Ep. 812: The Best Grub in Texas

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey, if you're in or around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you live for hunting season, you need to swing by the meat eater store in Milwaukee. We're stocked wall to wall with the gear we actually use in the field. First light FHF gear, Phelps game calls and more. You'll find us at the corners of Brookfield. Whether you're gearing up for the season, dialing in a setup, or just want to talk shop with people who love to hunt. This is your place. That's the meat eater store, Milwaukee at the corners of Brookfield. Stop in, get dialed and get after it. 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, Diedue. Owned and operated by Jesse Griffiths, who I argue not only is America's greatest chef, maybe not. I don't know. That's a big claim. He is definitely America's greatest wild game cook and chef. And we're in his restaurant. What I used to like about this restaurant. What I used to like about it. I need you to know last night's people came out to me and they were from somewhere far away, like Massachusetts or something. And they had recently come to Austin to eat at the restaurant. All right. They came to the show and told me that story. Why liked, why liked that? You used to like, you used to like Diedue where we're sitting right now. As you'd get to the menu and you'd 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. Um, backing up the claim that everything is from around here. The premise that Diedue is that when you come here, you're eating Texas food from Texas. Correct. And that is not an easy thing to do. I know that when I've had Jesse on the podcast, before we've laughed about, I remember Jesse and I were somewhere and he ran into a citrus stand and bought a truckload of citrus because when citrus is ready, that's his year long chance to get citrus. I've been with you buying a truckload of pecans because when pecans are ready, it's time because you're not going to get them from somewhere else. Things like, give me a thing that you'll just never have here. Like tell me the thing is the biggest bummer that you'll never be able to have. Pineapples. Okay. I love pineapples. Okay. But since you can't get a pineapple from Texas, you're never going to get a pie. You'll never see a pineapple in here, barring some kind of agricultural innovation. Pretty much. Yeah. You could conceivably grow a pineapple in far South Texas. And if they did, you would buy it. Oh, I would buy it. I'd drive down there and get it. Jesse buys, people bring things. I hesitate to say this because I don't want to have people just showing up at your door. People will show up at Jesse's door. You tell it because I don't want to say anything wrong. I mean, yeah, we get some kind of sketchy sales transactions sometimes. We don't participate. Solicitations. Thank you. Usually it's in the form of a dead feral hog. Okay. Maybe some mushrooms, which I will buy. Yep. But feral hogs, I will not. Okay. But other things a purveyor would just call and say, I happen to have a bunch of and you'll go, go for it and do it. Yeah. Jesse's been on the podcast before. I'm big, like I love his restaurant. If you were to ask my wife about her favorite restaurant, she's going to say this is her favorite restaurant. It's, it's far none, far away in my favorite place to eat. What we've never done with Jesse, we've never sat down to eat. So we're going to 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 prove to me that everything is from around here? Sure. Sure. Good. We'll start right in front of you. So those are some floutes made with shredded wild boar. Our feral hogs come from either the Hill Country or East of Austin. And these are real wild pigs. Real. So they're trapped live. And then they're brought into a licensed facility at which point they're inspected and then killed. Crunch. Who did that? Move your thing away. What's the, there's a phrase for someone that cannot tolerate the sound of other people chewing. There's like, I don't have that. I know they're not going to like this episode. They're not going to like this episode. If you move your thing, if you move your thing way away and then move it back when you have to talk. So shredded feral hog, these tortillas, we buy them from a very specific place in San Antonio. Shredded cabbage. So cabbage is in season right now. When cabbage is not in season, we will pickle or ferment it. So that then we can use it on top of here. I got a question already. If you buy a tortilla, you then, I'm assuming you then need to call that tortilla place to find out the source of their corn. You do. Yes. So not for everything though. I don't 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, this little girl started like basically eliminates Dan. And so we buy that. That's a local company, but our fresh ingredients, and I wouldn't go 100% 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 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? This is not what we meant. He's like, it says butter lettuce. We're like, yeah, well, talk to the rep. Not the right butter lettuce. Not the right butter lettuce. One time I think we were in here, you were telling us that at one point you got eggs that were like five from five miles away. And then you found out that you could get eggs that were like a half a mile from here. Do you still sort of roll with that? Eat those two of like the closer to this restaurant, that stuff has grown and made the better. There's going to be a lot of different things that determine where we get things. 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 their, how, how they operate, you know, especially with eggs, you know, we want a pasture situation. We don't want a warehouse. We want chickens to be able to live on pasture freely and feed on insects, things like that. So we will do the research. And if we have, so, so I mean, to that point, if we had to get something from farther away that fell more within our standards, then we would absolutely do that. Right. There are people that came up to me and they were telling me about how they'd come 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 it like correct. It's complicated. It is complicated. It's like, it's like you're doing things. You guys are doing things that make the least business sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the cost of real food. Yeah. It's 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, like, we're going to throw the word family farm out there. And I mean that for real, like a family's run in this place. If we want to really ensure that they are in business, then we have to buy from them and then their product is more expensive. Yeah. Almost invariably. Let's back up. Can we talk about what Randall's eating? Oh, yeah. I just want to do a quick recap. Sure. Mm-hmm. Quick recap on this first point. Then we'll try to get through without all the interruptions. So taxes, 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. Feral hog. Yeah. Wild pig that was trapped in the wild. 100%. And brought to you on the bone. