Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

-Funding for "Kitchen

Queens

New Orleans" was provided by the Melvin S. Cohen Foundation, Inc., and by the L.E. Phillips Family Foundation, Inc. -This time on "Kitchen New Orleans", it's a culinary adventure with three dishes that boldly travel around the world. First, a home-style Vietnamese garlic-sauted bok choy by Chef Lout Nguyen of Magasin Cafe. Then wild mushroom and potato pierogies, filled dumplings that reflect the Czechoslovakian heritage of Chef Sue Zemanick of Zasu. And finally, a muffulettu, the Sicilian ancestor of the New Orleans muffuletta, prepared by Chef Christina do Carmo Honn of Caf Cour. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans Kitchen Queens. Rounding out the eclectic fare of New Orleans' Magazine Street is Magasin Cafe, known for its expertly prepared Vietnamese specialties. Chef Lout Nguyen, who fled Vietnam with her family in 1975, learned to cook from her mother, who was also a chef. Today, the menu of her Uptown restaurant reflects Chef Lout's passion for the traditional dishes of her homeland. The meatless garlic-sauted bok choy begins with vegetable prep. -All vegetable. If you want meat, you cook this one with beef. Garlic and onion. And tomato. And white onion. After this, bok choy. -Chef Lout blanched the bok choy briefly in boiling water before adding it to the wok. -I put a little bit of srircha. Hot sauce. Like, a little bit spicy. This is sauted bok choy.

