gonna be Hector or I don't know. No,
we made that of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
That's the cool thing about being in here is like
down to the smallest detail, like the pickle. When you
eat this pickle, you're like, oh, this it came in
as a cucumber and then right there it turned into
a pickle.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Oh, I got a good one for you.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So yog I went back up to the because we
left behind the crowd, and I had a crowd question.
So it comes the day when cabbages are ready to
come into Die do a October. Okay, and now it's
not like you're prepping for tonight, but you're prepping for
the year. How do you handle staffing to say, hey, everybody,
(18:35):
come in, we're going to go through a truckload of cabbage.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Well, it's no, it's we were buying it. I mean,
in total, we're buying hundreds of pounds. So we'll bring
in ten cases, and then a week later another ten cases, and.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Then the season and see you still spread it out
throughout however long the window of opportunity.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Still that's I mean, I guess you've got people here
that all. Their whole job is just making.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Stuff pickles, I mean, like ferments, things like that.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
They're not there. Their job isn't even to make something
for a customer tonight.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Absolutely, it's very heavy on preps. So we have a
lot of staff because every single sauce, every pickle, every everything,
the paprika has to be made, the yogurt on that flatbread.
So years ago, one of our years ago, we had
an employee and she was from India and her family's
(19:28):
yogurt starter had been going for over two hundred years continually,
and she brought us that yogurt starter and so we
still use that yogurt starter to create our own yogurt.
So we make our own we make some of our
we make our own cream cheese, we make our own
sour cream, we make our own yogurt here. So anything
like that that we can make will make it and
(19:50):
there's just fun stories.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Is there anywhere else that does this like you do?
Speaker 4 (19:57):
You know?
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I'm sure, and I think that there's a more proliferation
restaurants like kind of what we're doing, like really kind
of taking deep dives and just definitely more focus on
locality and support of things like that. But I would
I would like to say no to an extent. You know,
like we we've been doing it for a long time.
We've been in business for nineteen years, and so we
(20:20):
am with the same ethos and the same functionality.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
There is distinct differences between everything I have tasted so far.
There's nothing like all that kind of tastes like that,
or this has similarities. Everything is so far different.
Speaker 7 (20:35):
Commonality though, is that it all has a ton of flavor.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yeah, there's an amazing it's very bold. Yeah, as my
grandfather was saying, this tastes like more.
Speaker 8 (20:45):
Yeah, oh no, I love that. The burger was the
burger was like shocking yeah into it.
Speaker 5 (20:50):
There's definitely like top fifty burgers.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I've ever had awesome Top fifty.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
I mean it might be the best one I've ever had.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
You by the wag, how does that work?
Speaker 3 (21:03):
That's Mariana Peeler just south of San Antonio. We've had
a great relationship with her for years and we settled
on that. It's like a it's a It was a
kind of a compromise between grass fed, which what I
am fascinated by, and grain fed, which is what the
customer is fascinated by they.
Speaker 5 (21:24):
So it's not hip anymore to eat grass fed. The
customer likes the corn finish.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Is it even though it's like a breed, there's like
an expectation about how it's been a lock it into
a shipping container and starve at half to death and.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Right, well, yeah, I mean you you can definitely get
almost obscene amounts of fat in there. She pastures her,
so they live on pasture. They have an opportunity to
like a free choice grain source, so they are still
eating grain. But most importantly to me is that her
processing facility, which she owns, is seven miles from the ranch.
(22:04):
So on their bad day they get loaded up, they
got a quick trip over there and it's all done
and there's no feed lot in between.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
And then how do you buy that?
Speaker 3 (22:13):
We buy mostly big rib primals like you saw on
the way in that we dry age and then a
lot of that trim from those rib primals goes in there.
I'm sorry, I completely misspoke. There's only a little bit
of waggu in the burger, the pistromius waggu.
Speaker 4 (22:32):
We buy.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Grass fed longhorn from a ranch in South Texas, the
one that you've been to where we turkey hunted. Uh
so he has just completely pastured long rangy longhorns that
and we buy older animals from those and then we
mix that with some of that wagg you and then
some of the age walks.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So your burger's long horn burger mostly yeah, huh.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Yeah, I mean, and it's like you get a really
incredible flavor. I tell it spoken, I said WOGGI, uh
it is, but.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Over here I might have directed you in your own direction.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
The brisket for the pastrami is is woggy. But this
is a grass fed longhorn. And by grass fed, I
mean that thing just lives out there that that eastern
peninsula and there's no I mean, it's just eating whatever
it can.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Is that expensive for you to buy, because like the
longhorn market collapse, does that make it less expensive for
you to buy?
