Ep. 812: The Best Grub in Texas

00:00:00
Speaker 1: 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 and chef. And we’re in his restaurant. What I used to like about this restaurant.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: But I used to like about it, I.

00:00:28
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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 easy thing to do. I know that. When I’ve had Jesse on the podcast before, we’ve laughed about I remember Jesse and I were somewhere and he ran into a citrus stand and bought a truckload of citrus because when citrus is ready, that’s his year long chance to get citrus. I’ve been with you buying a truckload of pecans, because when pecans are ready, it’s time. 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.

00:02:10
Speaker 3: Pineapples. Okay, I love pineapple.

00:02:14
Speaker 1: 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.

00:02:25
Speaker 3: Pretty much. Yeah, you could conceivably grow a pineapple in far South Texas.

00:02:29
Speaker 1: And if they did, you would buy.

00:02:30
Speaker 3: Oh, I would buy. I’d drive down there and get it.

00:02:33
Speaker 1: 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.

00:02:46
Speaker 3: 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.

00:03:04
Speaker 1: 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 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 everything is from around here?

00:03:48
Speaker 3: 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.

00:04:04
Speaker 1: And these are real wild pigs, real.

00:04:06
Speaker 3: 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.

00:04:16
Speaker 1: Who did that?

00:04:18
Speaker 3: What’s the there’s a phrase for someone that cannot tolerate the sound of other people chewing.

00:04:23
Speaker 1: I don’t have that.

00:04:24
Speaker 3: They’re not gonna like this. They’re not gonna like this episode.

00:04:28
Speaker 1: If you move your thing, if you move your thing way away and then move it back when you have to talk.

00:04:34
Speaker 3: 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.

00:04:53
Speaker 1: If you buy a tortilla, you then I’m assuming you then need to call that tortilla to find out.

00:05:02
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.

00:06:04
Speaker 4: One time I think we were in here.

00:06:05
Speaker 5: 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.

00:06:24
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:07:01
Speaker 1: 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.

00:07:21
Speaker 3: It is complicated.

00:07:21
Speaker 1: It’s like it’s like you’re doing things. You guys are doing things that make the least business sense.

00:07:28
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:08:03
Speaker 4: Let’s let’s back we talk about what Randall’s eating.

00:08:05
Speaker 1: 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 was trapped in the wild and brought to you on the bone.

00:08:32
Speaker 3: 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.

00:08:43
Speaker 1: So in the back door of this restaurant, wild pig carcasses come in.

00:08:47
Speaker 3: 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.

00:08:59
Speaker 1: 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.

00:09:19
Speaker 3: Well, speaking of inedible, part two, that’s our Addad.

00:09:23
Speaker 1: Meatball, right, the inedible added.

00:09:27
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: Just me understand that word to use and aggregated.

00:10:08
Speaker 3: 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, 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 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?

00:11:08
Speaker 1: 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.

00:11:20
Speaker 3: You just get and what you get. Yeah, we get what we get?

00:11:22
Speaker 1: Got it? So yeah, and how do these odd ads show up to you?

00:11:25
Speaker 3: 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 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?

00:11:57
Speaker 2: Hey, what about the what about the combination?

00:12:00
Speaker 1: Excuse me?

00:12:02
Speaker 2: Like what were this is a I don’t know, flata. What would we call that.

00:12:07
Speaker 3: 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.

00:12:18
Speaker 1: Really Texas rice.

00:12:20
Speaker 2: But then the French fries is really like.

00:12:21
Speaker 3: 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.

00:12:31
Speaker 2: Okay, so that’s.

00:12:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that. So what’s in the flatbread? Is it a flower based flat bread?

00:12:37
Speaker 3: 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.

00:12:52
Speaker 1: And then you’re able to get taters from Texas.

00:12:54
Speaker 3: 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.

00:13:06
Speaker 4: So we just have to have them.

00:13:08
Speaker 3: 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 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 do you feel like.

00:13:52
Speaker 5: You’re getting from an organic potato versus a non organic potato?

00:13:56
Speaker 3: 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.

00:14:19
Speaker 1: Okay, what’s next. We haven’t talk about this one yet.

00:14:22
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.

00:15:09
Speaker 1: But when you get how much might you shred? Like how much cabbage might you do when a cabbage is available?

