EP 583. Steel Shot, Cast Iron, Wild Plate

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today we’re going down into South Central Texas with Mr. Jeffy Griffiths. Those that don’t know, he’s a renowned chef, hunter, fisherman, and author based down in Austin, Texas. Owns an amazing butcher shop and supper club, and his restaurant is celebrated for its commitment to locally sourced and wild ingredients. Jesse, how the heck are you today?
Jeffy Griffiths: I’m doing great. How are you?
Ramsey Russell: Man, I’m doing fine. So you live in Austin. Where are you originally from?

I’m from North Texas. If you went up I-35 about three and a half hours just south of the Oklahoma border. Sometimes I’m accused of being from Oklahoma, but I grew up about 30 minutes south of the Oklahoma border in a town called Denton.

Jeffy Griffiths: I’m from North Texas. If you went up I-35 about three and a half hours just south of the Oklahoma border. Sometimes I’m accused of being from Oklahoma, but I grew up about 30 minutes south of the Oklahoma border in a town called Denton.
Ramsey Russell: How’d you grow up? I mean, what did a young Jesse Griffiths do growing up in Denton, Texas?
Jeffy Griffiths: I fished. I went fishing.
Ramsey Russell: Bass fishing?
Jeffy Griffiths: Mostly panfish. I loved crappie, sunfish, white bass, catfish. That was my thing. Since I was a kid, I fished a lot with my dad. As soon as I could drive, it was over. I just fished all the time. As a young adult, it got more complicated, but there was still a lot of fishing.
Ramsey Russell: Was it local farm pond or creek banks? How were you fishing?
Jeffy Griffiths: Creeks, farm ponds, which we call tanks.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeffy Griffiths: When I was probably about 12 years old, I’m just guessing, they inundated a reservoir just north of Denton called Ray Roberts. I grew up as that lake grew up. As it flooded, we would go out there and fishing. We fished it when it was just a little baby lake or a reservoir. That became my home turf. It’s a really good fishing lake, and especially in those early years, it was great. You could go out there and catch lots of crappie and catfish out there.

I’ve been out in the Gulf Coast, I’ve bass fished, but there’s something satisfying about being knee deep or crotch deep in the water with a stick and string.

Ramsey Russell: I tell you what, to this day, it’s funny how my earliest experiences put us on a trajectory. I really think to this day, having grown up in the delta and fished for brim in some of the mock bows, or as I got older and moved to central Mississippi, there was a creek behind our house, a shallow creek with some pools, cutting our own sticks and cane poles, putting on a piece of monofilament, going and catching little sunfish and little bitty sun bass. It just really, to this day, I went crappie fishing last week with a buddy of mine, wade fishing, and it reminded me how much I like stalking around with a cane pole, with a stick and a string. I still like it. I’ve been out in the Gulf Coast, I’ve bass fished, but there’s something satisfying about being knee deep or crotch deep in the water with a stick and string.
Jeffy Griffiths: Absolutely. I think crappie while they’re spawning too is so visual because they hold so tight to cover, and you’re hunting them. You’re getting in there, dropping a jig right down in front of their faces, and you feel that little thump. Then you have to pull them out of the brush pile, and that’s the hard part, getting them to you with those thin little mouths. I’m an unapologetic pan fisherman. Everybody always has that caveat. They say, oh, when I was a kid, I liked to catch sunfish and this and that. To this day, if you said, let’s go catch a bunch of 8-pound bass or a bunch of 9-inch bluegills, I’m going bluegill every time.
Ramsey Russell: Almost every single person I know that began their hunting and fishing lifestyle as a child can relate to squirrel hunting, rabbit hunting, mourning dove hunting, and panfish. There’s no shame in it. I think that’s how we all started, and I still enjoy that. It’s how we all start with those humble beginnings. But when you hear them talk about it, Jesse, it is almost apologetic. Well, you know, I still like the squirrel hunt.
Jeffy Griffiths: You shouldn’t apologize for it. Coming at it from a culinary angle or from an eating angle, I feel like those are not only the best fish to eat, but they’re the most prolific and the most sustainable fish for consumption. If my freezer is full and I have a lot of fish, I don’t fish. I’m at the point where I’m fishing for food, and I want to fish for the most fun food fish out there.
Ramsey Russell: Jesse, were there any experiences or building on those experiences, and some of the people that mentored you, that shaped who you are today?
Jeffy Griffiths: Really, my dad. I fished with my dad, and we would travel to fish. We never had a boat, money was pretty tight, but we had a canoe. We would go wherever we could, float rivers and fish, and try to get access to a farm pond. Absolutely, he was the one most formative to me. He worked real hard, still does. He’s still working today. He loves to fish, and that’s where I got that love of fishing and being outdoors from him.
Ramsey Russell: When did hunting come into play?
Jeffy Griffiths: Much later. We didn’t grow up hunting. I think it’s notable that I worked in restaurants and learned how to butcher animals. I was butchering hogs, lamb, beef, rabbits, chickens, all kinds of fowl and animals, but they were brought in from farms. I had learned that whole aspect by my mid-20s. I was always fascinated by hunting but never really had opportunities. Finally, some opportunities came forward, and I was able to get out in the field. Then I realized I had been missing that component my whole life. I loved to fish, be outdoors, camp, hike, whatever it was. Once hunting was introduced, it came full circle. Now I get to do it all.
Ramsey Russell: Did you say that when you were a teenager you were working at restaurants where you were butchering your own stuff like that?
Jeffy Griffiths: Not slaughtering.

Ramsey Russell: Butchering.

Jeffy Griffiths: Sure. When I turned 15, I started working in restaurants. I’ve been working in the hospitality industry my whole life, and then started butchering in my 20s. After I moved to Austin, I was working in a restaurant, bringing in whole animals and breaking those down, which is a rarity today and was a rarity back then for a restaurant to bring in a whole hog and break that down. There was always buying chops and bacon, you didn’t make your own bacon, you didn’t cut your own chops. The restaurant I was at chose that path. I learned those skills first and then came to hunting after that.
Ramsey Russell: That’s very interesting. When I was 15 years old, I was bussing tables at Shoney’s. What kind of restaurant, or how did you stumble into a restaurant that was breaking down whole hogs and things? What kind of restaurant was it? Who’s was it?
Jeffy Griffiths: Italian restaurant, here in Austin, that still exists. It’s called Vespayo. I had a long history of working in restaurants before that. I was probably in my mid to late twenties at that point. I had bused tables too, and when I still lived in Denton, I worked behind the bar. I’ve worked as a manager, served, got into the kitchen, worked in a few restaurants in North Texas, and worked at a few restaurants here in Central Texas. Then I finally found that restaurant, Vespayo, and really found a home there. They made everything from scratch, their own pasta, all desserts scratch-made. There was a bread program, butchering animals. There was a small garden outside. We were sourcing from local farms. We were buying flounder and soft-shell crabs from fishermen down on the coast. It was everything I’d always wanted. I was fascinated by that connection to food, especially in a restaurant. They were doing it. That was where I started to thrive. The chef and I are still friends to this day. We work together a lot and develop these programs more. He was very excited about sourcing locally. I was very excited about it. He was bringing in whole animals, so it was a great place to learn.

