Austin Chef and Author Focuses on Wild Turkeys for His Next Cookbook
Austin chef of New Texan restaurant Dai Due and author, Jesse Griffiths, is publishing this third book this year. This time, he’s turning his attention to turkeys through The Turkey Book: A Chef’s Journal of Hunting and Cooking America’s Bird, which will be out in March.
The Turkey Book documents Griffiths hunting of and traveling through turkey regions in America with his friend and hunter Ben O’Brien, within Texas, Oregon, Georgia, and Connecticut. Along with their experience, there are stories with local hunters and chefs.
Griffiths also shares how to break down turkeys, from plucking feathers to butchering. And then there will be more than 100 recipes, including entomatadas de guajolote (a sort-of enchilada dish that is fried and covered in tomato sauce), grilled turkey paillards with piri piri butter, wild turkey kiev, fried turkey, breakfast with white pudding, smoked turkey legs, and much more.
Griffiths’s first book, Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish, was published in 2012. He followed that with The Hog Book: A Chef’s Guide to Hunting, Preparing and Cooking Wild Pigs in 2021. Both books were nominated for James Beard Foundation’s media awards during their respective times in the Single Subject category. Hog Book won the medal in 2022.
Griffiths started his acclaimed New Texan restaurant Dai Due as a farmers market stand in 2008, which turned into a physical restaurant-slash-butcher shop in Austin’s Cherrywood neighborhood in 2014. He also runs the New School of Traditional Cookery, where he teaches people how to cook, hunt, and fish, and how to butcher their catches.