00:15:15
Speaker 3: Hundreds and hundreds of pounds. We make our own paprika, So we bring in hundreds of pounds of sweet peppers during peak pepper.

00:15:22
Speaker 1: Season, which just make paprika.

00:15:24
Speaker 3: 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. 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 it’s incredibly good.

00:16:06
Speaker 4: So that’s all paprika is, is the ground up pepper.

00:16:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn’t know that.

00:16:10
Speaker 1: So you make it smoked pap You make it smoked paprika, correct, Yeah, post predominantly what you use is post o Yeah.

00:16:17
Speaker 3: 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, 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. 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.

00:17:09
Speaker 1: How many cords of would do you think you go through? Oh?

00:17:12
Speaker 3: 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.

00:17:28
Speaker 4: But your week sounds like a lot.

00:17:30
Speaker 1: Yeah wow, Yeah, your cooking fire is running all the time.

00:17:33
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I mean Friday, Saturday, Sunday all day and then then you know, five six hours a night. Rest up.

00:17:41
Speaker 1: Let’s back up cabbage for a second. As you walk through this, who.

00:17:44
Speaker 4: Made that.

00:17:46
Speaker 3: The pickle? Yeah, I don’t know. I’m to find out it’s.

00:17:51
Speaker 4: The only thing it was made here.

00:17:52
Speaker 3: 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.

00:18:01
Speaker 5: 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.

00:18:12
Speaker 3: Oh, I got a good one for you.

00:18:13
Speaker 1: 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, come in, we’re going to go through a truckload of cabbage.

00:18:39
Speaker 3: 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.

00:18:47
Speaker 1: Then the season and see you still spread it out throughout however long the window of opportunity.

00:18:54
Speaker 6: Still that’s I mean, I guess you’ve got people here that all. Their whole job is just making.

00:18:59
Speaker 3: Stuff pickles, I mean, like ferments, things like that.

00:19:01
Speaker 2: They’re not there. Their job isn’t even to make something for a customer tonight.

00:19:06
Speaker 3: 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 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 there’s just fun stories.

00:19:54
Speaker 2: Is there anywhere else that does this like you do?

00:19:57
Speaker 4: You know?

00:19:58
Speaker 3: 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 am with the same ethos and the same functionality.

00:20:23
Speaker 1: 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.

00:20:35
Speaker 7: Commonality though, is that it all has a ton of flavor.

00:20:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s an amazing it’s very bold. Yeah, as my grandfather was saying, this tastes like more.

00:20:45
Speaker 8: Yeah, oh no, I love that. The burger was the burger was like shocking yeah into it.

00:20:50
Speaker 5: There’s definitely like top fifty burgers.

00:20:54
Speaker 1: I’ve ever had awesome Top fifty.

00:20:58
Speaker 4: I mean it might be the best one I’ve ever had.

00:21:01
Speaker 1: You by the wag, how does that work?

00:21:03
Speaker 3: 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.

00:21:24
Speaker 5: So it’s not hip anymore to eat grass fed. The customer likes the corn finish.

00:21:30
Speaker 1: 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.

00:21:43
Speaker 3: 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. 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.

00:22:11
Speaker 1: And then how do you buy that?

00:22:13
Speaker 3: 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.

00:22:32
Speaker 4: We buy.

00:22:34
Speaker 3: 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.

00:22:52
Speaker 1: So your burger’s long horn burger mostly yeah, huh.

00:22:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and it’s like you get a really incredible flavor. I tell it spoken, I said WOGGI, uh it is, but.

00:23:03
Speaker 1: Over here I might have directed you in your own direction.

00:23:06
Speaker 3: 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.

00:23:20
Speaker 1: Is that expensive for you to buy, because like the longhorn market collapse, does that make it less expensive for you to buy?

00:23:26
Speaker 3: 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.

00:23:44
Speaker 1: Understand you, you’re not out shopping for the cheapest stuff in the marketplace.

00:23:48
Speaker 3: 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 so they cost the customer.

00:24:10
Speaker 1: People didn’t want to rangy long horned steak.

00:24:14
Speaker 3: 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.

00:24:22
Speaker 6: A wild long horn It just tastes like a Western sizzler buffet steak.

00:24:28
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:25:08
Speaker 1: Like those longhorns eating like mesquite beans or whatever kind.

00:25:11
Speaker 3: 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.

