The Turkey Hunting Cookbook You Need (Even if You Don't Hunt)

Howdy cookbook fans!

Please welcome Austin chef and hunter Jesse Griffiths to the newsletter! Jesse is the proprietor of one of my favorite restaurants in Austin, Dai Due (if you are ever in town, you have to go) and the author of three cookbooks: 2012’s Afield, 2022’s The Hog Book, and his latest effort, out now, The Turkey Book. The latter two are both books about hunting and cooking; they’re also self-published.

I had the honor of being asked to edit The Turkey Book last fall, and let me tell you: as non-hunter, I was shocked by how intriguing I found it. I keep using the word “dreamy” to describe this book: it’s very meditative in parts, but it’s also funny. It’s both a travelogue and a diary of a hunter learning a new skill, an appreciation of the outdoors, of friendship, of learning, of efforts to preserve our natural environment.

Turkey has this dumb reputation for not being very delicious. It comes up every Thanksgiving: all these food journalists with hot takes that you should make beef wellington or duck a l’orange instead. Well! In the hunting world, it’s quite different. Turkeys are seen as a difficult target, requiring patience and immense skill to hunt. Hunters take pride in their skill at turkey hunting. There’s an elegance to turkey hunting, which happens in the spring as opposed to most other hunting seasons, which are in the fall. Besides, Jesse likes to eat turkey. I like to eat turkey! Go away, turkey haters. Leave us our fun.

The book is divided into four sections, each a different geographic area where Jesse goes on a hunt: Texas (of course), Georgia, Oregon, and Connecticut. In each section, he meets friends, both chefs and hunters, who offer their favorite turkey recipes: turkey boudin from Jean-Paul Bourgeois, Elias Cairo’s avgolemono, oyster stuffing by Dan Meiser. And of course, plenty of recipes from Jesse himself, including the Grilled Turkey Paillards with Piri Piri Butter recipe at the end of this email.

Here’s my conversation with Jesse.

This is your second self-published combination cookbook and hunting book. Why pick turkey as topic number two?

I'm just really taken by turkey. I love to eat 'em. Having wild turkey in the freezer, for me, is very important. Probably one of my favorite meals, the flagship recipe, is fried turkey. And then just the whole sequence I am really taken by. I love the springtime, [when turkey hunting happens], when the woods start to come alive and everything's sprouting and green. There's flowers and it's beautiful. And I love the challenge. I guess that's a pretty trite word for it, but [turkey hunting is] difficult. It requires some skill. You learn a lot. You're humbled often. There’s something about it, I just really wanted to write a book about it. But I can't write a book about it from the perspective of an expert because I'm not, so I chose to write it as a learning journal.

There's an urgency to The Hog Book. Hogs are an invasive species, so there are environmental aspects to hunting them, not to mention the destruction they cause. But this book has such a dreamy wandering quality to it. Part of that is that the reader is learning about turkey hunting alongside you, but what else goes into the voice of this book, the tone?

The Hog Book is a call to action, like a textbook, and The Turkey Book is more of a documented respect for these native animals. Two opposite ends of the spectrum: an invasive, introduced species that needs to be managed, and then this other native species that also needs to be managed, but in a far different way. [Turkeys] need to be protected so that we can continue to have this interaction with them in the future.

Originally I was like, I'm going to make The Hog Book, sub turkey. And then I realized, I can't do that. I absolutely can't do it. Too much has been said about turkeys. Too much has been eloquently said about turkeys. There's been so much beautiful writing about 'em. There's a culture of beautiful turkey writing. It's a thing. There are online turkey forums that have sub forums that are dedicated to just writing. You don't see that on hog hunting forums, if you know what I mean. There's a lore and a history and a romance to it.

This is your first book that takes you out of Texas, right? The Hog Book doesn’t leave Texas?

No, it doesn’t. I just don't get out of Texas a lot. That was a big part of it. Travel and pushing literal boundaries for myself too, because, well, I've also created quite a brand of being Texan, and then it feels somewhat off-brand to go somewhere else. But I was like, I've got to go to these other places and experience these other things. It's vulnerable. I'm traveling, I don't know what's going on. Vulnerability was kind of a key tone to the book, whereas The Hog Book is very confident. It's just like, we're going to kill 'em all, and this is how you cut 'em up. Versus: I don't even know if I'm going to see a turkey on any given day.