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes, sometimes we'll buy trim, but typically, like especially these days for probably the past year or so, we've really trended towards whole carcasses on feral hogs. So in the back door of this restaurant, wild pig carcasses come in. Yeah. We have a rail system, which is really cool because we can just hook them up on a rail. And it's like a little railroad goes from the back door into the walk-in on a big loop. And then it comes out, goes down the hotline and into the prep area right here to our right. Yeah. Meaning those inedible wild pigs that can't be eaten come into this restaurant and every day get eaten by people who then say that that's the best wild pig they ever ate. Very edible. Very, very edible. No doubt. Okay. Let's move on. Well, speaking of inedible, part two, that's our Audad Meatball. This is the Audad Meatball. The Inedible Audad. The Inedible Audad is here. Wow. It's funny how Audad gets more inedible the farther across that canyon that people shoot it, you know? And also that guide is like, yeah, man, you can't eat those things. You know that? You know, so they go chop the head off and, you know, I love Audad. I think Audad 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, Audad, again, needs to be aggregated. So we're going to slow cook that or we're going to grind it. And that's what that is. Help me understand that word you're using aggregated. But like, so feral hogs especially. So if we, I can't pick up the phone and say, hey, can you bring me five 65 pound feral hogs tomorrow? I can say, can you bring me some feral hogs tomorrow? And he's like, sure. I mean, one of them is going to be 138 pounds. Two of them, you know, probably siblings out of the same sound are going to come in at 47 pounds and so forth. So it's very difficult to achieve consistency in size and fat content. So if I want to run chops, we got to get a little bit lucky. And so, you know, what they, 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 everything off the bone and grind it and then make something out of it, or we're going to shred it off the bone and make something like that. It's an equalizer. Got it. And on this, this audit here that we're looking at as we discuss this dish has been ground. But these, I imagine, too, you don't say like I want a bunch of 100 pound carcasses or whatever you just get in what you get. Yeah, we get what we get. Got it. So yeah. And how do these audits show up to you? 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 for complete transparency, you know, but I think that at that point, we're kind of toe in the line between eating and invasive and also trying to demonstrate that that invasive is edible as well. Yeah. You know, so it's also like a, it's an object lesson right there. You know, like, well, you can, you can eat it. Hey, what about the, what about the combination? Excuse me. Like what, this is a, I don't know, a flat, what do we call that? Let's say it's a, it's our flatbread. Flatbread. So we make a flatbread and then it's got grilled meatballs on there. Those meatballs are bound with rice. The rice comes from out near Houston and Anowak. Really? Yeah. Texas rice. But then the French fries is really like, whose idea was that? Well, that's, you know, if you go to Europe and you get these like donor kebabs and these, these, these classics in the Middle Eastern P to sandwiches, a lot of times they'll put French fry. Okay. And so that's, I like that. So what's in the flatbread? Is it a flour based flatbread? Flour. Texas flour. 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 Barton Springs mill. And then you're able to get taters from Texas. Yes. Sometimes. Okay. Most of the time in 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 so we just have to have them. Yeah. It really hit hard during COVID and that we, and it's really funny because I think, you know, like that potatoes represent like one of like 200 ingredients that, that we get. And it's, and it's the one that's not consistently from Texas. And we 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. Preferably, preferably we get them from Colorado and New Mexico. And so we're able to do that. But again, if they hit the back door and they're not organic, they, what do you feel like you're getting from an organic potato versus a non-organic potato? You know, I don't, I mean, at one point years ago, I had done some research on it. I don't know how the standards have changed. And so maybe it is a fool's errand to think that I'm doing anything. But at the same time, I just, you know, whatever that standard means these days, I support it. You know, I think it's just better if we're going to make a concession. I want it to be the best possible. Okay. What's next? We haven't talked about this one yet. Yeah. So that's our pastrami sandwich. So that is beef, some wagyu beef, brined, smoked, and then steamed, a rye bread. And then sauerkraut. I think the real star of the show here would be the sauerkraut in that, you know, we, we had to pull this off of our menu for about three weeks. And then people were really upset. It's a good pastrami sandwich. And we had to pull it off the menu because we ran out of sauerkraut 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 sauerkraut. It's about a three week process of fermenting the sauerkraut. And then we can sit on it in the walk-in for months and months and months. So when you get, how much might you shred? Like how, how much cabbage might you do when a cabbage is available? Hundreds and hundreds of pounds. We, we make our own paprika. So we bring in hundreds of pounds of sweet peppers during peak pepper season, which is make paprika. It's amazing. Our paprika is like probably one of my favorite things that we make. And it has one ingredient. No, it's, 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 end of 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, 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. So that's all paprika is, is it ground up pepper? Yeah. I