00:25:29
Speaker 1: Sauce, the red sauce and the color of a boiled beat.

00:25:33
Speaker 3: 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.

00:25:54
Speaker 1: Ounce too hard to make ketchup?

00:25:57
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:26:26
Speaker 6: 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.

00:26:34
Speaker 3: 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, in a real system that that that you know, everybody wins from the far on down. Tomatoes they’re not cheap.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: 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, it became ketchup.

00:27:28
Speaker 3: 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.

00:27:42
Speaker 1: How do you get the vinegar that you use to make ketchup?

00:27:45
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:28:25
Speaker 1: You know.

00:28:26
Speaker 3: 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, who’s paying their people the best, best processes and all these things, And so.

00:28:52
Speaker 1: 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?

00:29:00
Speaker 3: 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 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 to this day is from a grape starter, the throat from the yeast, from a wild yeast that we got from across the road.

00:29:53
Speaker 1: You kidding me? You kept it going that time.

00:29:55
Speaker 3: Every day it has to be fed.

00:29:57
Speaker 1: What do you feed it with?

00:29:58
Speaker 3: You regenerated every day?

00:30:01
Speaker 1: Put sugar, flower and water, No sugar, don’t put sugar in about it?

00:30:05
Speaker 3: 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 it and render it all day long on Mondays to stalk the fryar with beef fat for the for the week.

00:30:33
Speaker 1: So you guys grind, you guys grind when you render.

00:30:36
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:31:05
Speaker 2: I got a question for it.

00:31:07
Speaker 1: You know about it.

00:31:09
Speaker 3: If I pull it by hand, then I only get the fat like that big sheath of you.

00:31:14
Speaker 1: You’re you’re skittish about having little hunks of meat in your in your towel fat.

00:31:19
Speaker 3: 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.

00:31:27
Speaker 2: Well, I think it makes it taste different.

00:31:28
Speaker 3: 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. 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.

00:31:57
Speaker 1: And then it brought you jar my new coon grease.

00:31:59
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, I got nobody’s ever spoken those words I.

00:32:05
Speaker 1: 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.

00:32:25
Speaker 3: Oh my, I could prove it.

00:32:28
Speaker 1: I believe you, three full court jars off a single raccoon.

00:32:32
Speaker 3: I mean, that’s that would be a good yield from a big pig.

00:32:35
Speaker 1: I gave. I gave a court to him him, and maybe I’m gonna give my last court to you.

00:32:40
Speaker 3: I would love that little raccoon lard.

00:32:43
Speaker 2: Hey, I’ve got a serious thank you for that.

00:32:45
Speaker 1: That was serious about what I’m saying.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: 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.

00:33:08
Speaker 1: Okay, he didn’t follow you.

00:33:11
Speaker 2: What temperature are you rendering your your beef tallow out?

00:33:17
Speaker 3: So they’re going to be popping into the oven.

00:33:19
Speaker 4: But yeah, talks about the whole process.

00:33:21
Speaker 3: Well, it’s it’s all all hands on deck. By that, I mean any heat source is utilized, so the four burner range.

00:33:29
Speaker 2: But you’ve got to be having You’ve got to be watching the temperature.

00:33:32
Speaker 3: Yes, I I don’t know. I could ask him real quick before we do it in the oven.

00:33:38
Speaker 2: I really want to know.

00:33:39
Speaker 3: But if you’re doing in stove top, it’s low and you know just as low.

00:33:43
Speaker 2: Do you have any sense of the temperature like one or two twenty five.

00:33:46
Speaker 3: I don’t it’d be over well, No, I don’t, honestly.

00:33:49
Speaker 2: Just because.

00:33:52
Speaker 6: 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?

00:34:07
Speaker 1: 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.

00:34:27
Speaker 6: May have really embarrassed us with Ted Copple. I rendered bear fat with Ted Copple. Would you tell you the other day?

00:34:34
Speaker 2: Well, we didn’t have it.

00:34:35
Speaker 6: 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.

00:34:44
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, and did I sent you? I?

00:34:50
Speaker 2: I didn’t. It was it was I didn’t have it, But I.

00:34:52
Speaker 5: Wouldn’t you grind it up? He’ll get rid of as much meat as possible or just all of.

00:34:58
Speaker 3: 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 and then we’re able.

