HIBT Lab! The Sioux Chef: Sean Sherman

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chef Sean Sherman is on a mission to revitalize and reimagine Native American cuisine.

Growing up on a reservation in South Dakota, Sean ate a lot of highly processed foods provided by the U.S. government. It wasn’t until he started working in restaurants as a teenager that he began to learn about fresh ingredients and how to prepare them. But as Sean climbed the kitchen ranks, learning the techniques and recipes of European-style fine dining, he began to wonder what happened to the culinary traditions of his Native American ancestors.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Sean talks with Guy about establishing a modern North American indigenous cuisine by cutting out non-native ingredients such as pork, chicken, beef, dairy, wheat and cane sugar. Instead, he cooks with heirloom varieties of corn, wild rice, foraged plants and native animals such as bison, salmon, duck and beaver. Under The Sioux Chef brand, Sean has hosted pop-up dinners, published a cookbook, operated a food truck, and in 2021, he opened Owamni, which won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.4	This is Chip Rantley, co-host of the NPR Podcast White Lives.
0:13.4	Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department, before we snuck
0:18.1	into the graveyard of a federal penitentiary, all we had were the photographs.
0:23.4	Photographs of a group of Cuban men standing on the roof of a prison in rural Alabama.
0:27.5	That's the season on the NPR Podcast White Lives.
0:32.7	Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.
0:35.0	I'm Guy Razz.
0:36.4	So some of the most commonly eaten foods in American restaurants, not surprisingly, are
0:41.3	things like fried chicken, cheeseburgers, pizza pasta, grilled cheese, french fries.
0:47.4	And yet, none of the things you need to make this stuff existed on this continent before
0:53.6	European settlers arrived.
0:55.6	There was no wheat or chickens or beef or potatoes or cane sugar.
1:00.8	But there was plenty of bison and turkey and dock and things like wild rice and heirloom
1:06.5	varieties of corn.
1:08.4	So why wasn't American cuisine featuring those ingredients?
1:13.0	Well, this is a question Sean Sherman found himself asking in his early 30s after spending
1:18.3	his teens and 20s in restaurant kitchens throughout the Midwest.
1:22.8	Sean is a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe and he spent his early childhood on
1:27.5	the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
1:30.6	As an adult, Sean set out to learn more about traditional North American indigenous foods.
	...

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