Host Jaymee Sire had the pleasure of welcoming the award-winning chef, author, producer and philanthropist Andrew Zimmern to the Food Network Obsessed podcast just days before his latest series, Pitmasters, made its debut. Jaymee invited Andrew to discuss his still-to-be-achieved career aspirations, dish on his innovative barbecue competition show and share more about his latest written work: The Blue Food Cookbook: Delicious Seafood Recipes for a Sustainable Future. Read on to catch some of the highlights from the interview and don’t miss the end where we share Andrew’s ideal day of global eating.

His Best Decade Yet

As it turns out, some wine, food and, yes, people do, indeed, get better with age. “You know, last time you were here, you were saying that your 60s were kind of shaping up to be your best decade yet,” Jaymee reminds Andrew. “We're about halfway through that decade. So, is that statement still true? Is it still a fantastic decade so far?”

His answer? So far, so good.

“Without, you know, breaking my arm trying to pat myself on the back, I think the older you get, the smarter you are, if you're paying attention. And I think that's one of the big human frailties out there, right, is that most people don't pay attention. They don't slow down.

“But if we pay attention, I think we learn from the things that didn't work, lean in more to the things that do work. And, so, whether it's my TV stuff, my book stuff, my other businesses that I've started, my relationship with my kid, the things that really matter the most, I think have worked out better, been better, are better. And I'm probably the best version of myself that I've ever been.

“I'm more at peace now than I've ever been,” he continues. “I'm also working more than I've ever been. So, that's interesting; how the hell does that work?”

Slowing Down? Not on the Menu

The multihyphenate has earned endless success throughout his career, but, even so, Andrew isn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. Jaymee asks, “When do you slow down? When do you see that era of your life beginning?”

“I don’t want to,” he replies, without missing a beat.

He explains, ”There's two types of slowing down, right? Do I want to spend more nights sitting around the fire pit at my house or just hanging out on the porch or late mornings or days I don't go into the office and all that kind of stuff? Absolutely.

“Do I want to start slowly but surely peeling back in certain areas of my life and spend more time doing the things that I really truly want to be doing? Absolutely. That is the kind of slowing down that I want to do. But, as far as the work piece, I would like to be working fewer hours but doing more things.”

What are those things, you ask?

“I have eight books I want to write. There's five TV shows I want to make. There's a restaurant concept that if I die and haven't launched it yet, I will regret it for wherever I go for eternity, right? And, so, you get to that point where you're like, 'OK, I want to be doing more of the things that make me happy, but I also have to do certain things because I have the opportunity to do them,'” he shares.

“And then there are the things that I feel I'm obligated to do.”

Chefs Leading the Way

His obligations? Service to others. Andrew has devoted much of his life and his platform to bettering the circumstances of communities around the world.

“The vast part of my life, I was an irredeemable human being and a user of people and taker of things," he shares. "And a lot of that had to do with my alcoholism and drug addiction. When I sobered up, I was told that service work would be a very important component to a healthy and happy life and a successful sobriety.

“I believe in service,” he says. “I believe in doing things for other people. I'm on the boards of six or seven nonprofits, a few of which are big global NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. I actually spend the majority of my time these days doing service work programmatically, mostly in Africa.”

When Jaymee asks Andrew what he thinks his job title is, he answers, “Good global citizen. I consider myself a teacher, and I consider myself a humanitarian.”

He continues, “You know, everybody always wonders, like, how come there's all these chefs out there doing these big things?”

“So many chefs have devoted their lives to doing social justice advocacy and social justice work, at a very, very high level. And it's because people, you know, if you sit in a kitchen and you're the chef in that kitchen, no matter which way you look, 360 degrees, everywhere you turn is a different issue. There's job and pay equity over here and gender equity over here and immigration rights over here and food waste here and hunger over there and climate crisis over there. It all comes into our kitchens. Farming, all of these big, big issues that we're trying to deal with today on a national, international level — energy consumption, alternative energies — are all things that we discuss every day in our kitchen. And so chefs, if they are aware and go slowly and pay attention, can't help but become educated to what the problem is. And we are very naturally problem solvers, right?

“That is what we do, right? We got 20 portions of salmon, and we have a full house tonight. What are we going to replace it with? You have to figure out what's going to happen at 6:30, 7 o'clock when that order for salmon comes in and you don't have one, right? Are we switching to striped bass? What are we doing? You have to be a problem solver. You solve 1,000 problems a day. I think that's why chefs have naturally gravitated into that leadership role when it comes to global issues.”