Speaker 3 (23:26):
It's about average as far and and and often don't
I don't know what like commodity pricing is on these things.
We're unaffected typically in meat prices because we don't have
the variations and markets because we're you know, I'm buying
from a guy that I'm he's one of my best friends.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Understand you, you're not out shopping for the cheapest stuff
in the marketplace.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
And I started hitting them up for these older animals
that had kind of naturally developed more fat and more flavor,
just beautiful, bigger animals. And and we started using that
for the burg because I thought, we thought that that
would be the best platform for it. The steaks didn't
go over well. People just weren't into them, you know,
and they caught. They cost us just as much, and
(24:09):
so they cost the customer.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
People didn't want to rangy long horned steak.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yes, it would be like do you like the wild cows?
I love them. We ate a big old steak when
we were down there, right.
Speaker 6 (24:22):
A wild long horn It just tastes like a Western
sizzler buffet steak.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
No, No, I mean it is. It's got that intense
iron flavor and it's I mean it would be if
you put it on the same like linear spectrum of
of a of a of a deer that have been
farm raised, and then you know that's going to be
taste like kind of a sweet corn fed deer versus
(24:48):
like a real like a sage brush eating deer. And
then the same thing with the with the with the
cattle you know, they're they're eating just corn, and they're
getting the kind of bland and sweet and fat and
just easy versus like the real nature of what but
beef tastes like, and beef has a lot more character
than what we collectively remember it to taste.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Like those longhorns eating like mesquite beans or whatever kind.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Of August September, they're eating mesquite beans. They're eating just
all those native grasses down there, and then there's there's
invasive blue stem anything. They're just in there just grazing
and they are they never get pellets or corn or
anything like that. Tell you about those wraps around, yeah,
to tell us about the.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Sauce, the red sauce and the color of a boiled beat.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
And that's yes, so that's our beat ketchup and that
that's kind of a that came down to more of
an economic decisions, like we could potentially buy enough tomatoes
and to make ketchup year round, but when we tried to,
our ketchup was exorbitantly expensive. Like if somebody wanted a two.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Ounce too hard to make ketchup?
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Too hard once you cook me, because you you're cooking
tomatoes down to a tenth of their volume, and you're
buying tomatoes at four dollars a pound, and so it's
a real reflection of how these markets actually work. And
so we had to find a solution, and that solution
was beats. We could buy beats more cheaply and then
turn them into a ketchup. But you know, like if
(26:18):
you said, oh I love this tomato ketchup, can I
get a side of it? It'd be like, okay, it's
six dollars and then then people get really up.
Speaker 6 (26:26):
It's interesting that tomato ketchup would be the thing that
was too expensive. Yeah, for people's taste, there's a lot
you would think it would be something else.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, it's it's well, you know, there's we are in
our culture. We have very decided ideas about what's cheap
and what's expensive. You know, a taco cheap. Uh, you know,
chips and salsa free always yeah, yeah, they're not. It's
never free. You know, you're paying for it. But and
and things like ketchup or you know those, Yeah, they
just they're supposed to be. And it's like, well, you know,
(26:56):
in a real system that that that you know, everybody
wins from the far on down. Tomatoes they're not cheap.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
You know, interesting things. But I don't know about ketchup
till I started getting into like the aesco fia of
the old French cookbooks. Is you would go into the
index and there's the ketchups, mushroom ketchup, onion ketchup, and
the tomato Ketchup is just one of many ketchups. But
it won. Yeah, it like very much won, you know,
(27:26):
it became ketchup.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's I mean, that's that's us
kind of trying to play within the markets, you know,
and just trying to figure out how to give people
what they want, but still within the context and within parameters,
economic parameters.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
How do you get the vinegar that you use to
make ketchup?
Speaker 3 (27:45):
We buy dry goods, you know, vinegar and sugar and
spices and things like that. It's kind of like a
little house on the prairie mentality, you know, it's like
we can go to the mercantile and get these dry goods,
but fresh ingredients or we're going to prioritize is coming
from within this system and then whatever else we can
(28:05):
within that, you know, like like flowers, we get Steen's
cancrup from Louisiana, you know, and it's like, instead of
buying molasses from who knows where, we get this beautiful
canesrup from our neighbors over here. We buy pistachios from
one farm in New Mexico. You know, it's just their neighbors.
