May 17, 2024
Chief to Chef: The Heart Of Firehouse Cooking
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Fires blaze and pans sizzle in equal measure when Ryan McKay, a battalion chief turned culinary maestro, shares his transition from kitchen rookie to firehouse feast-maker on All Clear Firefighter Health and Wellness. Our lively discussion not only stokes the fire of gastronomy but also highlights how cooking can be a tool for unwinding and reinforcing the bonds that make a firefighting team more like family. Ryan's tales from the kitchen, brimming with heart and humor, underscore the joy and challenges of feeding a diverse crew with varying tastes and dietary restrictions, all while keeping the flames of tradition and unity burning bright.
As we slice through the smoke, we uncover the meat of the matter: fostering healthful eating habits in an environment where temptation often lurks in comfort food form. Ryan and I exchange stories of personal health journeys and share strategies for making better choices, like embracing the vibrancy of shepherd's pie with a turkey and sweet potato twist. The conversation simmers with practical advice on how to incorporate an array of nutritious cuisines and reflects on the evolving demographics and palates within firehouse walls.
Finally, we serve up a dish of culinary wisdom, seasoning the episode with tips that transcend the firehouse kitchen. Discover the balance of the 80-20 rule applied to nourishment and life's indulgences, and grasp how to wield a knife with finesse or savor the perfect steak seared to succulence. Whether it's debating the merits of the classic smash burger or confessing to a grilled cheeseburger craving, our chat is a recipe for inspiration, satiating the hunger for knowledge and the joy of a well-earned treat.
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This is All Clear Firefighter Health and Wellness, where we help you light your fire within.
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I'm Travis.
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Thank you for joining us on All Clear Today.
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We've got another special guest.
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We've got Ryan McKay food extraordinaire, I think, or chef extraordinaire, I think.
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We're going to go with that.
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But if you've got another title, go with it.
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But we just wanted to reach out to you today, Ryan, good to talk to you, Glad to get you on the show.
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So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing, who you are, where you're at, where you're in the fire service, how long you've been doing it?
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All that good, pertinent stuff.
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Well, travis.
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First of all, thank you very much for having me here today.
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It's truly an honor to be on your podcast.
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It's always great to meet somebody who has the passion for health and wellness, like we both do Really quickly.
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Ryan McKay, I'm actually a battalion chief with Cobb County Fire and Emergency Services just outside of the city of Atlanta.
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The Braves are our home.
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It's in my first-in territory.
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I've been in the fire service for roughly 20 years.
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I spent about two and a half years out with Cal Fire, where I was born and raised, and about 18 here in Georgia.
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And boy, I'm a happy father of two.
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I'm married for 25 years to a beautiful wife and I love to talk about food, anything and everything you can possibly imagine.
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I've done it, been there, seen it, love to talk about it.
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I like to talk about food and eat food, so I think I'm a semi-expert on this myself not the cooking part, but at least the eating part.
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So you say you're in the fire service and I know that food is a passion of yours.
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Where did your interest in food and cooking, where did that come from?
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I'm sure for a lot of the folks that are listening to this, it's been a long journey.
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Food doesn't typically just bite you from the get-go and you'll have to apologize ahead of time.
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My food puns are terrible.
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I never get full of them.
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But both my parents see, I just did another one there I didn't even know it.
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Both my parents worked full-time.
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My mom was a teacher, my dad was in aerospace, but my mom who was an exceptional home cook.
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But I only got to experience that on the holidays and when my wife and I got married, we were both young.
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In our cooking journeys.
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I really had to learn a lot from my own and I was really exposed to that the most within the fire service and I had a lot of veterans asking when I was starting to cook.
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It was intimidating what to cook, how much to spend, what type of food these are the questions I was often asking myself.
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And when I was coming up through the fire service it was at the height of the food network top chef and the age of the celebrity chef.
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So I soaked up everything I could to try and keep up with those veterans that were teaching me the skills within the kitchen when I first started.
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I keep capturing it on TV, youtube, magazines, cookbooks, anything I can get my hands on.