AZ in Action

Jaymee tasks Andrew with building a custom action figure. “We're going to give you a plane ticket, one dish, one unusual ingredient that you love and your weapon would be your chef's tool of choice,” she says. “So, what are those four accessories that we're seeing in your superhero action figure box?”

His plane ticket? Botswana. “It's the place that I find to be the most soul-stirring with the kindest people, the most incredible wildlife. I think it's the most magical place on earth.”

His dish choice hails from Botswana, too. “Oh my gosh,” he begins. “I would want to be holding something that I ate there that I'm dying to eat again, which is the fatty skin of a giant porcupine.”

You read that correctly, friend. Giant porcupine skin.

“That’s insane,” replies Jaymee. (And the collective!)

“When we were there, we hunted giant porcupines with the kids in the village. And this is like a 50-, 60-pound porcupine.

“It's like a giant piece of pork belly; it's so delicious. It blew my mind. And to think that it was a porcupine, I'm just like, oh my gosh.”

His ingredient? “I'm gonna say lemon. I don't think I can live without citrus. I use it in everything, there's a thousand different variations.”

And, finally, his tool: a very, very, very big pot. “I find that wherever I go, and this is not a metaphor, though it could be, the pot isn't big enough. And I'm like, can I please have a bigger pot?”

Pitmasters

The inaugural season of Pitmasters premiered in July, and AZ offered dishy behind-the-scenes details on the series’ conception with Jaymee on Food Network Obsessed.

“I got a call from a friend of mine, and he said, I'm producing a competition show. Would you be interested in sort of being a quasi-host, head judge kind of character on the show? And I said, ‘Sure, how's it going to be different?’

“And I got the pitch, and I literally in five minutes said, ‘Yep, absolutely.’”

Jaymee asks what led him to such a quick decision. AZ explains that he trusted the production company, Alfred Street, and admired the work of partners Dan Cutforth and Nan Straight, who created Top Chef. “I knew they knew how to tell stories and I knew they wanted to be different,” he says.

“If you make everyone hop on one leg and not use a knife and only use canned ingredients, I mean, it's cute, but it's only cute for so long, in my opinion, right? So, we started out with, you know, 12 teams or whatever of some of the best pitmasters in America. OK, that's a great starting place.”

From there, the show goes where no show has gone before.

“So you have people, all of them can cook, right? OK, now let's build a town on the side of a mountain in Utah and give everyone kind of like a lean-to. And in this town, let's put a store, like a hardware store, and in that store is every piece of kind of shovel, chains, hooks, rebar, cinder blocks, big metal slabs that could be used as planches, could be used as a wall of the earth of it, right?

“You let your imagination run wild. So that they can constantly be going to this store as the gameplay allows them to, to be finding pieces of equipment or earning pieces of, or the right to go in there, to start building an outdoor kitchen.”

Oh, and one minor detail: “The fire has to be going for eight straight days.”

“So we need them in teams of two, right? So who's gonna sleep when? You can't go eight days without sleep.

“You have 18 hours, you're gonna be doing whole-animal cookery with two sides, and everyone goes off and does it and halfway through we surprise them with like, 'OK, take this piece of wild game and make me one perfect bite,' right? Well, sometimes you got to go wake up your partner, right? So, it's a thrilling and exciting show.

“Obviously, at each sequence of the competition, somebody has to go home. Ultimately, there is a final showdown between the two Pitmasters. But what we see over the course of these eight episodes is some ingenious cooking. And I mean just brilliant stuff. We have four fantastic judges who all really know their stuff. I mean, that's the other part that really swayed me.”

Other ways Pitmasters is unique from its counterparts? Viewers get a front-row seat to the development of each dish. When thinking of other competition shows, Andrew explains what was missing. “You weren't clued into what the decision-making was on the part of the cook. And the other problem that I found was that most barbecue shows were really just live-fire shows.

“This is, I think, the kind of competition show that allows teams to show off all of their talents. And I'm not just saying this because I'm on here telling you about it,” he says. “People's jaws are going to be on the floor when they see what all these teams do with their food in these cook-offs. Our competitions are in 24-hour chunks. It's absolutely brilliant. And they have to butcher as well. It is mind-boggling, some of the stuff that is made, and most importantly, how it's made.”