And I got tired. I mean, pecans were the only
game in town.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
You know.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Here it's the only nut. We have maybe an odd
walnut here and there, but nothing cultivated and nothing easy
to crack. So I was finally I was like, let's
let's just get pistachios, you know, but like let's do
our research and get them from a great place. Same
thing with our coffee. You know, obviously we're not growing
coffee here. We need to have it, but we do
the research. We're like, who's making the best you know,
(28:48):
who's paying their people the best, best processes and all
these things, And so.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
What about the burger bun? We didn't talk about the
burger bun. Then we got to talk about the fat
you fry and your fries and beef towels, so how
you make that? But what's the burger bun all about?
Speaker 3 (29:00):
You know, like all of our breads, you know, we
have a pastry chef in house, and she makes everything anything.
That's all of our breads we make in house. On
this table right over here, we butcher all the feral
hogs on the on one side and make the breads
on the other side. Their sourdough starter. When we signed
the least for this building in twenty thirteen, we were
(29:22):
parked over in that alley over there, went over there,
picked a big bunch of wild mustang grapes, took him home,
wrapped them in cheese cloth, mashed him up, and put
them in a slurry of flour and water and captured
that that hyper local yeast. And that's all right there
in the alley over there. We had to park over there,
there were some wild grapes, and so our sourdough starter
(29:44):
to this day is from a grape starter, the throat
from the yeast, from a wild yeast that we got
from across the road.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
You kidding me? You kept it going that time.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Every day it has to be fed.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
What do you feed it with?
Speaker 3 (29:58):
You regenerated every day?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Put sugar, flower and water, No sugar, don't put sugar
in about it?
Speaker 3 (30:05):
Yeah? Yeah, And then you're talking about the fat, the
beef fat. So every Monday, which is today, is rendering day,
and so we buy as much beef fat, mostly from Mariana,
and there's another butcher shop that sources all local and
sometimes we take their excess beef fat and we grind
(30:27):
it and render it all day long on Mondays to
stalk the fryar with beef fat for the for the week.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
So you guys grind, you guys grind when you render.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I think it's best you get the most service area. Yeah,
and you and it and it. And also I think
you'll see a lot of times people overcook their lard
or or tallow and get it too like brown and
because you will have when I'm when I'm cleaning a
feral hog, I pull by hand the leaf fat out
(30:58):
because if you cut, you get bits of meat in there.
I don't know why you have a whole thing based
on animal fats.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
I got a question for it.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
You know about it.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
If I pull it by hand, then I only get
the fat like that big sheath of you.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
You're you're skittish about having little hunks of meat in
your in your towel fat.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
One hundred percent well more so in lard. But yes,
also in the tallow, but it well. And I'll tell
you about lard. I always saw it's just whatever.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well, I think it makes it taste different.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
It gives it more of a pork or beef flavor.
And in cooking fats like lard and tallow, I want
some neutrality and I don't want to taste so savory.
If we're going to use that application for a dessert,
or if we're going to fry donuts in it on
Saturday and Sunday morning, we don't want it super beefy.
(31:50):
But then when you eat that donut, you're like, I
don't know why this is so good, but there's something,
there's something or like fried fish.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
And then it brought you jar my new coon grease.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Hell yeah, I got nobody's ever spoken those words I.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Rendered out. You know, I can blame me when I
tell you this. You know I can blame when I
tell you this. I rendered out one raccoon, and this
wasn't even picking it clean. I rendered out one raccoon
and it yielded three full court jars of lard. One raccoon.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Oh my, I could prove it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
I believe you, three full court jars off a single raccoon.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
I mean, that's that would be a good yield from
a big pig.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
I gave. I gave a court to him him, and
maybe I'm gonna give my last court to you.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
I would love that little raccoon lard.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Hey, I've got a serious thank you for that.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
That was serious about what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
No, No, I just have a very serious question weird
dealing before I thank you in our social media relationship,
like you on social media as if I wasn't going
to see you the next day. I was like, hey,
thanks Steve, and you didn't watch it.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Okay, he didn't follow you.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
What temperature are you rendering your your beef tallow out?
Speaker 3 (33:17):
So they're going to be popping into the oven.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
But yeah, talks about the whole process.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Well, it's it's all all hands on deck. By that,
I mean any heat source is utilized, so the four
burner range.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
But you've got to be having You've got to be
watching the temperature.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Yes, I I don't know. I could ask him real
quick before we do it in the oven.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I really want to know.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
But if you're doing in stove top, it's low and
you know just as low.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Do you have any sense of the temperature like one
or two twenty five.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
I don't it'd be over well, No, I don't, honestly.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Just because.
Speaker 6 (33:52):
I have a tendency to burn my grease a little bit.
But but but two twenty five is what I right
over stay to say. Do you think two hundred? Two hundred?
