We are used to young and winsome food bloggers, armed with a little knowledge and a keen eye for a sexy snap, turning their food fetishes and phobias into a massive industry. For the past few years, spiralised courgettes, raw date brownies and coconut oil have ruled, so what a breath of fresh air the latest star in the making is. You may not have heard of Jess Pryles yet, but she is doing for the steak what Ella Woodward and co have done for the avocado. Clean eaters and vegans may want to look away now because what this queen of the grill loves above all else is meat – the redder and bloodier the better.
Looking at the photos on the previous spread, you could be forgiven if your eye wasn’t instantly drawn to the sides of beef or the marbling of the steak. Equally, no one could blame you if, browsing through Pryles’ Instagram feed, you didn’t hover over a picture of her spilling out of a classic car in aviators, miniskirt and cowboy boots, Daisy Duke style.
Others have certainly paused over a picture that shows her, knife in hand and dressed in a camouflage shirt, stripping down the carcass of a deer that she has just shot. Guns, knives, red meat and a girl in combat fatigues – for a certain type of red-blooded man, that’s pretty much the full playbook for male fantasy right there.
“One of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen,” commented PortugueseDiesel. “You are a dream. If only my wife would skin a deer …” sighed MPocChampion.
A seductive image sells – although Pryles insists she draws the line at glamorous rather than sexy – but where this Texas-based barbecue champion departs from the food blogger cohort is that she wants to educate more than entertain. “I could have four times the number of followers on Instagram if I wanted to, if I played the algorithms,” she says. “The problem is, we live in a society where certain pictures get the likes, and those pictures go viral.” This, she says, leads to the rise of food porn, where dishes are included for how they look and not how they taste. “You have to make the choice when you are in this game.”
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Instead, pictures of herself in lacy frocks in meat fridges aside, she gives her 57,000 followers the hard facts about reverse searing, offset barbecuing and how to butcher a carcass. In other words, meat – preferably red meat – in all its guises. “I eat meat every day,” she tells me. “Chicken is my meat-free Monday.”
Her new cookbook, Hardcore Carnivore: Cook Meat Like You Mean It, signals her serious intent. Unlike the books of many social media stars this side of the Atlantic, full of whimsical shots that promote an aspirational lifestyle as much as the recipes, the focus here is on the hardware – the knives, the smokers – and techniques. She only appears on the back cover, and then in a boring old denim shirt.
“I’ve always been very conscious that I’m allowed to look like a woman, but I try not to use my sexuality to get ahead,” she says. “At the end of the day, it’s the information, the calibre of the recipes, that I want to be respected for. That’s why you’ll never see a picture of me with too many buttons on my shirt undone or in a bikini with a steak or anything like that. There’s a fine line between taking pride in your appearance versus exploiting your looks.
“I’ve always been a girlie girl. I’ve always enjoyed make-up, I enjoy doing my hair and I think there is a balance between the two. When I barbecue I wear a T-shirt and jeans and no mascara, because that just melts in the heat. I get properly down and dirty.”
Like a superstar DJ criss-crossing Europe, Pryles spends her time shuffling from one barbecue festival to another, both as judge and competitor. I speak to her at her office in Austin, and by 9.30am, she has already been to the gym, set up a competition in Australia, finalised arrangements to cook for 1,500 people in Brazil the following week and booked flights to St Louis to appear at a BBQ festival next month.
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She is used to questions about being a woman in a man’s world. “I miss having nice nails, because that’s impossible. It’s arduous, dirty work. There’s a lot of smoke and you’ve got be strong enough to hoist those heavy barbecue lids open, haul your wood, split logs and knock the bark off.”
She’s never encountered any sexism, though. “Certainly it’s a male-dominated world, but the few females that there are are pretty celebrated.” A Texan barbecuing magazine recently put an 82-year-old grandmother, Tootsie Tomanetz, at No 1 on its Golden Age of BBQ Top Ten.
Pryles won’t reveal her own age, beyond that she is in her thirties. “That’s the top Google search if you type my name,” she says, “and I find it funny to keep it from them. The truth is, when I tell them my age, they are shocked because they always think I’m much younger, so I don’t want to disappoint them.”
“I eat meat every day. Chicken is my meat-free Monday
She confirms she is single though. “That’s the second Google search: ‘Jess Pryles married’. The third is, ‘Jess Pryles ethnicity’. It’s hilarious. I think they are trying to figure out my dark hair and dark eyes and see if I’m Mexican or Italian.” For the record, her grandparents were Austrian and Czech.
What is perhaps even more remarkable than Pryles being a woman telling men how to cook meat is that, until three years ago, she was a cupcake baker from Melbourne in Australia. “I was getting bored making the same thing over and over again. During that time I travelled for the first time to Austin, which was starting to be known as a cool, hip city, a liberal dot in a Republican state.”
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It was there that she had her first taste of a proper barbecue. “The first time you have a taste of something that’s been smoked, it’s a completely different eating experience and it blows your mind.”
Australians are not, she says, the master barbecuers of British imagination. “An Australian barbecue is a couple of guys burning cheap sausages to within an inch of their lives. It’s not as gourmet as you think.”
The Texans, though, are fanatics. “Texan backyard cooks have a more heightened understanding of what they are doing. It’s not a question of turning on the gas and away you go. You have to trim the meat, understand how it cooks, how to rest it, how to run a wood fire, how to control your manual air intake.”
She spent several years visiting Austin for extended stays every six months, learning all she could and channelling the information back to her followers in Australia. Then, three years ago, she decamped fully to Austin, bringing her Staffordshire terrier with her.
Being accepted so quickly was down to her attitude, she thinks. “I went in trying to learn, not to teach people. But because I am very stubborn and focused, I learnt a lot. It’s been a natural progression.
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“The Texans love anyone who loves Texas as much as they do, and it has had a colossal impact on me. A lot of the recipes in the book are the flavours that have shaped who I am as a cook. Sometimes, though, I do stop to think how funny it is that this little Aussie girl is now telling the Texans how to cook.”