Eating Blue

Andrew’s most recent book release, The Blue Food Cookbook: Delicious Seafood Recipes for a Sustainable Future, is a must-buy for anyone interested in preparing seafood at home.

Jaymee’s first question: “What is blue food?”

“Blue food is all the food that comes out of our oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and also aquaculture systems, terrestrial and at sea,” Andrew explains. “I made a documentary series about two years ago called Hope in the Water. Intuitive Content, my production company, made it. Beard-nominated, Emmy-nominated. Really, really proud of that documentary series. And the idea was, let's take, you know, 12 big problems and let's find 12 solution-makers and tell those stories, right? Let's let people know that if we want to protect our oceans, we need to produce out of them at the same time. We can't just shut the system off that feeds 2 billion people around the world as their main source of protein, and has a billion people working on it, right?”

The Blue Food Cookbook is a natural progression of Hope in the Water. “It’s a very big book in the sense that it's essentially two in one. It's 145 fantastic recipes. There's also about 125 pages kind of describing, you know, answering all those questions. What's better, you know, fresh or frozen, wild or farmed? What are the issues involved? We wanted to make a bible that would be good for the next 10 years.

“So, if you're interested in anything to do with anything to do with food from our waters, this is what you should buy,” he says. “This book gives the home cook the confidence and the permission to cook more food from the water. If we eat more food from the water, our planet is healthier, and we as human beings are healthier. Fish and shellfish has the lowest impact of any animal protein on planet Earth when it comes to impact on our environment. And it has the most health benefits of any animal-based protein on our planet. So, it's like we need to be eating more of it, and by doing so, we'll protect our environment as well. And I couldn't be prouder of this. You know, Barton Seaver, who's brilliant, is … He and I wrote this together in collaboration with Fed by Blue, and it was just a wonderful project to work on.”

AZ's Perfect Food Day

Jaymee ended the episode by asking Andrew to dish on his perfect food day.

“We asked you this last time. We'll ask you again. We'll see if the answers have changed,” she begins. “The question is, what would be on the menu for your perfect, ideal food day? We're talking, take us through breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert. Do you want to throw in snacks? You can, but essentially there's no rules.

“So you can travel, time-travel, spend these meals with whomever you would like. It's your perfect day. We just want to hear what you're eating, who you're eating with.”

Breakfast: “It starts out in the morning. I would like to have breakfast with my grandparents and parents, all of whom are no longer with us. And I want my son to meet my grandparents, which he never had the chance to do. And I'm a nice Jewish kid from New York. So, it would be the full Russ & Daughters spread. I mean, that's what six generations of my family have eaten with Nicky and Josh's family and their ancestors. So we, the Zimmerns, Tuppermans, Fettermans have a unique bond that way. So yeah, that's how the day would start.”

Lunch: “Lunch, I would probably want at the beginning of summer in Venice, Italy. And there would have to have been some sort of ferry or problem or some other issue that prevented the 300,000 people that descend into that town each day. They would have to have been held back.”

“OK, so you have it to yourself?” Jaymee asks.

“Not to myself, I want other people around,” AZ clarifies. “But, just like, not like slanging people. I don't want to have to wait anywhere. And, you know, there's three or four restaurants I would want to stop in, a couple of small little bars to eat some chiquetti and experience the Venetian seafood the way it was meant to be experienced,” he says. “I think it's one of the most beautiful eating cities in the world. And I love seafood lunches that come out of the waters of the Veneto. And so that for me would probably be the lunchtime meal.”

Dinner: "I think for dinner, I would want to go to Hong Kong. And I mean, look, I could name-check six, seven, eight restaurants I'd stop at and do a progressive meal at. But, you know, to experience the depth and breadth of Chinese Straits, Malay and yes, even Pan-Asian cuisines that are represented in Hong Kong with an exceedingly high skill set, that's probably where I would want it. It's probably the intersection of the best of the best that's right there."

Dessert: “I time-travel to an ice cream shop in Eugene, Oregon, called Prince Pücklers. The owner of that place must love coffee ice cream, because he has six or seven different types of coffee ice cream, like espresso ice cream, cafe au lait, Vietnamese ice coffee. And coffee ice cream is my favorite dessert,” he reveals. “I would want to have a little tasting bowl with little scoops of all the different coffee ice creams that he has there.”

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