Ramsey Russell: Was he a hunter and fisherman also? What do you think precipitated his interest in local sourced and from nature food sources?
Jeffy Griffiths: Yeah, he was. He grew up in Pennsylvania, so he was a hunter, and he loved to fish. We’ve been fishing together a few times. He loved to garden. He loved food. He’s also one of the best cooks I’ve ever met in my life. He’s a very talented person. His name is Ryan Sampson. And yeah, he did have that connection. I’m sure that was formative for me because meeting this guy who knew how to process his own deer and how to make sausage, and who was also an incredible restaurant cook.
Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darn. Well, where in your journey did you go from working for him to launching the Dai Do supper club in 2006 and creating a nationally recognized restaurant yourself that I’ve heard is among Steve Fernella’s favorite restaurants?
Jeffy Griffiths: Yeah, yeah. So he does like it, or at least he says he does. In 2006, my business partner and I founded Dai Due. But it didn’t turn into a brick and mortar restaurant until 2014. So there were another eight years before it actually became a brick and mortar restaurant. In the beginning, it was, what we called a supper club. It was like a roving pop-up restaurant. We would serve at a farm, at a hotel, at a house, in a restaurant that was closed that day, anywhere we could. The concept was the same, everything was sourced locally. We were using olive oil out of South Texas, buying rabbits, buying fish from the Gulf, buying vegetables at the farmer’s market, and limiting ourselves to what we could find from around here. That developed over the years. At that point, I had started to hunt in 2010, we founded the New School of Traditional Cookery, which was a hunting and culinary-based program where we had a team of guides, and we would take people hunting and, start to finish, show them how to sight a rifle, hunting, skinning, gutting, butchering, cooking, all the way through, for a three or four-day stretch. All the while running the business. We were serving food at the farmers market, selling pickles, brined chickens, sausages, all kinds of stuff. The business was very diverse. Then in 2014, we brought it all home, opened the brick and mortar here in Austin, and have been going ever since. We hit the 10-year mark last summer, and we’re busier than we’ve ever been. It’s great. It’s a fun restaurant. We’re still holding to the same ethos that we always have. We just source from Texas and as close as possible. We’re limited in our ingredients. We don’t have things like lemons right now because they’re not in season, or because of a devastating freeze we had three years ago, the citrus hasn’t really recovered in South Texas. So we just don’t have those things. When we do, we celebrate them. Right now we have strawberries, but we don’t have peaches. We don’t have asparagus. Nobody really grows enough for us to get it. It’s a fun place to go, but you’re somewhat limited by what you can have, and it requires a lot of cooperation between us and the customer because they have to realize it’s not a regular restaurant. You can’t walk in and say, I want a Jack and Coke or a lemon with my tea. We won’t have those things. We just have what our neighbors produce. We serve all Texas-grown wine and Texas beers.
Ramsey Russell: No cheating whatsoever. No cheating. I mean, I’m asking myself why. Why does it have to be that local source? There’s got to be a reason. I mean, a lemon from California or a lemon from Mexico is pretty close. Olive oil, good olive oil is good olive oil. Or is it?

When COVID hit, supply chains all over the country crumpled. The meat processing plants in the Midwest couldn’t operate because people were sick. The farms in California weren’t able to distribute because the supply chain started to fail.

Jeffy Griffiths: It’s more of an exercise in resources and making the statement that we have plenty. You can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need. It’s not to say you’re going to walk into Dai Due and think, there’s nothing on this menu. It’s a huge menu. We have vegetables and pork chops, but we have to be very inventive with how we use those resources. It’s also very much about who we’re buying from. Let me give you two examples about how this dynamic works in a bad situation. First example, COVID. When COVID hit, supply chains all over the country crumpled. The meat processing plants in the Midwest couldn’t operate because people were sick. The farms in California weren’t able to distribute because the supply chain started to fail. We were fine. We never had any issue getting product because we buy from neighbors. We know their first names, and they’re right there. There’s no supply chain to break down. There’s no middleman. There’s no layers between us. So when we needed tomatoes, beef, or pork, we just called that person, and they continued to bring it to us. We had to deal with other COVID-related issues like seating and uncertainty, but supply-wise, based on these ethos about only sourcing locally, we never took a severe hit. We recovered immediately. As far as the concept of this restaurant goes, that’s a key point. It’s all about community support. We’re existing in a similar situation that a small town in Vietnam, Morocco, France, Norway, India, name it, would function, now or 200 years ago, in that we know where all our food is coming from and can get it. On the flip side, in Texas we have suffered in the past five years some incredible freezes, the first of which was devastating. We’re not equipped for it. We don’t have the infrastructure, and it’s unheard of for us to dip into single digits for five days in a row. We lost power, we lost water. Our house was 40 degrees for days, no lights. People died. It was hard. In a local catastrophic event like that, we did suffer. Because we’re so localized, when you have a local event where everything goes down, our short supply chains broke. The farmer couldn’t get across the bridge to deliver the cabbage. We did break down our supply chance. But the recovery rate was almost immediate. As soon as things thawed out, we were fine. We just had to deal with it for a minute. We lost power, shut down, and had an excess of food from before the storm, so we cooked it all and gave it to the neighborhood because nobody could get out and eat. Nobody could go to the store. Everything was shut down, roads iced over, everybody at a standstill. So we took all that food and served it back to our community for free because they couldn’t go anywhere and the food was going bad. Once again, it demonstrates why we do it. Certainly, there are great wines from France or California, but there are also great wines from Texas. We want those wines to be better. We want to support the people doing the right thing here, who are utilizing our water and land resources in the right ways. So we choose to only support them. We’re not trying to exclude wines from California, that lemon from Mexico, or that decent olive oil from Greece. We are really trying to highlight the resources, the responsible use of them, and the community connections we can forge by only using those products.

You were listing off like it would be similar to going to some of these other old school, older type countries and cultures and eating with that local sourced food. But it reminds me of almost a temporal difference. It’s like going back to the 20s or 30s or 40s, a different time of real, great America, back in those simpler days.

Ramsey Russell: You were listing off like it would be similar to going to some of these other old school, older type countries and cultures and eating with that local sourced food. But it reminds me of almost a temporal difference. It’s like going back to the 20s or 30s or 40s, a different time of real, great America, back in those simpler days. Is eating like this inherently healthier?
Jeffy Griffiths: I think so. The food is much fresher. Every vegetable you get is so much more fresh than something that’s been shipped from afar. Notice this, if I go to the farmer’s market and buy a tomato and put it on my counter, it’s going to go bad in a day and a half. If I go to the store and get a tomato and put it on my counter, it’s good for eight days. Something’s happening there. In the case of tomatoes, they’re being gassed. Some vegetables are being waxed to preserve them. The meats we use, we’re very selective about where we get them, what they’re fed, how they’re killed. We serve a lot of wild game. We fry only in beef tallow. We are proudly a seed oil-free restaurant. We use olive oil and butter.

Ramsey Russell: You all were seed oil free before it was cool.
Jeffy Griffiths: Yeah. Well, it’s become a thing now too. We do it for our own reasons. We do it for flavor. We still have to use that part of the cow. All that fat comes in, and the rancher has an excess of it. For us, there’s not a local canola farmer for us to support. The process it takes to make that oil, I look at it and I don’t want my kid to eat that. So we use beef fat because it boils down to resources. If we’re going to fry food, we need a frying medium that is available to us as a resource we’re going to steward. In Texas, that is beef fat. Somewhere else, it might be clarified butter, it might be pork fat, which would be in more abundance. We’re using our local resource there.
Ramsey Russell: Jesse, go ahead.
Jeffy Griffiths: When you said it harkens back to an older mentality, I’ll tell you a quick story about one of my favorite moments ever. I was down in the prep area. The entire restaurant is wide open, very transparent. Our prep area, where our butchery and bakery, they are operate off of one table. You can see everything. There’s nothing in the back behind any doors. The entire kitchen is open, wood-burning grill, a couple ovens, and a fryer full of beef fat right there. I was working in the prep area one day, and this older man came down holding his cowboy hat. He walked up, watched me for a second. I could tell he wanted to say something. I looked over, smiled, and he looked me in the eye and said, “I know what you’re doing here.” Then he turned around and walked up. It floored me because I knew exactly what he meant. He knew exactly what I meant. It was the quickest connection ever. Such pristine communication. He told me he understood what we were doing. He saw that we were doing things the old way. He was an older man, and he saw that. We serve biscuits and gravy, but we’re using local milk, venison, flour milled 45 minutes west of town to make these biscuits. We’re probably making food precisely the way his parents and grandparents made food. Exactly the same.

Biting into some of their bread, I realized I had never eaten real bread before. Anybody listening, if the only bread you’ve ever eaten comes out of a grocery store, you’ve never eaten real bread.

