What up, genius life crew another week another hour we get to spend together quick question before we get started. Have you had a chance to head over to the genius life.com to check out all of our new merch? I can't believe the genius like family now has merch it's just so beyond cool. It's like I'm partially living out my dreams of joining a boy band. Just kidding. I've always envisioned myself as a solo artist. My March line is packed with all the essentials needed to rep the genius life beyond your headphones and podcast app a personal favorite of mine is the tie-dye hoodie. The Revival of tie-dye is one of the best things that happened in.
20/20 I also love having the fanny pack. I throw it across diagonally and suddenly I'm the epitome of La street style. But in all seriousness this fanny pack is great for hikes traveling grocery store runs when you have a moment take a look at the genius life.com and let me know what you think and what you're most excited about maybe even send a few not-so-subtle hints to those you'll be exchanging gifts with this year and now welcome to episode 137 of the genius life. We made it.
We're back everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Genius life. I'm your host Max Lou Guevara filmmaker, hon science journalist. And the author of The New York Times best-selling book genius foods and the genius life. Guess who's back back again. We have the extraordinary Anya fernald Anya and I could chat for hours, and I'm so excited to share our most recent conversation.
Anya is the co-founder and CEO of bell Campo Del Campo operates 27,000 Acres of organic farm land in California and processes its own livestock for sale and its own butcher shops and restaurants Anya has been recognized as one of Inc magazines 100 female Founders, one of the 40 under 40 by Food & Wine named a nifty 50 by the New York Times and has been profiled in the New Yorker and it just doesn't end has served as a regular judge on Iron Chef America since 2009 on his debut cookbook.
Home-cooked was released in Spring 2016 and it is wonderful. This episode is so meaty with knowledge. I promise that the knowledge on you delivers is better than my weak meet pun on your shares her strategy for developing the super power of resistance to hyper palatable foods that wreck your health. We discuss the quality of life differences between animals that are Factory farmed and animals raised by Bill Campo and how this translates into product integrity and price experienced by the end consumer a few months back. I participated in Bell Campos meet camp and it was legendary and so eye-opening.
On your also thank goodness offers her secrets for optimally nutritious and delicious homemade bone broth. We also chat about the health and cosmetic benefits of enjoying a weekly braised and it wouldn't be an episode with Anya if we didn't talk about the differences between Suzette Tallow and Marrow and their practical uses. Anya's wealth of knowledge is truly. So powerful. I love whenever I get to sit down and chat with her. It also doesn't hurt that when she comes to recordings of the genius live. She brings about Campos food with her. And in this case, she brought Bell Campos new meatballs and Carnitas on you had the whole genius.
Team huddle around my cast iron skillet taste test and Carnitas and meatballs spoiler alert. They were so darn good to go head over to El Campo.com to get you some this episode of The Genius life is sponsored by my friends over at Ned. I'm so thrilled to reunite with Ned on this podcast and the timing could not be better as the holidays approach. You might be safely traveling to visit friends and family and while the holidays bring so much joy into the end of the year. They also can bring a wee bit of stress and that's where Ned comes in Ned produces the highest quality full spectrum CBD oil extracted from organic.
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You $15 $15 to spend on your first purchase. You have nothing to lose. Just go to public goods.com Max or use code Max at checkout. That is PU BL IC G Ood s.com forward slash Max to receive $15 $15 off your first order. Once you've received your public goods. Holla at me with your favorite 22nd hand-washing song. Can we do here you pick already team. We're about to jump into all things meet and Bell Campo with Anya, but before we do, I want to share an amazing iTunes review from someone in our genius life family.
Lee side note y'all have been crushing the reviews and I so appreciate it. I really get so much joy out of this podcast and hearing what you have to say makes me. Oh so happy ba Holland Estates, like all of your episodes. This was such an excellent interview. I listened while I walk so I was scrambling to pause and try to write down the supplements mentioned. Will you try and post episode notes and links Baja Linda. Thanks so much for your review. And I love that you're moving while listening. That's so great. And to answer your question. Yes, you can always find show notes and links on my website. Just head over to Max Luca Veer.com podcast. We have a ton of
References on the website for each episode if you don't find the answer that you're looking for text me. You can join the text Community by texting genius 2310 2999 401. I really look forward to hearing from you there. I've had so much fun with this text community. So shoot me a text and we can chat. All right guys with all that out of the way. Let's move on to episode 137 with a wonderful Anya fernald. You can also watch this episode on my YouTube channel if you so choose youtube.com slash Max Loop of ear. Just getting through this introduction. I'm already craving the new bill Campbell Carnitas that came right to my door. I was so lucky you guys
Guys, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode as much as I did taping it. Here we go. Thanks for being here
Anya. Thank you for having me. Of
course. You're the first time you're on the show. It was such a hit of an episode. You just came on and like a boss. You dropped so much knowledge about how meat can be good for you how it can be good for the environment. So I kind of wanted to have you back on almost to have like a sequel of sorts and also because we're friends and I love
you. Love you, too. I'm ready part
2 part 2
It so for listeners who maybe have not yet. Listen to the first episode. Let's start with your background. Like what do you do?
I co-founded and run Bell Campo where a ranch to table livestock operation. So we sell premium organic carbon impact positive meets directly to Consumers now after covid a lot of that is through e-comm and grocery. We also have restaurant butcher.
Shops, but broadly we're looking to sell directly to Consumers and meat that's really really high quality and farm in the in the in the right way regenerative lie with an attention to the soil quality soil health and Animal Wellness as a underpinning of human wellness.
It's amazing. I've been up to your farm and I saw firsthand what you guys are doing. It's incredible like the cows are treated like
Queens. Yeah. I know. It's a pretty magical operation. I mean
The the piece that's interesting. Is that often when you do the right thing on the egg side the right thing happens on the taste side, you know, so I think it's important to say we do it for the right reason but it also tastes much better by going slow and that's like in my own background, you know working early in my career in Europe. A lot of what I saw was very traditional agriculture the slow-going old fashioned ways of doing things tend to
to just yield the best quality products. So we've, you know in the u.s. We've kind of started to confound hyper palatability with deliciousness. Okay, but if you unpack that if you educate yourself to detach hyper palatability from deliciousness and you relearn deep nutrition you relearn how to taste things for flavor and health when you take yourself down that learning path you're going to learn to taste for for nutrition and you're
Gravitate to products that are formed in the way that bill Campbell
Farms. I mean, it's truly intuitive eating right and being able to listen to the signals that your body is giving you by way of your taste buds and your stomach which is something that I think that that whole system that whole Machinery gets short-circuited in the in the you know, in the modern food
environment. So this is something that I have in started to practice in my life. That's a little I'm obviously pretty whoo lady, but like
What I started to do, you know, I used to think of Cravings as something that was.
Bad, you know like Cravings are for sugar Cravings are for carbs like you want to avoid Cravings, but now I've started to really look at my cravings and sometimes I'll do it if I'm hungry and I like think about different foods and to say what what's like really deeply appealing to me right now?