Speaker 1 (34:07):
I believe that that's perfect perfect because if you look
at like confee and like French cooking confee and in
the rendering duck oil and stuff, I've always read the
two hundred. That's what I shoot for is two hundred. Yeah,
I do it in my oven, but I like kind
of doing it on a Burnercond.
Speaker 6 (34:27):
May have really embarrassed us with Ted Copple. I rendered
bear fat with Ted Copple. Would you tell you the
other day?
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Well, we didn't have it.
Speaker 6 (34:35):
We didn't have a thermometer, and I just burned it
because it was going slow. And he started going, wow, Clay,
this is really slow.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
And I was like, oh, and did I sent you? I?
Speaker 2 (34:50):
I didn't. It was it was I didn't have it,
But I.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Wouldn't you grind it up? He'll get rid of as
much meat as possible or just all of.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
It, yes, going and there they're trimming out anything red
and then it goes to the grinder, and then it
goes into We have induction burners that we put on
the butcher tables, we have the range, and we also
are popping everything in the oven at the same time.
Just any way we can do it because we need
so much of it, okay, and then we put it
in these big pants and then you know, it solidifies
(35:18):
and then we're able.
Speaker 5 (35:19):
To But tell me how long it usually takes from
start to when you pull it out of the oven
and you're like, that looks good.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
It's going to depend on the volume. I mean a
couple hours.
Speaker 5 (35:30):
You know what would be the max If I told you,
you know what, I spent a whole day, Jesse, I
was rendering my bear fat for eight hours, would you
be like, Man, you overdid it big time.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
And there's no wonder it's probably a little grinding.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah. What I always tell people is so when you
when you start to cook it, you have these large
bubbles coming out and that's you know, the water coming
out of it. What you want to shoot for is
and you'll know this what a Coors light looks like.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Oh, for a minute, I was gonna get you're going
to hit him with You'll know this as a rendering man, like,
hold a minute, man, are you gossiping?
Speaker 5 (36:13):
So I was telling him about our you know, about
our life on the bus, and about how there's you
can very easily fall into, like the life of a
rock star, and the only person really carrying the flag
of a rock star has been Randalls.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
I appreciate that, Jesse. Later, if you need to have
talk hot dogs, you can also point to him say
you'll know this.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
I love I just made a big batch of venison
hot dogs and they are really That's like we've got to.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
Topic. I really need to know.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
I got to make a business, make a business deal.
We've been fixing to make a video about how to
make venison hot dogs. Really here, if you can think
about this, we'd like to have you come out on
the rollers. We want to make not fancy dogs, not
like a thinking man's hot dog. We want to make
(37:05):
take your venison and turn it into a gas station
hot every man's joe blow no bend in it that
you can put on a gas station rollery. Have it
be like a little kid would eat it and he'd go,
that's a hell of a hot.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Dog, collagen cases to keep him flatten straight. Ye, classic,
no fancy nothing, roller dogs, coryander, garlic, paprika and nutmeg.
And that's your that's yours.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
Is the consistency of the inside.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Here's the thing when guys go, so, I've made hot
dogs and we use sheep case like anybody can do that,
and they can make a thing that they'd be like, well,
this is my version of a hot dog. I want
to make hot dogs. The baseballs.
Speaker 8 (38:01):
Making venison hot dogs, they end up with something that's
what I would call the rot shape. Yes, it has
a different spice mixed than what they call their brats,
but it's a hot dog flavored sausage exactly. But it
doesn't have it's an emulsification. Five parts lean, four parts fat.
So you walk us through it right now.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
No, I mean, when we make we come back, we're
gonna make gas station hot dogs. Then we're gonna buy
the roller. We've already shopping for a roll and we're
gonna put them on a roll. It's getting excited, I mean,
and then we're gonna put mustard ketchup on them. Then
we're gonna be like, that's deer meat. Gas station hot dogs.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
I ate seven venison hot dogs over the weekend.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Oh you've got them right now.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
I made. I made a batch of seventy two of them, Randall,
I love it. They're so good. There's they're very very good.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Are they hot dog colored?
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Well, they're a little grayish. They don't have I didn't
smoke them either, so you could do a cold smoke
on them we're getting.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
They don't smoke station hot dogs.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
They might be a little cold smoke, but they're also
going to have Nightrite in them, so you know, real
pinked out from that. I did put some Insecure number
one in there, but they they didn't take on a
ton of that pink color there.