Ramsey Russell: I think as hunters, we can better relate to locally sourced food than anybody else, especially if you’ve had gardens or owned a dairy cow. I was reminded of something the first time I went to France. Biting into some of their bread, I realized I had never eaten real bread before. Anybody listening, if the only bread you’ve ever eaten comes out of a grocery store, you’ve never eaten real bread.
Jeffy Griffiths: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: A lot of the food you’re talking about, Jesse, is real food. All of it.
Jeffy Griffiths: Exactly. There’s a cultural aspect to it too. The French are very good at making bread. They’re very proud of it. It’s a big part of their cuisine, a big part of their daily life. The French buy bread every day.
Ramsey Russell: Every day.
Jeffy Griffiths: I love this too. I went into a little bakery in the basement. One man, a one-man show. He made croissants, a couple other breakfast pastries, baguette, and I think sourdough. I asked for a baguette, and he asked me in French, “Blanche Aquitaine.” That means light or cooked. You could select if you want your baguette a little less baked or really nice and charred and crispy. He had those available. This is in a village. That’s the level of pride and detail they put into something seemingly so simple. You’re right. Then when you taste it, you’re like, I’ve never had anything this good. You just put butter on there, but the butter is really good too.
Ramsey Russell: Or the foie gras.
Jeffy Griffiths: And so it’s inspiring from a cultural aspect, from an enjoyment aspect, and being prideful of what you can produce and the traditions you have in a region. We have a lot of traditions here. It’s fun to like those traditions and the ingredients, and then you get to deal with the best people, ranchers and farmers.
Ramsey Russell: Well, Jesse, Since 2006, how has your philosophy on food sustainability and hunting evolved since the old supper club days?
Jeffy Griffiths: I see it more realistically. Everybody matures. When you’re younger, you’re more idealistic. I see now more pathways to making things better rather than idealistically thinking everything needs to be this way, period. We just need to work within these systems to promote and encourage people to be more mindful about their food. I sincerely believe that local food systems work better. There should be more farmers, more ranchers, and more people consuming in almost the European model, where you shop maybe three times a week and shop from neighbors. I think that every third house, not by requirement, but having chickens should be encouraged in cities, especially these days. The reason we have an egg crisis is because we need vast amounts of cheap eggs. Smaller flocks are not as vulnerable to bird flu as massive flocks kept indoors. Big cities are more apt to get sick together. There’s still a little idealism there, but it’s more of a soft promotion. These days I’d rather just say, hey, everybody, let’s get chicken coops. It’s fun. Then sometimes people see what’s happening in the news and think, if I had a chicken coop, I wouldn’t be paying $10 a dozen for eggs. You might pay more accounting for feed and losses to foxes and hawks, but it’s enjoyable. I’ve taken on an overarching role,  not preaching so much as encouraging or illuminating how much fun it can be to be connected to your food. Be that fishing, hunting, picking berries in the spring, going to the farmer’s market, buying a half cow from a rancher, supporting a restaurant that does that, having a chicken coop, growing a pot of herbs on your balcony. It’s all very viable. The more people involved in that connectivity with something you have to do daily, that’s what my role has become.
Ramsey Russell: Along those lines, is that what led you into hunting? You grew up a fisherman. You grew up pan fishing. You got off into this, started this journey into cooking. Is that what led you into hunting specifically? Because you had opened your supper club before you got actively into hunting. It sounds like you said 2010.

For me, hunting was and still is, and probably more than ever, about food. I don’t hunt if I don’t need to. It’s kind of a grocery store approach. 

Jeffy Griffiths: That’s when we started the hunting component of the business. I would say it was about the same time we started the business that I started to delve into hunting. For me, hunting was and still is, and probably more than ever, about food. I don’t hunt if I don’t need to. It’s kind of a grocery store approach. I do an inventory of the freezer and find we are very light on hog, then plans will be made to go hog hunting. We are very conscious about how much venison is in the freezer at all times. My daughter hunts now. She’s probably what you’d call the primary breadwinner as far as game meats go. I am motivated by food. Not to say I don’t love it,  I’m a turkey hunter. If you computed the calories it takes to harvest a turkey, it’s ridiculous. I enjoy being in the woods and hunting is fun. But I love the food aspect just as much. For me, if you charted it on a graph, it’s a flat line between planning a trip and consuming that last package of food. It goes straight through with enjoyment. There’s no peak or valley. The hunt itself, laying your hands on that bird or deer is great, but I’m already thinking about how I’m going to cook it.
Ramsey Russell: Texas is ground zero for feral hogs. We all know about it. What is your approach to hunting hogs down in Texas? You have a restaurant, you’ve got to do it. Is it spot and stalk? Are you flying with helicopters? Are you hunting them over bait?

Jeffy Griffiths: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: All the above.

Jeffy Griffiths: Oh, yeah. So hogs, that’s a huge topic. I wrote an entire book about hogs, the Hog Book. In the restaurant, we get trapped hogs, so we have to source them where they’re trapped and inspected first. They have a blue stamp on them from the Texas Department of Agriculture and then we can get them in, but they are 100% feral hogs. We serve some domestic pork too, to clarify, but it’s delineated on the menu. We have wild boar and we have domestic hog. Personally hunting them, I will definitely hunt them over bait. Texas is a big feeder state. Of late, I’m really more of a mind to hunt them during the day when they tend to be bedded down. That can be highly productive. I would say spot and stalk, moving along shady areas, cooler areas, riparian river bottoms and creek bottoms with the wind in your face and knowing what to look for, smelling them, being acutely aware of it and then being able to react quickly with a shot on hogs that are likely to be very close at that point. That’s probably my favorite way to hunt them. If we’re just making a grocery run, thermals work great because they can be highly nocturnal. It’s funny you say that because it’s turkey season right now and since Sunday, I think I’ve had four run-ins with hogs. Today is Thursday. In none of those situations was I able or willing to shoot the hogs because it would have ruined the turkey hunt. They’re just out right now and I keep running into them at short ranges, about 15 ft. I love hunting hogs. I love cooking hogs. I love talking about them. I think they’re a fascinating subject.

Ramsey Russell: Now look for table fare, a 300-400 pound boar, is he the one that gets the pass? Are you chasing those 150-200 pound shoats out there, those females, to make good quality table fare? Or if you see a big stinking 400 pound wild boar that’s been rolling in his own stuff, do you go, “Oh heck, that’s 400 pounds of meat I’m putting on the ground,” or are you selective?

Jeffy Griffiths: I’m selective when I can be. The question you just asked is probably the predominant question that people ask about consuming feral hog, which is size. In the Hog Book I broke it down.

Ramsey Russell: And sex.

Jeffy Griffiths: Yes, exactly. I broke it down. Over the years I heard that question so many times that when it came time to write a cookbook about feral hogs, I had to really consider and distill down the easiest methodology to present people to separate out these different sizes and sexes of hogs. Somebody could come to me and say, what is your favorite recipe for feral hog? I’m going to say, is that a 20 pound or a 350 pound boar? It’s not the same recipe. You cannot even approach those two animals the same. Whereas a deer and an elk, one’s just bigger than the other, but you’re essentially going to cook them the same way. It was difficult, but what I figured out was there are, in my opinion, four major classes of feral hogs. You’ve got small pigs, either sex, up to about 30 pounds. Those are your piglets. You’re going to cook them whole, cut them into big pieces, and roast them. They’re naturally going to be very tender. There’s a very low likelihood that they’re going to be tough. After that, you’ve got medium pigs which can go either way. They’re starting to develop some fat. You can start to make more diverse cuts on them. You can cut little chops, little ribs, things like that. So you’ve got your small hogs, either sex, medium hogs, either sex. Then the next two categories are branched. I have large sows and large boars. A large sow being my personal favorite animal to consume out in the woods, maybe close to turkey. A large sow is typically going to have a lot of fat and offer an array of cuts, chops, steaks, beautiful hams, ribs, bellies. You might even be able to smoke some bacon off a big sow. Then you have the elephant in the room, which is the big boar. My contention is it’s not completely a write-off. You don’t have to just haul them off to the gut pile, a 400 pound stinking monster.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t even stand to put him in the rear of the buggy. He stinks. I have to go disinfect the whole thing. He stinks so bad.