United this kind of a funny question to ask yourself like to saying like a lot of times don't want to vomit sugar so they just put that aside on you but like look at look at what's in your fridge and say what's deeply and sometimes sugar and they'll go with it. But like it's an interesting thing to kind of educate yourself around is like what is like feels like it's going to be deeply gratifying right now. It's not going to really be ever to surprising. But sometimes you're going to find some things that end up sinking in really well because I'm not I think we force ourselves to eat what we think we should eat and then we say but paying attention to what I want is what I need to do because
It's willpower, you know saying no to what you want. But if you can reconfigure want as like deep need and nutritional need you can actually turn into kind of a superpower on nutrition. You're
so right, I do that sometimes and I find that a lot of the times what I want is just something to do. I am. I eat a lot of the time out of boredom or just being in clock and close proximity to my kitchen. But yeah, I can totally appreciate that oftentimes we have these
Sub perceptual signals of nutrient yearning that maybe get sort of disguised as just wanting to eat sugar and carbs and rapidly digested easily accessible foods, but I think yeah if you can if you can unpack that there's probably some some deeper wisdom
there. So there's all this neat like researcher on goats that shows that they'll will when they when they have stomach issues just naturally gravitate towards bitter herbs and and seek out bitter herbs in
Pastor with lots of different types of herbs. So there's you know in nature animals had that you know that sort of like intuition of like my stomach hurt. So I'm going to have something with a natural antimicrobial because we know bitter herbs. I'll have a heavy antimicrobial days. So I'm going to go for things that are naturally antimicrobial as an animal. So I think that you and I as humans still have that in us we see it in our animals and our pastors, right but we still have that kind of intuition. So something I've really liked and there's certain things you can coach yourself to do.
You know and there's certain things like for me bone broth in the morning wasn't always my craving but it's been come enough of like a health Elixir for me that I'm like I do crave it now because I crave the result I crave the comb like I crave that the feeling that I get as a result of doing the right thing in the morning, which is like go kind of heavy on the protein in the a.m. And I'm going to feel good all day so you can kind of coach that through will power but I think the end results interesting to explore because you got to give yourself that optionality to say, you know, it's not about a meal plan, but it's about like
What exactly am I craving right now? It can be real good
fruit. Yeah, so let's talk about cooking what in terms of the bone broth that you consume every morning. What is that?
Okay, I of course cell bone broth about Campo and often. I do consume that bone broth, but I also cook a lot because I do all the social media for Bill Campbell a lot of those, you know in my own social and also just I do R&D for our company, you know, so we were downstairs tasting meat balls. That's a product that I developed with our team like so I cook a lot. It's also my stress relief and I love it. But I love my bone broth Jam lately.
I've been putting tongue in bone broth tongue has tons of collagen in it. Wow, and it adds a really nice viscosity. So I love a beef and poultry blend. I also like to put shiitake and flavorful mushrooms into bone broth. I typically make out of roasted bones and I also will Infuse it and with a ton of fresh ginger, so then it's like I make mine incredibly concentrated. So they'll cut like half and half with Bo Campo broth and then leftovers, but you know when I'll I roast chicken a lot and
Just keep all the scraps from that. You know, I'll usually spatchcock it. So cut the spinal cord out first keep that raw in the fridge. Maybe I've got two spinal cords in the fridge then toss those together with all my leftover bones and make that broth now. That's an interesting thing because you know, if you look at it chicken like our chickens at bel canto or like $25, right? It's incredibly expensive which is you know, amazing because it you know at a lot of a kind of high-end organic groceries, you'll see a whole roast chicken asses, you know, eight dollars or something, right? So I cooked and everything. It's amazing to me that fish.
In seasoned chicken are tremendous which you know, I think many consumers see that in the like, okay. Well, I can't afford the good chicken but the good the better beef I can I look at it differently. I think we'll the one with the greatest Price discrepancy is probably the one that you as a consumer should be most concerned about right because if there are so vastly it's not like all the chicken Farmers the small alternative world are just making bank. The reason why it's so much more expensive. Is that raising it holistically? It's just so much more.
Expensive so it's typically like four times what it cost for are like a regular organic chicken for our pastor again a chicken like a boat camper one. I
mean that's always blown my mind. So I'm glad that you brought it up when I go to even like a high-end Supermarket. You'll see an entire rotisserie chicken for $6. How are they able to produce that and cook it and bring it to Market so
cheaply so it's even more amazing because in the grocery stores you look at there's multiple layers of margin there. So in the grocery store the
If the farmer sells it for $3, the grocery store is probably selling it for nine or ten. And and their margin is still you know, the 40% is that there's a distributor and a broker involved as well. So the with chicken in particular what you got to think about is that the days for any animal the days that it's alive is the cost. Okay, that's really and whatever cost per day is also important. So in the case of like a, you know, very intensive chicken farm, whatever the costs are per day, but broadly it's the length is the
The length of life is the major discrepancy between that Supermarket chicken and that in a farmers market chicken. So a farmers market chicken like a bill Campbell one is like 10 weeks to come to full age and maturity. So two-and-a-half to three pounds. It'll take 10 weeks to grow from a little fluffy chick to that same way for our conventional chicken even in an organic operation. It will take two and a half to three weeks. Hmm. Okay, so that number of days it's just for x and that's actually ironically like exactly the price discrepancy that you and I just talk about like six dollars.
As for the grocery store chicken and $24 for boot camp, which is just 6 times 4, right? So it takes four times as long to grow it costs four times as much because directionally it's all the same inputs, you know, the chickens there monogastric save one digestive tracts of the eat nutritionally dense food seeds other animals things like that. They can eat grass as well, but they don't eat much of it because they just like us they want the high fiber things as a supplement not as the main source of calories. So it chicken though. It's just about the question of length of time. So the
Slow growing birds like we produce they cost a lot more because they take a lot longer to grow those guys that are doing it organic but in confinement the reason it's growing so quickly is typically it's like kind of a effectively like a stress response, you know, they're in a darkened environment. They don't move their High cortisol levels and they're inactive. So, of course they're going to gain weight and have an inflammatory
response. Wow, so they're so they're much younger than their like younger chickens. He's
a
cheap that are much much better. Yeah, and then it's also interesting because even with the same breeds the body can form it is really different. This is the piece where I want more consumers to like connect the dots because in confinement animals, you see these like really indicative physiological characteristics that have to do with a large guts and puffy. It's just to me it looks a lot like, you know, some of the especially in pigs, right which is actually the most genetically similar to humans. You actually get more of like a
Post in visceral fat. Wow. Okay, so exactly similar to obesity in humans, you know, and so it's they gain weight in these in these environments where the animals are sedentary and they're under stress. They actually gain weight in the same unhealthy ways that that humans do when they have similar kind of Lifestyle. So it's kind of like a lifestyle that's similar kind of effect on how your adipose and visceral fat Sagar gating. So whereas our chickens are going to be leaner and more muscular and there.
They're not going to have that same level of like visceral fat to actually know the visceral fat saki Health indicator for humans, right something I track in myself. And yeah, and it's in you actually see it in our Birds. I just don't have that fat around the viscera. Wow, so it's a very different so you your chicken. So it mean in that's the as a consumer. You need to be most at most worried when the expensive product is way more expensive right like because in the case of beef, I really shouldn't say this, but it's like, you know, it's different.