Speaker 5 (39:14):
A little on the migra would be that you would
have to add so much other filler that it'd be
hard to still call it a venison hot dog.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Well, it's going to need five parts venison lean, four
parts of some kind of fat that's going to be
fine poor pork, and then and then three parts ice,
and so it's going to be thirty three percent by
weight other fat. But then it's going to be whatever
that five parts is of pure venison.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
If we can, if we can publish a recipe and
have an instructional video of how to make a gas
station hot dog that your kid would be excited to
eat and have it be fifty percent venison. That is success.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Okay, we we can we can move We need to
move on because there's some yeah, yeah, there's there's some
nuanced I was starting.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
Sure you have some ip that he needs, and he's
very valuable.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
I know that.
Speaker 8 (40:10):
Yeah, I was starting to get a little sluggish from
the meal, but I haven't perked right up with the
talk of hot dugs.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
He had cheesecat, probably so. But my whole point was
as soon as it looks like a really light beer.
And this is what I teach in my classes. It's
like as soon as you get a straw color in
tiny bubbles, you're done, and that at that point you
need to strain.
Speaker 6 (40:35):
So how much solids will you get? Will you scrape off?
You know, the cracklings and just a little.
Speaker 3 (40:41):
Bit a lot. And that's one of the things that
gets me is like we still haven't found a consistent
home for those I hate throwing anything away, but we have,
like I mean, weekly we're probably fifty gallons.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
I throw them on my roof off the birds, magpies,
mag we have this. I need I need to metal.
I need to think about what you're talking because I
have looked at I've done it wrong. I'm not paying
attention to the bubbles. I'm looking first, like when I
feel the crackling is is spent? Is it's going to
(41:15):
get sure? And that the energy I'm putting into the
production has hit like any sort of reasonable efficiency, meaning
I could go and go and go and go and
go and maybe get a little more, but the crackling
is spent, diminishing returns. Yeah, I never look at the bubble. Okay,
that's possible. Well I'm not say I don't.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
I don't do it right. You do it right.
Speaker 6 (41:37):
I feel like there's there's a lot of signals in
the grease that tells you it's done, you know. I
mean in bubbles could be one of them, which I
wouldn't have thought either. I would I would be watching
the crackling because it's just like a lot of movement
early when it's rendering down and then finally it just
starts to slow and sudd You're like, we're not gaining anything.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Yeah, And I don't want it to get too dark. Yeah,
I want it to be blonde. Yeah, because then you
start to develop that toasty flavor in there, and so
that's going to affect your pie crest or your donut
or the other things you're gonna do with it.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
You have any way to legally use bear grease, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
When you get really good at something like like for you,
making grease, making tallow lard, you get to a point
where it talks to you. Do you know what I mean?
Like you are seeing a thing that you can't really explain,
the dumbness. Sure, it becomes a little bit like a
dark art.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
I always say that ice talks to me walking on ice.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Oh, I can look at it. I don't speak.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Yeah, I look at upon and it talks to me
about it tells me what condition it's in. But you
probably get with the grease. I never get, like, I
don't do it enough to when I'm making lard or grease,
I don't. I always leave it like, don't know, man,
I suppose that's probably good that the bubbles.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
That's what the bubbles were saying, real technical question. This
is a batch of bear grease that I made. Okay,
that looks great, it's really clear and pale. Right, but okay,
that's the color of a lot of them. Uh huh,
it never solidified.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Oh, this is cool. When I took bear hog hunting
out there to that property, he killed two hogs. I
had killed one a couple maybe a month or so
previous to that, and then and I killed one on
that property two days ago. And it's a there's a
there's a big pecan orchard on one side, and there's
a big pecan orchard on the other side. The whole
(43:43):
river by the bottom is nothing but pecans. And the
fat that we render off these hogs does not solidify
in the refrigerator. It stays almost completely liquid. So I
reached out to one of our customers here as a doctor,
and I was like, what's happening with this. It's like
Nola oil viscosity in the refrigerator as polyunsaturated fats from
(44:05):
eating a diet of probably only pecans, which are really
high in polyunsaturated.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
And that's what you told me too, right, Yes, that's
what I'm Yeah, Clay'd probably tell you it's predicting the
weather and there's bad weather coming out.
Speaker 5 (44:18):
I need to look at earlier that's what you said.
That means Saturday lots of eighteen to one carbon bonds.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
That's good Bear diet.
Speaker 8 (44:28):
Lay unknowingly came up with his second book title earlier
when he said signals in the grease.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
I like it.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
That's the grease signals.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
So that is do you feel like it's a good
product like that?
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Like that? Well? Yes, no, I mean the first off,
those hogs are very very good to eat, very sweet
mile but still have that nice bit of like barrel
hog flavor. To him, Uh, the fat was worthless for sausage.