didn't know that. You're making smoked, you're making smoked paprika. Correct. Yeah. Post oak, predominantly what you use is post oak. Yeah. I mean, you know, when we do off sites and fun other things, you know, we mix up that wood, but, you know, post oak, pecan, another favorite. And then when we go south, I almost invariably am using mesquite. And I mean, there's a, 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 cooking over mesquite, but there's just a lot of distance. It's, it's really fascinating to me because these woods burn differently. But where we're sitting right now, post oak would be, would be the wood. How many cords would you think you go through? Oh, 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 solid fuel smoker, which is really cool. And so it burns whatever wood we want to put in. But your one quarter of a week sounds like a lot. Yeah. A lot. Oh yeah. Your cooking fire is running all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, all day, and then, then, you know, five, six hours a night. Rest of the time. Let's back up to cabbage for a second as we walk through this. Who made that? The pickle. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to find out. You only, it was made here? In your kitchen. Oh, I thought you wanted a name. I was like, it's going to be Hector or I don't know. No, we made that of course. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Yeah. And then right there, it turned into a pickle. Oh, I got a good one for you. So the yogurt. I want to back up to the, because we left behind the crowd and I had a crowd question. Oh, okay. So it comes the day when cabbages are ready to come into Dieduay. Probably the third week of October. Okay. And now it's not like you're prepping for tonight, but you're prepping for the year. Yeah. How do you handle staffing to say, Hey, everybody come in. We're going to go through a truckload of cabbage. Well, it's no, it's we were buying it. I mean, in total we're buying hundreds of pounds. So we'll bring in 10 cases and then a week later, another 10 cases and then also throughout the season. Oh, I see. Okay. So you still spread it out throughout however long the window of opportunity. But still that's a, I mean, I guess you got people here that all their whole job is just making stuff. Pickles, I mean, like ferments, things like that. They're not, their job isn't even to make something for a customer tonight. Absolutely. It's very heavy on prep. So we have a lot of staff because every single sauce, every pickle, every, everything, the paprika has to be made the yogurt on that flatbread. So years ago, one of our, made the yogurt. Well, years ago we had an employee and she was from India and her family's yogurt starter had been going for over 200 years. Wow. 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, we'll make it. And there's just fun stories. All right, everybody. If you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this man, I'm telling you, I'm fired up. 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The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, two thousand and twenty six. So you got all day that day, but it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. Is there anywhere else that does this like you do? You know, I'm sure. And I think that there's a more of a proliferation of restaurants like kind of what we're doing, like really kind of taking deep dives and just definitely a more focus on locality and support of things like that. But 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 19 years. And so we and with the same ethos and the same functionality, 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. The commonality, though, is that it all has a ton of flavor. Yeah, it's amazing. It's very bold. Yeah. As my grandfather would say, this tastes like more. Yeah. Oh, no, the burger was like shocking. Oh, my God. I didn't do it. I'm like, there's a lot of meat. Is this definitely like top 50 burgers I've ever had. Awesome. Top 50. I mean, it might be the best one I've ever had. Would you buy the Wagyu? Oh, good. How does that work? 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 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 grass. So it's not hip anymore to eat grass fed. The customer likes the corn finished. But wagyu is that even though it's like a breed, there's like an expectation about how it's been. Certainly. Yeah. She raises her wagyu and lock it into a shipping container and starve it half the death and. Right. Well, yeah, I mean, you can definitely get almost obscene amounts of fat in there. She pastures her. So they live on pasture. They have an opportunity to like a free choice grain source. So they are still eating grain. But most importantly to me is that her processing facility, which she owns, is seven miles from the ranch. So on their bad day, they get loaded up. They got a quick trip over there and it's all done. Got it. And there's no feed lot in between. And then how do you buy that? We buy mostly big rib primals like you saw on the way in that we dry age. OK. And then a lot of that trim from those rib primals goes in there. I'm sorry, I completely misspoke. There's only a little bit of wagyu in the burger. Don't the the the pastrami is wagyu. OK, we buy grass fed longhorn from a ranch in South Texas, the one that you've been to where we turkey hunted. So he has just completely pastured long, rangy long horns that then we buy older animals from those. And then we mix that with some of that wagyu and then some of the aged wagyu. So your burgers are longhorn burger. Mostly, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like you get a really incredible flavor. I totally misspoke when I said wagyu. No, it is. But the wagyu is over here. I'm going to direct you in the wrong direction. No, the brisket for the pastrami is is wagyu. But this is a grass fed longhorn. And by grass fed, I mean, that thing just lives out there in the ranch, that that eastern peninsula and there's no, I mean, it's just eating whatever it can. Is that expensive for you to buy? Because like the longhorn market collapse, does that make it less expensive for you to buy? It's about average as far. 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 in markets. I see. Because we're, you know, I'm buying from a guy that I'm, he's one of my best friends. Yeah, no, I understand. You know, you're not out shopping for the cheapest stuff in the marketplace. Yeah. 