Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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Queens

New Orleans" was provided by... -This time on "Kitchen New Orleans," we venture beyond the crawfish boil with three inventive dishes featuring the seasonal delicacy. First, a seafood-packed fried appetizer, crawfish balls from Tanya Dubuclet of Neyow's Creole Cafe. Next, crawfish grillades with white-cheddar grits -- a signature of Alison Vega-Knoll of Station 6. And finally, blackened catfish Florentine topped with white-wine crawfish cream sauce by Tia Henry of Cafe Dauphine. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans Kitchen Queens. -A short streetcar ride from downtown New Orleans is laid-back Mid-City, a neighborhood with a quirky local vibe. Case in point, Neyow's Creole Cafe on Bienville Street, where a life-sized Bigfoot statue greets customers. The restaurant is known for the authentic Creole soul food of owner and chef Tanya Dubuclet. -First, we're gonna add a little butter in the frying pan.

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We're gonna add some seasoning. And all this is is diced onions, diced bell pepper, diced celery, and diced green onion. A little bit of cayenne pepper. A little sprinkle of garlic. And we're gonna add like half a capful of crab oil. And it's not gonna make it hot. It's just gonna give it flavor. We add the claw crabmeat, and then we also mix it in with the white crabmeat. I like to mix it because one of the crabmeats is a little bit sweeter than the other. It's just a good blend, and really it's just something that I just grew up on. We just always just mixed it. I grew up, we never asked questions why. We just always did what we were told to do. So I was told to do it this way so I do it this way. We just follow good directions. Just whatever my grandmother say do we did. The crabmeat is already cooked. It's really just getting it heated up, and it's mixing in the seasoning with it. This is another one of my favorites. I love seafood. We're gonna show you how we do a crawfish ball. I love the crawfish ball. Actually, the crawfish ball is an appetizer, and it's one of our best-selling appetizers. We opened in Houston about eight months ago. So many people from New Orleans after Katrina relocated to Houston, and if you go out like on a weekend or we go on a float and we have people from out of town, about a good 60% is from Houston. So we decided to go to Houston, and then Houston we can get all our same New Orleans seafood. Now we're gonna go ahead and add a little water. We do 1 1/2 cups of breadcrumbs for each can of crabmeat. So we did two cans of crabmeat. We're gonna do 3 cups of breadcrumbs. You mix all that up real good. Then we add about maybe a third of butter. Butter is the secret to everything. To me, you can't have too much butter. Really, after that butter melt and you mix it up real good, it's done. And then once it's done, like, that's when you can either put it on a crab shell and you can stuff it, or we're gonna roll some crawfish balls. You can roll stuffed shrimp, or you can put it on top of seafood. Now, for when we do the crawfish balls, we have to cool down the crabmeat. If we need to cool it down fast, we'll just ice it in a bucket with ice around it. But we have some cold crabmeat already, and we'll take the cold crabmeat, and we'll roll it just because when it's cold, it's just easier to roll. You can do it while it's warm. It just gets a little tricky. Now we're ready to roll the crawfish balls. This is the crabmeat that we just cooked. This is already cooled down. And all we do, we just take a little bit. You're gonna take the crawfish, and you're gonna put the crawfish in the center. And we just roll it like we're rolling a ball. That's all, like rolling a ball. It go in the flour. My grandfather was a fisherman, yeah.

I can remember him leaving out at 3

00 in the morning and going fishing.