I really like that both these books are so different, and obviously people are now like, well, what's the next one? And the true answer is, I have no idea. First off, taking a little break from it! We turned turn this one around really quick. I was still hunting turkeys last May. Wow.

The thing you said about vulnerability, I want to circle back to the learning aspect of this and the journal aspect of this, because I really think that’s what makes it. You bring in all of these other hunters and chefs who are also teaching you things, and they're putting very local spins on the turkey recipes. I think that that helps make it an interesting book for non-hunters as well. Whereas The Hog Book is very technical, as you've said, and maybe more for a hunter. So as a non-hunter, I was engaged and really enjoyed reading this book. That's not really a question, just an observation.

I mean, if you're going qualify yourself as a non-expert, I think that it also serves to be like, well, since I don't know, we're going to talk to all these other people who do. I think it's appealing to people. I mean, if you're an expert chef and an expert turkey hunter, maybe you won't get too much out of the book. But if you're not either one of those things, then there's probably something in there for you. And I think it's very appealing to people to learn from somebody who's also learning or has emphatically stated that they don't know everything.

And that's rare in cookbooks, honestly, because cookbooks are from chefs who have egos and they're experts. But this book is different. I really enjoyed it.

Well, thank you. I've been teaching butchery and cooking for a very long time, and I really found that the best approach is just to come to people's level and just be like, don't ever shame 'em about their approaches. Oh, well, I like to wrap that in bacon and put it on the smoker. I'm like, do you enjoy it? Yeah. Alright, great. In the wild game cooking community, there's a lot of like, oh, why? You just wrapped it in the bacon, you're cheating, or you this and that. If you grind your deer, the whole thing, into sausage, it's like, well, you wasted it. I'm like, are you enjoying it? That's really all there is to it. And that's very appealing to people when they think they're going to be shamed for not making a boysenberry foam and sous vide something or whatever. No, no. I want you to do something approachable and have fun and enjoy it, because at the end of the day, my job is to teach you how to best enjoy this resource. That's it.

Let's talk about self-publishing. This is your second self-published cookbook: how did you approached this book differently than book one? What did you lessons did you learn that you applied here?

Well, we've bootstrapped the whole operation. By that I mean both books. So Kickstarter enabled us to fund The Hog Book, and we were looking to get $65,000. We actually raised $130,000. We doubled it almost exactly. It was one of the highest-earning Kickstarter cookbook campaigns ever. That enabled us to publish The Hog Book. And then sales from The Hog Book enabled us to publish The Turkey Book. So it’s a really organic, bootstrapped, no debt approach to that. The Hog Book, we decided to self-publish just because we felt—this is [photographer] Jody [Horton] and I felt—that we had enough voice to be able to pull it off.

Now there's going to be a big trade off. Obviously with a publisher, we would've probably sold many, many more units, but we would've also been at the mercy of their design and editorial whims.

Here is the story. My first book was done through a big publisher. I was talking to the editor one day and we were going over a sequence for field dressing a hog, and step number one was “Remove the penis.” She screamed into the phone when she read that, she screamed, and she's like, that can't be step number one. I remember thinking, I'm so sorry, but that literally is step number one. I mean, you really can't go on to step number two until you do step number one. And at that point, I was like, we're not dealing with an educational material here. We're not willing to graphically and honestly discuss the content if we can't say these words and if we can't show these pictures, then I can't do my job.

And so stuff like that really informed the decision to go the self-publishing route, along with design, cover, and choice of team. I'm looking at you, here! Being able to go in and just pick your team instead of having a team picked for you, which could be of course, highly talented people. Being able to hire [designer] Blair [Richardson] and Jody and you and the other photographer, Sam [Averett], just handpicked to execute a vision, is to me worth it.

