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Topics:
Intro to Pete and Sarah and their business, Pete’s Paleo [3:51]
Pete’s top 3 tips for home cooks [10:34]
Grass-fed meat, cheap cuts, and respecting the whole animal [16:52]
Pete’s story of health recovery [27:46]
Pete’s Paleo Bacon [36:03]
Real. Skin Products [40:16]
Sarah’s leap from corporate America to do Real. and Pete’s Paleo full time [45:46]
Pete and Sarah’s next big venture, The Omnivore’s Pet [54:15]
Links:
Find out more about Pete’s Paleo, real. skincare and order online using this link.
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Liz Wolfe: Hey, everyone! Liz and Diane here with a few special guests on the Balanced Bites Podcast #93. I’m super excited. I feel like a schoolgirl at a slumber party because we have two of our favorite people on board with us today. I’m sitting here in my room kind of like… you know, picture that scene from Grease where they’re going to pierce Sandy’s ears and they’re all hanging out on the bed. You know, me and my girlfriends.
Diane Sanfilippo: I’ve never seen that movie. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Liz Wolfe: Dang it!
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m just kidding! I’m totally kidding. Sometimes I just want to leave you hanging in your pop culture world and pretend like I have no idea what you’re talking about. Most of the time I don’t, but this time I do.
Liz Wolfe: The problem with that is I’ll just keep going. You have to jump in. Otherwise, I’ll just keep rolling. So we’re here with Pete and Sarah from Pete’s Paleo, and we’re really excited. They’re some good buddies of ours. Diane, do you want to do any intro on Pete and Sarah before we get going?
Diane Sanfilippo: Hmm… when did we first meet these two?
Liz Wolfe: These two knuckleheads.
Diane Sanfilippo: I met them doing the book tour? Yeah.
Sarah Servold: Was it that or Thanksgiving?
Pete Servold: No, it was before that because we had met…
Diane Sanfilippo: No. Do you think I would’ve invited you guys to my house if we hadn’t met before?
Pete Servold: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah Servold: Oh, yeah, that’s true.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think I met you guys in October.
Pete Servold: It was October.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. I did the LA-San Diego book tour, and you guys were awesome and totally came out to that. And then I think Liz and I both met you in January when you came to both of our seminars and catered the seminars, which was amazing.
Liz Wolfe: Amazing.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, so we knew we’d be friends. But yeah, I think it was after we just quickly met and I invited you guys over for Thanksgiving brunch after a workout at Brazen. That was fun.
Sarah Servold: Paleo love at first sight.
Pete Servold: Yes, paleo love at first sight. We did a WOD together and we brought you duck fat.
Diane Sanfilippo: These guys brought me, like, a gallon of duck fat, which I actually paleo-ed it forward. Like that? See what I did there?
Sarah Servold: Nice.
Diane Sanfilippo: I gave Bill and Hayley, like, a quart of duck fat from that.
Pete Servold: Ooo, nice.
Sarah Servold: Keeping in within the tribe. I like it.
Diane Sanfilippo: Heck, yeah. And I’m pretty sure you guys gave me a huge compliment that morning at brunch about my kitchen-sink leftover Thanksgiving frittata.
Sarah Servold: Mmm.
Pete Servold: It was good.
Sarah Servold: Yeah.
Pete Servold: It was the right consistency, which is all that matters when you bake eggs.
Diane Sanfilippo: All right, good. I don’t know how I did that. I just kind of mixed it and threw it in the oven, but OK.
Liz Wolfe: That probably means I’m never having them over ever.
Sarah Servold: We’ll cook for you!
Liz Wolfe: OK, yeah.
Sarah Servold: And by “we,” I mean Pete.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, exactly!
Pete Servold: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: Sarah will entertain you while Peter cooks.
Sarah Servold: The collective “we.”
Liz Wolfe: The royal “we.”
Intro to Pete and Sarah and their business, Pete’s Paleo [3:51]
Diane Sanfilippo: So why don’t you guys give us a quick introduction for our listeners who don’t know who you are?
Pete Servold: I’m Pete Servold. I own Pete’s Paleo with Sarah. I went to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Atlanta, and I got super lucky right out of school working at a restaurant called Restaurant Eugene. It was complete farm to table. People would bring in whole animals. We had people dropping off fish directly from the Gulf Coast every day and just learning how to take what came from the farm and sitting around with a group of people and writing the menu every day. So the menu was dictated by the farm, which is what I think paleo should be. And I met Sarah a couple years after that after being a chef, and she insisted I do this thing called CrossFit, and then she made me do this thing called paleo, and the idea for the business was born right away.
Sarah Servold: Well, for me, it was pretty awesome because I had started dating a chef and was doing CrossFit and thinking: OK, how am I going to not get overwhelmed with learning how to cook paleo? Well, I just so happen to be dating this amazing, talented man.
Pete Servold: By not learning anything other than to say: Do this. I’m pretty.
Sarah Servold: With a smile and thank you. So even though Peter was pretty much going to bed around 3 o’clock in the morning after getting off work, I was still getting him up at 6 to go workout with me, and people in the gym saw what we were cooking and what we were eating for themselves, and they were still kind of eating grilled chicken and steamed broccoli, and they were somewhat jealous of… you want to give a sample meal, maybe?
Pete Servold: I think the one that really got them was I did a sautéed elk chili with roasted black pepper fennel and heirloom tomatoes.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, yeah, just that?
Sarah Servold: Yeah, just that. No big deal. So Pete’s Paleo was born.
Pete Servold: And so now we get essentially the same thing as I did when I worked at a fine dining restaurant. I call all the local farms, and I have relationships with the local ranchers and hog farmers and ask what’s going on and what they have, and then I write a new menu every week, and we make the food in our kitchen, and we package it, and we ship it out all over the country.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, so the shipping is kind of a new thing, so people are probably wondering: What?! Why haven’t I heard of this before? You guys were pretty much locally based in the Southern California area, correct?
Pete Servold: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: And you’ve been delivering to a bunch of gyms, right?
