Why Chef Jesse Griffiths Takes People Hunting

Now you've been, you use a lot of local ingredients, but you've also been doing this thing where you take people hunting and show them how to butcher an animal and show them how to cook an animal. Right. When did you start doing that? That was in 2008, so shortly after. We started doing classes on butchery of domestic pork, which was kind of my wheelhouse. I'd learned that in restaurant work. I'd been a prep cook and a butcher in a restaurant. And being new to hunting at that point, I had just started hunting a couple years prior and was really excited about it and saw the opportunity to really kind of tie the two together. You know, I knew how to butcher before I knew how to hunt. And so that I had a little bit of an advantage on the back end of it, but still have and still do have to this day a lot to learn about the front end of it. And I wanted to be able to share that with people because I think that hunting is a very key way to show people the importance of food. Because if you can feel sad about taking the life of a deer or a pig or a squirrel, then you can also understand what a case of carrots that is, you know, rotting in a grocery store because they haven't been sold or they don't look good enough to sell anymore. That's also sad to me. And you know, a lot of work went into that and so much it's immeasurable. And so being able to tie food with a source like that, with hunting or fishing or whatever, I think was really important. So we started doing classes where we were taking people out and it's guided hunts. And then you learn how to butcher, cook, and then you eat game throughout the weekend too. And we still do that to this day. And when you do this, how many times a year do you do this? You know, well, you know, in season, it's it's actually so it's hot. Our season typically runs if we if we have a couple dove hunts or something in there from mid-September till maybe April. So just basically the cooler and cool and cold months of the year, so about six, seven months. And when you do it, would you do it on weekends? Like when when do you? Yeah, they're they're typically weekend classes. We used to do a lot of private events. And now I've just gone to where we work with one ranch. We do a Friday through Sunday class. And in all honesty, though, our whole season this year has fairly much been booked up by people that came to previous classes. They come back. We have a pretty high return rate on those. We're about to release our schedule of those. But there's going to be very, very little seats available to those they fill up. We do eight classes a year for four people. You kind of would if you're hunting to you're going to need small groups, right? Yeah, yeah, it's and it's got to be very intimate. You know, we want everybody to see everything and put their hands on it. So it's really necessary. We have a team of guides or everybody if you've never been hunting before, you have a guide, we walk you through the whole the whole series of events like from siding in the gun to, you know, it's this constant barrage of like learning and it's like this is how you put your heel down, you know, this is the way the wind is blowing. This is the way we're going to walk to do this, you know, this is what time of day we expect deer to move when we expect hogs to move why we're sitting right here. Okay, you know, we're constantly feeding information. And then once that animal is taken, we're feeding, you know, more information about how you skin this how you gut this is how you use liver. This is call fat. This is a shank. This is best for grind. This is best for slow cooking, things like that. And then we teach them how to how to butcher it, break it down. And then we really want them to be able to do it on their own. And the whole time we feed them game to kind of really keep it in context. Because a lot of times people have been told, you know, you can't eat that, you know, you can't, you know, deer livers no good or, or venison tastes gamey to me or I wonder if you can touch the hog topic yet. But, you know, people are very opinionated about hogs. And we try to just kind of dispel those myths and empower and educate people and to be able to do it on their own. And whether or not they go and do it in the future, I don't really know. But I do think that it gives them some very good connectivity. I mean, I know people that came on a trip 12 years ago that still talk about it to me, I think it was important. And I mean, that's very, that's really important to me and very meaningful, that it's a it's a formative experience, even if they never do it again, you know, but it teaches them to really value a resource that time they killed a deer, because it's really hard to like, for me, once you've killed that deer, if you open up a bag of beef or something, I can't help but think like all those animals in a field, you know, they all had lives, they all had deaths, everything, you know, it's like, and I think it teaches you just to appreciate resources. And once you start to appreciate that resource, maybe you'll start to appreciate all resources, you know, right? You appreciate the vegetables, everything else. You might appreciate where your clothes are made, or, right, right, or, do we need a leaf blower, you know, things like that. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. 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