Months versus 26 months. Okay, like that's a big difference but it's not two weeks versus 10 weeks that's like kind of terrifying, you know to take the same kind of growth trajectory. Yeah, right. So but when getting down to the culinary side of that so if I drop my 25 bucks on a chicken, there's no way I'm going to get four chickens and nutrition out of that right that's impossible. But the question then becomes okay, how do you actually make that worth it? Right? And so how one thing that
That you will learn if you go down start to try these different types of products is that slower-growing musculature also yield slower growing bones and greater bone density. It's effectively a higher caliber viscera and everything. Wow, so it's amazing. You should got some Spare Time someday just get a conventional chicken bone and chicken bone from a bill Campo or a you know, any kind of quality regenerative farm and you can snap the bones for the conventional one your finger. Wow, just like a toothpick.
And our bones you can't because it took four times as long to grow to the same. It's like a tree that grows really quick compared to one that grows late. Of course. It's going to be more solid, right? Yeah. So then if you got that higher-quality viscera things like broth where you're actually melting all of that good quality out of every aspect of the animal so kind of the the flip side of the equation because I kind of scratch my head where I'm like, okay, how do I make this more accessible? And unfortunately the Paradigm in the u.s. Around subsidies in the way the world works. I don't know how to it's
Something like with massive scale that this gets way cheaper gets a little cheaper, but let's say it goes from 24 to 19, right? It doesn't go for twenty four to six. Yeah scale. It doesn't go from 24 to six unless I put those animals indoors.
So that's a real problem. You know, that's kind of like the challenge in my world now is like how do I then take that product and make it appealing to a consumer and teach them ways where they can use that and teach them the benefit because there's days that I wake up and I'm like well, maybe I just shouldn't do chicken, you know because it's so much more expensive and it's so hard to get people to see the value in it. So that that's something I you know, but from a consumer perspective. It's like make a broth out of the bones assume that when you spend more on it every single piece of it is and have tons.
More flavor, the other thing that you're going to notice is that you do have say shitty faster, right because there's more flavor and that kind of like that. It doesn't it's not hyper palatability flavor. It's like complex and challenging flavor. But that flavor is going to be something that shows up in everything you make out of it, right? So that broth is going to have more complexity and flavor. It's going to last longer. It's going to be more filling. So there's there's like these kind of like soft externalities of these products that are hard to quantify and sell but they're really important and they're costly to make
super important. So it's sort of like a missed opportunity. If you're buying a high-end bird like a bell Campo bird and not making bone broth because the bones are so much more robust in terms of their their mineral content Yeah, you mentioned earlier that you make bones you make bone broth after roasting the bones you don't just throw raw bones into
the into the suit both. So when bones are amazing in the fetus the of any animal including humans bones are first a matrix of collagen.
So as a fetus grows in cow or an embryonic animal it's going to be a matrix of collagen and then that collagen through diet calcifies, right? So the animals are eating grass or whatever that's got calcium in it. And then those that collagen collagenous Matrix actually calcifies. That's how bones are made in a body. So when you when you're boiling it, you're effectively undoing the making of it, you know, you're extracting that collagen out of that calcium Matrix and you're also pulling out some calcium as well. But then around all the bones is just
the collagen so things like faccia, right? You hear about fashion when you get a massage, right if Asha is that those are really that's what we call in the butchering side of things as silver skin or muscular sheaths. And so the faccia are basically she's made out of a tough tough network of collagen that actually really allow the muscles to move smoothly against each other when you boil the bones down you're taking that collagen is going to remain hard and tough if you cook it fast, so if you're having
Appearance where you cook a steak in its got like kind of like some white chunks on the outside. They don't dissolve. Yeah, and then you eating your
like got back. Yeah. That's like the most chewy thing ever
that's silver skin. So that's basically the part of the musculature that's designed to allow the muscles to slide against each other inside the body so you can't do anything hot with that. You actually have to do a long slow moist cook and that will dissolve the collagen out of there. Now, there's some other really good things you can do though with those cuts and you know, we talk a lot about like collagen and bone broth and then people take collagen and Power.
Hours, but you know the best way to get collagen is just to make stew hmm, you know, we were even Carnitas downstairs. And so Praises are so rich and in collagen and you've had that experience to you eat stew or something and it's like not fatty but you feel really full it's because it's so high protein with a liquefied collagen and you also kind of get that psyche that mouth feel, you know, Vicki it's sticky and that's and it's not greasy. It's sticky that's collagen. So you can really you can even learn to feel it like on your lips like that kind of like this touch of college.
And that's like it's kind of tacky nice and that's really filling really nutritious. So things you can do to get that out quickly. You could take a whole lamb shoulder sear it cover in water put in the oven for three hours and you're going to get really soft meat and you're going to get tons of collagen. So it's something to experiment with as you're on your like Optimal Health path, you know, the more food nutrients you can get in their natural availability. You have greater bioavailability. So the challenge for those of us who are interested in
meat based nutrition is I think to cook more to get that or find products that have that and the stakes that we celebrate on a cow actually kind of like one of the more like nutritionally impoverished parts of the cow
nutritionally impoverished. That's because they're what they're essentially just pure protein
which isn't bad right, but they don't have your you know, you taught me about like the the rate limiting pathway right for for the
metabolization metabolism of the lysine methionine. Yeah,
so you can't fully
Taba lies just pure striated muscle you need to mix it in with other types of protein to help metabolize and break it
down. Yeah. I mean, I think you do fully metabolize the protein in meat but you also there's this thinking and it's largely comes from you know, animal studies rat studies in particular that show that Rats on a methionine and Rich diet, which methionine is very abundant in muscle meat not as much so inclusion as tissue that there's a shortening of lifespan, but that that that effect is actually abolished.
When they're given supplemental glycine as well, which to me is like a major, you know, it's a sign that maybe nose-to-tail animal consumption is something that nature had intended for
us. Well, we used to eat more braised meat than grilled meat and I think that braised meat has just a huge Health functionality that also takes more value of the animal right? So nose-to-tail. It's actually about optimal.
The whole animal because most of the animals what holds it together and then the actual muscles that pull it are relatively like in important and they're less volume. Yeah. So if you're thinking about ways to eat for health, I mean liver and stuff is part of it, you know eating your organ Meats is definitely that's your jam great, but just getting into the habit of making a weekly braised can be transformative from a health perspective because you're going to get so much more collagen that you'll really notice it in your skin and hair and nails and gut so I don't think we tend to
you want to like I feel like there's a supplement culture in the US which is great and it works in specially because we eat poor quality food. We need supplements now, but sometimes we take you know, what's good from things and just immediately say, let's put that in a bottle. Yeah and sometimes I say like, let's take a step back right and say great if I'm if I'm on the road and I'm taking my collagen supplement that makes sense, right? But when I'm at home, and I have the time and bandwidth I should be getting some beef shoulder a lamb shoulder. So everything that's a shoulder in the animal because
Have so much mobility in the shoulder. There's tons of connective tissue here any muscle that needs to move in a lot of different ways and have the complex function in the animal is going to have a ton more connective tissue. So the in just like that's large load bearing shoulders like we have on lamb and beef and pork. That's why things like, you know, Boston butt or pork shoulder or so famous for brazing right because there are ways to liquefy all of this connective tissue and then then the cut the the muscles like the ones along the lon those actually the pressure
his Cuts right the ribeye and the New York and they surround the spinal cord of the animal. So in a cow, you got the legs and the spinal cord right down the middle. It's just a big slice of meat because it's not really active. You know, where all the action is is those shoulders in those thighs that's just holding the the spinal cord in place and then there's lots of muscles that surround the gut. Okay, so that muscle is very lean and or so I thought
It's very tender and mild because it doesn't get much motion and then functionally it doesn't have a lot of moving parts. So what you're eating when you have the rib eye is kind of like the sun exercise or at least exercise part of the animal. It's so in a free-range animal going to be pretty oxygenated have that nice deep red color have a lot of richness and flavor. It's not going to be Bland ever, but I'm just saying you're choosing a cut that's like because often in the in the u.s. Now, we've come to kind of conflate two things. Right and we've got this is because we receive a lot of marketing.