Jeffy Griffiths: I’ve had multiple occasions where the boar has been so stinky, and I really try to process all of them at least something. But once I got the hide, it’s way more manageable, and it doesn’t smell so bad. The meat sometimes can be very, very good. The biggest boar I ever killed, I would have to estimate it at, and everybody always goes way high, it was probably 275 or 300, which is still a very large animal. And it was one of the best-tasting pigs I’ve ever had too. He was pretty stinky, not terrible, but had a lot of fat on him. He came from a part of Texas where he was eating a lot of pecans and a lot of acorns, really predominantly acorns. And it was the time of year where he had been able to consume a lot of acorns. Late winter, early spring is really peak season for hogs here because of that tree mast influence where that’s the longest amount of time that acorns and pecans have been on the ground. They’ve had the most time to consume those, and they put on the most fat. I also killed a hog one time that just smelled deplorable. It smelled bad. 239 pounds on a digital scale. My steering wheel stank for a week, and then when I was driving a couple of days later, I thought, why does my truck smell so bad? I smelled the steering wheel and realized that was it. I touched it. But I got the hide, head, and guts off of that hog, and he went from 239 pounds to 139 pounds. I charted the path of this hog on Instagram. I named him Big Stinky. After I got all that off there, I started cooking Big Stinky. I was putting it out there, I was like, okay, let’s try this out, everybody. And he was great. The ribs were great. There was no game to them. They were fine, nice and fatty, and cooked up really nice. I’m not going to say that every boar is great to eat by any means. Please do not quote me as trying to be an apologist for the big boars. But they do have some value, particularly if you are in the market for a bunch of sausage, especially strongly spiced sausage, smoked sausages. They work pretty well for that. That’s what I dedicated that section of the book to. Here’s what you can do with these bigger pigs. Do you want to take a 20-pound small pig and bone the whole thing out and make sausage with it? No. What you want to do is cut that into big roasts and put them on the smoker or in the oven and cook them until they’re nice and tender. But that big boar, you put them on the smoker, it’s going to be tough as nails. It’s not going to be good. But it will make good sausage. Those size categories, as a generalization, work out really well. I encourage people to give it a shot if you want to. But if you’re a farmer and you’ve got a sounder of hogs coming in and devastating one of your fields every night, I’m not going to sit there over your shoulder and be like, hey, are you going to process all those and try to eat them? Just kill them, that’s fine. My role here in the realm of hogs and consuming hogs is I’m only concerned with the dead ones. If you want to eat them, I’m here to help.

Ramsey Russell: For those that have never broke down and dressed a wild hog, good luck. It’s a lot different than a deer. I can remember the first boar hog I ever skinned out, hanging him up by his feet like a deer. It was all good fun. That hog amounted to a big old 300-pound something. I’d bottom scales out there at the ranch I was working on. Big, big red thing. But when I got down to those shoulder pads, that became a whole different critter than skinning a deer. I’ve since learned because I have myself. As a matter of fact, we talked about it just the other night at supper, my sons and I. 200-pound female hog. I skinned it down, I dressed it. You got to be particular. You got to be careful not to taint or touch. It’s different than a deer, way different than a deer. I thought I had done it right. I had skinned a lot of hogs right. When we cooked the pork chops, it tasted like that hog smelled, and it had a different texture. It broke me of eating a wild hog for a very long time. We threw the whole thing out. I’m leading up to asking you, when it comes to breaking down a hog, if you had one tip that would make it edible and maximize its cookability, what would that one tip be when handling wild hogs?

Jeffy Griffiths: Keep them cold and dry. I think that a lot of people, their tendency is to try to simultaneously chill and wash the meat by putting them directly on ice. I’m a strong proponent of getting the animal skinned and gutted, being very careful. My dominant hand is my right hand, my knife hand. My left hand is pulling hide away while I’m cutting with my right hand and being pretty meticulous about getting that hide off. Once the carcass is ready, the skin and the guts are off, I want to get that carcass chilled down as much as I can, and I want to keep it as dry as possible. Moisture is a vector for bacteria, and even ice and water particularly can exacerbate the bacterial load on that animal. That is where gamey flavors will originate. Not always. Sometimes it’s in the meat. Sometimes you have what’s called boar taint or typical gamey flavors. I’ve also seen many instances where stress can really contribute to a stronger flavored hog. A hog that’s been cornered by dogs, a hog that has been shot but wounded and then ran several hundred yards, a hog caught in a snare, you can really delve into getting that meat a little more gamey-flavored through the introduction of a stressful situation. There’s a lot that can go wrong. When you were talking about those chops, was that from the big boar or from the sow?

Ramsey Russell: It was from a sow. As you were talking about the stress factor, it could have been. It may not have been the cleaning process. I don’t remember where that hog was killed. For the record, I hate wild hogs. I hate wild pigs. I hate them. I think they’re the scourge of the earth. The last bunch of hogs I’ve shot, I was in Georgia hunting with some friends deer hunting. A female and her baby stepped out, and he’s like, man, you shoot that hog. I said, if I shoot that hog, I’m shooting in her guts. I shoot hogs in the big old belly where they run off. I hate them. They eat fawns, they destroy the habitat. I’ve just got this hate for them. Not to say I’m against eating them, because I’m not. I ate some good hog throughout the day that my buddies kill. But the last several I’ve seen, I just shoot in the stomach. I have shot female hogs and them fall dead and they’re young and start suckling, start eating them. They’re a crazy animal. It’s no telling. I probably shot it in the shoulder because I like to shoot them in the shoulder normally, especially if they’re off at a distance. I just aim for the core and shoot them. I remember us all biting into it and getting the same reaction. It tasted like a hog smells, and I don’t know why. It had a bad mushy texture to it. I own it for having probably handled it wrong or carelessly, but it broke me of eating hog for a spell.

Jeffy Griffiths: It’s interesting because, like you said, they are more volatile in the processing, so you can make more mistakes. How soon after the hog was killed did you cook it?

Ramsey Russell: It could have been a couple of months.

Jeffy Griffiths: Okay.

Ramsey Russell: It could have been something like that. You said something interesting about the dryness of it all. It reminded me that I’ve got a lot of friends and associates down in South Africa, where all of South Africa is under fence, kind of like a part of South Texas. They do a lot of corral hunts. From hoof to hide, those headshot animals they’re managing on the range go straight into the market. He was explaining to me in a podcast 100 episodes or so ago that they’re flying or driving, they’re head shooting. They may shoot 100 animals in a 20-hour period or less. He’s got a crew that goes out, skins, and works. Those animals have to be cleaned, skinned, and in the walk-in cooler within 20 minutes from the time they hit the ground. If a single drop of water touches that carcass, the biologists and the government inspectors on site disqualify it because of the bacteria. When I’m out there doing these hogs or deer and venison, I grew up skinning them out and hosing them down. Is that how you process too?

Jeffy Griffiths: Well, we have two categories. We have rinsers and non-rinsers. I would say rinse if you have to. You would rinse if you have a gut shot, if you got dirt on the carcass, if you accidentally cut a stomach or intestine during the cleaning process. Otherwise, if you’ve got a clean shot and there’s no need to rinse anything off of it, there’s no contamination, no bacterial introduction in there, then do not rinse. If you have to rinse, like if the animal was slightly gut shot, if you nick the stomach when you were gutting, then I would highly suggest rinsing that off, but then let it dry really well and maybe wipe it off with a towel. For me, it’s cold and dry, cold and dry, cold and dry.

Ramsey Russell: Around the world, and to take it off of hogs a little bit and get more into the full menu, if listeners go to the grocery store to buy beef, we’ve got a dozen steaks and roasts to choose from, plus beef and hamburger. Whereas when I go around the world, especially down in Argentina. I use them classic example, because Argentina. Man it’s like around the world, they utilize every part of that hog or that cow but the squeal and the moo, every part of it. When we go down to a lot of the estancias to hunt, we’re served some of the choicest cuts, to include the beef ribs, the twitch muscles, the steaks, and things of that nature. But between the tourist groups and the locals, what they’re eating is the tripe, the intestines, every bit of it. And it’s all delicious. When you’re processing venison for your restaurants or for your own personal freezer, are you just going through the standard American, let’s call it Kroger cuts, or are you getting deep into the different cuts?