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 we started using that for the burger because I thought we thought that that would be the best platform for it. The stakes didn't go over well. People just weren't into them. We don't, they caught, they cost us just as much. And so they cost the customer. People didn't want a rangy longhorn steak. Yes. It would be like eating wild cows. I love them. We ate a big old steak when we were down there, right? But does a wild longhorn just taste like a Western sizzler? Buffet steak? No, no, I mean, it is. And that's what's good about it. It's got that intense iron flavor. And it's, I mean, it would be, if you put it on the same, like linear spectrum of a deer that had 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 sagebrush eaten deer. And then the same thing with the cattle, you know, they're eating just corn and they're getting the kind of bland and sweet and fat and just easy versus like the real nature of what beef tastes like. And beef has a lot more character than what we collectively remember it to taste like. So those longhorns are eating like mesquite beans and whatever kind of August, September, they're eating mesquite beans. They're eating just all those native grasses down there. And then 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 us about those wraps around. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry about that. It tells us about the sauce. Yeah. The red sauce is the color of a boiled beef and that's on the burger, right? Yes. So that's our beet ketchup and that, that's kind of a, that came down to more of an economic decision is like we could potentially buy enough tomatoes and to, to make ketchup year round. But when we tried to, our ketchup was exorbitantly expensive. Like if somebody wanted a two ounce ramachan. It was too hard to make ketchup. Not too hard. Expensive to make ketchup. Once you cook, I mean, cause you're cooking tomatoes down to a tenth of their volume and you're buying tomatoes at $4 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 $6. And then, and then people get really upset with you. It's interesting that tomato ketchup would be the thing that was too expensive. Yeah. For people's taste. There's a lot of things. You would think it would be something else. 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. It's, they're not, it's never free. Yeah. You know, you're paying for it. But, and things like ketchup are, you know, those, they just, they're supposed to be, and it's like, well, you know, in a real system that, that, that, you know, everybody wins from the farmer on down, the tomatoes, they're not cheap. You know, interesting thing, but I didn't know about ketchup till I started getting into like the Escofier, the old French cookbooks is you would go into the index and there's the catchups, mushroom, onion ketchup. And the tomato ketchup was just one of many catchups, but it won. Yeah. It like very much won. It became ketchup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I mean, that's, that's us kind of trying to play within the markets, you know, and just trying to figure out how to give people what they want, but still within the context and within parameters, economic parameters. How do you get the vinegar that you use to make ketchup? We buy dry goods, you know, vinegar and sugar and spices and things like that. It's kind of like a little house on the prairie mentality. You know, it's like, we can go to the mercantile and get these dry goods, but fresh ingredients are we're going to prioritize is coming from within this system. And then whatever else we can within, you know, like, like flowers, we get steins cancer from Louisiana, you know, and it's like instead of buying molasses from who knows where we get this beautiful cancer 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, you know, here's the only nut we have. Maybe a odd walnut here and there, but nothing cultivated and nothing easy to crack. So I was finally like, let's let's just get pistachios. But like, let's do our research and get them from a great place. Same thing with our coffee. You know, obviously we're not growing coffee here. We need to have it, but we do the research. We're like, who's making the best, you know, who's paying their people the best, best processes and all these things. And so what about the burger bun? We didn't talk about the burger bun. Then we got to talk about the fat. You fry and your fries and beef talus, how you make that. But what's the burger bun all about? Yeah, same deal. You know, like all of our breads, you know, we have a pastry chef in house and she makes everything, anything that's a chef. She makes your burger buns. All of our breads we make in house. Okay. On this table right over here, we butcher all the feral hogs on the, on one side make the breads on the other side. They're sourdough starter. When we signed the lease for this building in 2013, we were parked over in that alley over there, went over there, picked a big bunch of wild mustang grapes, took them home, wrapped them in cheesecloth, mashed them up and put them in a slurry of flour and water and captured that, that hyper local yeast. And that's our point to right there in the alley over there. We had to park over there and there was some wild grapes. And so our sourdough starter to this day is from a grape starter across the road from the yeast, from a wild yeast that we got from across the road. You kidding me? And you kept it going that time. Yeah. Every day it has to be fed. What do you feed it with? No, you regenerate it every day. Yeah. You buy a little bit of sugar and water. No sugar. No, no, you don't put sugars in it. No, I never done that. I don't know about it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then you're talking about the fat, the beef fat. Yeah. So every Monday, which is today is rendering day. And so we buy as much beef fat, mostly from Mariana. Um, and there's another butcher shop that sources all local. And sometimes we take their excess beef fat, um, and we grind it and render it all day long on Mondays to stock the fryer with, uh, beef fat for the, for the week. So you guys grind, you guys grind when you render? I think it's best you get the most, um, surface area. Yeah. And you, and it, and it, and also, uh, I think, um, you'll see a lot of times people over cook their lard or, or tallow and get it to, uh, 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. Hmm. I don't know why you have a whole thing based on animal fats. Oh, I've got a question for you. No, you know more about it. I have lots of questions. If I pull it by hand, then I only get the fat, like that big sheath of leaf fat. You're, you're skittish about having little hunks of meat in your grime, in your tallow fat. A hundred percent. Well, more so in lard, but yes, also in the tallow, but it, well, and I'll tell you what, lard, I always thought it's just whatever. Well, I think it makes it taste different. It, it gives it more of a pork or beef flavor. And in, in cooking fats, like lard and tallow, I want some neutrality and I don't want to taste those 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. You don't want it to taste like beef. 