A Day In The Boundless Life - Ben Greenfield

Take a deep breath in through your nose.

And out through your mouth.

Breathing in. Repeat after me. I'm aware of my food, aware of my food. Breath out. I smile at my food.

When I married my wife and I witnessed the joy that comes from cooking from scratch. The deep meditative aspect of it on occasion, the intimacy that you develop with your food. The idea of owning dinner in the way that when you sit down to dinner, you just have an appreciation for every last ingredient that went in there. You know, coming from a guy who used to just dump Kraft macaroni and cheese in the pot or pour myself a bowl of cereal for breakfast.

One of the coolest parts about savoring God's creation is, is all the, the preparation aspects of it. It's just like anything, right? It's the journey, not the destination. Destination is fun. Trust me, destination is going to be mouth watering.

You know, a lot of times this grass fed, grass finished steak tends to be kind of lean without a lot of those nice fatty deposits that we steal. It's a great mouth feel. But these, these steaks actually tend to have a pretty decent fat cap on them.

You're going to be having steaks that bare, bare minimum, you'd pay about 100 to 120 for this cut in any steakhouse.

It's the little details that, that really make your steak stand out, amplify the flavor. Drying steaks and making sure there' not a lot of moisture is going to give us a little bit better crust and caramelization and mouthfeel. It's more important with fish, but it helps with the steaks as well. So what do we got here? We got a coffee, salt, paprika, cayenne rub. Coffee is a very, very interesting rub. Not only for people who drink coffee. Should this be an option for you because you got coffee grounds every morning and it's the spent coffee grounds, not the fresh ones, that taste even better on steak.

It's just environmentally friendly. You're reusing a great ingredient in your kitchen. Coffee is also known as, as one of those foods that has like these anti carcinogenic properties. It's an antioxidant. That's why it's so good for things like, you know, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and just general health overall. But the cool thing is that by the nature of it being an antioxidant, when we heat up these steaks, you know, and there's some smoke and there's some burning and there's some fire, the coffee helps to protect our own bodies against some of that oxidation that occurs in the steak when we're cooking it. So we get, you know, we get the health benefit too.

You don't get a buzz from it. It doesn't, you know, keep you awake. And if you've never had a coffee rub steak, you're in for a treat. And don't worry, you don't, you don't like tasting browns or anything like that. Growing up in a, in a health and fitness industry very focused around protein powders and man in a can drinks and, you know, all sorts of supplements that are supposedly healthy but all come in packaged format, you know, just like Trader Joe's and Costco and Walmart to a certain extent.

You know, when I really began studying how our ancestors ate, how the longest living people on the face of this planet eat. Sardinia and Okinawa and Loma Linda and, you know, in Costa Rica and all these areas around the world where there's a disproportionately high number of centenarians.

Yeah, they call them the blue zones. One glaring aspect of their diets is that everything is just recognizable from the earth. You know, there's not a lot of, not a lot of stuff that you eat out of a package. And when I realized that, when I realized that true health is not shopping at gnc, right. True health is like going out to your backyard and finding an organic farm and going to the farmer's market and hand picking your vegetables. I mean, that's the way that you really, truly feel alive and connected to your food. And that's where you get the energy out of the food. We're all basically batteries. All our cells operate with this very unique electrochemical gradient across the membrane, therefore dictating that in order to be truly healthy, yeah, you want to eat healthy, yeah, you want to move and exercise, but you have to keep your body's battery charged. So now we're finding out things about health we never really knew before. Like infrared light from the sun is amazing for charging up those, you know, those body's batteries with photons of light. Going outside barefoot and just walking barefoot on the surface of the ground is incredible for inflammation, for sleep, for.

Just basically getting what are called negative ions from the surface of the earth which help to keep that battery charged. We know that heat and cold, which are becoming increasingly popular, like the Wim HOF guy and you know, people, people championing saunas now sauna and cold on a regular basis is incredible for the human body, you know. Yet we all hear you're supposed to go to the gym and bench press, but getting in a sauna, getting cold almost every day. And then hydration, but hydration with careful attention paid to how many minerals are in your water, how clean and pure that water is. I tell you what, somebody who's eating healthy and exercising already, if they dial in light exposure, earthing, grounding, heat, cold water and minerals, that's like the next frontier health. And the cool thing is it's kind of like old school, right? It's where our ancestors were from. What we've got now is we got. This one's pretty cool. This. This is a cinnamon cacao. This is the cacao I was talking about. And we got some salt in here, little bit of pepper, but not as much pepper as I put in that one. The pepper that I put in that one is very special. It's called Grains of Paradise. Grains of paradise has been proven in research to speed up your metabolism and to help you to burn fat, which means that these steaks are going to have zero calories in them. Joking little substitutions here and there. You know, drinking an organic biodynamic wine rather than a big old California cab full of 80 plus different preservatives and herbicides and pesticides. Choosing a pepper that actually speeds up your metabolism. If you're interested in things like fat loss and weight control.