We conflate industrial convenience with optimal delicious. Right? So we've been taught for years that you know, white and very lean pork is the best pork. That's just kind of an industrially Convenient Food for for the pork industry produce that nothing to do with quality. That's something to do with flavor, you know in the same thing goes with like a rib eye versus like a flat iron. Okay. It's just really convenient to market the revised because
There's 10 or so of them on each side of the beef, you know, there's 15 or 20 of those kind of prime steaks in every animal and there's only two flat irons. That's a pain to get into market. Right? So these things that we need to always look at this like critically saying, okay take a step back from the price point of these different cuts and we're talking at the start of the conversation about looking at your pantry looking your fridge me like why am I kind of vibing on right now? Right, but the same thing true like for me I enjoy being a rabbi no problem. But if I actually look at like how I feel
So if I make it like a I'm feeling hungry talking about this like a like a like a braised like beef shoulder and I braised it with like, you know, black and shiitake mushrooms and then I pull it out the next day and I toss some like carrots in there and some shallots. That's like good eating that like makes me feel amazing that makes it real by look like a snack, you know, like that's actually a deep and I think it's because it's like it's kind of checking more boxes for my health. So that's where I think you kind of pay attention to your actual not
Your emotionality but your visceral response to foods you can kind of Coach yourself to take on more into cook, you know to try more things and you might actually find that like that 999 cut of beef Claude right is is doing more for you than your $39.99. You know
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and and more nourishing than the more expensive more prized cuts of meat. They're going to talk about accessibility right and like and food Equity. I think that's an important. That's an important point that you bring
up. Well, we we've really love the grill in the u.s. We love throwing stuff on the grill and there's kind of a piece of that to our I'd say, you know, you can also take a book from like all of Asia and we take a page from their book where a lot of these cuts to you can brace them but also just like you can pop them in your freezer cut.
Really thin Against the Grain and throw them on a hot pan. I mean, there's like a style of cooking that that's kind of like in a lot of Asian countries. You see that fundamental there's not really cuts of beef. They kind of just cut all the beef the same way and then they'll prepare it a certain way. So it's like either boiled or it's cut really thin and cook hot and fast so it's kind of ways to work around it. But this idea that there are certain cuts that are precious and less precious. It's like that's just a that's really the economics of the animal and you need to educate yourself and Empower yourself to try the different things. You may find that you really liked.
Tongue and just incredibly inexpensive and super nutritious, right? Yeah. Now there's actually there's definitely certain, you know, certain cuts that are going to be, you know, chewier and more complex and hard to get your head around like there's that it's not like this is an absolute. There's a reason why everybody's are famous and delicious, you know, but I think that what we're seeing right now is a kind of a generational shift like I'm seeing people doing carnivore and trying like rendering their own suet they're doing you know, they're trying to make live. It's like the question I get the most on Instagram now, it's like I just got this liver.
I really want to eat it and that's amazing. Like I If I had thought two years ago people would be DME being like I want to eat more liver. That's I would have been that's never ever going to happen. So that's these are some shifts that are happening people are kind of discovering its but livers like, you know, five nine and a half pounds it incredibly
expensive. It's so cheap. I love it and it's such a I have such a big problem cooking it because neither of my brothers will go near it so I have to buy it and generally when I buy it I know that I'm going to be the only person eating it but I'm such a big
fan. How do you cook it?
I will generally sear it in very hot ghee. I find that GE is the most and you know, I would I welcome your thoughts on this but I find that it's like the most complimentary. It's got the most complimentary flavor profile to go with the liver. Yeah, and then I typically would just throw salt on it. Maybe some maybe like a squeeze of lime. Yeah, my friend Mary Shenouda who is a friend of yours as well. I believe she has an incredible recipe that I fell in love with it's actually it involves chicken liver, but I loved it so much that I
In my first book genius Foods. Okay, and that also that was where she is with peppers. She does with peppers, but she also uses ghee and that's where I first kind of like made that GE liver connection. Yeah, and I also found a big part of cooking liver and you know, you're the expert here, but but I find it to be really important not to over cook it absolutely like you want it more or less rare as I
correct. Absolutely. I'd say medium rare and and I think if you're squeamish about the pink in the liver, like don't do a thick slice of it.
It I would cut it to a quarter inch thick. I love GE I think for a more economic cooking fat that has the same taste properties to it is great. What is it? What's new is just rendered beef fat. Mmm. And
so what was the difference between that and
Tallow same thing? So it's a more precious suits is actually the visceral fat interesting. It's like the fat that surrounds the organs and protects them from the bones inside of the body. So every these organs are super tender, you know, the membrane is very very tender. They're very they don't have any
Did muscle structure so there are like think about it, like people, you know in boxing when people get punched in the kidney. It's like needs of the most painful thing. So the viscera are very very tender and the way that the body protects them is this visceral fat. So they're a little pillows of fat that surround the organs in the animal and protect it from any like abdominal injuries and from its own bones. So that fat like there's different characters of fat in within the animals really beautiful. You really see it in in pigs as a consumer because bacon cooks very
Lee than like the fat on a pork shoulder right because they have different kind of functionality the bacon the back fat on a on a pig is excellent for salami, but makes terrible bacon. It's to Chris for the bacon. So if you actually taste as you'll taste them differently to be hard to describe it, but some of them are like more Poppy and they've got a finer texture other than a little bit that basically has to do with the presence of collagenous tissue and fascia in the muscle, right? That's like the bacon has a little bit more of it. So it's got more chew. So in the in the beef that Sue it actually has very very tender.
Facial structure and it renders really well. So it's the most precious of the beef fat and the other fats are will marrows the most brushes fat and then after that suet and then below that is Talent Alice kind of everything else. The other really neat thing about the suet is that it's not attached to any musculature. So it has very little like taint of meat flavor. So if you're if you were just to take the a big slab of fat off of a rack of New York's let's say of extra muscular fat
Just render that out. It'd be really beefy. But Sue it's just been this kind of little bag of fat within the gut so it doesn't have any kind of muscle fiber in it. So it has no the Aging be flavor. But I've been cooking with it a ton. I was I did carnivore diet a couple times on an office year and in the course of that rendered a bunch of it just to try it out and love it and it's also just you know, I love ghee but a big jar of good guys like 30 bucks expensive. Yeah pensive and for an I use a lot of fat in my cooking.
