From the Jungle to the Table
Chef D'Carlo turns invasive species into a traveling culinary experience across Puerto Rico
There are days when Chef Deborah Carlo Hernández drops her son off at school and realizes she has two free hours before her next appointment. Instead of waiting around, she goes fishing or heads into the brush.
Her truck carries whatever she might need if an opportunity comes up. Sometimes her dog comes along, too. She is training him to help locate snakes so she does not have to do all the searching herself.
Her work does not follow much of a standard schedule. It depends on the animal, the place that she’s working, the next event on her calendar and, quite often, whatever time happens to open up between one thing and another, but she’s always ready.
Deborah is professionally known as Chef D'Carlo, a Puerto Rican celebrity chef, barista, mixologist, hunter and animal rescuer. She also previously worked as a veterinary technician. Somewhere along the way, all of those seemingly separate skills began to overlap and eventually became a profession that is difficult to fit neatly into one category.
She hunts and captures invasive species that affects our ecosystem, evaluates the animals, processes them and eventually brings them into the kitchen. According to Deborah, she is currently the only woman in Puerto Rico doing that entire process herself.
She laughs when she tries to sum it up.
“From the jungle to table.”
Marcos: How does a chef end up working with invasive species?
Chef D'Carlo: I’ve been working with them for more than six years. What I wanted to show is that just because something is an invasive species, it doesn’t mean we have to kill everything we find and throw it away. I decided to use what I already knew and turn the problem into something that could actually be used.
And when Deborah says used, she means almost all of it.
The meat may end up on a plate, but she also preserves hides for crafts. Teeth become necklaces or pieces of macramé. She works with natural soaps and candles as well. Whenever possible, the point is to take an animal that has to be removed from the environment and find another purpose for what would otherwise be discarded.
She does most of that work herself.
“I’m a one man army,” she says.
The phrase gets an extra layer of humor coming from a woman who has built a career in spaces where people still frequently expect the person doing all this work to be a man.
The kitchen, though, is where her philosophy becomes easiest to understand.
Caiman is one of her favorites because of how versatile the meat can be. She has prepared it in “pastelillos”, stews, tacos, fricassee, “sancocho” and “pinchos” (skewers). At one event she roasted a caiman and prepared the tail stuffed with mozzarella and chorizo, then wrapped it in bacon.
“That was the first thing that disappeared,” she remembers.
Her seasoning tends to be straightforward. Salt, pepper, garlic, citrus. She does not want so many spices on the meat that the person eating it can no longer tell what they are tasting.
If someone has come to try caiman, she wants it to taste like caiman.
Marcos: What about the other species you work with?
Chef D'Carlo: Iguana tastes like chicken wings. Python is more like turkey breast. It’s a very clean meat.
I tell her that I have heard people complain about the taste of python.
“They haven’t tried mine.”
She laughs.
Python presents its own challenges. Its small ribs make the meat more difficult to use safely in dishes such as paella, so Deborah is selective about how she prepares it. She would rather leave a dish off the menu than take an unnecessary risk with a guest.
Then there is the pleco.
Most people who recognize the fish know it from aquariums, where it spends its time attached to the glass like some small armored creature from another era. In Puerto Rico, however, plecos released into waterways have become an invasive problem, and in open water they can grow far larger than the ones people are accustomed to seeing in fish tanks.
They are not exactly an easy sell at the dinner table.
“Visually, it’s not very pretty,” Deborah admits.
The surprise comes after it is cleaned.
She compares the meat to fresh open-water tuna. It is reddish, lean and soft on the palate.
At one event, fishermen brought their catch directly to her. Deborah cleaned the plecos on the spot, seasoned them, put them on the fire and served them.
By the end, she says, nothing was left but bones.
That transformation is the part of the work that interests her most. An animal viewed almost entirely as a nuisance suddenly becomes food.
Her veterinary background follows her into the kitchen as well. Deborah says she prefers dealing with live specimens because she can examine the animal first. She pays attention to visible indicators of its condition before deciding whether it is suitable for consumption.
Her experience as a veterinary technician, an animal rescuer and someone familiar with animal anatomy all eventually found their way into her work as a chef.
“I know what I’m looking at,” she explains.