Sarah Servold: We would’ve been happy almost just servicing Southern California, but somehow through this paleo community the word spread about us and we just kept getting requests all over the country from Iowa to Minnesota to St. Simons Island in Georgia just saying: How can I get your food? So we put our company in a position that we can now ship nationwide, and we ship everything fresh on dry ice so that you don’t lose any of the quality of the food when it’s frozen, and so far, so good.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s amazing. Just as kind of a little side note, I don’t think people really understand how much goes into the food prep situation. You know, there aren’t a lot of businesses out there doing this. There are more now. They’re kind of popping up all over the place. That’s what seems to be happening. But you guys are really doing something different because I’ve seen some paleo meal services before. There are some that are more local to people, but not everybody’s doing it with the highest quality ingredients, and that’s the thing that I think is really, really unique and different about you guys. What made you feel like that was a really important thing to kind of keep your integrity around?
Pete Servold: You know, for me, food is life, and it’s so real and sustainable. It’s just this thing that it’s a such an honor to get the trust from people to feed them, and to take that lightly or to take it as just a business endeavor where you’re trying to make money as your sole motivation is really backwards, and it’s why I became a chef, was to feed people really good food and just kind of satisfy that carnal need for that. And when I learned about paleo and the more that I learned about it, the more that I realized this is exactly what I went to school for. This is what I want to cook. It’s all these different proteins, using every type of animal that’s out there so that you’re getting this wide variety of vitamins and minerals and nutrients, and cooking the vegetables that are grown around you when they’re growing and not saying: Well, it’s January and I want to cook asparagus, so I’m going to cook asparagus. We started the company with that mindset, like we’re just going to make the best food that I know how to make, and we’ll set the prices based on being able to make the company sustainable and then go forward from there, and then if we’ve failed, we’ve failed, but at least it was doing things as good as I could possibly do them.
Diane Sanfilippo: Well, I have a ton of respect for what you’re doing because as some people listening may know, I actually did have a meal delivery business back in 2008. It was something that I started. It was gluten free, everything was organic, and I only did grass-fed meat, you know, organic poultry, that kind of thing. And it was really hard, and I couldn’t make it work. I wasn’t a trained chef. Who the heck did I think I was?! But even coming from that sort of experience, too, I have that much more respect for it, so I think it’s amazing, and I think it’s really awesome that you guys are keeping the integrity of the food and the quality really, really high because it’s one thing to just kind of go out and get “paleo food,” like what you guys were saying the chicken, broccoli, coconut oil – that’s kind of Liz’s joke all the time –
Pete Servold: Yeah, exactly.
Diane Sanfilippo: Or even just running to Whole Foods and getting a rotisserie chicken and some salad, but this really kind of takes it to that next level where even if it’s not local to the person buying it in Georgia because you’re sourcing it in California, at least they know that you sourced it locally for you from a purveyor that you trust, right?
Pete Servold: Yeah, exactly.
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s not coming from overseas. It’s not mass market off of a huge industrial food truck. It’s really done the right way.
Pete’s top 3 tips for home cooks [10:34]
So let’s talk a little bit more about some tips and tricks that you might have for home cooks because I think it’s awesome for people to learn about your business, but I would love for them to learn from you a little bit more.
Pete Servold: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Diane Sanfilippo: We had the pleasure of learning from you at PaleoFX, and I think all of us, myself, Bill and Hayley, I think, George, and all of us food blogger/health coach/nutritionists were just like: Yeah, that was our favorite presentation because we learned two or three amazing tricks that just we’ll use every single day now. So why don’t you tell us maybe the top three tricks or tips that you want to share with people about just making cooking a little bit easier for themselves?
Pete Servold: I would say first and foremost, especially for paleo people, is don’t be scared. Don’t be so intimidated. It’s a learning process. The reason why I can debone a chicken as fast as I can and take apart a case of onions as fast as I can is because I’ve done it thousands of times. And cooking is a craft. It’s something that you just have to go out there and just do, and if you burn an onion or burn a couple squashes or something like that during the process, it’s $2. Just buy extra. And don’t be afraid to try new things. Grab the vegetables that you don’t recognize when you go to the grocery store. That’s what YouTube and Google and all that stuff is for.
Sarah Servold: Join a CSA.
Pete Servold: Yeah, join a CSA. That would be the first piece of advice. The second thing would be to salt throughout the cooking process, not at the very end. And if people watch the amount of salt that goes into processed foods, you’d be really kind of grossed out because salt is cheap and it’s a preservative, so it’s used in a lot of food to an overabundance. But when you’re cooking everything from scratch, every time you add a new ingredient to the pan, you want to give it just a little pinch of salt, just a tiny amount, and what that does is it pulls moisture that’s in the vegetables or the meat out of the food, and it allows the food to cook in its own sauces and allows things to kind of intermingle together.
Liz Wolfe: Whoa, wait. OK, so you want those flavors to come out?
Pete Servold: Yes.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, my gosh. Damn. This is so good.
Diane Sanfilippo: Liz’s brain just exploded all over the computer. But wait, let me ask you, isn’t there one vegetable that you’re not supposed to salt right away?
Pete Servold: Uh… which one?
Diane Sanfilippo: I thought you were not supposed to salt mushrooms right away. Is that true or not true?
Pete Servold: Well, it depends. My guess behind that is because mushrooms are, like, 99% water.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.
Pete Servold: And so the idea being if you don’t salt them right away that they’ll brown up on the outside and be moist on the inside. But that just sounds like a bunch of malarkey to me.
Diane Sanfilippo: I don’t know. It’s just something I heard.
Pete Servold: I can definitely understand the thought process behind it, but I think that’s crazy. Actually my favorite vegetable stock is made from mushrooms. I put mushrooms in almost first every time I cook with them because I want the moisture out of them because I want it to flavor the rest of the food because mushrooms have that umami; that fifth flavor comes from mushrooms. It’s that earthy kind of round-mouth, kind of sexy feel, and I want that.
Liz Wolfe: Ooo.
Diane Sanfilippo: Liz is like: What did he say? What?
Liz Wolfe: I totally know umami but only because it has to do with The Karate Kid.
Pete Servold: Oh man, that’s awesome.