Hmm, so I would be tearing through life thirty bucks of Ghia week or something. And so I was sooo it, you know, I can it's it's, you know, basically a third or a quarter of the price for about campus to it. So it's much more economical and it's got the same characteristics of 450° smoke point. Wow, and then it's beautiful flavor and eggs fried ensue it or are they not the really hardcore carnivores just like slice up the suet and kind of snack on it, which is not my jam.
I've seen Paul
saladino do that. He just brought like a bag of sweat like over with him. Yeah that in the was just popping into his
mouth. Yeah. That's that's not something I've been able to although I couldn't ask for a more enthusiastic woman about me in general. I'm not going there with a sewage
chunks. So way where can because I don't think I've ever seen it in the supermarket where it can listeners like pick up suet we
sell it on your site and then you can get it from a quality butcher got it, and I actually rendered a jar for you. Oh drop it by. Yeah, but it's and it's very easy to render. You just throw it in a pan.
Cook it for like three or four hours and you pour it off. We sell it whole because honestly, there's not enough of a market for it yet for us to render it out. But there's companies like fat Cozad company that sells rendered suet in grocery stores is kind of catching on because now that animal fats like out of the bad the bad bin right then people are looking at it and for me, it's just you know, if you're if you're looking for even if you're buying good quality avocado oil, it's still going to be more expensive than suet. So for me Su and and lard, hey,
I like Lorde enough. I don't love the the porky flavor though and everything. So so it's got that nice like that bovine mildness, right? So it's more applicable to more things and then it'll keep in fridge for like six months,
you know, it's interesting from an environmental standpoint. It's probably so much more sustainable to use these beef fats, like most people are not buying beef fat so it's probably so much that's going into the into the
landfill to pay people. We sell it now not all of it though. We see the what we some of the lower qualities that we pay people to pick up.
And it turns into biofuel. Wow, but it's I mean, there's just this there's sort of radical shift away from animal fat and it's not just like all of a sudden everybody woke up and did it was a it was I remember, you know, my my mom telling me that when she was a kid the she remembers the point at which margarine became cooler than
butter. Oh God, I think I remember
that it was like a thing where there was and she was like, yeah, they used to not be able to sell its kind of like with almond milk not
being able to call milk. Now there was a similar type of Industry backlash and so they would sell it in a white block and then it came with a Dye drop and you massage this like in the 1950s when a woman's killer sensation things. So they would you have to stir the color in and then it was like the miracle of technology that margin was better. So it's like there's been like billions of dollars convincing us to not cook the meat of the animals. We love to eat in the fat of those same animals. We love to eat. It's like no no, don't do that by this.
Process vegetable genetically modified spray your grill with it. Like it's crazy from a flavor perspective from a health perspective. They perform well at the same heat. They taste great together. It's a total no-brainer, but you can make a version of it yourself and this is something I always recommend when you're cooking is a nice rib eye if it has a fat cap on it and it doesn't always like sometimes it'll be cut off or of age too much but you have some fat on it. Even if you have like a nice little like Walnut sized piece of fat kind of notched into it. Where the two.
Muscles of the ribeye meat cut that out get your pan hot rub that piece of fat across the pan and that will just quickly render fat out. Well get that nice and smoking hot throw your rib eye into that fat so you can cook animals in their own fat. You can cook your Meats in their own fat very easily. Same thing with the porkchop. You should never be like spraying a grill with avocado oil with Pam the only case where you ever be able to do that would be for a boneless skinless chicken breast.
Right, you know because it's the only kind of me that doesn't have enough fat on it. So when you're looking at a piece of meat and figuring how to cut it how to cook it. Like if I'm cooking. Let's say a lamb shoulder and there's one side that's bone. Those ones that it's fat when I heat up my pot my my Dutch oven and put it fat side down fat side down first render that out and I'll hear it. It will be poppy. It will smell fatty and good and then once it's rendered out, I'll turn it over and then I've got my own fat, so there's no need to like put the
Butter in burn the but you know, you've been there like burn the butter. Yeah. Oh man. I got to like wash the pan out put new butter in but watch it like a hawk like no its own fat will perform really well at the appropriate temperature.
I love that. That was something that you the first time you told me that I was very surprised that when cooking burgers, for example, or steaks. You don't add any additional fat to the pan No, and it doesn't stick
somehow if you're if you're not you have to go hot you have to go hot because you have to render the fat you have to make it hot enough at the fat will melt.
Keep in mind that you know, the beef won't the melting temperature needs to be there. So you can't put in a cold pan because you do that you basically the proteins will bond to the pan before the fat has time to render out so it's kind of like a race of the two things. You want to get the fat rendered out before the protein has time to glom onto the pan and attach it. So those proteins like flattened out and cook onto the pan. Wow. So if you go hot though, throw it in there now if you're working with like a 95% lean, it's not going to work. Yeah, you know, you need to you need to have like at least
Least 10% throw some oil in there. Yeah
exactly. So cast iron pan on the on the skillet, you're turning the flame basically up too high like, you know, if the dial goes from 1 to 10, you're putting it a 10.
Well I like to do is to put my hand an inch above the skillet if it's like uncomfortable. That's good. Hmm, it can't you can't be like it's comfortable to hang out there that's hot enough throw than then put the part of the meat down. That is the most fatty what that you'll see it render out. You actually see fat.
Peeping out from around it and then put the face of the meat that's leaner into that same thought. It's
amazing and with with when you're making a burger similar
concept there. I just will put my beurre. I'm always using an 80/20 blend and I'll just throw the burger in with that ground meat in it. Like the ground fat in it will render out immediately. Yeah Will seize up off the
pain talk to me about salt salting
meat. So it's all things complicated because when you salt you're going to draw a little bit of moisture on to the surface.
Is that the meat so to me salting the meat a minute or two before? It doesn't really make a difference in the in the taste quality as when you're salting it partially through the cooking and you also are pulling a little bit of water onto the surface of the meat that's going to potentially make the surface of the meat gray before Browns. Hmm. If you had that happen where you cook meat and it's like grayish for someone like been boiled
if I leave it out for too
long. Okay, but also if you just
Sierra and a pan it will get dark brown. It'll just get more like brownish. Yes that happens when meat sweat because what'll happen is that what hits the pan as wet and water and that'll boil and then you're kind of boiling the surface of the meat
God. It's so it's like yeah because I've noticed both one salting steaks. I throw it in the pan. It doesn't get dark. It gets kind of like you have
this little layer of water that water boils. And so those cells on the surface of the meat you're boiling them. Wow, so they're going to be grayish not brownish you want to
Fry those cells right? You want them to get brown and crispy. So I prefer I actually usually get my fat rendered put the stake down and then when I flip it over that's I that's been cooked. I'll salt that got it because if I'm not salting like I mean if I'm doing a dry brine or a wet brine or something where the it's about the salt penetrating the flesh. Yeah, of course also the beforehand but that'll be like six hours beforehand. Got it. Maybe three. So if you're talking about any time within the hour
Before you're going to cook it if it feels good, too salty beforehand, you know, it's like fun and sprinkling it. Okay fine. And obviously if you're doing it in the oven you should do it first, but if you're doing at stovetop on you're watching it, I would recommend just salting it as you flip it got it my one kind of caveat to that would be meat. That's very dry, which would be like if you have like a 45-day age dry aged steak or something. You actually might want to sell to beforehand because in that case the meat will be so dry. It'll be difficult for the soil to absorb. Hmm. I also think it's like the
idea of a finishing salt is interesting. You know, that's a salt that you're adding more for texture than for flavor. So that might be like, you know, like a maldon salt or a Jacobson's flake salt or Redmond salt. It's like kind of got a cool textural thing.