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I'm pretty obsessive when it comes to something I'm passionate about.
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So I cooked for years as a firefighter, both starting out in Riverside and then when I joined here in Cobb, and thankfully I had a little bit of a passion for it People can sense it because I was chasing after, trying to master a recipe, much like you would try to master forcing a door or pulling a hose line.
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So those members that were around me within my crew saw my earnest desire to try and elevate the food and they were, of course, reaping the rewards.
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And what I found very quickly, travis, is that when you cook and put good food on the firehouse table, then it seems to lower down the stress levels of people.
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They don't have to concern themselves about what was going to be put on the table.
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If it was going to be fresh, it was going to be healthy.
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And having that responsibility, even at the lowliest rank as a probationary firefighter all the way up until I still cook as a chief, that is a special skill and a special responsibility that I didn't take lightly.
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So it was always my will and my desire to try and train myself as best as I could, and then that kind of turned into me trying to teach others, because they saw how not only successful my steps were in the process of cooking and preparing food and shopping and planning ahead, but they saw how, hey, you know what, when you actually put food down that was good on the table, you enjoyed levels of quiet and calm, and that's where conversations would start.
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So when I was consistently being asked by people both within my crew but then outside of my station, and then soon it was outside of my fire department, I was getting questions from people, I figured, hey, you know what, I've got a camera, I've got a computer.
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Let's go ahead and start just filming stuff, putting it on the internet, to making it easy, because I can't remember all the recipes I put out there, so it's just easy for me to write it down or, even better, to visually see it, cause I know a lot of us in the fire service are visual learners.
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So I just started putting my stuff on YouTube.
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It led to a channel, it led to cooking competitions and then, roughly about a decade ago, I actually landed on a primetime NBC cooking show.
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So I just thoroughly enjoyed representing the fire service within that realm.
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I would say pushing my experiences onto the internet so others can share and learn from it, because the best way to learn is to fail, and, man, if you don't fail in the kitchen, you're not trying.
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That journey just led me towards where I was into position to start talking about food on a national level, across the nation, to any fire service that would listen to me.
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So the journey has paid off very well for me.
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So it sounds like from the passion that is very evident in your voice and what you're saying about food.
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Would you say that cooking is probably one of the most important skills that a firefighter can have or can learn even early in his career?
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This is something I've pondered a lot, because there are a tremendous amount of skills for jacks of all trade.
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We have to learn a little bit of everything, but the one skill that I think that translates not only within the fire service but at home, it translates during the career and then post-career is that of providing food and sustenance for not only yourself but for the members around you.
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I had a good veteran firefighter when I started out in Cal Fire on Riverside who pulled me aside and said he was going to teach me the most important skill as a firefighter.
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I half expected him to take me to the bay and demo forcing a door or throwing a 28-foot extension ladder.
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Instead he took me straight to the grill outside and said I'm going to teach you how to cook lemon pepper chicken.
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I'm thinking to myself what is he talking about here?
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But that really kicked off my journey within the firehouse.
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For any cook, for any that can cook, they understand the power it has to be able to connect, to break down barriers, to refuel, to entertain.
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It translates to everyone, no matter your background or purpose.
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We all need to eat, we can all share in the experience and it is the one universal language that we can all pretty much understand.
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The firehouse kitchen really is the most reverential healing tool in the fire service, and we try and wield it to its potential.
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So take advantage of the experiences and the skills you earn in the kitchen and then put them to good use off-duty as well.
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Whether you're a single fire recruit learning to feed yourself nutritional meals, maybe on a dime, or a spouse looking to impress your special someone on a day Valentine's Day, holidays, you name it or maybe the eldest sibling looking to host your first holiday feast, this skill will last you a lifetime.
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So when you start talking about the skills of being able to cook and cook for yourself I know that firefighters typically have control of two out of three days, depending how your shift is.
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You can cook for yourself at home, you can pick what you eat at home.
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But if you're the one that cooks at home and you also cook at the station, how hard is it to translate making spaghetti for, say, four, versus making spaghetti for eight or 10 or whatever the case is?