Diane Sanfilippo: And again I’m left in the pop culture darkness. I’ve seen The Karate Kid. Why do I have no idea what you’re talking about?
Liz Wolfe: It doesn’t even matter.
Pete Servold: I think you may have misheard Mr. Miyagi.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, something got lost in translation, I guess.
Pete Servold: So I definitely understand the thought process behind where that advice may have come from, but I disagree. For me, it’s always like just add a little bit of salt. You salt things so that they taste good. And when you’re cooking from scratch, you really don’t have to worry about it, as far as the amount of salt and stuff that you’re putting in the food.
And the third thing – and this is a big one – is get a good knife. I good sharp chef’s knife will make you want to be in the kitchen because when you have a good knife and you take down vegetables or you’re taking apart a pork butt or something like that, with a good knife it’s easy. The knife will slide through the vegetables, and it’s a lot easier to get those nice, pretty cuts that you see on TV or at the restaurant, and it just makes the whole process more enjoyable. You can get it sharpened professionally twice a year for, like, 10 bucks, is what it normally costs. And it’ll last forever. I have a couple different knives. But really, one good chef’s knife for 80 or 100 bucks, it’ll last forever and it’ll be the best tool that you’ll ever have in the kitchen.
Sarah Servold: People are so scared of that. I think my mom, bless her heart, she still cuts everything with a steak knife because she’s just so scared of a large chef’s knife. She doesn’t know how to hold it. She doesn’t know what to do with it.
Diane Sanfilippo: You hook grip the chef’s knife.
Sarah Servold: Yes!
Pete Servold: It is pretty similar to the hook grip.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s just what I call it because I think it’s funny to tell people to hook grip their knife. Hook grip saves lives.
Pete Servold: Yeah, exactly. What do I do here with this acorn squash? Hook grip!
Diane Sanfilippo: Just hook grip.
Pete Servold: Knuckles down and hook grip.
Sarah Servold: A rough hook-grip chop.
Diane Sanfilippo: OK. Liz, since you’re our resident…
Liz Wolfe: Idiot? I’m the village idiot.
Diane Sanfilippo: No! I did not say that.
Sarah Servold: Not on this show. Sarah’s here!
Diane Sanfilippo: Cooking… I don’t know.
Pete Servold: Newbie.
Diane Sanfilippo: Newb.
Grass-fed meat, cheap cuts, and respecting the whole animal [16:52]
Liz Wolfe: Well, yeah, I have a question for Pete and Sarah. When we were all talking in California about what you had prepared for the workshop group that day, you were talking about making use of the more difficult cuts, the less common cuts, and the ones that people aren’t necessarily comfortable with. And so it’s kind of a two-part question. What are the best ways to make those things palatable, as you do such a phenomenal job of doing? And also, as far as cooking grass-fed and how those cuts can kind of turn out a little bit more tough than maybe some of us would prefer that they turn out to be, do you have any advice just to throw out there for… me?
Pete Servold: Yeah, so I’ll work backwards. I’ll go to the grass-fed thing first. So two things with the grass-fed: It is a very different flavor compared to what most Americans think of when they think of beef.
Sarah Servold: And texture.
Pete Servold: And texture. But as far as the flavor goes, it’s tough because it’s, like, that’s what cow tastes like. Grass-fed beef, that’s what cow tastes like. We are used to corn-fed beef, and if you feed a ruminant grain forever, it doesn’t really taste like a ruminant anymore. So the biggest thing to kind of counteract that is to start with some ground grass-fed or either get a brisket or a chuck or something like that and braise it for a long time and you can braise it in a really flavorful liquid, like a pho-style broth or curry or roasted garlic, something like that that’ll kind of offset the flavor. Or with ground, you could do a roasted garlic hamburger. You can fold kind of whatever flavors that you want into the burger to get people to try it. Once you’ve had it a few times and your taste buds have become re-accustomed to what your brain anticipates, because your brain is anticipating a certain type of flavor, and when it gets something different, it feels way off, and so once you’ve had it a few times and your brain isn’t quite anticipating the corn-fed beef, it’ll change your reaction to it.
And then as far as with steaks and things like that, the biggest thing is how you cut them to keep them tender. If you look at a steak when it’s sitting on the resting board, you’ll see the muscle lines in the steak, and they just look like little grooves, and they’ll typically have a pretty straight pattern, and what you want to always do is slice exactly perpendicular to that. I hope I’m not getting too technical for an audio thing, but basically find those muscle lines and cut exactly across them at a 90-degree angle, and that literally lets the steak get pulled apart in your mouth.
Diane Sanfilippo: We can post a link to YouTube on cutting against the grain or something.
Pete Servold: OK, yeah. So basically you want to cut against the grain. And as far as using the lesser known cuts goes, that is old-school French chef to the bone. Our job as chefs is to take every piece of the animal and use it and make it taste good. I think it’s a Fergus Henderson quote I saw in the Beyond Bacon book, like it’s only polite that if you’re going to knock an animal on its head and head and eat it that you use every piece.
Liz Wolfe: Love that.
Pete Servold: It’s really important. And the art of a chef is to take the cheap cut of meat that nobody wants and make it taste delicious, and you do that through different cooking methods. Most commonly it’s braising because you just cook it forever slowly, and the muscle just kind of falls apart, and you get beautiful braised brisket or shank or things like that. And it’s funny that in the past 10 years in kind of the popularization of chefs as celebrities and things like that, you have things like brisket and osso buco and sweetbreads which is an organ meat that it used to be that nobody could rid of it, and now it’s hard for me to get.
Sarah Servold: Except for the Jews.
Pete Servold: Except for the Jews.
Sarah Servold: The Jews were buying it.
Diane Sanfilippo: Oh, yeah, headcheese, all that.
Pete Servold: Yeah, exactly.
Diane Sanfilippo: In the house!
Pete Servold: Yeah, I was invited into the tribe.
Sarah Servold: Honorary member.
Pete Servold: Yeah, I knew how to cook briskets. But yeah, one, as a paleo person, you have to respect the whole animal because it’s proper husbandry, and two, as a chef, it’s a pride thing that if you give me something that everybody else would throw in the trash, I want to make it delicious and I want to be able to sell it for money because that’s how they made money.