You couldn't use the back fat for sausage. Once you
ran it through the grinder, it liquefied on way out,
like just frozen chunks of fat into the grinder liquid
(45:04):
on the way out just because it was soft wild
howk even the harder fat off the back, not just
the leaf fat.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
And then for.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Something like a coned feet where you need that solidified
protective cover wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Work because it never solid Yep, that's a good point.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
But for general cooking, sauteg things like that, it was great.
But anything that you needed like a I tried to
make pie crust with it came total disaster because you
couldn't get that solid fat incorporated.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
You never cut it in exactly now their day, I
noticed he had. He never mentioned it to me, but
he had the jar of congrease I made next to
a jar of bear grease in the same area. And
what I thought was interesting was indistinguishable well, and how
they were predicting weather, like the amount of like solid
(45:55):
the late where the line was liquefied.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
The congrease was totally solid.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
No, no, yeah, it was was it thinking that you
didn't see that. He didn't mention it, but I saw it.
Oh okay, yeah, he didn't say hey, thanks for that,
but I was looking at him. I thought, oh wow,
it's remarkable how similar in appearance they are.
Speaker 6 (46:17):
I think you misinterpreted that because the coon grease was
completely solid and the bear grease was basically sixty forty
you know, olive oil like and then the saturated fat.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
That it makes me think like an unreliable reporter.
Speaker 6 (46:39):
Dude, Well, I think maybe over time it's possible that
your coon grease, when it's not being shook up and
everything would kind of solidify. But basically, I had some
barre oil analyzed by one of the best lipid labs
in America. And basically the short version is is that
the clear olive oil colored liquid is unsaturated fat eighteen
(47:05):
to one carbons like olive oil. The heavier stuff is
saturated fats, and it's a variety of different carbon chains
and stuff. But anyway, this bar oil that I submitted
was like sixty percent unsaturated fat forty percent saturated but apparently,
but I think it's different based upon the bear's diet.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Sure, there's a lot of hand lotion, natural hand lotion
in that bear meat.
Speaker 6 (47:35):
So they analyze this barre oil and there are species
of lipids, Like if you have any jar of oil
that there is animal fat or like olive oil, there
are multiple, if not hundreds of species of lipids that
make up that oil. And this lab person she said
(47:59):
the most surprising thing about the barrel oil was that
it had uh, oh my gosh, it's slipped my mind.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
What it's called Sarahmid's.
Speaker 6 (48:08):
The barrel oil was three percent Saramid's, which if you
go to a drug store and look for skin lotion,
it'll say Sarahmid's because Sarahmid's are a species of lipid
that is like forty percent of your skin and so anyway,
but pork fat didn't have nothing else that she had
ever seen had saramids in it.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
But a little off topic.
Speaker 4 (48:32):
But what do you mean?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
And it's for my book, You're honest, Jo honest want me.
He constantly wants me to talk about my book that's
coming out a year and a half.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Be ready, very good book.
Speaker 4 (48:43):
What's it called?
Speaker 1 (48:43):
I read the first half called American Bear very good book. Wow,
first half is could go to ship after that.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Get this guy talking about it.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
You can put a big old chapter in there about
that grease I gave you.
Speaker 4 (48:56):
Probably it'll be it'll be the apple.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
I'll put it in the I'll be like my dear friends.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
You spend on bear fat in this book. I don't
want to give it all away. But you're not gonna.
I'm telling you, you're not giving anything away. Give them
a taste.
Speaker 6 (49:11):
Man, it's the Let me just say that the opening
of the book will be unlike any book you've ever read, probably.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Because the discussion before.
Speaker 6 (49:22):
Yeah, and and we we do have right now in
the structure of full chapter on me going to Atlanta.
I went to Emery Labs in Atlanta and saw the machine,
the most technical lipid analysis machine in the world.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
Study.
Speaker 6 (49:41):
We did novel research on bear grease never before. They
want me to publish and they want me to somehow
be involved in a published article about it. Well, and
I was like, that would be great, Let's do it.
I'm getting a little jealous.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
There you go eighteen months out. Yeah, where are we
on our walk through? Have we gotten to your lettuce
rap yet? No? Nopet's tackle the lettuce wrap. Yeah, and
then we'll tackle the salad.
Speaker 3 (50:08):
We're gonna let's just talk vegetables first. So the lettuce
is a hydroponically or aquaponically grown butterleaf lettuce actually the
company owned by another friend of mine. And then right
outside of Austin. So we get these super fresh, really beautiful,
uh you. We'll notice a little bit of lime on there.