Jeffy Griffiths: Specifically on venison, I don’t think a deer offers the same variety of cuts as beef does. To speak to what you’re saying, that is not only a cultural necessity to consume all those parts, but everybody knows how to prepare them and everybody appreciates them. There’s no prejudice against eating tripe or these off cuts. In fact, they’re all equally celebrated. Somebody might think, I love ribeye and I love tripe, which is allowed, you can like both. For me with venison, sure, I will cut back straps and tenderloins. I love the meat off of the ribs, the entire side of the deer. I love to roll that up and slow-cook it, and then the legs will offer you a lot of different cuts as well. We’re not really a big venison steak family, we lean more into things like cutlets and ground. I’ve got a 14-year-old daughter, so my interest is really keeping her interested in eating it. It’s a very subjective thing when you’re butchering. I always try to tell people this, don’t watch a video or listen to me about what cuts you should take because it really depends on what you like to eat. I find that western hunters like steaks a lot more, they like to steak an entire deer out. Whereas southern hunters tend more towards a few steaks and a lot of sausage and ground. That’s a generalization of course. It’s a fascinating cultural and geographical dynamic. For me personally, it’s probably a very boring approach to deer because of how we eat, but also the consistency that we eat deer is high. We eat a lot of it, so backstraps and ground are currency because you can do so much with ground. Also cutlets, be it a turkey cutlet or a venison cutlet, are going to get consumed here. For me, it becomes just different preparations, but it makes everybody happy here.

Ramsey Russell: You probably utilize a lot more than the average guy. One thing I’ve never done with a deer, and I don’t know why, is the caul fat. One of my favorite things to eat in Africa. And I’m butchering the pronunciation because I learned southern phonics. But it’s skill packy and it’s minced lamb liver wrapped with caul fat. I really like it prepared about the size of a deviled egg because I can eat them like deviled eggs, and I will fill up like a tick. I love it. I think that lamb fat is amazing. I do like liver, but that’s something I can tell you we can’t go to an American grocery store and buy something like that.

Jeffy Griffiths: No. We’ve collectively allowed our palates to change to accommodate very sweet meat, like corn-fed beef. That’s kind of the standard. If you have a conversation about game, the metric is always, how does that compare to beef? Or if it’s a bird, it’s chicken. These are very middle-of-the-road flavors. Wrapping minced liver in stomach lining is not an approachable flavor to us as a culture. Another thing we can normalize is making that exciting. Don’t apologize for it and don’t say, I know this sounds gross, because it doesn’t. When you think about it, it is not at all. It sounds amazing, and it should be. How do we go about promoting and normalizing the utilization of these animals that we purport to love so much, and spend so much money, time, and effort on their conservation? For me, conservation could almost apply to consuming the caul fat and the liver off of animals as well. Then you’re fully utilizing that resource. Once that singular resource is utilized, you can move on to the next one, and it develops a real appreciation for it. Other cultures, through either tradition or necessity, have developed that more than we have.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think the proliferation of fast food changed the American palate? I would guess that people who choose to eat like you cook at your restaurants are more deliberate eaters than somebody who just runs by the fast-food restaurant two or three times a day to eat. Maybe they taste something a little bit different or want a different flavor in the way you prepare things than just getting some belly fodder with a Subway sandwich.

Jeffy Griffiths: Absolutely. It’s a constant battle. Certain flavors like bitter and sour aren’t appreciated either. There are bitter vegetables that I think are wonderful, but that is absolutely out. Because as you saying, Fast food relies on three key flavor components, salt, fat, and sugar. You combine all those three together and it’s over. It’s not even up to you anymore because your brain is saying, yes, yes, yes. You can still incorporate those things. You can put a little bit of honey in that marinade that you’re grilling. The feral honey hog, the wild boar chop, we’re going to brine it with some salt, then we’re going to grill it. We’re going to add smoke, then that char develops natural sugars, plus a little bit of honey. That tweaks it. We’re not accommodating the palates because our job is to make delicious food. But to your point, is there a palate battle happening due to our high consumption of fast food and processed foods? Absolutely, yes. Has that affected our collective palate? Unequivocally, yes. That’s why we can’t wrap lamb liver in caul fat, because it doesn’t have all of those components. We’re getting to the point where if it doesn’t have those components, a decent chunk of the population is not interested.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s transition to duck hunting, because I know you do duck hunt. I want to get into it because I hear it over and over again, especially among non-duck hunters, flying liver, I’ve heard ducks called that. What is your ideal duck hunt? Where, with who, under what conditions?

Jeffy Griffiths: Yeah, that’s an easy question for me. They say there’s like four stages, and you can hear this about fishermen or hunters. When you’re young, you want to catch a fish, then you want to catch a lot of fish, then you want to catch a big fish, and then you want to catch a fish the way you like to do it the most. The same thing applies to hunting. I’m definitely there. If I’m duck hunting, I want to hunt ducks the way I like to hunt ducks. I love a farm pond hunt that we walk into and have very little cover. There’s no blinds, find eight decoys. I love simplicity in fishing and hunting. I don’t own a boat. I don’t like to carry decoys. When I’m turkey hunting, I like mobility and the least amount of gear possible. So for me, a farm pond or a creek slough or a walk-in duck hunt is going to be my favorite. If I kill two ducks that way, I’m very happy. I don’t need the numbers anymore. I love duck hunting. I love the sounds, I love the mornings, I love when I can actually hit them. Some days you’re on fire, and some days I’m not. I primarily hunt with my one hunting buddy. We hunt turkeys, deer, pigs, and ducks together. We fish together, and hopefully, he’s on that day if I’m not. That’s my ideal. All of that said, another interesting factor is that we hunt at the bottom of the flyway, where we’ve gotten away from a lot of the rice fields that used to exist here in Texas. We’re primarily shooting gadwalls, ringnecks, maybe a few teal sprinkled in there, and they aren’t the best ducks. I’ve recently been gifted mallards. It’s undeniable how much better those are.

Ramsey Russell: Why are mallards and pintails, especially if they’re rice-fed or grain-fed, so good? Is it the size and fat content?

Jeffy Griffiths: Size and fat, and just there’s some mildness. I sat down with the family and cooked one of these mallards, and everybody was looking at me like, wait, what is this? And I said, I know. The point was made that night, they said if all the ducks that you brought home tasted like this, we would be encouraging you to hunt ducks a lot more. I said that is absolutely right. If all the ducks I had access to tasted this good, I would be primarily a duck hunter in the winter.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you’ve never shot a mallard, which I find remarkable because it’s a very abundant duck. It’s found throughout all the flyways. There are great populations in parts of North Texas. Did it just never work out? Did you miss some? How is it you haven’t shot a mallard?

Jeffy Griffiths: It’s crazy. I mostly duck hunt in that situation I outlined. We’re hunting this one pond. I’ve never seen a mallard there. One time we shot a canvasback out there about 10 years ago. Some wigeon, but haven’t seen wigeon in years. It used to be a 50/50 mix of wigeon and gadwalls. Now it’s just a gadwall party. Maybe some wood ducks in the creek weeks. The couple of times I’ve had the opportunity to go to a place to shoot a mallard, something has gone wrong. I got sick one time and had to cancel the trip. I can’t remember what happened the other time. The universe seems to be conspiring against me because I’m fascinated by these mallards. In Central Texas, where I hunt specifically, it is a rarity. I saw a group of six one time during the split when I was dove hunting on that property. I walked over a tank dam and these mallards got up, and I was sitting there holding a shotgun thinking, maybe next time, not today. That’s the only time I’ve seen them here. I’m sure we get some passing through, but I have never laid eyes on a mallard in Central Texas.

Ramsey Russell: Has not habitually shooting mallards as part of your bag influenced the way you cook duck, the recipes you use?