None of this, however, happens inside a conventional restaurant.
Chef D'Carlo is based in the Bayamón area, but her kitchen travels.
She works throughout Puerto Rico doing live paellas, pasta stations, roasts, outdoor dinners and events featuring exotic meats. A romantic dinner on the beach can be part of the job. So can a weekend at an Airbnb or a gathering on a farm.
She calls herself a traveling chef.
For longer stays, she offers what she describes as Living Chef Services. If a group rents a house, farm or Airbnb with the proper facilities, she can handle the meals throughout the stay.
Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.
“Nobody washes dishes, nobody takes out the trash that whole weekend. I take care of everything.”
The menu is built around the people she is cooking for instead of forcing the client to choose from a fixed list.
She asks what the event is for, what they have in mind and how much they want to spend. Then she works within those limits and develops options.
Her slogan says a lot about the way she approaches food:
following hearts, not recipes.
With invasive species, the relationship between hunting and cooking can become surprisingly direct. If she has an event coming up, Deborah prefers to work with fresh product. A farm dealing with an invasion may become the place where an ingredient for the next dinner comes from.
She also collaborates with farms that need invasive animals removed. In those cases, she says, she does not charge for the removal. The animals she can use may become raw material for an upcoming event.
That does not mean every animal becomes dinner.
Part of the work is understanding what can be safely used, what cannot, and when the right decision is simply disposal.
There is also nothing casual about the hunt itself.
Deborah repeatedly returns to that point during our conversation.
This work has risks.
She rarely films herself hunting or fishing because, once she is handling an animal, the animal needs her full attention.
“I’m not worried about likes or content.”
She may take a quick photograph afterward. That is about it.
After more than six years working with invasive species, she says she has never had a serious incident with one of the live animals she has handled.
She does not interpret that as proof that the work is safe.
Quite the opposite.
Snakes, caimans and other animals respond according to instinct. Knowing how they move, when they are likely to flee and when they may defend themselves is part of the job, that prevents accidents.
One of the more unusual methods she describes involves moving a large python when she is working alone. Rather than draping the animal around her shoulders, she allows it to coil around her leg while she maintains control of the upper part of its body. The snake's own grip helps distribute its weight while she makes her way out.
“They’re strong. Really strong,” she says.
Then comes the line that sounds almost absurd without the rest of the story:
“And we walk out together.”
She laughs again.
For Deborah, that distinction between understanding an animal and fearing it is important. She is a hunter, but she is also an animal rescuer and keeps snakes herself. Removing an invasive species does not mean she sees the animal as evil.
The problem is where it is, how quickly it reproduces and what happens to the ecosystem around it.
That is one reason she is critical of people who turn animal captures into content without explaining the risks involved, education comes first.
Entertainment is one thing. Education is another.
And then there is being a woman in a field where people still do not always expect one.
For years, some of that confusion started with her professional name.
Clients would ask for Chef Carlo and assume a man was coming.
Then Deborah would arrive.
“I’d show up in my animal print and mis botitas (my little boots), and they’d be like, ‘¿Dónde está Carlo?’ (‘Where’s Carlo?’)”
The story still makes her laugh.
Eventually, her professional identity became Chef D'Carlo, a name that makes it a little clearer who is standing behind the food.
But the joke also says something about the unusual place she occupies.
The woman arriving to prepare dinner may be the same person who, a few hours earlier, was standing in a river, working on a farm or walking through the brush looking for the main ingredient.
Then she packs up and takes the kitchen somewhere else.
Across the island.
For Chef D'Carlo, a recipe can begin long before anyone turns on a stove.
Sometimes it begins with a phone call from a farmer who has an invasive species problem. Sometimes it begins during the two hours she has free after dropping her son off at school. It may continue along a riverbank or deep in the monte (the countryside, brush or wild terrain), then finish a few days later on a dinner table somewhere else in Puerto Rico.
The problem changes form in her hands.
And sometimes, it becomes dinner.
CHEF D'CARLO
Deborah Carlo Hernández
Celebrity Chef / Barista / Mixologist / Hunter / Animal Rescuer
Instagram: @Chef_Dcarlo
Contact (939) 496-2581
Live paellas and culinary services throughout Puerto Rico