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00, 2:00 in the evening, and my grandmother would sit on the back porch, and she would clean all the fish. He caught it, she cleaned it, and she cooked it. My grandmother even shucked oysters. We had a backyard full of oyster shells. Alright. We're gonna roll it in the flour. It's just an all-purpose flour. Then we use an egg wash. It's just egg, water, and ice. We use the ice 'cause the ice keep the batter on the crabmeat. And after that one, you're gonna dip it into Italian-style breadcrumbs, because it gives a little more flavor. And that's our crawfish balls. And now what we're gonna do, we gonna deep-fry it maybe about three minutes in a deep fryer. And that's it. We heat the grease up to about 375 degrees. Once that's heated and ready to roll, we put this in the basket. And we're gonna deep-fry it for about three to four minutes until golden brown. Tomorrow is Monday -- red bean Monday -- and we go through about 42 pounds of red beans. And I guess it's easier for people to come here and to get their red beans than to actually go home and do that two-, three-hour process yourself. Alright. Now we're just about done. I'm gonna pull it up. Nice golden brown. When we serve it up, we serve it up on a little plate of lettuce. It's a little remoulade sauce for our sauce. It's our crawfish balls. -Our next stop is Bucktown, a fishing harbor and go-to spot for great seafood. Our destination is Station 6, a restaurant on the Jefferson and Orleans Parish Line established by married chefs Alison Vega-Knoll and Drew Knoll. Chef Alison learned the art of blending French cooking with Creole flavors from her French grandmother. -Growing up in New Orleans, grillades and grits is a staple for Sunday brunch, and it's one of my favorites. But I'm not always wanting the veal, which is the traditional way that you make grillades and grits. So I came up with an idea of using crawfish, and I serve this occasionally at the restaurant for brunch. So, it takes a little time. So, what we're gonna do first, is we'll get our milk and water going, and then we'll add our grits afterwards. So, you're gonna add your milk... water... some heavy cream. It's very light.

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Some butter and some salt. We're gonna put that up to a simmer, and then we're gonna add our grits. So, we're gonna let that go, and then we'll start our crawfish grillades. First, you're gonna just melt your butter in oil, and then I'm gonna add some diced, yellow onion. I have some celery... some bell pepper. And we're gonna just cook this down, and I'm gonna add a little bit of garlic in there, too, okay? 'Cause you always need garlic. I'm gonna cook this down until it gets translucent. I'm gonna add some cremini mushrooms. Gonna cook this down. And I cook the mushrooms about halfway. We're gonna add a little bit of flour. It's just gonna give the sauce a little bit more body. So, I just put a little bit of flour. And that's gonna cook down. One of my little secrets that I've learned, you just turn it down and cover it, and the steam will help cook that flour. So we're gonna have that all cooked down. And then at this point, I'm gonna add some brandy. A little Worcestershire. Whoo! I'm gonna add a little hot sauce, but you can use whatever pepper sauce that you want. So, this is gonna cook down. I like to give it a little kick. I have some canned tomatoes that I've just chopped up a little bit. We're gonna add some veal stock, which kind of gives you that stewy kind of richness to it, and some chicken stock. I'm gonna add a bay leaf. A little salt and pepper. I'm gonna add half of my tarragon right now. So, we're gonna reduce this down, and that's gonna be the base of our sauce for our grillades. We're nice and hot over here for our grits. Got our milk going. We are gonna add our stone grits. These go pretty fairly quick. So we're gonna get this going. So, I grew up in Metairie, off Metairie Road, which is kind of ironic, 'cause that's where I ended up having my first restaurant. But I went to school uptown. So I always liked to cook. I didn't know that at that point when in high school that I could go off and be a chef. It wasn't popular back then. I had gone off to college, and then, when I came back, it was then that Susan Spicer was so popular, and I was fortunate enough to be able to work with her and Danielle Bonnot. I did not go to culinary school. I opened my first restaurant at 26, and then I got married and started having kids. And we lived in the Caribbean. I sold Vega, and we went there. And then eventually, we ended up opening a restaurant, which was called The Larder. And that was fun, 'cause it was my husband and I doing that together. And then we had that for a couple of years, and it was time to come home. So it looks like our grits are getting to that point. They're nice. They're getting tight. So, we're gonna add my secret. I love adding just a little bit of cream cheese, just for a little extra richness. And we'll add some white cheddar. It's a sharp white cheddar. You can add, if you want a little Creole seasoning and salt and pepper. So I'm gonna get that nice and tight. And I'm gonna let those sit while we finish off our crawfish so it'll tighten up a little bit. So, this we've been letting reduce down about halfway. In Louisiana, crawfish are very popular, but when we get them, they are already cooked and seasoned. I put a little Creole seasoning with them, and I'm just gonna put those, let those -- you just need them to warm up. We're gonna add at this point some green onion... the rest of that tarragon. Tarragon's one of my favorite herbs. And a little salt and pepper, and it should be ready to go. So we can start to plate up. So now we're gonna plate up our dish. We have our nice cheddar grits. And a nice little portion of that. Our yummy crawfish grillades, just pooled right over the top. Mmm. Smells good.

