Joe Rogan and Steven Rinella: Beaver is Delicious!

When did you realize that beaver were delicious? Not till after. I think I ate, no, I ate the first one when I was in, the first one I ever ate when I was in community college. I'd still tell people about the beaver that you cook for us in Wisconsin and how good it is and they look at you sideways and I'm like, I'm telling you man, it was like the most delicious pot roast I've ever had. It was fantastic. Yeah. It was really good. There's even stories about early on with the, when early explorers were in this country they had a difficult time getting fish sometimes and beaver were approved for the Lenten meal because they were aquatic. Wow. So on Fridays when you had to have, like when you're supposed to have your meat-free day, you were allowed to eat beaver meat because they were a water animal. It was a very popular food item. You following what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I get it. The first ones we ate, I had started reading about, I'd always read narratives, stories about the mountain men, meaning like when I say mountain men, like a very specific thing, like a rocky mountain beaver trapper who was sandwiched in time between the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the collapse of the beaver market in the 1840s. So like it's a very like finite period of time is what a mountain man was. Explain to people how big the beaver market is because this is going to blow people's minds. Well, America's first, you know, Astor, John Jacob Astor, like the beaver market made America's first millionaires. His fortunes came from being a beaver trader. The richest man in the country, their money came from beavers. Yeah, and he was in on the business end of it. He wasn't in on the trapping end of it. Right, he was in on the hats, right? The fur companies, yeah, the big fur companies. Well, it was- And when we bought, think about it like this, how big it was. For us to do the Louisiana Purchase and to buy that chunk of land, when Lewis and Clark came out, part of their mandate was to suss out the potential for the trading beaver hides. Wow. It'd be like buying something now you'd want to know about oil and gas, right? You don't know, can we justify this through oil and gas? They're looking to justify it through trading beaver hides. Now also, there was also language about that they might find out about whether worldly mammoths were existing out there as well. So there was like some confusion about what was going on. Wow, they really thought that woolly mammoths were still alive? Jefferson was interested in that stuff because he had been to some areas, he had some familiarity and been to some areas with these large bones and he was puzzled about them. He was wondering if this wasn't some, if it maybe in fact was not an extinct species, but was somehow living in the American West still. How hard is it to- People, not historians, popular historians really loved to make a big deal out of that because it's so weird, but it wasn't like, hey, let's buy the, let's do the Louisiana purchase transaction because of the possibility of locating mammoths. I think it was like an idea that was floated around. People see it and they, people such as me see it and perhaps overemphasize what it meant, but it was an idea that was out there. The beaver trade stuff was certainly a big factor. Another thing I was reading about recently that just point out to your, to your, that you might think is interesting is that we, people have this idea of Lewis and Clark going into this unspoiled, uncontacted landscape. I was recently reading a piece by a historian who was talking about at the time Lewis and Clark headed out into the Great Plains, there were Native Americans living on the Great Plains who had been to Europe and met the King of France and returned back to the Great Plains. Whoa, what year? They went out in the early 1800s. So they were out in 1804. Wow. You got to, if you imagine the time from the time in the 1500s when the Spanish, right, were poking around and come like Coronado, right? Coming up from Mexico into the Great Plains, Cabeza de Vaca being shipwrecked along the Gulf coast and people pushing up into these areas. That was hundreds of years prior. Like the distance that separates, imagine the distance that separated Lewis and Clark from the first Europeans who were doing activities in and around the Great Plains is like the distance and time that separates us from Lewis and Clark. More so, right? Yeah. It's the distance and time that separates us from the Declaration of Independence. It was like a long history of people messing around. That's crazy. However, so yeah, but think about it too. Like Lewis and Clark were encountering people who had horses, right? Right. And those horses had been, yeah, those horsemen traded up. So that's just a side note to this idea of eating beavers. So I got, from reading about the mountain men, I got interested in this idea because it's always, like anytime you read about mountain men, you're always going to find the part where the author talks about how much mountain men liked beaver tail. And the first people that tried to eat beaver tail was around when I was in, I was in community college at the time. And my brothers, I remember stuck a beaver tail in the oven for a while and cooked it. And they reported back to me that like, whatever it is they're talking about, uh, isn't that like, there must be some other explanation. Can we eat beaver tail? Yeah. Yeah. We ate it in Wisconsin. Yeah. We have a, there's a, there's a how to, like, there's like pictures and an explanation of how to prepare, how to actually prepare a beaver tail mountain man style in the meat of your fishing game cookbook. It wasn't bad. It was just bland. It's just fat. It's fat. So after that, we started thinking that when they say the mountain men like beaver tail, we thought it must have meant they like rump. Basically like the hindquarters. So we started when we, when I would catch beavers, um, I'd be careful when skinning them to not get the caster. The beavers have two large glands on the inside of their legs. They're like tucked in their, what looks like if you lay a beaver on its back, tucked kind of on either side of its, of its, like if it's a male, like tucked either side of its penis or either side of its cloaca, you'll, you'll see a, uh, not cloaca, but like vent. You'll see these, these glands that are the size of, I don't know if you make like a, if you take your index finger and your thumb and make a circle, there's like a gland on each side called a caster gland. There's oil gland in there. They used to use it for perfume. It still has value today. It's used for a wide variety of things. It smells beautiful. If you're ever walking on a stream bank and you smell like a strange perfume smell, it's usually beaver caster. Wow. Smells great. Tastes like shit. Tastes like you're eating, like you rubbed roses or something all over your food. So start figuring out like to, to skin them and be very careful not to get the caster on your knife or get the caster on your hands. And then we would just take the meat and put it in crock pots with potatoes and onions and stuff and just cook them down in a crock pot so you could pick them. And it was like roast beef. So then I started eating that, but I still, then later I realized that it read other accounts of how people prepared beaver tail. And if you take the tail, like the scaly ass tail, and it really should be from a fall beaver because the tail will be twice as thick in the fall than it is in the spring. You're emaciated in the spring. Take the tail and just skewer it on a stick and put it next to a fire where the skin starts to bubble and boil away. And pretty soon you can just peel all that skin away. And what's hiding under there is the best equivalent, like the best equivalent or point of comparison that I can think of would be just, it's like if you had a really, like imagine you're eating a grass fed steak, right, but still has that fatty gristle on it. It's just made up of that gristle. Like what a lot of people would trim away from a steak and not eat. That's what's inside that beaver tail. But people eat, these individuals that were doing this were fat starved, eating such lean meat all the time. I think they loved it because here's like a chunk of fat. And they had ready access to it because they were catching them to make a living. And if you're just eating the meat, there's no fat on the meat. And so they would compliment it with just eating the beaver tail fat. And I'll often tell people about it. And I even gave some to, there's like a culinary arts institute and I gave some chefs that stuff. And everyone that eats it points out that it's not that it tastes so fantastic, but it's just like really interesting to try and eat it. The fat from the tail. And it's like, you got to put yourself in a position you've probably been in this too, where if you're, especially if you're out hunting and eating freeze dried food or not eating great and you're just exerting yourself all day, all the time, what you want to eat changes a lot. And the level of appetite you have is off the charts. And so just to eat a big slab of fat was appealing to people.