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It's a great question, travis.
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It's all about scaling and understanding your ingredients and I think the best skill to try and when you're looking to cook for maybe six to 12 firefighters.
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There's really three skills that I try and hone in on that I can teach to the people out there that are listening, and that is to plan ahead to meal prep and to buy in bulk.
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Planning out hopefully is self-evident.
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You schedule out the coming shifts, even if you're like the single lone cook at a firehouse.
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Perhaps you can try and encourage other people.
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Hey, man, can you just cook, maybe once a month, twice a month, maybe help break this out, or maybe jump in here and be a sous chef for me, but really what it does.
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It also allows you to hunt for sales and seasonal items which, if they're in season, they're more abundant, thus they're more inexpensive.
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I'm a huge fan of meal prepping.
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That's pretty much what I do now all day, 20 years into the job.
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This is how I best take advantage of the quieter moments of the day, so you can prep early and cook, so, like with the tones drop.
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Then you're not taken off.
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Track Time is one of your best ingredients because if you start early and prep and cook in advance.
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Slow cooked meals, something you put in the oven and forget about for a number of hours those are the kind of meals that can help out with meal prepping.
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And then you can always meal prep off shift, which I did for many years.
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If you're already prepping for you and your spouse and your family, what's doubling it?
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And then just bring into the firehouse especially if you're a single station.
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It works out perfectly.
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And then the last thing I would really condone is buying in bulk.
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Pull monies and buy in bulk from large format warehouses.
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Here in the South we have the likes of Costco and Sam's Club.
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This extends your buying power, even in the face of runaway inflation, which we're all dealing with.
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And then you can always incorporate that with the planning ahead.
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And don't get me wrong, it's not easy.
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It's like pushing spaghetti from the back end trying to cook for that many people.
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It can be a challenge, but it's nothing you can't overcome by planning ahead.
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Yeah, and planning, I think, is even at my house on a personal level, like when my wife is putting the grocery list together.
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You'd be amazed that she's.
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Hey, there's a special on chicken.
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What are some ways that we can utilize chicken that we maybe haven't done before, things like that.
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So there's always an opportunity for diversity in the food that you're eating.
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But how do you handle it when you've got that one guy at the station who is keto, who's carnivore, who is name name the diet of the week?
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He doesn't eat what everybody else does?
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How do you handle that when you've got a large variety of preferences and needs when it comes to food?
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Man, I'll top you with one of that Travis.
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I had a gentleman for many years that actually was allergic to onions.
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Can you imagine cooking without onions?
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It was ridiculously difficult, but it really pushes you to, I would say, challenge you and how you can tackle flavor and texture in different ways.
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And I try and break down food and the fundamentals of cooking into four different things.
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And I'm not the one who came up with this, samin Nosrat.
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She's a famous New York Times chef.
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She's done a great job on Netflix, putting out a great video series on salt, fat acid and heat.
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She's got a book of the same name.
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But it really aids you with inspiration, conceptualization and execution of successful meals.
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It takes salt as the most effective and abundant seasoning.
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As an example, salting, let's say, chicken, like you said earlier.
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If you salt it often and early enough, it affords our members grace with overcooking on a call just because you're planning ahead with salt and taking advantage of the osmosis and the diffusion skills that it has.
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I think a great way to sum it up is let's take a small science-based detour on the ability of salt to combat, I would say, denaturing.
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Think of our protein as a strand of loose coil with water molecules bound on the outside surface.
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When an unseasoned protein is heated, it denatures the coil, kind of unravels, releasing all these water molecules out of the protein matrix, leaving the dry, I'd say the meat dry and tough if overcooked.
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But by distributing through the protein structure, salt prevents the coil from, I would say, densely coagulating or clumping when heated.
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Now when steak, when you see it it's nice and flat in the pan, but then it starts to seize up like a fist.
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This is less prone to happen if you have salt in there, because it retains the water molecules and it keeps them bound.
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A piece of meat remains moist and gives you, like, a greater margin of error and grace.