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You can really smell that tarragon. Okay. So, we're gonna put a little fresh tarragon on there and there you have it. It's my crawfish grillades with white cheddar grits. Enjoy! -We travel next to the historic Lower Ninth Ward and Cafe Dauphine, a restaurant founded by Chef Tia Henry and her husband, Fred. The dining establishment has helped revitalize the neighborhood, attracting people to the area for a taste of Chef Tia's soulful New Orleans cuisine. -This particular dish, the blackened redfish Florentine, I think speaks to our location in the Lower Ninth Ward. What people may not sometimes know is that we are just like 2 1/2 blocks away from the Mississippi River, which is right down the street from our restaurant. And then, in the opposite direction, maybe a mile and a half down the road, is Bayou Bienvenue. So what I know is that there is a bounty of catfish in the Mississippi River. I've even seen some of the locals pull man-sized catfish out of there. So today, I have some beautiful Louisiana catfish fillets that are gonna be the star of this dish. I have some homemade blackening seasoning that I'm gonna season the catfish fillets with. The primary ingredient in here is paprika. And to add to the paprika, we have black pepper, white pepper, salt, herbs, oregano, basil, and thyme, and also a little cayenne pepper for heat. We also have granulated garlic and granulated onion powder in this mixture. This seasoning is not very salty, so you can use a liberal amount to cover your fish. It's gonna give the fish a beautiful, black crust that makes it really, really, really Creole. And we want to make sure that we season both sides liberally with the blackening season. So, after we blacken our catfish fillets, we're gonna top it off with the white wine cream sauce that has crawfish and spinach and red onion in it. So the catfish component is a tribute to the Mississippi River and the crawfish component is a tribute to Bayou Bienvenue. Bayou Bienvenue, which is a mile and a half from where we are at one time was very abundant with crawfish. My father-in-law told me stories that whenever he was young, from the runoffs from the Bayou, you used to be able to just take a net and just scoop up the crawfish from runoffs that were, like, in ditches and little canals that the Bayou form. It's not as plentiful with crawfish anymore, but this is still my tribute to the wonderful natural resources that we have here in the Lower Ninth Ward. So, we're heating our cast-iron skillet with olive oil, and we just want enough to coat the bottom of our skillet really well. And to that, we're gonna add 2 tablespoons of butter. You want to make sure that your skillet is piping hot before you put the fish in it, and you can see that it's starting to smoke some, so you know that your skillet is almost ready for the fish fillets.

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And that's what you want to see, a nice sizzle whenever you put your fish in the skillet. And I'm gonna cook about two fillets in there at a time. The fish is gonna cook really, really quickly in that skillet. It's only gonna take maybe about four to five minutes per side. And let's see what our fish is starting to look like. So you can see it's starting to make a nice, dark-brown crust on the top side of that fish. I chose to use olive oil and butter. Olive oil, predominantly it's to coat the bottom of my skillet. Butter for flavor, but I use more olive oil than butter, because if we just used butter, we're gonna find that it starts to burn a lot faster in there. So the olive oil and butter combination works well together. So our fish is ready to turn over on the other side. Like I said, it only took about four minutes for it to cook on its first side. So, on blackened fish, it has a really dark crust on it. You know when somebody overcooks something or burns something, they say that they want it Cajun. So, this is Cajun that looks burnt, but it really isn't. So, our fish fillets are about done now, so we're gonna remove them and put them on a plate. So, in my heated skillet, I'm gonna add a little butter, because I'm gonna saut some onions and crawfish in this skillet. So, once my butter is melted, I'm gonna add some sliced red onions. I prefer red onions, number one, because they're beautiful in the dish, and, also, they have a nice, sweet flavor. I'm a native of Lake Charles, Louisiana. I came to New Orleans in 1997 to go to college. I graduated from Xavier University with a bachelor's in biology premed. So immediately upon graduating, I got a job as a laboratory scientist working for the state. I worked there a few years and decided that I wanted to go back to school for nursing. So, I was halfway through the program. Hurricane Katrina happened, and me and my husband's lives changed for forever. And everything that we predicted would happen in our future, God had a different plan, and our lives went on another path. Once the onion starts to cook down, we're gonna add our crawfish. The crawfish are already precooked, but they still need to be cooked a little bit extra. So we're just gonna saut that together, just a couple of minutes. Then I want to deglaze the bottom of my skillet with white wine.