Liz Wolfe: I love the respect for the animal because I think that’s what’s been most enriching for me with this whole journey, is not just reclaiming my health but also feeling more connected to my food as if it’s more of a respectful relationship because before, I think I was a really mindless eater.
Pete Servold: I think it’s how we’re conditioned to be. You go to the grocery store and it’s just the same three cuts of meat and it’s in a Styrofoam container and you don’t really think about it unless it goes up a dollar a pound, and then you’re like: Hey! Why?!
Liz Wolfe: Then you’re all mad.
Pete Servold: Then you’re all mad and you don’t think about the food chain or the fact that the market dictates food prices, stuff like that. But yeah, Thomas Keller is my favorite chef, by far. He owns French Laundry in Napa and Per Se in New York City, and he got his start in Hudson Valley. And he ordered a bunch of rabbits one time and the rabbit farmer showed up with a cage full of bunnies, and he killed one and eviscerated it, and he was like: OK, that’s how it’s done. And he left.
Liz Wolfe: Wow.
Pete Servold: And Thomas Keller had to take care of the rest, and the first one wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t go well, and he realized that as a chef it’s his job to put every ounce of his talent and skill into every piece of that animal because that animal gave itself so that we could have a delicious meal. And that’s part of the process, and that’s OK, but what’s not OK is to waste any of it and to overcook it or screw it up. Part of being a chef is to use every piece and to use it as respectfully as you should.
Sarah Servold: We need to reconnect our relationship with food and where it came from.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think what you guys were saying about veggies and getting the CSA, my favorite thing has been getting either whole animals or quarter animals, even half. I just got a quarter of a cow.
Pete Servold: Nice.
Diane Sanfilippo: So there are cuts in the freezer that I’m like: What am I going to do with this? And what’s actually funny is that a lot of the farmers when they go to take it wherever it’s going to be butchered, they assume we don’t want the bones or the organ meats. I was like: Wait a minute. What are you doing with those bones? I want them! Give them to me! So they packaged them up as soap bones, and they’ve been awesome to cut the liver. You know, beef liver is pretty huge. They ask you how you want it cut up, and they’ve been awesome to cut that into, like, 8-ounce portions so I can defrost it at a reasonable pace. So I think it’s really cool if people are looking into veggie shares, also look into the meat shares. It’ll push you outside your comfort zone a little bit and challenge you to make these different cuts, but what I think is probably the best part is that you end up getting those really expensive steaks for, like, a quarter of the price per pound because you’re buying everything else. I posted a steak on my page maybe a couple weeks ago on Facebook, and I said I don’t eat steak that often, and someone thought I meant because it was red meat, and I was like: No, I just don’t purchase steaks because I’m cheap and I buy ground meat and that’s what I feel like I can afford except when I get the cow for, like, 5 bucks a pound or 6 bucks a pound or 7 or whatever it is, I’m getting ribeyes for a week straight.
Pete Servold: Yeah, it’s really cool. You make the use out of the whole animal, and just like you said, it forces you to try new things and to learn how to handle the whole animal because it’s like: Well, I paid for this and the animal was butchered, so now I have to eat it.
Diane Sanfilippo: What’s your favorite cut to cook? Of meat?
Liz Wolfe: Of meat. What else could you be talking about?
Pete Servold: Of cow?
Diane Sanfilippo: What’s your favorite cut of zucchini to cook? Of just kidding.
Pete Servold: I think eight-ball zucchini is my favorite.
Diane Sanfilippo: I don’t even know what that is.
Pete Servold: It’s this beautiful, cute, little round zucchinis that I get from Suzie’s Farm here in San Diego. They’re the size of an eight ball and really, really pretty. You know, I would say that my favorite cut of cow would have to either be the tail or the brisket.
Diane Sanfilippo: Where does the brisket come from?
Pete Servold: The brisket is like the back left flank area.
Liz Wolfe: We have a couple briskets hanging out, Pete, a couple grass-fed briskets hanging out, and we have a smoker, and we have an oven, and we have a grill. Which one do we use?
Sarah Servold: MacGyver, go!
Pete Servold: All three.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, my God. We’re going to ruin it. And they were expensive. Those were indulgent cuts to get outside of the whole… we didn’t order a half a cow to get those. We actually bought them individually, so I don’t want to mess it up.
Pete Servold: OK. Yeah, so don’t mess it up. No pressure! The biggest thing with the brisket is you want to trim some of the fat off because it does have quite a bit of fat on it. And save that fat. You can render it and cook with it. What we would do at the restaurant when we would get whole animals in is we would save all the fat trimmings and we would render it down, and then when we had a pork dish with eggplant and roasted cauliflower and rutabaga, all three of those vegetables got cooked in the pork fat from the same animal. So you’re just wrapping your mouth in the flavor of the dish.
Diane Sanfilippo: Mmm, porky goodness.
Pete Servold: Exactly! I would definitely smoke one of the briskets, but keep in mind that you only need to smoke it for a couple hours to really get the flavor. The smoke is only going to penetrate so much, so smoke it for a few hours and then throw it in the oven and braise it the rest of the way because that’ll get you the smoky flavor and you won’t run the risk of drying it out on the smoker, which can happen. But as far as the grill goes, I would stay away from the grill with brisket because that’s something that’s going to really benefit from slow, low-heat cooking and really suffer from quick, high-heat cooking. It would just be way too tough. You need to take the time to break the connective tissues down.
Liz Wolfe: See, man? The world needs you people.
Pete Servold: Yeah, chefs do have a purpose!
Pete’s story of health recovery [27:46]
Liz Wolfe: Yeah. I love it. Yeah, so I know this is not my podcast, but I do want to ask one more question about your individual story, Pete. I was saying I think we’re all connected to this world of paleo eating for different reasons, but I know you have a very personal story of health recovery.
Pete Servold: Yeah. I think from when I was 17 or 18 years old, and I’m 29 now, and basically for 7 years until I met Sarah, I was in the restaurant industry in one way or another. I’ve been a bartender, server, manager, chef – you name it, I did it. And for me, what that ended up meaning was that bourbon and Taco Bell were two of my four food groups.
