What it Takes to FEED the LSU FOOTBALL Team | AthlEATS

[Music] to achieve success as an athlete it's imperative that you train your mind and body for play but one underestimated element is training your eating habits and on this episode you're jumping in the kitchen at lsu to see how they harness the power of food to help fuel the athlete's goals i'm leland welcome to sports dissected the series hi guys so i'm here with the chef michael johnson lsu how you doing today good how are you i'm good first and foremost i mean how do you fuel the guys to get this kind of stuff get some of this hardware behind us you know it really starts with the sourcing and where we get our ingredients from i think that's one of the most important parts you know like we buy a lot of local ingredients so that it's not traveling from all over the united states coming from louisiana crops and farms the proteins that we source are antibiotic-free hormone-free proteins all clean stuff obviously supporting the fisheries is super important i mean shrimp and seafood here is a huge industry and so if we're buying seafood from overseas or from california we're not supporting our community and i think with that family culture it's all about community you mentioned kind of earlier off camera that this facility was built in 2019 what specifically do you have your hands in building and putting together the kitchen so i actually was in the building watching the building be built they hired me in april of 2019. this was a big piece of the focus for nutrition center it's stepping forward into the idea that sports nutrition is super important for athletes and buying into that i helped design where the equipment went and watched the build and made corrections and that to me was a super important part of it because i take a lot of pride and invest a lot of energy into watching it happen and watching it happen kind of gives you inspiration onto what you want to accomplish with it [Music] we seat 167 athletes we have three meals a day two to three hour meal periods depending on the time of year this is one of the big selling points as a recruitment tool when you come in and sit down at one of these family-oriented tables you're not just sitting with your teammates there's cross-communication amongst the sports there's cross-communication amongst the sexes amongst races it's really a melting pot of human beings and it really has that family atmosphere we don't really get a heavy rush of 167 people all at the same time they kind of trickle in trickle out that allows us time to come out socialize with them get feedback about the food interact with the student athletes because you know it's it's building relationships if we want to know whether they're enjoying it or whether there's something wrong or something's going good we want to go out and force the interaction and have that moment with them and allow them a voice of what's going on with the food [Music] so we do some fresh cooking the pizza station's fresh the sandwiches are fresh obviously like the salad unit that's kind of a buffet style you know they come up and it's self-service we have ladies at the comfort station they serve the food for the guests is there a favorite station uh the comfort station is by and large one of the busiest depends on the time of the year and the athletes one of the most important things for us to do is offer variety you know lighter foods to heavier foods athletes that are on gain programs that are looking to gain lean muscle mass and we have athletes that are on a lean program where they're looking to lean out on fats we have five dietitians that are each separated over i think 22 sports and so each one of them has an amount of athletes that they have one-on-one conversations about how they achieve their goals you guys kind of gauge how many pounds of vegetables or meat that you guys kind of go through per year or per season per year it's massive humber and there's also numbers that are interestingly low like sugar so we purposely remove sugar from the diet as much as possible the average human being consumes like 25 pounds of sugar every year our athletes are only consuming like a cup and a half we find substitutes you can't just not have things that are sweet so we use agave nectar we use maple sugar we use honey we use dehydrated honey honey powder and this is one of our dishes today you know we have a jacketed tilt kettle in cooking techniques you have moist heat and you have dry heat so this is a moist heat cooking technique technically because it's surrounding that kettle with steam and it's not allowing it to get over 250 or 300 degrees inside that chamber and so it's not going to brown it's not going to burn it it is a moist heat cooking and so we make a lot of soups the etouffee was made in there a lot of stews and stuff like that we have a cold smoker as well which i love you can smoke cheeses you can smoke fish without it actually cooking and heating you're just imparting the flavor of the smoke so outside a hot smoke is getting over getting over 140 160 we smoke at 180 190 sometimes higher than that for hot smoking so we're actually trying to cook the product at that point this allows us to smoke things without cooking it to chill it and then we can cook it the next day this is a digester in the world of sustainability this is an important piece of equipment so instead of us taking food scraps and putting it into the trash can that going out to a dumpster attracting pests and rodents and making awful smell we put pre-consumer products into the orca and this is a bacillus bacteria injected aerobic process it handles about 250 pounds in a 24-hour period and it goes out in the form of gray water through the drain that goes to our grease trap and helps maintain the health of our grease trap and instead of us having to clean the grease traps three or four times a year we only have to clean them once or twice a year so there's very little waste in this kitchen we've reduced our footprint going out the door to waste by about 90 percent [Music] one thing that i really enjoy what we do here is we make fresh pizza we shred our own cheese we make our own sauce from scratch we stretch our own doughs and it shows in the product we use italian tomatoes it's one of the few things that i do import and buy cans is italian tomatoes because of the quality we shred cheese daily by us shredding it every day you're getting a moisture rich cheese that melts nicely you see how fluffy and light it is you know that just offers to the quality of the pizza you guys are perfect for tomorrow so is that the whole week you're always prepping for the day absolutely if we have a large piece of meat that we're cooking on monday we're pulling it out today so that it's thawing naturally we don't like running things under water because