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. Um, and then brought you jar my new Coon grease. Hell yeah. I got. Nobody's ever spoken those words. I rendered out, I rendered out, you know, I can believe when I say this, you know, I can believe when I tell you this, I rendered out one raccoon. And this wasn't even picking it clean. I rendered out one raccoon and it yielded three full court jars of lard, one raccoon. Oh my. I could prove it. I believe you. Three full court jars off a single raccoon. That mean that's a W could yield from a big pig. I gave a, I gave a court to him, him, and maybe I'm going to give my last court to you. I would love that little raccoon lard. Hey, I've got a serious thank you for that. Oh, that was what I'm saying. No, no, I just have a very serious question. Kind of weird deal. What temperature? I thank you in our social media relationship. Like I addressed you on social media as if I wasn't going to see you the next day. I was like, Hey, thanks, Steve. And you didn't watch it. Okay. He didn't follow you. What temperature are you rendering your beef tallow out? So they're going to be popping it in the oven. Well, you tell us about the whole process. Well, it's, it's all, all hands on deck by that. I mean, any heat source is utilized. So the, the four burner range, but you've got to be having, you've got to be watching the temperature. Yes. I, I don't know. I could ask him real quick. What's the four wheeler? I never do it in the oven. I really want to know. But if you're doing it stove top, it's low. I know just as low. Do you have any sense of the temperature like 180 or 225? I don't. Oh, it'd be over. Well, no, I don't honestly, just because I don't know what the temperature being. I have a tendency to burn my grease a little bit. But, but, but 225 is what I kind of stay to say. Will you think 200, 200? I believe that that's perfect. Perfect. Cause if you look at like confit and like French cooking confit in like rendering duck oil and stuff, I've always read that 200. 200. That sounds like shoot for us 200. Yeah. And I'll do it in my oven. But I like kind of doing it on a burner. So I can watch it. I may have really embarrassed us with Ted couple. I've rendered bear fat with Ted couple. What'd you tell me the other day? Well, we didn't have a, we didn't have a thermometer and I just burned it because it was going slow and he started going, well, Clay, this is really slow. And I was like, oh, and I, I'm going to show them the grease I sent you. I didn't. It was, it was, I didn't have it, but I would have. You grind it up. He's going to tell them nobody. Get rid of as much meat as possible or just all of it. Yeah. No, no, no. Clean oil. They go in and they're trimming out anything red. And then it goes through 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. Cause we need so much of it. Okay. And then we put it in these big pans and then, you know, it solidifies and then we're able 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. That's going to depend on the volume. I mean, a couple hours, you know, what would be the max? If I told you, you know what, I spent a whole day, Jesse, I was rendering my bare fat for eight hours. Would you be like, man, you over did it big time. And there's no wonder. It's a little ground. Yeah. What I always tell people is, so when you, when you start to, to cook it, you have these large bubbles coming out and that's the, you know, the water coming out of it. Yeah. What you want to shoot for is, and you'll know this, what a cooler's light looks like. Oh, they know these for a minute. I was going to get, I thought you were going to hit them with, you'll know this as a rendering man. I was going to be like, hold a minute. You want, you want, oh, beer man. Are you gossiping? He was gossiping. So I was telling him about our, you know, about our life on the bus tour 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 Randall. I appreciate that. Jesse, later, if you need to have talk hot dogs, you can also point to him and say, you'll know this. I love, I just made a big batch of venison hot dogs and they are really. I'd like to try one. Dude, we're like, we've got a project. You know, I really need to know. I know 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. Oh, really? So, if you can think about this, we'd like to have you come up on the rollers. We want to make not fancy dogs, not like a thinking man's hot dog. We want to make take your venison and turn it into a gas station hot dog. Joe blow hot dog. Every man's Joe blow, no bend in it. That you can put on a gas station roller. And have it be like a little kid would eat it and he'd go, that's a hell of a hot dog. Yeah. College in KC's to keep them flat and straight. Yeah. Classic. No fancy nothing. Well, it roller dogs, coriander, garlic, paprika and nutmeg. And that's your that's your classic. I think we come back here is the consistency of the inside. It's an almost five years. Think a lot of times 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 be like, well, this is my version of a hot dog. I want to make hot dogs. Emulsified. Get at a baseball. Moves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not really ready to talk about making venison hot dogs. They end up with something that's what I would call a sauce shape. Yes. And it has a different spice mix than what they call their brats. It's a hot dog flavored sausage. Exactly. But it doesn't have it's an emulsification. Yeah. Five parts lean, four parts fat and three parts. So you walk us through it. Right now. Get no, I mean, no, when we make our video, we come back, we're going to make gas station hot dogs, then we're going to buy the roller. We've already in shopping for your role. And we're going to put them on a roller. He's getting excited. I mean, and then we're going to put mustard and ketchup on them. I love them. And we're going to be like, that's deer meat gas station hot dogs. I seven venison hot dogs over the weekend. Oh, you've got them right now. I made, I