Liz Wolfe: Red Bull and cigarettes? Been there.
Pete Servold: Yeah, Red Bull. I mean, you’re supposed to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and be healthy. Yeah, bourbon and beer and all that stuff’s totally good for you.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, yeah.
Pete Servold: And I think I was just a guy in my 20s, so I was invincible. And right after I met Sarah was the night that I thought my heart was going to explode.
Liz Wolfe: Awww, but you’re not saying that in a cute way.
Pete Servold: No! No, no, no. I was in love, but my heart had other plans. I woke up at about 4 in the morning one night when I was 26, and I felt like someone was stabbing me in my chest every time my heart beat, and I had a fever of about 104 degrees, and I didn’t know what to do. Somehow my mom was in town on business, so just like any grown man, I ran to my mother, and she took me from her hotel to the hospital. And they did a bunch of tests, and it turns out I had pericarditis. And what that is, is you have this sac around your heart called the pericardium and it’s full of fluid and it’s supposed to basically allow your heart to beat very easily, and mine had become inflamed from any number of things just beating my body down. I had constant heartburn, so they thought that maybe my esophagus had become so inflamed that it had rubbed up against the pericardium. Basically, long story short, it was a lifestyle issue. I had to get an emergency dose of steroids so that it wasn’t squeezing my heart shut. You know, I’m 26 years old, and the doctor walked out of the room after giving me the diagnosis, and I just started crying. And I’m like: How is my heart broken already? And I realized that I wasn’t invincible and that I couldn’t live like this anymore, and I didn’t think it was an accident that it coincided with meeting this beautiful woman that was telling me about CrossFit and paleo, and so I just really took it seriously.
Sarah Servold: But he had told you that this was going to be an ongoing issue.
Pete Servold: Yeah, that was the other thing, is the cardiologist basically said: Now that this has happened, it’s going to keep happening. It’ll happen probably once a decade, and then it’ll start happening more and more often. You have scar tissue, and there’s just nothing you can do. And so I went back in for my regular echocardiogram that I have to get every 6 months because of that condition 3 months ago? It was about 3 months ago. And the first two guys that looked at it thought that I was the wrong patient, and then finally the big echocardiologist-looker guy came in…
Sarah Servold: That’s a technical term.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, that’s his title.
Pete Servold: He had a really long name tag. Finally, he said: What’s your diet and what’s your exercise routine? Because you have no scar tissue, your resting heart rate is that of an athlete, and you don’t look like you’ve ever had pericarditis.
Sarah Servold: I think he has our Pete’s Paleo flyers up in his office, actually.
Pete Servold: Yeah, the cardiologist actually sells our food now.
Liz Wolfe: Awesome.
Pete Servold: Basically through diet alone I fixed the scar tissue on the sac that surrounded my heart, and so that for me was… There’s nothing that paleo hasn’t given me but my health. To go from being 26 and feeling like I was going to die to being 29 and being in the best shape of my life was pretty damn awesome.
Liz Wolfe: That’s phenomenal. Not only what Diane said earlier about how you guys are really doing your business right and sourcing responsibly and ethically and whatnot, but you’re not just in this because paleo is exploding. You’re in this because paleo has changed your lives and your health, and I just think that’s awesome.
Pete Servold: Yeah. It’s definitely been crazy because we did it to have something to do. We wanted to own our own business because of how much it had meant for us, and then in the past year and a half of running the business, we’re like: Holy crap, this is huge!
Sarah Servold: It actually works!
Pete Servold: There are a lot of people that are doing this now!
Sarah Servold: Well, I feel like at first we really thought this was a way to lose weight and perform better in the gym when we were just doing it personally, and then with Pete’s heart issue and I’ve gone off maybe a medicine cabinet full of medicines from sleep issues to polycystic ovary syndrome to digestion issues. I mean, the two of us, we didn’t even have to move two books from our bathroom from our last house because we could just dump all those old medicines.
Pete Servold: Yeah, we just moved, and we threw out what we had in an entire medicine cabinet, and none of it made the move with us.
Diane Sanfilippo: Woohoo!
Sarah Servold: That’s pretty empowering.
Pete Servold: Yeah, it was awesome.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, late 20s, early 30s…
Sarah Servold: Mid… 30s…
Diane Sanfilippo: Even obviously older than that, it’s become the norm that people have multiple prescriptions. I’m serious!
Pete Servold: I know.
Diane Sanfilippo: I’ve definitely been in homes where I’m not opening medicine cabinets, they’re either just sitting out or someone has a glass medicine cabinet, people who are in their 30s and are taking a bunch of prescriptions. And it’s not to say that there might not be a time and a place for something like that, but I think it is worth realizing what we’re doing and just how much our food contributes to that.
Sarah Servold: It’s shocking. I mean, I went to the dermatologist probably about a year ago with just some mild acne issues after going off my polycystic ovary syndrome medicine, and I left her office with – no kidding – 14 prescriptions.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, my God.
Sarah Servold: I’m not even kidding. I went to Rite Aid, and I’m like: I don’t even know what I’m doing here. Why am I even… 14 prescriptions?! It was outrageous.
Liz Wolfe: And totally standard.
Diane Sanfilippo: How were there 14… Are you being serious?
Pete Servold: It was insane.
Sarah Servold: I’m being serious, but it was not even just for… I mean, the conversation went from like: OK, I’m having some breakouts along my jawline, which are obviously hormonal, to: Oh, yeah. I guess I do have a little bit of dandruff and maybe some dry skin and maybe… You know, it’s like she led the conversation in so many directions that I left with a fistful of prescriptions.
Liz Wolfe: That’s the way it goes.
Diane Sanfilippo: I don’t even know what to say.
Sarah Servold: I actually had the thought the other day that I wanted to call up Rite Aid and have them pull all those prescriptions so I could now go back and look at everything she had tried to prescribe me and then compare it to what some natural remedies would be.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. It’s amazing. OK, so do you guys feel like we want to transition our conversation now that we’re talking about our skin here?
Sarah Servold: Pete?
Pete Servold: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: I mean, we could talk about food for probably hours on end.