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So the same chemical process, it's also called brining.
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You can either do it dry by just sprinkling some salt on top, or you can put into a salt and sugar solution, submerge in a bath, and again, that's the circling back to time is your best friend and letting it do all this passive cooking.
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But to come back full circle to your, your question on you have people with these various different diets, the Ketos and the Mediterranean diets of the world.
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You almost always find some sort of connective thread.
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You'll find that, hey, you know what?
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Everybody can eat sweet potatoes Great, there's something I can build upon Everybody, by and large, likes to enjoy protein.
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Okay, that's two out of the three things that I'm trying to chase for.
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Let's make sure we get a high fiber ingredient in there as well, because fiber is very big, helps avoid those glucose spikes and whatnot.
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So just conversations around the firehouse that are the routine every single day, just trying to find those gaps that you can fill in with smart, inspirational food ideas through the fundamentals of cooking, will oftentimes find you there.
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Cool, and that's good to know that all hope is not lost when you have that picky eater among you.
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But we had Dr Jill Joyce on a while back and she was talking.
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She's great, by the way.
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Oh, yes, very sharp when it comes to the more scientific end of it.
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You just covered a lot of science right there, talking about the use of salt and things like that, but something less scientific she said that was interesting was around the firehouse.
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If you take the snacks away, if you take and get it and not say I'm taking them away, but get them off the counter Clear the countertop, put your fruit out, put apples or whatever the case is off the counter, clear the countertop, put your fruit out, put apples or whatever the case is.
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Have you found that it's easier to provide healthy food?
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to the guys on shift.
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If you hide the stuff, that's not great for you.
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When she spoke and I listened to her podcast it was great.
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She truly identified one of the key things that I always tried to employ while I was there and I actually almost became a little draconish about it where I would take items that were on the kitchen countertop and I was bad in the early days and I apologize to my crews way back then I would just throw stuff away without question.
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Now I'm to the point hey, you know what, if you want it, I'm going to put it just out of reach.
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So there's effort involved into it.
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If you want to get it and then replace whatever snacks or we always had the grocery store to drop off those just expired items, hey, the fire service, they'll eat anything.
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Here you guys go and then you have all these pastries and donuts sitting on the countertop.
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It's hard for people, especially in our, I would say, all the exposures that we're having to deal with sleep deprivation, chief among them that when you're trying to look for those quick carbs to try and bring your energy back up.
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Jill knocked it out of the park.
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It's exactly what I would have said Take those items.
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Hide them, push them away just out of sight just so there's effort involved and replace those grazing opportunities with something that's natural and provides fiber.
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So you're talking bananas, apples, oranges, grapes just leave those on the countertop.
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And I think the study that she was referring to.
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She found that people would lose up to 20% of the calorie intake per day just by deploying a very simple habit forming that you know great way to handle it, yep.
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And you know, for me myself personally, when I had my last physical things weren't great.
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I needed to cut back on lose weight, cut back on sugar, cut back on cholesterol all the stuff they tell firefighters all the time and the thing that I started doing was I stopped drinking soda.
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I tried to start good.
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Try to pick things that were better options.
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For me it's sparkling water.
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I'm sure there's something in it that'll kill me, but it seems to help take the edge off and it's, you know, throttled that back to where I don't do it as much and it's just one of those things that make the healthier option available.
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So you know, when you cook in the firehouse, it sounds like that you're also watching out for the health and well-being of the guys on a certain level.
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When it comes to you know what you make available.
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But when you're cooking in the firehouse, everybody always has the conception, if they're not in the fire service, they eat chili all the time, it's steak all the time.
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That's pretty true.
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But when you cook, what do you find to be the most popular options that are traditional, that you see in the fire service?
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That are great options and maybe easy for maybe a new cook that is listening to the podcast that they might be able to think about.
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You don't have to tell us how to cook it, but maybe some things that maybe they they should consider looking at as a good, safe, healthy, traditional options.
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The fire service is very traditional when it comes to its food options.
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I think we've expanded over the last couple of decades.