made a batch of 72 of them. Red, I had, did you see eight seven? Uh-huh. I love it. They're so good. There's, they're very, very good. It's a. What color are they? Are they hot dog colored? Well, they're a little grayish. They don't have, I didn't smoke them either. So you could do a cold smoke on them. We're getting way off. They don't smoke gas station hot dogs. They might be a little cold smoke, but they're also going to have nitrite in them. So, you know, real pinked out from that. I did put some insecure number one in there, but they didn't take on a ton of that pink color there on little on the gray side. You would have to add so much other filler that it'd be hard to still call it a venison hot dog. Well, it's going to need five parts venison lean, four parts of some kind of fat that's going to be that's fine. Beef or pork. Very fat. And then, and then three parts ice. And so it's going to be 33% by weight, other fat, but then it's going to be whatever that five parts is of pure venison. If we can, if we can publish a recipe and have an instructional video of how to make a gas station hot dog that your kid would be excited to eat and have it be 50% venison, that is success. Okay. We was we can move. We need to move on because there's some, yeah, there's, there's some nuanced. I was starting sure you have some IP that he needs and it's very valuable. Know that. Yeah. I was starting to get a little sluggish from the meal, but I haven't perked right up with the talk of hot dogs. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this man. I'm telling you, I'm fired up. Well, anyway, right now we're running the ultimate spring turkey giveaway and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes, including an incredible turkey hunting experience, gear from SIG, a shotgun from Benelli, a $1,000 gift card from First Light and a whole big pile of gear from other partner brands. One lucky winner is going to receive a spring 2027 Rio Grande turkey hunt in the Texas Hill Country for you and two of your buddies or family members brought to you by bird dog. And during the giveaway, the more you spend at First Light, Phelps Game, Calls, FHF gear in the meat eater store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire prize package. Getting entered is easy. Just head over to the First Light contest page at First Light.com. Fill out the entry form in your in. Remember for every 25 bucks you spend, you get 10 additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the whole damn prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2026. So you got all day that day, but it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. He had cheesecoats from Ohio. Probably. So my whole point was, as soon as it looks like a really light beer, and this is what I teach in my classes, is like, as soon as you get a straw color in tiny bubbles, you're done. And at that point, you need to strain. So how much solids will you get? Will you scrape off the cracklings? Depends. Just a little bit. A lot. A lot. And that's one of the things that gets me is like, we still haven't found a consistent home for those. I hate throwing anything away. I got one. But we have, I mean, weekly, we're probably 50 gallons. I throw them on my roof. Oh, for the birds. Magpies. Magpie. They go nuts. We have no magpies. I need to think about what you're telling me. 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 as spent, is it's going to get, and that the energy I'm putting into the production has hit like any sort of reasonable efficiency, meaning I could go and go and go and go and go and maybe get a little more, but the crackling is spent. Diminishing returns. Yeah. I never look at the bubble. Okay. I don't, I don't do it right. You do it right. I feel like 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 of any. 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 settle. You're like, we're not gaining anything. Yeah. And I don't want it to get too dark. Yeah. You know, I want it to be blonde. Yeah. Yeah. Because then you start to develop that toasty flavor in there and so that's going to affect your pie crust or your doughnut or the other things you're going to do with it. Would you have any possible way to legally use bare grease? No. Gotcha. 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? You are seeing a thing that you can't really explain, the doneness. Sure. It becomes a little bit like a dark art. Yeah. I always say that ice talks to me. Walking on ice. Oh, I don't speak that language. Yeah. I look at a pond and it talks to me about, it tells me what condition it's in. 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 always leave it like, I don't know, man. I suppose that's probably good. That's what the bubbles are saying. Real technical question. This is a batch of bare grease that I made. Okay. That looks great. It's really clear and pale. Right. But, okay, that's the color of a lot of them. Uh-huh. It never solidified. Oh, this is cool. When I took Bear, hog hunting out there to that property, he killed two hogs. I had killed one, a couple, maybe a month or so previous to that. And then I killed one on that property two days ago. And there's a big pecan orchard on one side and there's a big pecan orchard on the other side. The whole river bottom is nothing but 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 customer here as a doctor and I was like, what's happening with this? It's like canola oil viscosity in the refrigerator. And it's polyunsaturated fats from eating a diet of probably only pecans, which are really high in polyunsaturated fats. And that's what you told me too, right? Yes. That's what I'm, yeah. Clay probably tell you it's predicting the weather and there's bad weather coming up. Yeah. I need to look at this earlier. That's what you said. That means it's primarily unsaturated fats, lots of 18 to one carbon bonds. That's good. Bear diet. Clay unknowingly came up with his second book title earlier when he said signals in the grease. I like it. That's the grease signal. All right. So that is, do you feel like it's a good product like that? Well, yes. No. I mean, the first off those hogs are very, very good to eat. Very sweet, mild, but still have that nice bit of like barrel hog flavor to them. The fat was worthless for sausage. You couldn't use the back fat for sausage. Once you ran it through the grinder, it liquefied on the way out. Like just frozen chunks of fat into the grinder, liquid on the way out, just because it was soft to wild hog. Even the harder fat off the back, not just the