Pete Servold: Yeah.
Pete’s Paleo Bacon [36:03]
Sarah Servold: Do we want to talk about the bacon at all?
Liz Wolfe: Yes! Do that next.
Diane Sanfilippo: First tell us about your bacon, OK? Some of which I have!
Pete Servold: How do you still have that, by the way?
Sarah Servold: I know! I don’t understand.
Diane Sanfilippo: I’ll tell you. Because I’m trying to be nice and save it for when I can share it. I don’t like to eat amazing things by myself.
Sarah Servold: Wow.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.
Sarah Servold: We’ll send you guys both some bacon. We’ll have to probably sent it next week because I think we might be tapped out with deliveries tomorrow, but we’ll send you guys both some bacon next week.
Liz Wolfe: Score!
Diane Sanfilippo: I mean, I still have some.
Pete Servold: OK.
Diane Sanfilippo: Tell us about the bacon.
Pete Servold: The bacon was the impetus, I think, for everything else that we talk about, where it’s like you want to have good things and all there is out there is crap. And I wanted to put bacon in some of my recipes, but I have a really strict guideline for what does or doesn’t make our list for the food that we make, and none of the bacon came close. All these brands that are $7, $8, $9, $10 a pound and they came from Tennessee or wherever still had a ton of sugar, still had nitrates and nitrites, and still came from CAFO pigs. And so I called my supplier, and I was like: How much belly can you get me? And we just started making our own bacon. And I think I had texted you about it on Facebook or something, Diane, a while ago, and I said: Nitrates/nitrites, what do you think? And then we ended up just using salt and pepper and herbs, celery powder being one of the herbs as a natural nitrate, and we cold smoke it after we cure it, and we ship it out every week. It’s never put into a brine, which is like a liquid cure, so there’s no extra water so it doesn’t splatter all over the place. It doesn’t shrink up when you cook it, and it’s just whole, real, decent, delicious bacon that’s not bad for you.
Sarah Servold: And melts in your mouth.
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s really some of the meatiest bacon I’ve ever had. Eating that felt like I’m actually eating a cut of meat from the pig, not just this weird, shriveled, fatty thing.
Liz Wolfe: Mouth full of salt.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, it’s really not. It really tasted like meat. And I know bacon is really more of a fat source than a protein source, but I really felt like it was just much more meaty than any other bacon. Like you said, it doesn’t shrink up when you cook it. The taste was just awesome. I love it.
Pete Servold: Again, it’s your impression of what things are because all you’ve ever known is not necessarily accurate to the point where we had someone who got bacon for the first time last week, and they sent us an email, and they said: Hey, I ordered bacon, and all I got was this slab of pork belly.
Diane Sanfilippo: Awww.
Pete Servold: Right, and you can’t fault them for that because they’ve never seen what bacon actually looks like.
Sarah Servold: We had to do a blog post on what to do with this slab of meat you just got in the mail because people didn’t realize that that was actually the bacon.
Diane Sanfilippo: Right. And your mom’s steak knife is probably not going to help too much.
Pete Servold: No! Oh, Joan.
Sarah Servold: Oh, poor Joan.
Diane Sanfilippo: I got out my biggest knife and sliced myself up some probably quarter-inch slices of bacon. It was amazing. Yeah, amazing.
Sarah Servold: I think Bill and Hayley put it through a meat slicer.
Pete Servold: Yeah, they have one.
Diane Sanfilippo: They have a meat slicer! Listen, I’m not as cool as those guys are.
Sarah Servold: No. Few people are.
Diane Sanfilippo: I don’t have a meat slicer. I don’t have a Berkey. I don’t have all these tools in my kitchen. I have some knives, and I’m lucky I have a food processor.
Pete Servold: That’s all you need. Hayley put up some picture that Bill painted while he was living in Italy, and I was like: That’s it. I give up. I’m not going to be as cool as Bill ever.
Diane Sanfilippo: No, never. I’m telling you right now, I’m pretty sure Bill Staley is good at everything.
Pete Servold: Yeah. I thought I was cool, and then I met Bill.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, my God.
Sarah Servold: Wah-wah.
Pete Servold: Anyway, so that’s the story of the bacon, but back to skincare.
Real. Skin Products [40:16]
Diane Sanfilippo: OK. Yeah, let’s talk about skincare a little bit. Sarah, you were talking about all these prescriptions that you were handed, and the realization that probably a lot of it was hormonal. Obviously if you were coming off of PCOS meds, there’s probably some hormone rebalancing that needs to happen. I’ve definitely dealt with the same thing. I know, obviously Liz has a ton of experience there, but why don’t you tell everyone what kind of birthed out of your struggles with skincare?
Sarah Servold: Yeah, it’s interesting and frustrating. I kind of just blindly accepted all of those prescriptions and filled them at the pharmacy and started using them, and I think it was really up until the Balanced Bites Seminar at Elysium in San Diego a few months ago that I was thinking to myself that I am really doing it right. I’m eating paleo. I’m CrossFitting. I must be at the pinnacle of health. And my body is so clean. And then listening to Liz speak about skincare and then reading the Skintervention Guide, Liz, I think I told you, it was a big slap in the face. It was just like: How did I miss this when it’s standing right in front of me and so obvious? I’m eating clean, I’m exercising, but I’m still putting all these chemicals and toxins into my body via my skin, my largest organ. I felt like I was almost kind of betraying myself that I hadn’t thought of this earlier.
Liz Wolfe: I’m honored to be the one that slapped you in the face.
Pete Servold: And I’m jealous.
Diane Sanfilippo: And she’s pretty tall, so I’m pretty sure that was hard! I didn’t realize that you were even paying attention, first of all, at our seminar.
Sarah Servold: I was actually actively taking notes like the nerd that I am, just sitting in the back of the room.
Diane Sanfilippo: Well, you guys were at two of them, right?
Sarah Servold: Yep. Yeah, it was definitely one of the best things that I had done, attending one of those seminars, because it just opened my eyes to a lot of things and really piqued my interest. I mean, it made me change my habits. And to instill that type of message with people that they go home and actually make changes, I think, is pretty powerful.