With The Turkey Book, the concept changed on me a few times as I was delving into it. We made some serious turns in the process. Being self-published enabled all these course changes, until we finally wound up where we are, which I'm extremely happy with. I wouldn't have it any other way. The book that we created and the way that it flows, and I think it's unique and that it's kind of undefinable. People don't know if it's a cookbook, if it's a book about hunting, there's a story, but then there's technicals, and then there's history, and there's all kinds of stuff. So the freedom of self-publishing to me is worth it. Not to say that I would never work with a publisher, but self-publishing has defined for me my needs in creating books.

Well, and I have to imagine it also makes your books more useful to their intended audience, even if that audience isn't quite as big as it might've been through a traditional publisher. You're talking about farmers and hunters who are used to doing things like field dressing. So I don't know what those people would've done with a sort of hamstrung half version of these books.

Right. We don't have to pull a single punch.

A lot more chefs are leaning towards self-publishing, for all of the reasons you just mentioned. Chefs are people who are used to running their own businesses and used to calling the shots, and being thrust into the traditional publishing market can be kind of a shock, I think. I know Gavin Kaysen in Minneapolis is also doing self-published books. Now, if you were going to give advice to a chef who wanted to do a self-published book, what would you say?

I have people coming to me and ask very much that question. It's just like, I want to do a book: should I self-publish or should I go with a publisher? In fact, I had this conversation two days ago, with a very a dear friend of mine. My answer is always, it kind of depends on where they're at in their careers. I couldn't have self-published Afield. It would've been like a paperback on Amazon, spiral bound. It would've not been possible. So going with a publisher for the first book, probably, almost definitively, was a good idea for me. And then after that, after there was an audience that I had built, then I could self-publish. But then you have to see that concurrently, the ability for us to communicate with each other via social and other channels has grown exponentially. And so to get the word out about your book is now so much easier. So timing is part of it.

What are your expectations? How many people can you reach? How notable is the book you want to write? I mean, it could be very beneficial to go with a publisher. And that's what I told my friend the other day. I think you've got two no-lose routes here, because he's got a big name and he's got a big following. And he could go to a publisher and probably get a pretty good deal. Or you could go the self-publishing route and still get a lot of books out there in front of people. But within those parameters, I would say that to me, that would probably define that decision. How many people can you reac? Is it enough to make it worth your while?

And I think also in your case, having a particular reason for the particular books is also key. A different book is going to do better through traditional publishing or versus self publishing.

Definitely. Definitely. A quick turnaround, is another thing that self publishing does. There is no way that a publisher would have this out [this quickly]. Maybe in 2025. We were able to turn this thing around, and I believe from the first food shoots at the studio and my first tweaking, the introduction and the writing and stuff to when the book landed, the physical copies landed, in something like 14 months. It took me 11 years to do The Hog Book start to finish. There's photos in there that were 11 years old when it published.

And that's the flip side of that, right? Is that you can take as long as you need.

Certainly, certainly. We wanted to get this one out for turkey season. We wanted it to be a journal, and I wanted it to seem like current and vibrant. I think that playing with the tone of books is just super fun, and that's really enabled us to do that.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Grilled Turkey Paillards with Piri Piri Butter

Serves 4

Season the turkey with salt and pepper. Mix together the olive oil, garlic, vinegar and cilantro in a small bowl. Marinate the turkey breast in the olive oil mix for 4 hours or up to 24 hours.

Make the piri piri sauce: Cook the bell pepper, hot peppers and the bay leaf in the olive oil over medium heat until tender, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for another minute.

Discard the bay leaf. With an immersion blender or in a blender, puree the chile sauce with the sherry vinegar until smooth, adding a teaspoon of water, if necessary, to just make it come together. Season with salt and refrigerate for up to 1 week. This will make about 1 cup.

To make the piri piri butter, combine the softened butter with 1 cup of the piri piri sauce in a small bowl. Have the butter softened when it’s time to serve.

Preheat a gas grill to high, or start a really hot fire with hardwood charcoal or logs burnt down to hot coals.

Grill the turkey pieces over high heat. Allow them to develop a bit of a sear for a couple of minutes, which will cause them to stick to the grill less. Grill them mostly on one side, then flip and “kiss” the other side to just cook the pink out. Once cooked through—and don’t overcook—remove from the grill to a serving platter and immediately dollop the softened butter on top.

Okay that’s all for today! Buy The Turkey Book, it’s great! See y’all next week.