May 21, 2020
Anna Borgman went to culinary school before she became a hunter. She studied the relationship between how an animal was raised to how it tasted on the plate. The same is true for game -- a sense of place imparts itself onto every animal harvested. This episode, we talk about the art of butchery, and delve into some practical tips -- like which knives you need and how to handle silverskin.
2:30 - May 29 "So You Think You Wanna Fish?" webinar with Artemis
8:00 - Shooting stars! Paint brushes! Lupine! Oh, my! That lovely point when you know your local wildflowers by name... it bolsters your sense of place
10:00 - iNaturalist citizen science app; plus Seek app, which uses your phone to identify plants
10:30 - Anna of Forage Fed teaches butchery and does game processing, and she's also into how food systems work
13:00 - Portland Meat Collective with Camas Davis - whole animal butchery for chefs
15:00 - Cricket protein farming... yup.
16:30 - Entomophogy = bugs for food
17:50 - Butchery versus meat-cutting
20:00 - Why does meat look different on older vs. younger animals, or how does meat quality change depending on how an animal has been raised?
20:30 – Fred Provenza’s work on how animals meet their own nutritional needs instinctually
25:00 - How animals are fed affects so much else... land use, public land health, etc.
28:00 - There's no single right way to butcher an animal. The two golden rules, however, would be 'clean' and 'cold' -- below 45 degrees is ideal
30:00 - Gloves can help you handle that meat without your hands going numb.
31:00 - You don't need an expensive knife. You just need a sharp knife. Anna uses the Victorinox ones... totally affordable.
32:00 - Knife arsenal: you need a boning knife (maybe two, depending on stiffness preference), a paring knife, and a butcher knife. A grinder is also pretty handy
34:00 - Being a woman at 'sausage school' and laughing like a teenager at all the punny jokes
35:00 - Cleaning silver skin, which is the connective tissue that lines muscles (it also dulls your knives and clogs your grinder)
40:30 - Subbing whitefish in a crabcake recipe
42:00 - Meat color/toughness has to do with how muscles are used for movement (and something called myoglobin)
49:00 - Good books to start out with: Adam Danforth's books on beef and other animals; MeatEater's guide to field processing
53:00 - You can't mess it up. Really! Just get in there and cut up the animal. You get better every time.
56:30 - In the field, try to keep your knife hand clean. One hand for pulling hide and swatting hair, one for clean meat-handling.
57:30 - a bone dust scraper
59:00 - dry-aging & flavor
1:06:00 - Bear fecal plugs, ya'll
1:07:00 - Find Anna at forage-fed.com, or @annaborgman on Insta