(50:29):
That is a South Texas organically grown line from gns
Orchards down near Karizo Springs. We've got fresh IRBs because
we are in season four, things like minton salatro, some
red cabbage and radishes also in season. But then the
you know, the real star of the show there is
the ground nil gui so and these are coming from
(50:50):
that band along the Texas coast south of Kingsville all
the way to the border where the aeteria is and
then kind of extends over to the west to Felfurious
in a little bit farther. But then where the where
the nil guy range. And so we get in a
lot of nil guy. I like nil guy. A lot
doesn't hit corn. Peters has a really nice, very natural diet.
(51:13):
They're invasive, they're very very sustainable. And these are harvest
from helicopters.
Speaker 5 (51:19):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
One shot sniper shot from a helicopter broke broken arrow
ranch out of Ingram, Texas. And then they have inspectors there.
They'll they'll do eighty in a day. And they have
these trailers set up and they process them all, take
them back their age and cut them and distribute them.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Where do they hit that thing from the helicopter headshots?
Only the hit him in the head from the helicopter.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Wow, buckshot, No, those are rifles.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
This guy's got to be good day.
Speaker 5 (51:47):
And they're doing a lot of days. You're not the
only one serving nil guy. That is correct that they
don't do eighty a day. They do a batch of eighty, correct,
not three sixty five. But when they go down there,
they will do eighty.
Speaker 3 (51:58):
Yeah, they no, they distribute and they for the longest
time Broken Era has been the pre eminent source of
like real wild game like this farreal hog and nil guy,
you know. And then they have a lot of other
stuff like axis red stag things like that. But they've
they've really like led the industry in that field harvesting
(52:23):
technique and they're very, very good at it. Their distribution
is amazing, their customer service great people.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
That's got to be some high overhead for them. Man,
you get a helicopter involved in something, yeah, things start
getting expensive.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
Yeah, and then all the people on the ground, you know,
trailers and you know inspectors that have to go with them,
and they're they're shipping over state lions so they're USDA.
They have to have a USDA inspector with them. So
it's it is quite an operation, but they do it
so well. I mean, and I think arguably this is
some of the best meat that you could possibly purchase
because it is harvested in this way and then immediately
(52:59):
treated in the field.
Speaker 7 (53:01):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (53:01):
You know, they have this shocking technique where they hook
him up and they know about that, yeah, and to
kind of speed him through rigor Mortis thinks about that,
and and then they're they're getting them skin gutted and
chilled and distributed, and I just I think they do
a wonderful job.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
We had a meat scientist, Can Purdue. I'm about to
get him back on it has been long enough now.
He had quite a lot to say about the shocking.
There is a I'll have to revisit the podcast. He
had quite a lot to say about it. There is
(53:39):
a very specific moment when that needs to occur. It
is not a later in the day thing.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Yeah, I don't think that. I don't know the ENS announcement,
but I do know what it's called. And I love this,
the tender Buck electro stimulator.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
We let's move to the next out.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
This is just a salad. I wanted to throw a
salad out there. We've got some romaine and watermelon, radishes
and herbs and a vinaigrette. There's probably some egg in there.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
It's very good.
Speaker 3 (54:12):
I don't know if it's as exciting as the other topics,
but yeah, so, I mean all of it. And that'll change.
What goes into that salad will change, you know, the
dressing and all these things. Well, what is the dressing.
This is a onion dressing, so it's like a charred onion.
We grill and then puree that up with some egg
yolk and olive oil.
Speaker 1 (54:33):
Oh, we didn't talk about eggs eggs from.
Speaker 3 (54:35):
We get eggs from two different sources right now, one
of which we've been using since we were at the
Farmer's Market together. Like we both sold at the Farmer's Market.
And let's be two thousand and six through twenty and twelve.
His name is Chris, and he runs an amazing operation.
He just has very very good eggs. That's what the
(54:58):
only thing he does is raised chickens for eggs. And
then we also get we sell a few eggs retail. Uh.
And that's from another farm out in the Hill Country
called Hat and Heart. And that is also another fantastic
egg That's the egg I eat at home because they
send them in twelve back cartons and so that's the
ones that I steal from the restaurant to take home.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
How many jobs do you create here at Die Doue.
Speaker 3 (55:23):
We probably got around forty, that's great man. Yeah, between
front of the house staff and and everybody in the
kitchen and so yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Dude's gotta be the fun if you were in the
if you were in the food business, gotta be This
has gotta be the most educational, funnest place to work.
Speaker 3 (55:40):
If if it's your thing, you know, if you want,
if you want more refinement and and and truffles and
different ingredients, and you know, you might find home somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (55:50):
This is like way, that's just like how that's just
it's a demonstration of buying power. It's not a it's
some of that. It's a demonstration of buying power. It's
not a demonstration of creativity and elbow grease.