I am obsessed with flake
salt. Okay, how you use
it? I use it as a finishing salt. I keep a have a little sauce plate or sauce Bowl whatever they're called on my dining room table at all times with flake salt and I throw it on pretty much everything. I throw it on steak. I throw it on exile throw.
Vegetables. I also it always I always get looks of bewilderment from the from the waiters. But whenever I'm in a restaurant, I know that they if it's a higher end restaurant they have some flake salt in the kitchen. So I literally asked for that. You know, I like you're that guy I put on that guy but I pushed the table salt, you know to the side and I call over a waiter busboy and white kind of please get this like thick flaky salt and sometimes they like finish me with like just ask the shop about it. Oh no and they bring it out for me and it's
amazing. Yeah. It's such a
It's such a
game. I also think for people listening to this like having flake salt in your kitchen adds, like a restaurant quality level of sophistication that is extremely expensive but adds like a lot like what like what it adds is not commensurate with how much a
close thing to know about that people get flake salt know like what I tore through it was so expensive in the key thing is that one flake salt is in water. It's just the same as regular salt. Yeah, so there's really no reason to use it unless you have an application work and stay totally dry. Yeah.
So you have to use it once all your food is fully finished cooking. So you're not going to whisk it into your salad dressing. You're not going to add it to that. You're not going to Salt your steak with it before you cook it because then it's going to pull the moisture out of the steak and it immediately just turned to a nice little say line saline layer. Yeah on the exterior of the meat. So I think you just have to be careful about it's expensive but do use it in a way that's conscious of it because when it melts it's basically just salt right? There's really no difference.
Yeah. It's so worth it. I would say that in a good extra virgin olive oil like those are those are the two
places where I'm like spend what you can afford absolutely but I love we're what you were saying about the steaks and not wanting to boil it. I've heard so I've the way that I operate with steaks correct me if I'm wrong. So I so you've definitely challenged them anything about salting meet before I throw it on a pain, but I've heard that you can throw it on immediately before you put in the pan before it has time to accumulate that water lecture or like 45 minutes before if it's like 15 minutes 20 minutes. You don't want to do that. It's got to be either like 45 minutes to an hour before or longer.
Or immediately. Yes, we thought
absolutely and then what we're talking about fat about fat and rendering fat remember that when you're clicking organs, they do have a lot of fat in it. But the way that the cell structure is that fat will not render out. So if your liver liver has tons of fat in it. Wow, if you throw liver into a dry pan, it's not going to render out because it's a very very fine structure. Okay, so when you're using that's one place where you that's I think Sue is fantastic in that GE is also great. I use probably avocado oil in
A pinch for that but for those you're going to want to go very hot and fast because otherwise they'll end up kind of medium throughout which is not very good and you want a nice crust because with the organ Meats the contrast is super important there you could also if you are making marrow, you can save the marrow bone fat and use that, you know, if you rent if you put marrow Bones on a pan and cook them for yourself put your flaky salt some lemon zest some time on that so delicious and then you'll but you can save what's in the bottom of the pan because a bunch of that will end up there put that in a jar just like you might save Bacon fat and then cook.
Your liver and things in that but with your organ Meats, there's going to be no time to render it out because the way the fat structure is so that's one where you really do abundant on adding fat to the pan first
fascinating when it comes to throwing back to the stakes because I love myself a good steak. They've got to be they definitely have to be dry before you throw them in the pan. Right? No water
no water and no water. I wouldn't freak out about like drying them off, you know,
like the paper towels like you wouldn't recommend doing that
if there are very very moist maybe but I'm just going to
or like let it dry on a cutting board for a minute or two. It's not about the it doesn't take a lot of water to make it grayish. But it also it should dry off if it's if it's for whatever reason has like a what's called a purge, you know, so a lot of water in the bag. Yeah, you could dry off with a towel it will definitely improve the crispness of it because you know, you think about you couldn't like fry. It's difficult to fry like a wet vegetable to write it doesn't adhere the fat doesn't crisp in the same way. So getting rid of the moisture is going to improve the Christmas and the mayor reaction that you get from your
fat. I love it so useful.
You also I believe you allow your stakes in a best-case scenario to get to room temperature before throw it on the grill,
correct, especially so thick so if I'm talking about a stick as under an inch and a half, I'm not going to be worried about it because when I put it in the pan just the heat contact from the pan itself will bring the middle to temp in minutes. But if I'm going north of an inch and a half, especially north of two inches, there's going to be a major gradient issue. So you've had the experience I'm sure of
Like a black and blue snake where it's cold in the middle
your experience. I haven't put I can picture that isn't sound very
pleasant. So that's a really common thing. I take the take the 2 inch steak out if there's like, you know, I always think it was like sort of like super bro cooking really going on is huge steak and then it's like you put it there and then it's it's like burnt on the outside and then Raw on the inside. So in those bigger chops the same with roasts. It's very important to do that. And if you can't do that, you actually need to go low and slow first. So the hack if you
Have like that 2-inch. Goodbye from El Campo two-inch-thick Tomahawk steak bone in but you didn't plan it out and you're running home. You've got to get out of the fridge. I would at that point go in my oven with it at 200 degrees and it will turn greyish and you might be a little freaked out right? I might do it 20 30 minutes at 200 degrees in the oven and then take it out and hit it hard and sear it and that's called the reverse sear. So that's like basically you when you're cooking stove top your you're doing a classic Seer sequence. So you're searing on
The outside and then the residual heat from that Syria is cooking the inside to Temp a reverse your you disaggregate that sequence. Right? And so you actually take the inside cooking part do it first at low temp. You do the same thing when you sous-vide. Okay, and then afterwards you hit the Seer and you folks in the crust, it's a nice process. I feel like it's really good. If your personality if you like really a lot of like control and to really understand the process and if you are nervous about having spent a lot of money on me.
Right, you don't even like that. It's useful for dynamic case too because there you're going to be really sure that you can have it dialed. So if you want your meat and ice like let's say medium rare you can put it in your oven at 180 or 200 take it to an internal temp of 125 while you're doing that you hit that, you know cast iron stove top get it hot as you can super hot and then sear it on three sides start the fat cap get your fat and then do the two sides. You have a perfect steak. Wow. Okay, it's a little less sensual and fun, you know because you're not like touching it.
It and smelling good cooking it slowly. You know, it's a little less Delicious from my perspective. But I think if you're like, oh my God, I spent $80 in the steak. I don't want to mess it up. It's a great way to do it. Now. I'm not a fan of sous-vide. Right sous-vide is something that I think from a toxicity perspective is really questionable because you know, that's when you're doing that same process of slowly cooking the interior, but you're doing it in a plastic bag in water, right? And there you have a lot of potential for contamination those bags. Some of them don't have bpa's but they've got something else that you would know more.