00:35:19
Speaker 5: 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.

00:35:27
Speaker 3: It’s going to depend on the volume. I mean a couple hours.

00:35:30
Speaker 5: 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.

00:35:41
Speaker 4: And there’s no wonder it’s probably a little grinding.

00:35:44
Speaker 3: 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.

00:35:59
Speaker 1: 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?

00:36:13
Speaker 5: 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.

00:36:28
Speaker 1: I appreciate that, Jesse. Later, if you need to have talk hot dogs, you can also point to him say you’ll know this.

00:36:36
Speaker 3: I love I just made a big batch of venison hot dogs and they are really That’s like we’ve got to.

00:36:43
Speaker 4: Topic. I really need to know.

00:36:45
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:37:23
Speaker 3: 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.

00:37:36
Speaker 4: Is the consistency of the inside.

00:37:40
Speaker 1: 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.

00:38:01
Speaker 8: 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.

00:38:21
Speaker 1: 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.

00:38:36
Speaker 3: I ate seven venison hot dogs over the weekend.

00:38:39
Speaker 2: Oh you’ve got them right now.

00:38:41
Speaker 3: 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.

00:38:52
Speaker 2: Are they hot dog colored?

00:38:53
Speaker 3: 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.

00:38:59
Speaker 1: They don’t smoke station hot dogs.

00:39:01
Speaker 3: 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.

00:39:14
Speaker 5: 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.

00:39:23
Speaker 3: 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.

00:39:44
Speaker 1: 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.

00:39:59
Speaker 3: 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.

00:40:06
Speaker 4: Sure you have some ip that he needs, and he’s very valuable.

00:40:09
Speaker 3: I know that.

00:40:10
Speaker 8: 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.

00:40:19
Speaker 3: 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.

00:40:35
Speaker 6: So how much solids will you get? Will you scrape off? You know, the cracklings and just a little.

00:40:41
Speaker 3: 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.

00:40:52
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:41:35
Speaker 3: I don’t.

00:41:36
Speaker 1: I don’t do it right. You do it right.

00:41:37
Speaker 6: 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.

00:41:57
Speaker 3: 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.

00:42:09
Speaker 2: You have any way to legally use bear grease, gotcha.

00:42:16
Speaker 1: 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.

00:42:35
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:42:35
Speaker 1: I always say that ice talks to me walking on ice.

00:42:41
Speaker 3: Oh, I can look at it. I don’t speak.

00:42:43
Speaker 1: 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.

00:43:04
Speaker 5: 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.

00:43:21
Speaker 3: 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 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 eating a diet of probably only pecans, which are really high in polyunsaturated.

00:44:11
Speaker 1: 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.

00:44:18
Speaker 5: I need to look at earlier that’s what you said. That means Saturday lots of eighteen to one carbon bonds.

00:44:25
Speaker 4: That’s good Bear diet.

00:44:28
Speaker 8: Lay unknowingly came up with his second book title earlier when he said signals in the grease.

00:44:33
Speaker 1: I like it.

00:44:33
Speaker 3: That’s the grease signals.

00:44:37
Speaker 4: So that is do you feel like it’s a good product like that?

00:44:41
Speaker 3: 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 on the way out just because it was soft wild howk even the harder fat off the back, not just the leaf fat.

00:45:11
Speaker 1: And then for.

00:45:13
Speaker 3: Something like a coned feet where you need that solidified protective cover wouldn’t.

00:45:18
Speaker 1: Work because it never solid Yep, that’s a good point.

00:45:21
Speaker 3: 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.

00:45:32
Speaker 1: 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 the late where the line was liquefied.

00:45:58
Speaker 2: The congrease was totally solid.

00:46:00
Speaker 1: 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.

00:46:17
Speaker 6: 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.

00:46:36
Speaker 1: That it makes me think like an unreliable reporter.

00:46:39
Speaker 6: 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 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.

00:47:27
Speaker 1: Sure, there’s a lot of hand lotion, natural hand lotion in that bear meat.

00:47:35
Speaker 6: 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 the most surprising thing about the barrel oil was that it had uh, oh my gosh, it’s slipped my mind.

00:48:06
Speaker 2: What it’s called Sarahmid’s.

00:48:08
Speaker 6: 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.

00:48:30
Speaker 2: But a little off topic.

00:48:32
Speaker 4: But what do you mean?