You know, choosing. Choosing salts that are super mineral rich. We've got some great salts in here.

What we're gonna do next is one final step on our sweet steaks. Then we're gonna get these guys on the smoker. You can use a really nice honey. You can use a molasses. I really like the way that a little bit of maple tastes for a little bit of a sweet touch on these steaks and just a touch of caramelization. What I do is I just get a little driz.

You know, because, you know, waffles. We're not at Denny's. We're just kind of adding a little bit of flavor here.

Rub that in. Now, in my. In my excitement about getting you guys these steaks started up, I skipped one step. That's not crucial, but that can be nice when you're doing a rub. And that's scoring, meaning that I'll oftentimes cut little check marks up and down in the steak before I rub it. I didn't do that tonight. So we're all gonna die.

We're gonna smoke these bad boys for about an hour. You don't want to waste any of your. Any of your rubs a little extra on there.

Or we could make coffee with it tomorrow morning. These guys just sit in there for an hour. They don't need to be, they don't need to be tended to. They're just deep in smoke, just absorbing all that pecan pellet goodness. We're going to use the same butter sauce for both steaks just because it can't fail thyme and rosemary.

So there was a study that came out a couple of years ago that shows that when blueberries are consumed along with beef, you get an increase in stem cells. And so sometimes when I make this butter, I'll actually put blueberries in the butter and make a blueberry infused butter. Just because you can eat your steak and get younger at the same time. Who doesn't want that?

And the other cool thing about doing an hour long smoke beforehand is the texture of the steak just gets really even throughout. Rookie mistake. Left a little bit of wrapping on that guy and a little bit of wrapping on that guy.

Guys. So this, this basically oxygenates the wine and also structures it. As you pour it through, you get a lot better flavor. I do this with water. With wine, it's basically like, imagine that your wine was tumbling down a fresh mountain spring. It just makes the wine taste alive and amazing. It's like this whole series of, like glass beads that it passes through. I have a, I have a filter for all the water in my whole house that passes through the same table.

This is called the Bolitzer.

Lavender Rose. A little bit of wine, it's like a rose. It's a real man's drink. You know, it's pretty much that of whiskey right here. All the wines I get are organic biodynamic wines, meaning that they grow the grapes without a lot of water. They get super stressed. And that concentrates all the antioxidants in the grapes, but it also lowers the sugar content and slightly lowers the alcohol content of the wine. Then there's no sulfites, there's no herbicides, there's no preservatives, there's no pesticides. It just, it's good, clean. Like you could drink a bottle of this hangover free. How should people think about butter again? I grew up, it was evil. Butter clog your arteries and it's going to kill you. Ben Greenfield says what?

There was a very almost like politically driven movement back when all that vilification of saturated fat occurred because we had a lot of monocropping of soy and wheat and other compounds that we could eventually turn into oil, particularly rapeseed or canola. And we also had the emergence of a lot of these synthetically produced fats like crisp margarine, etc. In the years since then, we've come to find that canola oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil and the like, is incredibly fragile. And when heated or when put under pressure, creates what are called free radicals that have the ability to be able to just rip apart the membranes of your cells. Matter of fact, if somebody came up to me at the county fair and offered me like a stick of cotton candy or a corn dog, I'd always take the cotton candy 10 times out of 10 because that's just sugar, right? I can go for a walk around the fair, maybe go for a ride and scare myself, maybe go do some bench pressing or whatever, and that sugar is in and out of me. But whatever oil that was used to soak and fry that corn dog is going to be what my body uses to make its cell membranes for about the next three months. That's why vegetable oils are such a problem. And when you combine that with the fact that a lot of the harder oils that have been created synthetically, like Crisco and margarine, have a lot of trans fats in them, which we've now found are one of the most horrific things that you can put into your body for cardiovascular health. Dictates that the vilification of saturated fats was really unfortunate because these saturated fats got replaced with highly unnatural synthetic fats and oils that aren't good for the human body. And furthermore, what we found is that most people can handle and actually do very well in terms of the way they build cell membranes, the way they build hormones and things like, you know, testosterone and healthy cholesterols and estrogens, those saturated fats are incredibly important for that.

Grab a plate, bring over your plate, and I will just dish you guys up whatever piece of the steak you're most craving.

Whether you want a bone or a big old chunk of everything.

I know it's all the smoke.

Talking.

Are nice bite sized pieces.

Buddy can grab like a bone piece or another piece.

That look good. And that's a disc, my friends. It's just like a perfect medium variety. So see that? Exactly what we're going for. Nice fatty cat. And again, this one that I'm cutting into right now, this is more kind of like the, the coffee rub. The other ones, the long bones are a little bit more like sweet rub. Are these sizes I'm cutting these into pretty good for a bit. It's like grab one and one and one of the other. Yeah, you'll just have to basically, like, choose your favorite child and decide which flavor that you would like the moment from. But, of course, there's enough for everybody.

Sam.