Speaker 3 (56:05):
Well, I appreciate that. I can only say that because
there are people that sometimes that will come here and
they're like, this is not what I'm looking for.
Speaker 1 (56:11):
I want.
Speaker 3 (56:11):
I want to go to this place where we play
things and it's a little fancier. We use some tweezers
and this. Yet that's fine, you know, I mean, everybody's
got their their place. We have it. We have a
wonderful crew here. You know. It's it's just it's so
much fun to come in here because everybody they get
into it. You know, we try to educate them as
much as possible about what these things are and you know,
(56:33):
like and like pull the curtains back and let them
see and just and understand how important it is to
support you know, loncito or the you know, the supposed
eradication of add ad or why we use beats or
why this olive oil is so valuable and all these things.
So we try to really you know, inculcate that in them. Uh,
(56:54):
so they understand what they're doing.
Speaker 5 (56:55):
Yeah, when you come down for your our dad hunt, Randall,
you might want to incorporate stopping by here and doing
a little beat about eating out of dat.
Speaker 7 (57:04):
I've been thinking about how to suggest that myself in
a way that didn't seem.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
Like you're trying to take advantage of them.
Speaker 4 (57:10):
So I appreciate you saying that.
Speaker 1 (57:11):
I'll go ahead and improve that right now.
Speaker 4 (57:14):
Can I have a concluder?
Speaker 1 (57:15):
Yeah, I was about ready to do one. Go ahead,
let it rip.
Speaker 4 (57:18):
I've got two.
Speaker 3 (57:19):
I'll make them very short and sweet.
Speaker 4 (57:21):
One.
Speaker 5 (57:21):
Every time I eat here, I'm very inspired. It's very inspirational.
When I eat here, I'm like, I need to go
home and do a better job and like put more
effort into cooking at home. Because even though it is
like there's a lot of stuff going on there. I
don't need to get that. I don't even want to
call it fancy. You were just trying to not call
your food fancy, so now I don't want to use
(57:42):
that word. But like, I need to do a better job.
Number two, I feel like what you do as a
restaurant tour you're making the world a better place. Oh man,
that's very kind, but you really are, Like I'm almost
emotional about it. Like the whole thing that you just explained,
it's only making everybody around you and you're involved with
(58:02):
ye better because of what you're doing here.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
You appreciate it. Very cool.
Speaker 1 (58:08):
Yeah, man, I get a lot of pride out of
being your friend. I love the stuff you do, the
way you care yourself, the way you treat people around you.
I love this restaurant. I think people should come and
check it out. Man. It's like you've created something of
a lot of beauty. And also you just play by
your own rules, you know what I mean, Like you
didn't you just did things the way. You can just
(58:31):
tell that you just did things the way that made
sense to you. And when someone's like, oh it doesn't
work that way, you can't do it that way. You
just say, oh, figure it out, see what I can
do and landing in the cool spot.
Speaker 3 (58:42):
Man, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
So you come to Austin, you guys can feel free
to say whatever you want. But I always tell people
whenever I talk to someone that's coming to Austin, like,
you gotta go to die do a man. That's what
I've heard about forever and from everybody that's come down here.
It says, if you get the chance to go, you
got to go. If you ever down there, just regardless
if it's work or vacation, you got to go. And
(59:06):
it has inspired me to do some more stuff with
with the game at home, to do some different things.
You know, we get in you get in a rut,
and I don't guess it's a root because I like
the way the things that I cooked, the way that
I do, but there's so much more potential to make
it different. I like it, and this is thank you Jesse.
It's great.
Speaker 8 (59:28):
Yeah, I mean it's everything I tasted was exceptional. But
you know, oftentimes it feels like a vision is sort
of tacked on.
Speaker 7 (59:40):
To a to a restaurant, and this there's like a
very kind of render there's there's, indeed that there.
Speaker 8 (59:49):
This is like a very clear, honest concept that carries
through everything with great clarity, and.
Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
It's so good.
Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
My other concluder after Clay is, uh, how do we
decide who gets the watch? I've been watching. Now I'm
going to get more serious about it. I'm been trying
to steal man.
Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
These guys said, I cannot add anything to it, but
just I just want to say. The food is incredibly good.
It's incredibly good, and you're you're just such a generous person.
So thank you, Jesse.
Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
It's the community and it's good ladies and gentlemen. Jesse Griffins.
Speaker 4 (01:00:34):
Now tell me who made this pickle.
Host
Steven Rinella
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