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The white wine does not have to be an expensive brand. I chose Chardonnay, but by all means use whatever you have at home. You don't have to go out and buy anything expensive. We just want to get that nice flavor in our cream sauce. So we're gonna let the wine reduce with the crawfish and red onions. It won't take long. This isn't a dish that you can walk away from. You got to kind of babysit it 'cause you don't want to burn it 'cause it isn't gonna take long to cook at all. My mom is my mentor/chef/home cook. I've been cooking from a very young age. By the time I was 10 years old, I was preparing meals for the whole family. It really wasn't a chore. I really looked at it as a honor and privilege that my mom trusted me enough to prepare meals for my dad and my younger brother. And my mom is the one that taught me how to cook. My mom is a phenomenal cook. She is the type of cook that bakes bread every Sunday and makes homemade pies and cakes for every Sunday meal. So right when the wine has almost reduced, we're gonna add our heavy whipping cream. And, so, our heavy whipping cream, I'm adding a little sea salt... and a little white pepper -- not black pepper, white pepper. Now we're just gonna let that reduce. People always say that when you're choosing a career, you should chose something that you love doing, where it's never like work when you go there. And whenever I enter my kitchen here at my restaurant, it never feels like work. It feels like home. So, once this cream starts to boil, watch it, turn the heat down and reduce that heat as needed, because you don't want your skillet to boil over. But it's starting to reduce. So you can see that the sauce is reducing nicely. And we're just waiting for it to get to a good consistency for us to add our last two final ingredients, which are our fresh spinach leaves and our grated Parmesan cheese. This is the consistency that we're looking for right now. It's nice and bubbly all over, and the cream has reduced a good bit now. We're gonna add just a sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese to just give it a little pop of flavor. And we have fresh spinach leaves that we're gonna add to it that's gonna really accentuate our flavor and give it a nice, beautiful presentation. This is our Florentine aspect of our cream sauce. And we want to be generous with our fresh spinach leaves, because they are going to reduce significantly. And it doesn't take long for them to wilt, so once you add them, literally it takes like a minute. They pretty much wilt as soon as they touch the heat. Once our spinach leaves have all wilted into our sauce, and that will only take a minute, our sauce is done, and it's ready to put on top of our blackened catfish. So, our Florentine sauce with crawfish in it, I'm telling you, y'all, this sauce is delicious all by itself, but it's gonna be amazing with this fish. So we're gonna apply a generous amount of this crawfish white wine cream sauce to this fish. And this is a super-impressive dish. This is our blackened catfish Florentine. I'm telling you, this dish is amazing. Whoever tries this dish is gonna be so impressed. -Thank you for joining this dining tour spotlighting women who are changing the culinary landscape of the Crescent City. See you next time for more inspirational chefs on "Kitchen

Queens

New Orleans." You can find recipes for all of the dishes in this series, chef profiles, plus more information about "Kitchen New Orleans" by visiting wyes.org. Like and follow WYES-TV on Facebook and Instagram. -Funding for "Kitchen New Orleans" was provided by...