it rushes the process right and water can deteriorate the quality of the food sometimes when you stuff something you'll put one big log in the middle if you will and and wrap the meat around it and then truss it another way is to lay a thin layer or a relatively thin layer across all of it and then roll it so that it kind of has a spiral stuffing to it and it you know it creates something kind of pretty inside another important piece of what he's doing there is you want to make sure that the stuffing is even all throughout so that the loin is even all throughout if you get a thick end of the loin and a thin end of the loin one end is going to be undercooked the other end is going to be overcooked when the center of the loin is added at it's done right i plan on just like stirring it hard on the top you're like a nice color on it i'm going to cut slices um you'll be ready do you kind of cook off of a field oh definitely i think you have to push off what you do for what you're doing all right so major what's the first step pretty much man you got it all laid out for you you're gonna season the whole inside of it just kind of bring it up and sprinkle it so when you're seasoning if you lift it up higher you know like you can kind of make it rain so to speak like you get you get a better spread the closer down here you get concentrated areas of seasoning if you hold it up here you get more spread okay so what you're trying to do is form one uniform size all the way across kind of lump of stuffing there that's right all right both sides at the same time there you go go grab the middle there you go there just keep doing that working working from the inside out that's okay if it falls out it's fine all right there it is there it is chill yeah it's good that was a damn good job all right chef so how did you even get to this position and how can kids kind of aspire to even become a chef it takes a lot of uh determination you know working up from the bottom of a kitchen to come up to executive chef caliber you know you have to set yourself aside from the pack you have to work harder be willing to put the hours in in the kitchen when other people aren't developing leadership qualities and paying attention to the leaders above you and how they manage people and care you know care for people i see myself as a supportive role for my team and just helping them facilitate the things that they're trying to accomplish in 1999 i was living in baton rouge i got my culinary degree here graduated went out into the local baton rouge environment and met a woman a girl at that point actually we had kids got married had more kids and ended up chasing my career back to kansas city where i was originally from worked there for six years kind of built my career up to a point where i was kind of hitting a stagnant point in kansas city and the company that i was working for recognized that i was putting in the hard work and they gave me a promotion to seattle to work for the seattle mariners that's kind of where i really started honing my what i would call previous to that slow food field cooking which was developed by the italians into that farm to table sustainable kind of mindset of a chef major league baseball has 81 home games at some point i worked 65 days in a row of 18-hour shifts and i wasn't seeing my family i wasn't seeing my kids i wasn't seeing my wife and she grew tired of it and our marriage fell apart so she moved back to baton rouge with the kids because this is where her support system was i had been looking for work down here but going from the caliber of being a large stadium chef to being a restaurant chef there's a there's a large gap there in lifestyle if you will then i went to work for the seahawks and i developed a lot of relationships there with local chefs who i got to pick their brains for philosophy and kind of you know closer more more deeply understand you know who i wanted to be as a chef it was super painful for me to you know know that they were needing me and wanting me here and i hadn't been able to accomplish that four o'clock in the morning i'm pulling my hair out i'm really stressed out i get on to indeed i typed in executive chef baton rouge and the first job that pops up is lsu i uploaded my resume and this is a four o'clock in the morning mind you and at 10 o'clock in the morning i get an email saying would you like to talk about salary requirements are you available to talk with me today and i was actually in the airport flying back to seattle that day walking when i got it i get a phone call from a friend of mine that i haven't talked to in 10 years and he picks up the phone and says hey is this mike johnson i'm like yeah this is mike johnson what are you doing dude like we haven't talked in forever long story short i just got a phone call from my buddy of mine did you just apply for a job in baton rouge and i'm i was like this was six hours ago and he lives in atlanta how the hell did you know that i applied for that position we had a friend a similar friend that was working here saw my resume come through and called him and said hey is this mike johnson on february 14th on valentine's day of that year i came down did a cooking practical did my interview and they made me an offer right there the funny thing is is i was still wearing my chef jacket and i went over to pick up my kids and i had my seattle seahawks chef jacket on my kids were like dad why are you in your chef clothes and so i got to tell them on valentine's day that day that i was moving to baton rouge and it was uh it was uh what a moment it was an emotional moment my first year here was 2019. what a magical year holy cow i mean it was incredible lsu is an incredible place the culture here is incredible administration the atmosphere the weather the fishing you know like i love living here this is my home and this is my family shout out to our partners at the game day the game day is a new sports and sports betting media company built for today's fan check out the link in our bio and on our community tab for all their great content and head to their website at thegameday.com for the latest sports book promos betting tips expert picks and sportsbook app reviews [Music] you

Channel: Sports Dissected by COISKI

Views: 1,644,283

Keywords: feeding a football team, how to feed a football team, what goes into feeding a team, what goes into feeding a football team, feeding football players, how chefs make meals, how chefs make meals for team, chef cooking for football team, lsu tigers national championship, lsu tigers football, feeding college athletes, feeding college football players, feeding college students, how to feed football players, football meal prep, college football meal plan, college football facility

Id: W0Im7CHJCL8

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022