Jeffy Griffiths: Absolutely. We’ve got smaller-breasted birds. I’m slow-cooking the legs, maybe making boudin out of the livers, gizzards, and hearts. The breasts we’ll sear. To be super honest, I think if I had access to mallards, like I said a minute ago, I would hunt ducks way more if I had access to those ducks I perceive as more delicious.

Ramsey Russell: Your approach to duck hunting, I love this. Less is more. The older I get, less and simpler is better. Go out with your shotgun, your dog, your duck call, a few decoys, shoot a few ducks. Is that also your approach to some of the recipes you use, like the mallard you cooked that was so good? Was that a very simple recipe, or did it have a whole lot of ingredients?

Jeffy Griffiths: For those specifically, I seared the breasts. I cut the breasts off, seared with salt and pepper in a pan, and I can’t remember what kind of sauce, probably just a reduction of some kind of stock, maybe some fruit involved. Fairly straightforward. The legs I made a confit, salted with herbs, cooked slowly in fat, then removed once tender and broiled until crispy in the oven. That was the real winner. I took some of the fat they had cooked in and tossed potatoes in it with parsley and garlic. To me, that sounds simple. Maybe some listeners would think that’s crazy, but for me, that is a simple approach. I used to working like that. I dedicate a lot of time to cooking every day, and it’s a priority for me. I’m not covering up flavors. I want to give the birds their due respect for what they are, where they’re from, and what they taste like. Salt and pepper on the breast with a simple sauce. Duck really invites some,

Ramsey Russell: Sweet, fruity.

Jeffy Griffiths: Yeah, acid in the form of citrus or vinegar. Something sweet like a raisin or maple syrup, in small amounts. I don’t think that’s covering anything up, I think that’s enlivening the natural flavor of duck which is incredible.

Ramsey Russell: The same could be said for just about everything. Just let the meat speak for itself if it’s done right. This may surprise you, but throughout the northern hemisphere, everywhere that they exist, and I mean Pakistan, Azerbaijan, California to Maryland, the deep south, north, south, everywhere I’ve been, universally one of the favorite duck species is green-winged teal. That’s why, everywhere we’ve been to some of these crazy places, they said, maybe we eat some duck, we all cook some duck, whatever. They always go through the pile and go for the green wings. Granted, mallards aren’t just as abundant as the green wings. I was recently in Azerbaijan and their three favorite “ducks” are, in rank order, green wings, mallard, coots. Man, they both love the coots. They really do. Something I learned this year, I’ve been doing it wrong. I’m an old guy and I have been doing it wrong anytime I’ve shot those darn ring necks, and we do shoot quite a few at our property in Mississippi, and I love to shoot them. I think they’re a fun, fast duck to shoot. I’ve always just breasted them out. I was hunting down in southwest Louisiana this year, and I knew the guy I was hunting with, his blind had shot a lot of ring neck the day before. No problem, I like to shoot them. Once we got to talking about it and waiting on shooting time, he said, we shoot lots of ring necks and that’s my favorite duck. I said, really? I like to shoot them, assumed that’s what he meant. I love to shoot them, but golly, it’s like skinning a deer, having to cut that old boot leather skin and breast them out. He said, boy, you’ve been doing it wrong. They get rid of their pin feathers earliest and they get fat. They have pretty white fat, and we whole pick them. Let me tell you, that was as fine and pretty a duck as I’ve ever put in the freezer. I made a gumbo with them for Christmas. To take it a step further, I got to telling the story about the fat and about all the good stuff on these ring necks, and some biologists were telling me they had been inserting transmitters inside the cavity, surgical implants. Those ring necks they were implanting the geo trackers with had so much visceral fat, they had to remove a little bit, like a little liposuction, to fit the transmitter in the cavity. One of the biologists from North Dakota took it home to render it. He said, are you kidding? I’m not getting rid of this great fish fat. I see no shame now in shooting ring neck. It took me a long time, three decades of shooting ducks, to understand that I had been treating ring necks completely wrong, thinking you could probably work with a duck like that, couldn’t you?

Jeffy Griffiths: Certainly. I’ve also hunted in Louisiana and they’re almost supernatural in their approach to making things taste great there. That region is very unique within the United States as being one of the most objectively great places to eat. They have probably the most unique food culture of anywhere in the United States, and their utilization and inventiveness there and appreciation for the subtleties around those things, like how you cook the different ducks and the different methods they have. You could spend a lifetime down there learning more about those methods, and I think that’s just really fascinating. I love stories like that.

Ramsey Russell: One of your latest projects is the turkey book, and it focuses on turkeys. Did you learn anything in researching and writing that book that surprised you most about turkey behavior or hunting strategy or culinary preparation?

Jeffy Griffiths: I could talk about turkeys a lot. We’re in the middle of it right now. I’ve had a wonderful season so far. I think I’ve hunted about nine days so far. I’m three birds in. I have one tag left, about to travel to New Mexico, Nebraska, Wisconsin. I think I’ve learned more from turkey hunting than any other vocation I’ve ever had or any other activity like it. It has definitely made me a much better hunter in general. I think I might be a better business person. I might manage things better because they will teach you graciousness and patience. You’re constantly second guessing yourself. Waiting them out is usually a good idea, except when it’s not. You can sit in one place for eight hours and then finally just look over, and there’s that bobbing red head, and that bird has been cued in on your spot for eight hours, but he just finally decided to come back. That will mess with your mind. You can take it negatively or you can take it as a life lesson and be like, that is incredible. I had no idea how this was going to turn out. Patience, dedication, and a really sore butt paid off. Sometimes you get them off the limb. That happened the other day too. It’s a rarity, but it was 7:12 am and my buddy had one on his back. That’ll reinforce that you don’t know. I’m giving a vague answer, but I could unequivocally say that turkey hunting is my favorite. I love the time of year. I like spring a lot. It’s a really fun time to be out in the woods no matter where you’re at. Most places, be it New Mexico or Connecticut, spring is cool, and chasing these birds that you will never master. You will never be just an expert. I guess you could be an expert. I watch some guys on YouTube that are experts at it, but they’re still getting turned around. They’re still getting bested here and there. I like that a lot. We’re going to New Mexico in about 10 days and it’s entirely likely that we’re going to come back with no birds. I’m fine with that. That’s not the outcome I want, but I have accepted anything between four birds and zero birds because you just don’t know. We’re going to give it our all. We’re going to get up there, put in the steps, walk up the mountains, sit, make bad decisions, maybe make some good decisions, and at the end, maybe get a couple Merriams. I love eating them, and that is a big part of it too. I really appreciate and enjoy turkey. That’s been a big motivator. We all settle in. You like ducks. Everybody kind of settles into that one thing. There’s something appealing about that process too. I love ducks too. I can tell that you like turkeys as well. I think we’re a little bit flipped on that, and I think that’s great. There is that one thing that appeals to your personality and gives you that really precise challenge, and it can appeal to you for as long as you’re able to physically do it. To me, that’s turkey.

Ramsey Russell: You say you like to eat them, but how do you approach cooking turkey? The classic way, if you ask somebody how to cook ducks, duck poppers, jalapeno cream cheese, bacon wrap. Turkeys, fried turkey breast, turkey nuggets dipped in pancake batter or chicken fried. I’m not an avid turkey hunter. My son is ate up with it and keeps us in turkey. My favorite cut, whether we’re talking chickens or anything, is not the breast. I want the dark meat, and my favorite turkey cut is not the breast, it is the leg and thigh quarters. I cook them in a crock pot, then pull the steel cables out and chop it up. You can do anything you want with barbecue sandwiches or tacos, a million different ways. What is your approach? Are you smoking whole turkeys? Are you breaking them down? How are you cooking your turkey?