Other than me, but
super cautious what they put in those but you know, you just don't know. Yeah and have it's never informed consent, right? You don't know what's in those bags. It might not be BPA could be BPS. It could be BPF
and Plastics are a liquid right and foods, like there's it's a it's a in everything the exterior Foods all porous membrane, unless you're eating like a coconut it's going to get right in there pretty fast,
right and also plastic is made using oil so oil can actually dissolve some Plastics not all but that's why you don't
Want to buy oil or fatty foods if they've been sitting in plastic, especially if they've been sitting in plastic and heat and you don't know how food has been stored prior to it reaching your
Supermarket. Yeah. So I've been on Food Network shows for years as a judge and when I do that and I that a lot of that food is cooked sous-vide and I have such a strong inflammatory response to that food that I eat all tastes great. You know, it's really good way to get super dialed Precision, but I've avoided using that technique in any of the bill Campbell.
Just because I feel like it's a it's kind of too much sort of like a microwave where you're like, I know it's convenient, but I feel like there's a cost to this convenience, you know, so but but you can and you can also do it like on a trigger or a grill you can do that reverse sear where you just bring it to Temp low and slow and it's the same concept of the sous-vide low and slow to cook the interior and then focus on just the Searing at the
end. Yeah, what are your thoughts on adding some other spices to steaks prior to grilling like black pepper garlic powder?
Things like
that. So, you know, I have a lot of thoughts about sauces first off. I think it's kind of like doing a cleanse I think on your health Journey if you decided that cooking was part of like what you want your adult life to Encompass. I would recommend starting with Simplicity and and I think that a lot of things get masked by Rob or a marinade and I think fundamentally really good clean meat doesn't need it. You should know.
you know sauces are like an inflammatory cocktail, you know, it's typically canola oil sugar and soy, yeah and basically every like 99% of marinades are basically canola oil safflower oil sugar or some sort and in soy just crap it's and so you're taking kind of Nature's perfect food of me and then putting like this inflammatory cocktail in a man like me doesn't agree with me, you know, it's like what else I question that premise, you know, so I think that taking the sauces out of
the equation, you know, I had this experience I get sent so many products and this person will go unnamed but a great, you know, like the cigar this really nice rubs and I noticed my my eight-year-old daughter like eating it with a spoon. I'm like, oh God, that's weird. I look and it's like the number one ingredient sugar. Its course. She's eating with a spoon especially in our like sugar impoverished household. She like this is great. I love this like super and it was yummy. It was like it was like brown sugar and cinnamon and you know, it's fine. That's
fine writer Piper palatable think she's ever had in her life so
it but
Keep in mind like read the ingredients. We do you're not making it yourself. Now a little sugar on meat as an enhancement a little, you know, I use coconut or agave ins in salad dressings. Occasionally. It's great. Yeah like but you just have to die. You have to coach your palate, you know, I think barbecue for me. I mean it's delicious but I think it's one of the more inflammatory combinations that we have kind of widely available and there's so much sugar in it. Like that's why you you get that kind of like gut bomb feeling from barbecue some pork. It's not the pork. It's not the
Fat people are like so much fats like no, it's the combination of tons of protein and tons of sugar in the same boat is really hard on your on your body
tons of protein tons of fat and tons of sugar. Yeah. That's I mean, I can't tell you how many times people like people people have messaged me on Instagram telling me that like meat, you know, like they get an upset stomach from eating meat which I think is so generally unlikely, but you can't really offer advice without knowing exactly how they're eating it, but
I would say most of the time it's people are eat it. That's how people are eating
me. So then what's the question would be like, what's the opportunity that I can offer you for a different way? Right? So if you if you're accustomed to putting like your Jarred teriyaki sauce on your chicken, what's the other way? So some things I would recommend doing or you mentioned really good olive oil really good lemon juice or fresh lemon juice lemon, zest fresh herbs parsley. Thyme or fantastic. I would recommend starting with that as your palate.
So if you take like even a boneless skinless chicken breast or just a simple whatever lean piece of meat and try that with like a more basic like a comma sauce that you're making out of different ingredients that you understand. If you want it sweeter, you know a great combination is to use some coconut sugar olive oil lemon, that's fine. You could also do a chimichurri where you take just basically, you know, like two cups of herbs and half a cup of olive oil and 1/4 cup of lemon, right? That's a nice combination. That's also really really unlike the kind of American sauce cocktail of the soy could not
And sugar, yeah parsley lemon and olive oil those were all like prebiotics. They're great for your digestion parsley as a natural antimicrobial. It's a natural gut Soother so many of the traditional combinations of things. We ate with meat we're all about helping us assist in digesting and taking advantage of this incredibly healthy food. So you look at like charcuterie right traditional preserved pork little heavier on your system is got like some natural anti microbials in it.
Things that stop the decay of meat also are going to be harder to digest right go where meet their harder for us to digest so you always ate those with pickles and mustard and vinegar right things that are all banned Kraut like Kraut heavy heavy probiotic load. So we tended if you look at in traditionally kind of I think ancestral kind of diet approaches you are taking this superfood you're combining it with things that made it easier to extract optimal nutrition.
And that's where if you look at what you're combining with your meat, that's the ideal. So for me, it's always in my fridge. It's fresh flat leaf parsley. It's really good olive oil and really good lemon juice and then whatever salt now beyond that in terms of what you're going to put on your steak we're talking about that. I would never recommend any like dry green herbs, like some people crossed it with rosemary. If you're grilling a steak most that's going to just catch on fire. Okay.
If you're doing a wet rub by all means your dry green herbs are fine. If you're doing a dry rub, I'm going to always want to stick to to not herbs but spices because those actually will melt into the surface of the meat and be moistened enough by the water on that's coming out and a fat they won't catch on fire. So there's a but in general if you're if it's like I only like my steak with this marinade or this thing. I encourage you to use as a provocation to be like and do I have the right steak. You know, it's like the same thing as like I can only
Like go out with my boyfriend if I'm drunk It's like the other right guy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's like if you're having to do that much to make it work. Is that really like
you just had a lot of people listening thinking about questioning the
relationship I want to I also think agree really good thing to learn is disliked marinate your meat after you've cooked it. Okay, so we have this thing about marinating the meat beforehand because we associate it with moisture. You know what the moisture is going to come from Quality Meat. Yeah. It's really difficult.
Unless you're using an injector which is what they do, like in barbecue competitions youthbuild syringe or Tumblr something to actually get moisture into the meat. If you want your meat to be moist use good quality meat and if you want a delicious marinade marinate your meat after okay, so don't soak your chicken and your teriyaki sauce beforehand cook it simple hot and fast or however you want to and then slice it thin Against the Grain and then toss it with your marinade and that's going to yield better taste quality because when you have meat that's been soaked in in.