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For sure I know that my most popular recipe by far is just a shepherd's pie or cottage pie Very homey meal it can be.
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Typically it's done with veal, but I've offered it many times with ground turkey, and then you can replace their standard potatoes with sweet potatoes or parsnips or carrots if you want to.
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So there are ways to even take traditional firehouse legacy recipes and just introduce more healthy options.
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So just try and staying away from the processed foods, the center aisle of the grocery store and shopping on the outside circle that's the best way to handle it.
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But truly, I think for us in the fire service, because of our demands both in calorie and trying to stay awake, majority of the time I really try and focus on just providing my members a large amount of protein.
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Especially the older you get up in age, that protein threshold seems to get a little bit higher and higher.
00:16:44.053 --> 00:16:47.159
So I know that I'm trying to remember that off the top of my head.
00:16:47.159 --> 00:16:51.856
Dr Peter Attia and Dr Andrew Heberman, two names I'm sure your listeners are very familiar with.
00:16:51.856 --> 00:16:58.645
They always are trying to advocate for at least one gram per protein per pound of your ideal weight for everybody.
00:16:58.645 --> 00:17:00.188
And that's when I'm cooking for people.
00:17:00.188 --> 00:17:02.331
I look around the room and I'm trying to shoot for that.
00:17:02.331 --> 00:17:07.538
So 150, 200, maybe 225, but you need to start slowing down with eating.
00:17:07.538 --> 00:17:10.249
So those are the types of things I'm trying to shoot for us.
00:17:10.249 --> 00:17:14.871
Make sure I have a baseline protein capture for everybody within the table that I'm serving.
00:17:14.871 --> 00:17:24.179
Try and make sure I'm getting fiber into them through some nice green proteins or not proteins, but produce and then you can build a recipe in and around there.
00:17:24.345 --> 00:17:29.247
At this point now, with our fire service being so diverse, I think the food is starting to reflect that as well.
00:17:29.247 --> 00:17:34.788
So you're not going to traditionally find the same recipe done five or six times out of a 10 month cycle.
00:17:34.788 --> 00:17:38.376
Things are going to be changing up consistently and people are quite frank.
00:17:38.376 --> 00:17:39.307
They're just open for it.
00:17:39.307 --> 00:17:47.851
I think the advent of social media has really pushed hey man, let's try something completely out of the box here and see if we like it.
00:17:47.851 --> 00:17:57.086
I took a lot of recipes from Southern California and brought them over to Atlanta, georgia, and initially there was a lot of pushback, but those are my most requested meals to this day A lot of Latin inspired foods, a lot of Vietnamese food.
00:17:57.086 --> 00:18:09.627
So just find inspiration from the people that you're servicing as a cook and then just build around there and you'll start to unlock, I would say, people's journey and their reluctance that was once there to try new foods.
00:18:09.627 --> 00:18:10.769
It'll disappear.
00:18:11.392 --> 00:18:13.115
Yeah, and ask what?
00:18:13.115 --> 00:18:15.105
What was your mom's best recipe?
00:18:15.146 --> 00:18:20.067
Not your, I'm sure you got one, but if you got that guy on your shift, that's maybe not from where you're at.
00:18:20.067 --> 00:18:22.011
Hey, what did your mom like to cook?
00:18:22.011 --> 00:18:24.117
Oh, she did roasted chicken.
00:18:24.117 --> 00:18:28.575
Okay, let's try it and just mix it up and get input from other people.
00:18:28.575 --> 00:18:32.896
Always when my wife she prepares something that was traditional when she was a kid.
00:18:32.896 --> 00:18:39.057
It's very different than what I did, and it's nice when we try different things and you get a pretty big repertoire doing that.
00:18:39.057 --> 00:18:52.538
But one of the things that you did mention in our conversations outside before we were recording, you were talking about the 80-20 rule, which that seems like that's got a lot of application when it comes to feeding the firehouse.
00:18:52.719 --> 00:18:57.492
Why don't you explain what the 80-20 rule is and how that applies to what we're talking about today?