Speaking Vietnamese

Queens

-Our next destination is Mid-City, where a streetcar passes the doorstep of Zasu, a neighborhood gem established by Chef Sue Zemanick. The restaurant's name is a reference to the Czech family ties of the chef, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. The Pennsylvania native was drawn to New Orleans by her love of fish and seafood, and in 2014, she was recognized as Best Chef South by the James Beard Foundation. -I'm making mushroom pierogies with caramelized Vidalia onions and asparagus and onion creme fraiche. So, to give you a little history about pierogies, growing up, my grandmother was from Czechoslovakia, so she always made these around the holidays, and we would go foraging for mushrooms in Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and take them home and make pierogies with them. Pierogies are a little dumpling that are traditionally filled with mashed potatoes. You can also fill them with other things. Growing up, we would filled them with what is called lekvar, which is prune butter, and have a dessert pierogi. Today, we're going to be making the mushroom and potato pierogies that I used to eat growing up with my family. So to start, we're going to start with the dough. In here, I have about 12 ounces of flour and a tablespoon of salt, and I'm going to use a fork to make this dough. I'm going to take two whole eggs and a third of a cup of melted butter and hot water. I like to make a little well in the center. Going to add my eggs and my hot liquid and stir it together with a fork. Now, you don't want to overwork this dough. You just want to kind of bring it together into a loose mass. Once it comes together, I'll stop using the fork and bring it together with my hands. You do not have to worry about putting the hot liquid on the eggs 'cause you're going to be mixing this quickly. So, as long as it's not boiling hot. You just want the butter and the water to be just below a simmer. So, we're gonna stir this together. And now I'm going to move on to using my hand to make a ball out of this. Now, any of the extra flour that's in the bowl that doesn't get incorporated, I just discard. You don't want to overwork this dough. You just want to bring it together. And that's what you're looking for -- a very loose mass. You'll see the flour is not mixed all the way in. But that's okay. Now the dough has come together, we're going to wrap this in plastic wrap and let it rest while we make the filling for the pierogies. I like to let the dough rest for at least an hour, and you can do it -- leave it in the refrigerator. Now we're going to move on to making the filling. I like to use different types of mushrooms that are readily available. You can use wild mushrooms, which I prefer, but for this case, we're going to use some cultivated mushrooms. I have here some oyster mushrooms, some stiitakes, and some king trumpets. So first off, we're going to start chopping these mushrooms. You want to chop it to like a small dice. And I like to use a variety of different mushrooms because they have different flavors and textures. You're going to need about a cup of mushrooms for this recipe. If you only have one type of mushroom, that's fine. I like to use wild mushrooms when they're available. Some of my favorite ones to use are chanterelles, which are great and grow pretty well here in Louisiana. I also like to use morels when they're in season, but if you can't find those mushrooms, you can just use whatever you can find at the grocery store. Button mushrooms will work just fine. King trumpet mushrooms are cultivated mushrooms. They have a very meaty texture and they're very pretty to look at. They really do look like a true mushroom. Now that the mushrooms are all chopped, we're going to set these aside, and now we're going to move on to making our caramelized onions. I like to use Vidalia onions for this because they have a very natural sweetness to them. And we're going to julienne these and cook them in whole butter. We use a lot of butter in Eastern European cooking. Makes it taste better. I'm going to set aside a portion of the onion for my onion creme fraiche. When you're julienning onions, a lot of people cut them this way, but the proper way to cut them is actually with the grain of the onion. Try to slice these as thin as possible. You'll achieve a better caramelized onion that way. When they're cut too thick, they'll take forever to caramelize. And I like to caramelize my onions slow and low for a long time. I usually cook them about 20 minutes, but sometimes they take a little bit longer, depending on the sugar content of the onion and also what temperature you're cooking them at. I think it's important to do it slow. A lot of people have, you know, taught me in the past to cook them at a high heat and deglaze with water. But that's not the proper way to caramelize onions. And you never want to salt the onions while they're cooking. You want to wait 'til the end. The salt will draw out the water in them and it'll take forever to caramelize. So now that our onions are julienned, I'm gonna set these aside and take my little piece of onion that I saved and put that in a vegetable juicer to make our onion creme fraiche. For the recipe for the cream fraiche, I use about a quarter of an onion, just so you have enough to get through the vegetable juicer. I came up with the idea of juicing the onion for this recipe because of my love for French onion dip, and I wanted to incorporate the onion flavor, but not using an onion powder. So I've decided to put it in a juicer. If you don't have a juicer at home, you can use a blender and strain out the liquid. So, I'm gonna put my onion in here. You don't need a lot of onion to make onion juice, and you'll probably have more juice than you'll need for this recipe. So, now that we have our Vidalia onion juice, I'm going to take some creme fraiche and combine these two together. I make creme fraiche myself at home. It's very easy. You can also purchase it at the grocery store. So, I always do this to taste. But you just want to add a little bit of onion juice at a time and mix it together. And I like to season with a little bit of salt and pepper. This is going to be the sauce for our pierogies. Growing up, my grandmother always served the pierogies with sour cream, and this is just my version of making it a little bit more interesting for our diners at the restaurant. So now, we're going to move on to caramelizing our onions. So, I have a sauce pot here, and I'm going to add some whole butter to that. So, once the butter is melted, I'm going to add the julienned onions in there. Once they're all broken up a little bit and they start to saute, I'm going to turn down my heat and try to keep a close eye on these, because if you don't stir them every once in a while, they will definitely burn on you. You're going to cook these for about 20 minutes over low heat. I'm going to turn the burner down and move on to the mushroom filling. For the mushroom filling, I like to get my pan smoking hot. I'm going to add the butter and the mushrooms pretty much at the same time. Stir these. These I like to cook until they're nice and golden brown. Usually takes about two to three minutes if your pan is nice and hot. I like to to stir this pretty constantly. That way, they don't burn. Once they start to get brown like that, I will add a pinch of thyme, some garlic, some shallot. And then I will finish with my salt and pepper. We're waiting 'til the end to season. That way, none of the water is drawn out and you can create and achieve a golden brown product. I'm now going to add some finely chopped chives to that. Then we will combine these with the mashed potatoes to make the pierogi filling. So, for the filling for the pierogies, it's going to be a mixture of sauted mushrooms and mashed potatoes. I just make a classic mashed potato with Yukon Gold potatoes, Idaho potatoes, butter, and heavy cream and a little bit of salt. I'm going to mix the mashed potatoes with the sauted mushrooms. My mushrooms. So, I'm going to mix in my mushrooms, and you can mix this all together while it's warm. It'll incorporate better. You can add as many