Few parents dream that their son will grow up to be a forager. What would that mean anway — outside of a Stone Age culture?
For Austin forager Tink Pinkard it translates into hunting, fishing, farming, gathering and preparing food in its raw state so that cooks can turn the fruits of his labors into fresh, unforeseen feasts.
Unruffled and open-grinned in a camo cap and beard on a rain-splattered day, Pinkard explained his journey from the backwoods of southern Louisiana, the son of an oil drilling consultant and grandson of small-town grocers, to the gleaming kitchens of Austin’s food revolution.
“I grew up with the ebbs and flows of farming life,” he says. “When Dad was offshore, I was in the butcher shop with my grandfather. When Dad came home, I was in the woods, hunting or fishing.”
He inherited his first name from his grandfather, who earned the nickname “Tink” as an electrical engineer on a World War II naval vessel.
“He was constantly tinkering,” Pinkard says. “When I was born, mother wanted Christopher. My dad wanted Tink. Been Tink all my life.”
His family followed an oil boom to Houston in the early 1990s. Somewhere along the way, he shed his thick Cajun accent. But he never lost his love of the outdoors.
“I was outdoors all the time,” he says. “My mother says it was heck to keep me indoors. In the summer, I wore shorts, rubber boots and a T shirt.”
After graduating from Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches with a split geography and sociology degree, Pinkard packed up and headed to Montana for a few years. In May, he’d be fly fishing at Firehole Ranch. In October, he’d winterize the ranch and head to the Flying D, media mogul Ted Turner’s ranch. During winters, he served as a tour guide in Yellowstone National Park.
He learned about the mountains and about outfitting hunting and fishing tours. But he also grew close to chef Bruno Georgeton at Firehole Ranch.
“He molded me to treat hunting and fishing as a way to procure protein,” he says. “That’s what led me to being a guide that’s more oriented to the consumption of the food than to the sport.”
His girlfriend — now wife, legal secretary Leah Deason Pinkard — had put off law school to bunk with this evolving forager and to work as a ranch housekeeper. Eventually it was time for her career. The couple first returned to Nacogdoches, where they started an organic poultry farm. The market in East Texas, however, was not that evolved yet.
So they headed to Austin in 2008.
“Austin was the food place to be,” he says. “I could find chefs who really wanted to work with me. I also wanted to be part of the local agriculture scene.”
For three and a half years, he worked for Farmhouse Delivery, first taking locally sourced food to residents, then acting as a buyer.
“I got to know a lot of local farmers,” he says. “That’s when I found out how bad the feral pig problem was. My aim now was to get rid of the noxious creatures and yet deliver the protein to chefs and clients. And with my background as a butcher, I could also break them down.”
Among those to encourage him in the early years here was Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due Supper Club. He set up his first hunt school on the Madroño Ranch near Medina.
“I was the woods,” he says. “Jesse was the kitchen.”
Other chefs called. They wanted to hunt, too. So he evolved into something of a wildlife manager as well as a hunting and fishing guide.
“You have to harvest and clean your kill at the end of the hunt,” he says. “Novice hunters to seasoned hunters came to learn how to process the carcasses and make their own sausages. You end up with a better connection to the land and the animals when you do everything from the gate to the plate. It also tastes better that way.”
So why a “forager” rather than a “hunter,” “farmer” or “fisherman”?
“I always though of foraging as picking mushrooms or huckleberries in the mountains,” he says. “Here, foraging is everything. Now even hunting is foraging.”
The part he loves the most is fly fishing. He holds casting clinics where clients learn to tie flies, identify insects and fish, then clean the fish as well.
“People think it’s only for the mountains,” he says. “You can do it all over Texas.”