Pete Servold: Yeah, we got in the car after I was done packing up at Elysium, and Sarah is like: Wait, you get tallow from all the ranchers, right? And I said: Yeah, of course. And she was like: Well, I’m going to make it all myself! I’m just going to do it.
Liz Wolfe: Yes. So awesome.
Pete Servold: It was on the way home from the seminar when we came up with it… she came up with it.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, talk about what you created. Talk about Real. Skin Products.
Sarah Servold: So I started making products for myself. I started making face and body lotion out of grass-fed tallow, obviously Kasandrinos olive oil, and just some various essential oils, and that kind of took on its own life. I then started making my own deodorants, my own lip balms, my own soaps and all these other products. Peter just gave me the thumbs-up because he uses the deodorant that I made for him as well. But really then friends and family started sampling and said: Well, you should be selling this because I would buy it. So we figured why not round out the offerings of Pete’s Paleo and start up a spin-off company? So we started Real. Yeah, so we sell all of these natural skincare products, and I know nowadays “natural” doesn’t really have much meaning behind it, but for us, if you can eat it, I’d say it’s pretty safe to put on your body. And that’s really kind of what we want people to take away, is if you would put it in your body, if you can’t pronounce those ingredients, then you shouldn’t put it on your body. And people just need to kind of open their eyes and see what’s going on with the current products on the market and really just take a step back and think: What is this really doing to my body? Yeah, so we do face and body balm, we do deodorants, we do soaps, we do lip balm, and starting soon we’ll have body spray/perfume because those people that know realize that perfume is definitely one of the most toxic substances out there.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think it’s funny you said that obviously Kasandrinos olive oil goes in. Well, here’s the thing: Tony Kasandrinos is the one who really did introduce us, right? He was kind of the little connector there, our buddy.
Pete Servold: The like how you said “little.” I don’t think he’ll appreciate it, though.
Diane Sanfilippo: Get it? Little connector?
Pete Servold: Because he’s short.
Liz Wolfe: Only compared to certain… I mean Dwight Howard, he’s a tall guy.
Pete Servold: I’m just kidding.
Sarah’s leap from corporate America to do Real. and Pete’s Paleo full time [45:46]
Diane Sanfilippo: But Sarah, what were you doing before you kind of started working on Real. and working with Pete’s Paleo full time? I think it would be interesting for people to hear this because actually just on last week’s show we were talking about this exact thing, what it takes to kind of leave something you’ve been doing and move over to something that you’re so passionate about doing but it’s a little scary. What were you doing before?
Sarah Servold: Yeah, it takes big cojones.
Diane Sanfilippo: Or Diane to text you saying: When are you quitting your job?
Sarah Servold: Yes! Quit your job. Have you quit your job yet? It’s Tuesday. Have you quit your job yet?
Pete Servold: Peter, Diane says I should quit. Oh. OK, well, then.
Sarah Servold: I was actually in, as you can relate, corporate America at a large advertising agency for several years, and I was actually working on the Marine Corps brand doing recruitment advertising, and that’s how Tony and I met back in my New York City days, and he was a recruiter and was helping me out with some advertising projects. So yeah, I mean, it just got to the point where here I am in corporate America, stressing out, and my body is paying the price for that. It’s just so incredibly powerful what stress actually does to you physically and mentally, but it got to the point where I needed to leave my job and really dedicate my time to our company. And Pete’s Paleo and Real. and all of our other ventures were almost at this plateau point, and now was the time to take the chance and harness all of the attention and energy that is behind this paleo movement and really focus it on propelling us forward. And it was scary and, Diane, like you said, you had to keep prodding me to do it because I was nervous to take that leap, but I haven’t even looked back, and I literally have felt that weight come off my body since quitting my job and really focusing on things that I’m interested in, things that I’m passionate about and that benefit us and other people. Outside of marrying Peter, it may be one of the best decisions of my life!
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m so glad to have been involved in that.
Pete Servold: Yeah, you were. And to Sarah’s credit, she was working two full-time jobs for a year. I was the spoiled one. I’m the one who just walked out of the crappy restaurant that I was working at and just started Pete’s Paleo with Sarah, but she kept her daytime job, and she was working two full-time jobs doing all of the stuff that she does for Pete’s Paleo. I mean, she started Real. while she still had that other job and traveling every week or every other week and doing all of her stuff to be really good at her other job that she was. And she did that for almost, I think, a complete year. And they basically asked her to go to China for a day and to fly back and were being jerks about it, and that was kind of the tipping point.
Sarah Servold: I think Peter’s really hoping that Real. is going to take off so he can go back to having a sugar mama.
Pete Servold: Yeah. I actually would like to just be a chef for my wife who is the CEO and owner of Real. Skincare, and I’d like to just play golf, be a stay-at-home dad, get back to being a scratch golfer…
Liz Wolfe: Big plans there. Dream big, Pete!
Sarah Servold: No one ever accused him of that.
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s good to have goals. Well, Sarah, everyone has their story, and it’s always a little bit personal to talk about what’s going on when we’re worried about finances and we’re changing businesses and all of that and leaving a job, but what was it for you that made you feel OK to leave the job that was paying really well? I mean, I’ve done it and a lot of people have done it, and I know you guys are married but don’t have any kids yet, and I obviously don’t have kids. Everybody, I think, knows that at this point. And so there are some people who are dealing with the stress around it because they do have a family, but for you, what was that piece that made you feel like: OK. This is going to be OK, or I’ll figure it out? Or how did you kind of come to terms with that decision to leave the comfort of the salary?
Sarah Servold: I truly believe in what we do and what we’re doing. And to read the emails and hear the stories and see the differences that we’re making in our customer’s lives is really what just kind of pushes me to keep going because I know that if there’s 10 people that I’ve made a difference in, then there’s 10 more and 10 more. And we need to just keep doing what we’re doing to help benefit all of those people. And I don’t think that eating clean, eating paleo, and using real skin products is ever going to go out of style. It’s not a fad. It’s here to stay. And so that, to me, is what really gave me the faith to believe that what we’re doing is going to sustain us.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. I remember saying to you, too, when you were just kind of scared about it, and I was like: Well, when you leave the other job, you have all that other time now to do everything you can to crush it at Pete’s Paleo. You can’t see the full potential of what you’re going to start until you open that door with the time, and then the pressure is on, you know? The pressure is on, but I think it’s good pressure because you’re like: You know what? It’s make or break. I have to make it. And it gives you that extra motivation. I think people are maybe sometimes worried that they won’t be able to push as hard as they might need to, to start a business or to get into it full time, but I think once you’re left without that place to go at 9 in the morning except to the thing you’ve created, it’s like: Well, now I really have to make this work. I can’t just mess around anymore.
