What it Takes to FEED the LSU FOOTBALL Team | AthlEATS

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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

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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

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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

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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

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