leaf fat. And then for something like a corn fee, where you need that solidified protective cover, wouldn't work because it never solidified. Yeah. That's a good point. But for general cooking, sauteing, things like that, it was great. But anything that you needed, like I try to make pie crust with it, right, can do disaster because you couldn't get that solid fat incorporated in the corn. You can never cut it in. Exactly. Now, there a day I noticed he had, he never mentioned it to me, but he had the jar of corn grease I made next to a jar of bear grease in the same area. And what I thought was interesting was indistinguishable. Well, and how they were predicting weather, like the amount of like solid, the late, where the line was liquefied. The corn grease was totally solid. No, no, no. Yeah, it was. Was it 100%? I remember thinking that you didn't see that. He didn't mention it, but I saw it. Oh, okay. Yeah. He didn't say, like, hey, thanks for that. But I was looking at him. I thought, oh, wow, it's remarkable how similar in appearance they are. I think you misinterpreted that because the corn grease was completely solid and the bear grease was basically 60, 40, you know, olive oil, like, and then the saturated fat. Okay. Never mind. Really? He cut all that out. No, no. At least we think like an unreliable reporter. Well, I think maybe over time it's possible that your corn grease, when it's not been shook up and everything would kind of solidify. But basically I had some barrel oil analyzed by one of the best lipid labs in America. And basically the short version is, is that the clear olive oil colored liquid is unsaturated fat, 18-1 carbons like olive oil. The heavier stuff is saturated fats, and it's a variety of different carbon chains and stuff. But anyway, this barrel oil that I submitted was like 60% unsaturated fat, 40% saturated. But I think it's different based upon the bear's diet. Sure. I said there's a lot of hand lotion, natural hand lotion in that bear meat. Well, so they analyze this barrel oil and their 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, oh my gosh, it slipped my mind what it's called, ceramides. The barrel oil is 3% ceramides, which if you go to a drug store and look for skin lotion, it'll say ceramides because ceramides are a species of lipid that is like 40% of your skin. And so anyway, but pork fat didn't have nothing else that she had ever seen had ceramides in it. A little off topic, but what do you mean? And it's for my book, Giannis. Giannis is one of my, he constantly wants me to talk about my book. It's coming out a year and a half. Be ready. Very good book. What's it called? I read the first half. Called American Bear. Very good book. Wow. First half is, could go to shit after that. See how this works, Clay? Get this guy talking about it. You're gonna put a big old chapter in there about that grease I gave you? Probably. It'll be, it'll be the epilogue. I'll put it in the front. I'll be like, my dear friends, see for no less. How much time do you spend on bear fat in this book? I don't want to give it all away, but You're not gonna, I'm telling you, you're not giving anything away. Give them a taste. Man, it's, let me just say the opening of the book will be unlike any book you've ever read, probably. Because it all goes with the discussion of the bear grease. It wasn't written before. Yeah. And, and we, we do have right now in the structure of full chapter on me going to Atlanta. I went to Emory Labs in Atlanta and saw the machine, the most technical lipid analysis machine in the world. You stuck your bear grease in there. 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. And I was like, that would be great. Let's do it. I'm getting a little jealous. There you go. 18 months out. Yeah, you'll be ready. Where are we on our walkthrough? Have we gotten to your lettuce wrap yet? No, no. Got it. Let's tackle the lettuce wrap. Yeah. And then we'll tackle the salad. We're good. Let's just talk vegetables first. So the lettuce is a hydroponically or aquaponically grown butter leaf lettuce. Actually, it's a company owned by another friend of mine. And then right outside of Austin. So we get these super fresh, really beautiful. You will notice a little bit of lime on there. That is a South Texas organically grown line from a G&S orchards down near Carrizo Springs. We've got fresh herbs because we are in season for things like mint and cilantro. Some red cabbage and radish is also in season. But then the real star of the show there is the ground nil guy. So, and these are coming from that band along the Texas coast, south of Kingsville, all the way to the border. Where the Eteria is. And then kind of extends over to the west to Palfurius and a little bit farther. But then 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 feeders, has a really nice, very natural diet. They're invasive. They're very, very sustainable. And these are harvest from helicopters. One shot sniper shot from a helicopter broken arrow ranch out of Ingram, Texas. And then they have inspectors there. They'll do 80 in a day. And they have these trailers set up and they process them all, take them back their age and cut them and distribute them. Where do they hit that thing from the helicopter? Headshots only. They hit them in the head from the helicopter. Wow. Buckshot? No, these are rifles. No kidding. These guys got to be good. Because they're doing 80 a day and they're doing a lot of days. You're not the only one serving nil guy. That is correct. They don't do 80 a day. They do a batch of 80. Correct. Not 365. But when they go down there, they will do 80. No, they distribute. And for the longest time, broken arrow has been the preeminent source of real wild game, like the Sparrow Hog and nil guy. And then they have a lot of other stuff like Axis, Red Stag, things like that. But they've really led the industry in that field harvesting technique. They're very, very good at it. Their distribution is amazing. Their customer service, great people. That's got to be some high overhead for them, man. You get a helicopter involved in something, things start getting expensive. Yeah. And then all the people on the ground, trailers and inspectors that have to go with them. And they're shipping over state lines. So they're USDA. They have to have a USDA inspector with them. So it is quite an operation, but they do it so well. I mean, and I think arguably this is some of the best meat that you could possibly purchase because it is harvested in this way and then immediately treated in the field. You know, they have this shocking technique where they hook them up and they zap them. I know about that. Yeah. And to kind of speed them through rigor mortis. I do what Steve 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. We had a meat scientist. It was delicious. The guy from Purdue. I'd like to get him back on. It's 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. Okay. It is not a later in the day thing. Yeah. I don't think that, I don't know the end's announcement, but I do know what it's called. And I love this, the Tender Buck Electro-Stimulator. We, let's move to the next salad. This is just a salad. I wanted to throw a salad out there. We've got some romaine and watermelon radishes and herbs and a vinaigrette. There's probably some egg in there. It's very good. 