Jeffy Griffiths: I’m never cooking a turkey whole. I am breaking them down. Most birds, most animals will present you with situations where you have to separate different cuts out, otherwise it’s not going to turn out right. The turkey is one of the most profound examples of that, where the breast needs to be cooked very precisely, I would say 150 degrees internal. The legs, whenever somebody says, this turkey leg was dry and tough, I think I know what happened. You did not cook it long enough. You have to understand that turkeys don’t fly around all day. They walk around all day, supporting a large frame, and they have very tough leg muscles. The flavors of those two parts are so incredibly different. You have a very mild breast, which I do love, and then a really rich and more intensely flavored leg quarter. I also take the wings. I also love the offal, the heart, liver, gizzard. The turkey livers are probably my favorite game liver of all.

Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeffy Griffiths: I love them. I made a smoked pate yesterday that turned out amazing. Ground heart, liver, and gizzard from a turkey that I shot the day before and mixed that with a little bit of fatty barrel heart dog, some bourbon, some raisins, some pecans, and maple syrup. And instead of baking that pate, ground that up just like you would, and instead of baking that in the oven, I did it on the smoker and it came out beautiful. Just a little bit of that on some nice toasted bread, a little dab of mustard, and that was incredible. I just love how much a turkey gives up. Turkey’s yield. And when I wrote the book, I charted it. They yield at 55% typically. If you’re willing to take the wings, I take the necks too. If they’re not too dead. A shot of a number nine TSS can do a number on a neck sometimes, but the neck from that bird day before yesterday was pretty much intact. I don’t know how, but it was. I don’t know where I hit the thing, but I like to take as much as I can off of them. They do yield almost higher than any other game animal. At 55%, that’s a good deal. So if you have a 20-pound bird, you’re getting 11 pounds of bone-in cuts off of that, which is substantial financial. For me, I always make this point too, people are apologetic, “Well, I like fried turkey breasts.” Fried turkey breast is probably the best way to enjoy turkey breast. It’s wonderful. You’re not covering anything up, you’re not making excuses, you’re not doing that because you didn’t have any chicken. It’s objectively good and it’s objectively better than any other fried poultry, I think. My birthday falls in mid-May, so right in the middle of turkey season, right around our berries start to come in. So my birthday meal every year, same thing, is going to be fried turkey and dewberry cobbler, mashed potatoes, gravy greens, hot sauce, and biscuits. For me, that is the best meal out there. I don’t think people are like, “Well, I just like to fry the turkey breast.” Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Well, chicken fried is my favorite food group, Jesse. There’s no doubt about it.
Jeffy Griffiths: I love that.
Ramsey Russell: You have been outspoken about the importance of using non-toxic shot. Where does that come from? What prompted that opinion?
Jeffy Griffiths: I remember sitting at the dinner table when my daughter was very young. I love to hunt doves. September, October around here is big dove hunting time. It’s one of the biggest outdoor experiences in Texas. Shooting a lot of doves, eating a lot of doves. In fact, my daughter’s name is Paloma, which is Spanish for dove. Watching her eat a dove, she was probably about six at the time, just chewing on a dove, and it just clicked. I thought, wait a minute, what am I doing here? I am going to great lengths in every form of getting good eggs and growing some of our own vegetables and getting beef that’s pasture-raised and killed at a local slaughterhouse, and I’m putting lead into my daughter’s food and she’s chewing on it. I do not think there is a defense out there for that. People will say, “Well, it’s better for killing birds.” I’m not really sold on that. Or maybe, “It’s not bad for them.” Lead is a poison. It just is. I also started thinking about, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a big Texas dove hunt or a big dove hunt where you get 100 people in the field. Running some simple math on that, let’s say there’s 100 people in that field, and they’re all shooting 1-ounce dove loads, and it’s a slow day, so every one of them shoots 16 times into this, it’s probably an ag field.
Ramsey Russell: I don’t know what dove fields you hunt. The boys I hunt with may be shooting three or four boxes, but go ahead.
Jeffy Griffiths: Everybody shoots 16 times. Yeah, you’re right, absolutely. So we have introduced 100 pounds of lead into that field.
Ramsey Russell: With just 16 shots.
Jeffy Griffiths: Just 16 shots. Let’s repeat that 50 times over the season. The math is there. Maybe some of this dissipates. It runs off. I don’t know all the science behind it, but what I do know is lead is not good for us in any form. I wrote an opinion piece once about why I personally stopped shooting lead at doves and got a lot of good feedback. A couple of doctors backed me up, “Yeah, you should not be consuming lead in any form.” Some people were really angry with me. I was shocked at the anger that I was getting. I was not calling for regulation. I was calling for self-regulation. I was asked to write that piece, just like the question you just asked me, why I personally don’t. I don’t care what you do. I feel like your actions potentially have an effect on all of us. I have made the switch to steel for dove personally because I believe that steel is not as bad for you to consume as lead. Maybe it’s worse for your teeth. That was one argument, that you’re more likely to chip a tooth. So far, so good on that note. We chew carefully with all shot birds around here. We know to do that still.
Ramsey Russell: Still most oftentimes passes through the animal, especially a dove or a bird.
Jeffy Griffiths: I’ve had great luck with steel with doves and hunted with the Winchester steel for a few seasons and then have switched to Boss, which I don’t know if is an economical good. Great choice. I love Boss for a lot of reasons. I shoot Boss turkey loads and they are bad medicine, really great. I also love what they do as a company and their stance, to show that you can have this great American company that’s doing good things, in my opinion. We’re lucky enough where I get some shells from Boss and I can shoot those at doves now and feel really great about it. They’re developing, I believe, a dove load that should be out this year and I’m very excited about that. At the end of the day, I just can’t get behind lead anymore because we’re also having to produce lead. Not only are we exposing ourselves to it via the field we’re hunting over and the food that we’re consuming, but the production of it still has to happen. With anything there’s nuance and I don’t know the entire story around industry and things like that, but I know simply that if you were to present me two shells, one steel and one lead, and you cut them open and you asked me to empty the contents of one of those shells into my mouth, I’m going to choose steel.

Ramsey Russell: It’s really, I got a very similar conversation the other day and it really, it’s kind of hard to believe. And this ain’t political at all. I don’t care if we’re talking Democrat, Republican. I’m just talking in the year 2025 with all that we know and have learned in the past 150 years, I really can’t believe we’ve made the conversion to non-toxic shot for waterfowl, but not for everything. And we had a guest on here last year, Mr. Stutzenbacher, who was the first waterfowl biologist for the state of Texas. He is a very old gentleman and been retired for 20 something years. But he almost single-handedly championed the conversion to non-toxic for waterfowl based on his experiences down the Texas marsh, him and his dog walking through the marshes and seeing all these dead birds and picking them up. He started doing necropsies. And first one thing and another, he explained that even back in the market hunting days in the 1800s, the storehouses up north that were processing these birds were acutely aware of lead shot killing waterfowl. And he said they’d open up the crates and they were literally inspecting these unprocessed birds and they picked one up. He was lighting a feather, what Mr. Stutzenbacher called the straw hat, and they’d throw them out. Nope, this doesn’t count because the way that lead would get into their systems, it doesn’t poison them like toxicity, it gets into their gizzard, it gums up the works. They’re not hungry, they starve to death, they wither away to skin and bone. And still from that point in the market hunting days to the conversion in the late 1980s, early 1990s of non-toxic shot for waterfowl, we’re talking about over a hundred year span. And he said that as few as one or two lead pellets would gum the works on waterfowl and cause their demise. And so we started doing the math. And I’m not the math, you are. But let’s just say we’re going out to this wetland and shooting lead shot. Three pellets, four pellets hit the bird and kill him. The rest fly off into the marsh. And there’s hundreds of guys for hundreds of years doing this. And I know that some of the research out of Mississippi State University has shown that legacy lead in some environments, particularly agriculture, is non-existent anymore. It’s been disk under, disk under, disk under, disk. So it’s deep, it’s out of that feeding profile for dabbling ducks. But Mitchell Stutzenbacher, and I don’t know how current his data was, still said there are wetland areas that were very heavily shot during the market hunting days that are still contributing, all these years later, to waterfowl mortality from ingesting lead. And to your end, talking about going out there and biting into a lead shot or consuming lead shot ourselves. I shot a couple of fields down in Texas here, a sesame field, a sunflower field. You talk to the landowners. We were hunting there mid-January. 10,000 doves have been taken out of that field. 10,000 doves, that’s minimum 10,000 shots, seven, eight to an ounce of lead shot going out. And those are game birds that are walking on the surface and pecking, and that little dove doesn’t know the difference in a piece of grit for his gizzard to digest and a piece of lead. He doesn’t know the difference. And so I just find it hard to believe that I’m not woke, I’m anything but woke. But I do find it hard to believe that we’re still slinging that much lead out in the environment and possibly endangering some of these game birds we like. Now look, I don’t throw rocks in glass houses, Jesse, and I shoot a lot of lead shot around the world because non-toxic shot is unavailable, is not mandated. And that in and of itself is kind of shocking in this day and age that in most places around the world that we go to shoot ducks, we’re still shooting lead like the good old days because there’s no interest, there’s no concern, there’s no manufacturing, it’s unavailable. And even if it was available, it wouldn’t be enforced. That’s crazy. It’s just crazy in this day and age that we’re still slinging so much toxicity out into this resource that we treasure and care about.