Water based sauces and with a lot of sugar in it. The sugar is going to burn that's going to be the equivalent of the crust but it's not going to get that deep complex flavor that you actually get from the caramelization that met our reaction of the protein itself
God. I love listening to you talk. I just so my favorite way to eat steak has always been without any any type of sauce. I will admit that. I do like the Primal kitchen makes like a steak sauce that I really like. It tastes kind of like a one but with like better ingredients, I do I like that but generally
Ali 9 times out of 10 just that mold on salt that big thick flake salt on a steak for me and then I ate at a restaurant fairly recently and I like called Via Veneto those here in Santa Monica and it was the first time I'd ever had like a really nicely done steak with extra virgin olive oil as a sauce with like a few drops like just like like 2 tablespoons of expert extra virgin olive oil and then a few drops of balsamic vinegar and it was like
The best thing ever to Game Changer. Yes, and I learned and create you probably know this boy better than I do because you've lived in this part of the world, but it was is it was it is that sort of like a Tuscan? Yeah mode of eating steak is
that well, it's also interesting. You know, that's a technique that you're going to use in places where the fat is less prevalent naturally in the meat. Okay, so it's interesting like we would never we don't there's not many fat based dressings for our sakes. I mean people do like a bearnaise like a butter.
I'm times like an anchovy butter on a cool stick, but in general the American Meat has so much fat in it that you if anything you want more of like a steak sauce, which is more of an acid-based you mutts acid and sugar to help you handle all the flavor all the fat interesting but in cultures where you have a leaner meat, so that is that that I that's region is in its in Tuscany and the traditional beef is the Maremma breed which is a one of the great way toxin these beautiful huge beasts that can.
Now is another one of those the piedmontese so there's they actually descended from the Russian steppe oxen. That's a beautiful type of its work animal. So historically there's like cows that were bred to be tractors right moved move things around there's cows that were bred for milk and cows were bred for meat. And so that animal is a traditional track to read it was used to work the pastor's to pull Plows in central Italy. And so that musculature super lean. I mean, it's like, all right.
Red no veins of fat. So what you're going to do with that then you've got this great beefy flavor, but you add the olive oil because you're adding that fat
afterwards having the fat. Yeah. I had it with a with a rib eye and it was fire and rib eyes are pretty fatty. But when you're buying grass-fed grass-finished beef like what Bill Campbell produces I know it's probably it's going to be leaner in general right then like your typical not
like always like 40 percent less fat. Wow, and sometimes we do get a mean occasionally have outliers. You'll get a what's it could Prime grade because Prime is not a you know, a great around quality Prime. This has to do with how much
About it has yeah. So our meat is typically if we're grading it like then we selected Choice which is nothing to do people think Prime is like cleaner and better and better Source. No Prime is simply about how much fat is available inside the musculature. Hmm. Okay, so that Prime grade is something that for most grass-fed producers. I would have to raise animals. So they're much much older to get there. But but you actually when you're using a grass-fed steak a fat based finish also just melted butter is bomb on steaks, so
Good and also and another great thing to use just in terms of natural flavor builds and people get on this as a little bit of an obsession especially in SoCal with fish sauce, right level of fish sauce, but I love anchovies in salted anchovies in a state combination and with pork. So if you look at things that are going to naturally build on what we like about steak part of it is this Rich Umami flavor, which is that like kind of undergrowth mushroomy deepness. And so if you take anchovies, you actually enhance that flavor plus you really it's a
Like omega-3 boost the be another amazing steak sauce for you to try at home. Just get that nice hard sear fry in its own fat cap. And then just soak a salted anchovy or take like a Jarred anchovy and cut it up and melt it in some butter. So just like cook it but like the butters going to it's not going to get crispy. It'll just kind of soften and smash it with the tines of a fork while you're doing that. So maybe like 2 tablespoons of butter and like to Anchovies and pour that over the steak and that to me is like the OG steak sauce because Stakes
sauce actually historically includes anchovies well in it because it's got that really really rich in Umami
flavor. Isn't that isn't it? Our anchovies like a staple ingredient in worchestershire sauce? Yeah,
exactly. So that kind of like complex fishy like Umami flavors. So great combined with steak and there's also nutrition
Powerhouse. Did you do could you do that into everything with olive oil? So I'm simply
contact with something. Yeah, and you could also just you can also blender. I also will make a sauce really simple with capers.
Joey's all well lemon rind and and parsley and just grind that up my Vitamix like make a little green smoothie and put that on top of eggs on top of grilled Meats on top of like kind of boring chicken breast, you know, it's a great combination. That's where if you focus on the sauces that you can have fresh afterwards with the cook meat. It's always going to be more delicious. I also find that that saucing your meat after it's cooked. It's a much better way to end up with great-tasting.
Dover's because that kind of like encapsulating the meat was like a parsley olive oil lemon sauce. It's a great way to hold it in the fridge and it'll taste really good the next day. So it's like makes it more snackable more yummy for your for your leftovers as well.
Oh my God, this conversation has made me so hungry. Come on, and I'm sure we're just eating before we started rolling. Well, this was so fun. Always always learn from you. You're amazing. We're about out of time. But before we wrap up where can listeners find you on social media?
How can they learn more about Del Campo and potentially even place an order
to they should go and build Campo.com? They can buy their suet and then they can go to at the El Campo meet Co our Instagram handle and find out how to render this do it. Well, it's the pulpit we will have a lot of recipes that are I'm Anya fernald at Instagram as well. And I do a lot of recipes and lots of braising on my account. It's kind of like a braising all the
time. Yeah. I love following you and you now ship like all over the
US so cobras been a major
ER pivot for my business. I mean we increase our retail e-commerce business
threefold. Well thirtyfold
wow, so it's been it's been exciting and we're just going to keep on growing because I think during covid a lot of people got more comfortable with having meat shipped to their home while people working from home still and you know just changes so we started to just open that door. And now I think we've got like 80 different products on the website. Well compared to you when I talk to you this time last year. I had maybe eight, you know, we were just so-so
Small so we've just met that and we're really focused on that consumer that's doing maybe on like a, you know paleo or Kyoto Protocol. So we offer a lot of different just like kind of unusual meets the Vets. Picanha is just like fun stuff Copa steaks so you can mix it up. If you're if you're on a fairly protein intensive diet and are just like I don't want to have another night of rib eyes or hot dogs or whatever. We've got a huge range of cuts because we process all of our own animals in our own plant. We sort of got the whole range of all the cuts.
Love it. I support anything I can do to help build Camp. Oh, you know go even further I'm game because I love the way you treat your animals and the quality of the food. I mean, I like I mean I could see bulk. I'm lucky in that I get to eat Bill Campbell me all the time. I live in LA where you guys have stores. So I'm just super grateful that you now have this robust e-comm offering so that people can feed their families your meat
anywhere. It's huge. It feels so powerful to have now the production to support all these different fans also really cool.
So many of our customers by almost all of our meat from us now well, so it's amazing those chickens were talking about we sell those as well. So it's neat to kind of feel like we're supporting a really like a key part of Health for a lot of people. It's something I'm feeling just proud of them. They covid been a challenge right? No doubt, but when one of theirs like where every door closes another opens and that's been the open door for us is the ability to connect directly supplied directly and get into people's homes their product
love that well, thanks for being here.
Means a lot to me, of course, it's all you guys out there in Prague castle and thank you so much for tuning in highlight your favorite quote from Anya or I tagged as both check out Bell Campo. Text me. Let me know what you thought about this episode of the show 310 2999 401 leave a rating and review on iTunes would very much appreciate that and I will catch you on the next episode of peace.