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 will, will, will, will. What is the dressing? This is a onion dressing. So it's like a charred onion. We grill them and then puree that up with some egg yolk and olive oil. Oh, we didn't talk about eggs. Who did you get your eggs from? We get eggs from two different sources right now. One of which we've been using since we were at the farmer's market together. Like we, we both sold at the farmer's market in the, this would be 2006 through 2012. His name is Chris and he runs an amazing operation. He just has very, very good eggs. He, that's what the only thing he does is, is raised chickens for eggs. And then we also get, we sell a few eggs retail. And that's from another farm out in the Hill country called Hattenheart. And that is also another fantastic egg. That's the egg I eat at home because they, they sent them in 12-pack cartons. And so that's the ones that I steal from the restaurants to take home. How many jobs do you create here at Diedooay? We probably got around 40. That's great, man. Yeah. Between front of house staff and everybody in the kitchen. And so yeah, yeah. Dude, this gotta be the fun. If you were in the, if you were in the food business, it's gotta be, this has gotta be the most educational, funnest place to work. If it's your thing, you know, if you want, if you want more refinement and, and, and truffles and different ingredients and that, you know, you might find at home somewhere else. But this is very refined. This is like way, that's just like how, that's just, it's a demonstration of buying power. It's not a, it's some of that's a demonstration of buying power. It's not a demonstration of creativity in elbow grease. Well, I appreciate that. I can only say that because there are people that sometimes that will come here and they're like, this is not what I'm looking for. I want, I want to go to this place where we, we plate things and it's a little fancier. We use some tweezers and this. You know, I get that. And that's fine. You know what I mean? Everybody's got their place. We have a, we have a wonderful crew here. You know, it's just, it's so much fun to come in here because everybody, they get into it. You know, we try to educate them as much as possible about what these things are. And, you know, like, and like pull the curtains back and let them see and just and understand how important it is to support, you know, long CEDA or the, you know, the supposed eradication of all that 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 so that they understand what they're doing. Yeah. When you come down for your Audat hunt, Randall, you might want to incorporate, come stop and buy here and doing a little beat about eating Audat. I've been thinking about how to suggest that myself in a way that didn't seem like you're trying to get advantage of them. So I appreciate you saying that. I'll go ahead and improve that right now. Can I have a concluter? Yeah, I was about ready to do one. Go ahead. Let it rip. I've got two. I'll make them very short and sweet. One, every time I eat here, I'm very inspired. It's very inspirational when I eat here. I'm like, I need to go home and do a better job and like put more effort into cooking at home. Because even though it is like, there's a lot of stuff going on there. I don't need to get that. I don't even want to call it fancy. You're just trying to not call your food fancy. So now I don't want to use that word, but like, I need to do a better job. Number two, I feel like what you do as a restaurant tour, you're making the world a better place. Oh man, that's very kind. Now you really are. Like I'm almost emotional about it. Like the whole thing that you just explained, it's only making everybody around you and you're involved with. Yeah. It's feel good about it. Better because of what you're doing here. Thank you. So appreciate it. Very cool. Yeah, man. I get a lot of pride out of being your friend. 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 like, oh, figure it out. See what I can do and land it in a cool spot, man. Oh, thank you. So when you come to Austin, you guys can feel free to say whatever you want. But I always tell people whenever I talk to someone that's coming to Austin, like you got to 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. Or if you ever down there, just regardless of if it's work or vacation, you got to go. And it has inspired me to do some more stuff with the game at home, to do some different things. You know, we get, you get in a rut and I don't guess it's a rut because I like the way the things that I cook, the way that I do, but there's so much more potential to make it different. I like it. And this is, thank you, Jesse. This is a great, this is a really good game. Oh yeah, thank you for being here. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, it's, everything I tasted was exceptional, but you know, oftentimes feels like a vision is sort of tacked on to a restaurant. And this, there's like a very honest- It's kind of rendered in. There's like a, there's indeed, this is like a very clear, honest concept that carries through everything with great clarity and it's so good. Thank you. Awesome. My other conclutor after Clay is, how do we decide who gets the- I've been watching that like a- I've been watching that. I'm going to get more serious about eating in a minute. Yeah. I've been trying to steal a bite now. Man, what these guys said, I cannot add anything to it, but just, I just want to say the food is incredibly good. Thank you. It's incredibly good. And you're, you're such a generous person. So thank you, Jesse. It's a community and it's really good. Ladies and gentlemen, Jesse Griffiths. Now tell me who made this pickle. This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.