Jeffy Griffiths: Right? That was always my point. I thought we cared about this and I think that we were really opposed to being, as a society we don’t like to be told what to do, and I think that’s fine. And I think if we can change the mentality of being scolded and told what to do to unifying and saying hey, we’re going to fix this ourselves. We’re going to self-regulate and create a market, and I think that eventually the shot shell manufacturers are going to catch on and prices would probably come to match, because dove shells are cheap and steel dove actually is not that much more. We’re probably looking at about 25% more to shoot steel. But if you look at a tank of gas and a hotel, it’s all adding up anyway, and I don’t know if that’s a really valid argument at this point. But I agree, I think we should take more pride in conservation if we’re going to tell the non-hunting world that our primary motivations are conservation and we are the primary drivers of conservation through Pittman Roberts and all that, we need to still toe this line and walk the walk and say hey, we’re going to do this because we actually do believe in this.

Ramsey Russell: Jesse, you founded the New School of Traditional Cookery to teach people how to respectfully hunt, butcher, cook their own game. What inspired you to launch this initiative? And is it more about techniques, lifestyle, taste, or an approach to a field-to-fork lifestyle?

Jeffy Griffiths: I found that I really love education. I love talking to people, I love hearing their stories and their questions. This is a topic we can infinitely learn about. Putting hunting, fishing, wild food, good food in an educational context was a given for me and it became very enjoyable. The best job I’ve ever had, hunting with people, a lot of times their first hunt ever. I would say that out of the probably 4 to 500 people we’ve had go through the program, probably half had never hunted before. Whether or not they hunt again, I don’t know. But they have had that one experience and I think that’s really important, that we’ve introduced them to the connectivity they can have between their food and doing that themselves. It’s been incredible. We’re still doing butchery classes and they’re in high demand, and it’s very humbling to me. I’m honored that people still to this day are scrambling to get into these classes and experience that. What’s notable is each time I do a class at the restaurant, it’s a three-hour butchery class, or we advertise it as three hours. It gets longer and longer.

Ramsey Russell: Because of the questions.

Jeffy Griffiths: Because of the questions, because of the Answers. As the questions come in, it’s incumbent on me to develop an answer or go and research it and come back next time with a better answer. The class gets longer and longer. We’ve gone from three animals per class to two, but the class has gone from three hours to pushing three hours and 45 minutes. That example alone illuminates the desire that people have, the interest, the excitement. It fuels me. I love it. I love the classes, I love the interaction. The first thing I tell everybody is, hey everybody, grab a drink. Water’s here, bathrooms right there. I’m Jesse. Ask any question at any point. Sometimes hands go up right away and I’ll be like, give me a second. I love how curious people are and how much it’s inspired me to learn because I don’t know the answers to everything. Sometimes people will say, when I do this, I do it this way. That is a great idea. As a topic, it’s fascinating. It allows us to develop ideas and stay excited to promote what we do, especially to people that are new to it. It gives them some confidence, some empowerment to try to do it on their own. There is quite a big barrier to entry with hunting if you don’t know anybody, if you don’t have familial connections, especially here in Texas with limited places to hunt. Being able to at least give people some semblance of confidence before they go out about how to handle the butchery and the cooking afterwards is really fun for me. It’s been the best job I’ve ever had.

Ramsey Russell: Your work has earned a lot of well-deserved recognition. For example, the hog book we talked about won the James Beard Award. What did that moment mean to you and how has that recognition changed how you approach your work or has it?

Jeffy Griffiths: Definitely has. It was one of the best moments of my life. I was there with my fiancée and my daughter in Chicago. Let’s just say that a book about hunting, a book that has pictures of guns in it, a book that has a lot of blood and guts and gore in it, to win a James Beard Award is notable. The two books I was up against were both vegetarian cookbooks, and I did not at all expect to win. My first book was nominated, and then The Hog Book was nominated. We’ll find out soon. We’ve entered the turkey book, and we’ll find out if that one gets a nomination in early May. We were in Chicago, and it was just a stunning moment. Without being trite or cheesy about the whole thing, I felt like it was kind of a win for a lot of us there as a community, like hunting,  which in that audience that day, probably very few of those people had ever been hunting, and probably a high proportion of them have a certain outlook on what hunting is. To be able to momentarily represent hunting or just consumption, or the sustainability aspect of consuming feral hogs, I was very proud to be able to do that and to represent that just for a moment. It was a wonderful night. We went and had cheeseburgers afterwards, and it was, in context, one of the best meals I’ve ever had because we were just so happy. It was a great night, and it has driven me to be inspired to continue to do what we do, to work really hard, and to always try to stay open to learning and educating. I feel like that’s what was appealing about that book,  that it was a textbook, and the motivation to write it was to educate people and to enhance their experiences around feral hogs. I think that’s a good path to be on, and it definitely motivated me to continue along that path.

Ramsey Russell: Are there any future project books or workshops you’re excited about?

Jeffy Griffiths: I’m toying a couple of ideas around. I have not officially committed to another book. I’m looking at some ideas. There’s a lot out there. And I always listen to the great questions. It’s the people that they say, hey, I want to know about this ducks is a big one. Deer is one, fish, there’s so much to be told. I am working on an independent project right now that will be long-form videos, really educational, and we’re going to do that in a format that will allow us to present everything start to finish, which I think is really important. There’s a lot of censorship of the parts of the process that are highly necessary out there. On YouTube, you cannot show the blood and the breakdown, and that’s exactly the point that needs the most attention and education, how to handle that part of the process. We’re working on creating a platform where it’s going to be uncensored, and we’re going to be able to present the whole process to everyone because it is all about education and empowerment. They need to learn how to do that, see it, feel comfortable with it, and know that it is part of the process. So, not to be vague, but that is probably the next thing that I’ll be releasing.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Jesse. I’ve enjoyed our visit. What an amazing visit. Where can listeners go to buy your book, sign up for classes, follow along with your work, or otherwise connect with you?

Jeffy Griffiths: Thank you, Ramsey. It’s been an incredible conversation. I thank you very much for the invitation. The books are available at thewildbooks.com,  The Hog Book and the turkey book (we’re very clever with our book names) are both available there at thewildbooks.com. They’re also available on the Meat Eater store. That’s really the only other outlet that you can find nationwide. So either through Meat Eater or through our own classes, which you can look up through the restaurant website. The restaurant is Dai Due, spelled D-A-I D-U-E, and you’ll find the New School of Traditional Cookery classes there. I think there might be some new classes about to go up and be available,  hog and/or deer butchery classes,  and we should have a few of those available soon. And then, of course, the restaurant Dai Due here in Austin, Texas. If you’re in town, please come and see us.

Ramsey Russell: What is Dai Due? Where did that name originate? What does it mean?

Jeffy Griffiths: Many years ago, I was looking through this old Italian cookbook and there was a proverb, and translated it means, “From the two kingdoms of nature, choose food with care.” The first two words of that are “dai due,” which literally is Italian for “from the two.”

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Jesse. And folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Connect with Jesse in the links below in the caption. See you next time.