00:18:58.515 --> 00:19:02.671
Yeah, this is something, travis, I came up with a couple of years ago and I've stuck to it.
00:19:02.671 --> 00:19:05.778
I would say it drives a lot of what I do lifestyle-wise.
00:19:05.778 --> 00:19:14.275
But not only is 80-20 a great rule of thumb for the protein-to-fat ratio for a great burger, but it also works well for behavioral guidelines for health.
00:19:14.275 --> 00:19:23.789
I try and stick to at least 80% of the time staying disciplined, making informed decisions on healthy foods and earning energy through movement, whatever the movement may be.
00:19:23.789 --> 00:19:31.094
I try and get in an hour to an hour and a half every single day, but the other 20% of the time you have to remember to live.
00:19:31.094 --> 00:19:33.320
Food is a pleasurable journey.
00:19:33.320 --> 00:19:34.625
It's a pleasurable experience.
00:19:34.625 --> 00:19:42.753
You've got all sorts of textures, temperatures, colors, flavors, and there's a reason why this is a universal language.
00:19:42.753 --> 00:19:49.758
So, so, please, you have to remember, even if you're sticking to a diet that may or may not be successful for you, that you have to live.
00:19:49.758 --> 00:19:54.385
You have to give yourself some grace and allow an opportunity for you to enjoy those people around you.
00:19:54.385 --> 00:20:01.671
And then, once you develop a program or a protocol that outlines healthy decision making, this mantra becomes second nature.
00:20:01.770 --> 00:20:12.717
After committing time, start slow, win small victories, consider shortening your window of eating, let's say from maybe 10 hours to eight hours to combat possible insulin resistance and flight inflammation.
00:20:12.717 --> 00:20:18.749
Shop on the outside of the circle grocery store, like we talked about earlier, and focus in on produce and protein sources.
00:20:18.749 --> 00:20:25.632
Dedicate time and energy towards optimizing sleep so that you can have, you can avoid, those late evening snack urges.
00:20:25.632 --> 00:20:28.923
Small steps with easy victories and then scale up.
00:20:28.923 --> 00:20:37.913
I usually operate in the 90 10 range now instead of 80 20, because I've been doing this for a decade plus and then take full advantage of the 10 without restrictions.
00:20:37.913 --> 00:20:39.076
It's a liberating feeling.
00:20:39.076 --> 00:20:51.054
My wife and I typically, at least once a week, maybe twice a month, we'll go and get ourselves some pastries from beautiful pastry shop in Atlanta and I can go with no reservations because I've stuck to the mantra of the 80-20.
00:20:51.054 --> 00:20:53.046
And again, just remember to live.
00:20:53.046 --> 00:20:53.727
Life is precious.
00:20:53.727 --> 00:20:57.246
Nobody knows that better than you and I and those brothers and sisters in the fire service.
00:20:57.246 --> 00:20:58.607
You have to take advantage of it.
00:20:59.028 --> 00:21:01.252
Yep, and exclusion of.
00:21:01.252 --> 00:21:04.659
I'm not going to eat this because it's bad.
00:21:04.659 --> 00:21:10.685
I'm not going to eat Oreos because, yes, they're not great for you, but if you totally exclude them, what are you going to want?
00:21:10.685 --> 00:21:18.228
You're going to want Oreos and Jeff Ash, who is a health and wellness coach that I've been working with personally, out of Texas.
00:21:18.228 --> 00:21:19.529
He's very much on.
00:21:19.671 --> 00:21:20.392
Honor your hunger.
00:21:20.392 --> 00:21:24.458
If you're hungry for a reason, fuel your body, but fuel it properly.
00:21:24.458 --> 00:21:31.797
Fuel it at the right time and try to respect it by not eating the garbage and make healthier choices as much as you can.
00:21:31.797 --> 00:21:37.193
So let's see, We've talked about the 80-20 rule, We've talked about scaling up and things like that.
00:21:37.193 --> 00:21:46.691
But let's say you have that firefighter who has the desire to be the next Gordon Ramsey of the firehouse or whoever your celebrity chef is.
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