00:48:34
Speaker 2: 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.

00:48:41
Speaker 1: Be ready, very good book.

00:48:43
Speaker 4: What’s it called?

00:48:43
Speaker 1: I read the first half called American Bear very good book. Wow, first half is could go to ship after that.

00:48:52
Speaker 2: Get this guy talking about it.

00:48:53
Speaker 1: You can put a big old chapter in there about that grease I gave you.

00:48:56
Speaker 4: Probably it’ll be it’ll be the apple.

00:48:59
Speaker 2: I’ll put it in the I’ll be like my dear friends.

00:49:02
Speaker 4: 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.

00:49:11
Speaker 6: Man, it’s the Let me just say that the opening of the book will be unlike any book you’ve ever read, probably.

00:49:19
Speaker 1: Because the discussion before.

00:49:22
Speaker 6: 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.

00:49:41
Speaker 3: Study.

00:49:41
Speaker 6: 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.

00:49:55
Speaker 1: 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.

00:50:08
Speaker 3: 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. 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 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. They’re invasive, they’re very very sustainable. And these are harvest from helicopters.

00:51:19
Speaker 5: Uh.

00:51:19
Speaker 3: 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.

00:51:37
Speaker 1: Where do they hit that thing from the helicopter headshots? Only the hit him in the head from the helicopter.

00:51:41
Speaker 3: Wow, buckshot, No, those are rifles.

00:51:45
Speaker 1: This guy’s got to be good day.

00:51:47
Speaker 5: 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.

00:51:58
Speaker 3: 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 technique and they’re very, very good at it. Their distribution is amazing, their customer service great people.

00:52:28
Speaker 1: That’s got to be some high overhead for them. Man, you get a helicopter involved in something, yeah, things start getting expensive.

00:52:34
Speaker 3: 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 treated in the field.

00:53:01
Speaker 7: Uh.

00:53:01
Speaker 3: 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.

00:53:18
Speaker 1: 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 a very specific moment when that needs to occur. It is not a later in the day thing.

00:53:46
Speaker 3: 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.

00:53:54
Speaker 1: We let’s move to the next out.

00:54:01
Speaker 3: 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.

00:54:11
Speaker 2: It’s very good.

00:54:12
Speaker 3: 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.

00:54:33
Speaker 1: Oh, we didn’t talk about eggs eggs from.

00:54:35
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:55:20
Speaker 1: How many jobs do you create here at Die Doue.

00:55:23
Speaker 3: 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.

00:55:33
Speaker 1: 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.

00:55:40
Speaker 3: 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.

00:55:50
Speaker 1: 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.

00:56:05
Speaker 3: 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.

00:56:11
Speaker 1: I want.

00:56:11
Speaker 3: 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, 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, so they understand what they’re doing.

00:56:55
Speaker 5: 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.

00:57:04
Speaker 7: I’ve been thinking about how to suggest that myself in a way that didn’t seem.

00:57:09
Speaker 1: Like you’re trying to take advantage of them.

00:57:10
Speaker 4: So I appreciate you saying that.

00:57:11
Speaker 1: I’ll go ahead and improve that right now.

00:57:14
Speaker 4: Can I have a concluder?

00:57:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was about ready to do one. Go ahead, let it rip.

00:57:18
Speaker 4: I’ve got two.

00:57:19
Speaker 3: I’ll make them very short and sweet.

00:57:21
Speaker 4: One.

00:57:21
Speaker 5: 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 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 ye better because of what you’re doing here.

00:58:05
Speaker 3: You appreciate it. Very cool.

00:58:08
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:58:42
Speaker 3: Man, Thank you.

00:58:43
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:59:28
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean it’s everything I tasted was exceptional. But you know, oftentimes it feels like a vision is sort of tacked on.

00:59:40
Speaker 7: To a to a restaurant, and this there’s like a very kind of render there’s there’s, indeed that there.

00:59:49
Speaker 8: This is like a very clear, honest concept that carries through everything with great clarity, and.

01:00:00
Speaker 3: It’s so good.

01:00:02
Speaker 1: 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.

01:00:18
Speaker 2: 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.

01:00:30
Speaker 1: It’s the community and it’s good ladies and gentlemen. Jesse Griffins.

01:00:34
Speaker 4: Now tell me who made this pickle.