mushrooms as you like. I like to do a pretty mashed potato-y version. Sometimes I'll just do mashed potatoes and cheese, but today we have this mixture with mushrooms. So once this is all mixed together, I'll set this aside to cool, and now we're going to move on to making our pierogies. Now we're going to start rolling out the dough for our pierogies. I always like to do it on a floured surface. I find it easier if the dough has been removed from the refrigerator for at least 10 minutes before rolling. We're going to roll these out to about the thickness of a nickel. It's like a dumpling dough, basically, so it's just something that I had to work on for a very long time. Sometimes my grandmother's recipe didn't always work because she was not putting butter in the dough. She was sometimes using sour cream or just water, and I found that over time, if I added the butter to it, it would create a better mouthfeel for the dough. I'm looking for the thickness of a nickel. Takes a second to roll out. This dough can pull back a lot, but don't worry because you can actually re-roll the scraps one time and get a great yield out of it. And I usually just roll it out on one side. I don't flip this dough over because you don't want the flour to get on the inside once you put your filling in, It helps them to stay sealed better if you don't have too much flour on the dough. Okay. Now that the dough is rolled out to the thickness that we want, we want to take a ring mold or cutter and cut circles out of it. Grandmother would use an old can from canned vegetables, but you can just get these cutters these days. It's a lot easier. Depending on the size cut you use depends on how much filling you put in. I normally put in about a heaping tablespoon, and I like to go and put my filling on all of my circles. That way I can just go back and seal them all closed and drop them immediately into boiling water. What's great about pierogies is that you can fill them with anything. You can boil them, you can saute them, you can deep fry them. And I also like to sometimes save my extra pierogi scrap and deep fry it and cover in powdered sugar, like my little Slovak version of a beignet. I've done them with sweet potatoes before and crawfish. Just like I said earlier, you can do lekvar, which is prune butter, which are really tasty, and I usually does those with powdered sugar after they're done. So, I have a little bowl of water here, and we're going to start sealing the pierogies. So I just want to moisten half of the circle, the semicircle, and kind of fold it over and pinch it together, and you don't want any of the filling to come out, so you want to double check your work and pinch them twice. So I will go through, make all the cute little dumplings, and then go back and check them to make sure that they stay sealed. Growing up, we always saved a little bit of the mashed potato water because it has natural starch in it to help seal the dough, but I found that with this dough recipe that I've come up with, I don't need to do that anymore. My kids love pierogies. My kids love all food. They're good eaters. So, we're going to simmer these for three to four minutes or until they rise to the surface of the water, and then let them cook for about one more minute. Now we're going to boil our pierogies in simmering water. Gonna drop them in one at a time. You don't want to overcrowd the pot because they will stick together. I do not put salt in this water because the dough has plenty of seasoning as well as the filling, and I will salt them after I saute them. I like to give it a very gentle stir right after I drop them so they don't stick together. So, now that these have cooked for three to four minutes, gonna remove them with a slotted spoon. So, now that my pan is nice and hot, I'm going to add some canola or grape seed oil to it. You can also use clarified butter if you like. I think it adds more flavor if you do. But in this case, I'm going to use canola oil. I will use oil in this because I want to get the pan very hot. But clarified butter does have a really high smoking point, so you can use that. So once it's hot, I will drop my pierogies in. I'm going to let them brown for just about, say, 45 seconds or until they unstick naturally from the pan, and you'll be able to tell because they'll start moving around. So, you want to be very careful when you put these into the saute pan because you just took them out of boiling water, so the water might splatter. So, just be very careful and always drop away from you and step back if you need to. So, once they're golden brown, I'll flip them over and brown them on both sides. They're almost like a little pot stickers, but filled with delicious mashed potatoes. At this point, I like to season with a little bit of salt. My caramelized onions have had plenty of time to cook. See how nice and golden brown they are? Now that they're at that color, I can season with some salt and pepper. I like to serve my pierogies with some asparagus. I've just cut this at a bias and blanched it in some salted water, and I like to mix that in with my caramelized onions. I like to put a lot of the onion creme fraiche that we made. I think the coolness of the creme fraiche against the warm, buttery pierogies is a nice contrast. I usually serve three at the restaurant, but you can eat as many as you like. It's also a great dish to make with a smaller ring mold because you can serve them as a little hors d'oeuvre. So, put the onions and asparagus on top. Here we have my grandmother's mushroom and potato pierogies. -Our final stop is the French Quarter and the historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center on Royal Street. Chef Christina do Carmo Honn and her husband Dana operate the museum's Caf Cour, an eatery that offers food with history. Upon moving to New Orleans from San Francisco, the couple established Carmo, their tropical restaurant in the warehouse district, where chef Christina draws from the culinary influences of her native Brazil. -I'm going to make the muffaletto now, muffulettu, and then we're going to start poaching the tuna. So, we have some water here that is already boiling. I will put the tuna. Okay. Let me put it up the volume. Yes. Okay. So, we are poaching the tuna now. While it poaches, I'm going to make the olive salad. So, I have some Kalamata olives here......and some green olives. Some lime zest. And roasted peppers. Some olive oil, too. Muffulettu is the original muffuletta sandwich, and then the muffuletta was the ancestor of the muffuletta, and it's made with tuna. Completely different. -The muffulettu is the delicious ancestor of the muffuletta, which is a New Orleans creation. Defined by its aniseed bun, the rustic sandwich has roots in Sicily, where it can still be found. -Okay. Almost done. So, I was born in Rio de Janeiro, as it started with my grandmother, so I used it to live all together. She she was from Portugal, and I started cooking and I love it. So now it is flaky here, and we are going to start making the sandwich. Get it all... Okay. So, I have the bread. The bread, like... you know this is the muffuletta, but this one has anise. It's a little bit different from the muffulatta. And I have some mayo mixed with some anchovies. That's what we put... So, you put that layer of mayo. You put on top, too. That top part. Okay. Alright. Try to make food from all the countries, traditional foods, and we always pay attention to history, and we wanted to to develop that and show other people. Okay. Some more in there. And I put the olive salad that they made before. Okay. Then we have the onions. Red onions. That's beautiful. And the last ingredient -- the Pecorino. Shaved Pecorino. Now we cover. So, now we cut. Slice. And let's see if I can put it here. That, and a little salad that I make, some olive oil already, and I put that with organic greens. And... So that's the muffulettu. -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 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 WYESTV on Facebook and Instagram. -Funding for "Kitchen New Orleans" was provided by the Melvin S. Cohen Foundation, Inc. and by the L.E. Phillips Family Foundation, Inc.