Sarah Servold: Well, you know, we live at the beach, so I do a little messing around. No, but seriously, though, I am busier than ever, and I don’t understand how I was physically doing two full-time jobs at the same time because I just have so much to do. And, Diane, I think we texted about this, like, I could just keep going and going and going. There’s always more to do. I guess I just was kind of prioritizing before when I was doing two jobs, as to: OK, what am I really going to work on? Am I going to be bored when I quit my job, and am I going to have enough to fill my day?
Liz Wolfe: Hahahaha!
Pete Servold: Yeah, exactly. It got to the point, too, where there were just so many opportunities not being chased down, because at the end of the day, like we touched on it at the beginning, what we do is just very time consuming. Cooking all that food, organizing getting thousands of meals together on a weekly basis and shipped out in the right direction is just a lot of stuff, and so there were a lot of things that were coming in front of me and in front of Sarah that I was like: I can’t do this, and I don’t have time. I have to go back to the kitchen. And Sarah was on her way to DC for another meeting, and we realized that we’re really not taking this to its full potential, and we’re either going to do it now or we’re going to regret that we didn’t do it now. So we just kind of had to pull the trigger.
Sarah Servold: And let’s be clear: I’m not in the kitchen. There’s a crew with Peter in the kitchen. There is no way I’m allowed through those doors.
Pete Servold: No. We gave her the tour on the off-day.
Pete and Sarah’s next big venture, The Omnivore’s Pet [54:15]
Liz Wolfe: Well, speaking of home life and such and children or lack thereof, I think you all will agree with me when I say that just because we don’t have human babies doesn’t mean we don’t have fur babies. A lot of people know that my dog is basically my best friend, and I like to feed him right, and I know you guys have another little venture that I would love to hear a little bit about regarding keeping our fur babies healthy.
Pete Servold: People, let me tell you ’bout my best friend! So we have a dog named Canela who’s our best buddy. And I actually have a really awesome friend, a guy that I worked with right when I got my start in this business and who kind of taught me a lot of things about food and how to handle yourself in a restaurant. And he went through some serious health issues a couple years ago. He had to get a kidney transplant and was in a really bad place for a while, but he is healthy now, and he lives in LA, and he got a little dog, a scrappy little guy.
Sarah Servold: Named Augustus.
Pete Servold: Named Augustus.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, I love it.
Pete Servold: And it really kind of gave him a new life, I think, in the same way that it does for all of us with pets. And the guy had some health issues, and so to fix those health issues, he started feeding him raw dog food. And he sent me a picture a few weeks ago of him grinding raw grass-fed meat for Augustus, and I immediately texted him back, and I was like: How much does that cost? How much do you make? How much do they eat? Come down next week and we’re going to talk about it. So we started a company called The Omnivore’s Pet, and I actually got the final phone call today. We have a single-source grass-fed rancher that’s local here in Southern California that’s going to be providing us with a mix of organ and muscle and bone, and we’re going to be using the local organic vegetables and be making frozen, individually packaged raw dog food that we’ll be shipping all over the country like our other meals.
Sarah Servold: And don’t fret. Cats are next.
Pete Servold: Cats are next.
Diane Sanfilippo: They better be! No veggies in my cat food.
Pete Servold: No veggies in your cat food.
Sarah Servold: Yeah, exactly. And that’s kind of why we’re doing one at a time because we’re starting with the omnivore and then moving on to the carnivore.
Pete Servold: It’s the acronym BARF, biologically appropriate raw food. We’re both dog owners and he did all the research already, so we know the right amount of kelp and fish oil and all the vegetables and everything that needs to go into it to make it a complete diet for the dogs. And it’s been really cool because we’ve actually been feeding our dog raw food for about six months now, and she, when we moved out here, had a lot of skin issues, really dry skin, almost like she had allergies, she was sneezing so much. And now, six months later, she’s never scratching all the time…
Sarah Servold: Shiny coat.
Pete Servold: Yeah, a really shiny, beautiful coat, tons of energy. She’s staring at us now with her big, beautiful eyes.
Liz Wolfe: Aww, best friends.
Pete Servold: But yeah, the first run is going to be the 24th of June, and we’ll start shipping it out. You can look on The Omnivore’s Pet on Facebook and TheOmnivoresPet.com, and you’ll be able to get it through our website. Yeah, we’re pretty stoked about it.
Liz Wolfe: I’m so excited. I will definitely be hitting you guys up for some of that because we are always looking for the next thing to spoil our dog with.
Pete Servold: Diane, we’ll need your help with the recipe for the felines. We’ll send you our test batches.
Diane Sanfilippo: OK, awesome. Paleo Kitty is not the most discerning.
Sarah Servold: He doesn’t have a very refined palate?
Pete Servold: He doesn’t have a Yelp account?
Diane Sanfilippo: But then again, I’m kind of the same way. If someone’s going to feed me, I’m mostly going to eat it as long as I don’t get glutened. That’s kind of my rule. But I’ve been feeding him raw since he was 4 months when I got him. I throw things on the ground while I’m eating. I’m like: Eat that. And he’ll pretty much eat everything. I think he actually thinks his name is “Eat That.”
Sarah Servold: I saw this commercial on TV the other day for cat food, and as one of their marketing plusses, they were touting the fact that there was no corn, no soy, and no grain in this cat food, and they were using it as a selling point to people that clearly don’t see the same connection for themselves. They’re so willing to go above and beyond and not include anything bad in their pet’s food, but not realize that: Oh, maybe it’s bad for me as well.
Diane Sanfilippo: That is really i