The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy

-Funding for "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy" was provided by the... -Dooky Chase's restaurant served as a test kitchen for Chef Leah Chase, where throughout her lifetime, she explored the culinary traditions of other cultures, insisting that in order to understand people, you had to get to know and eat their food.

Chefs Dook Chase and Cleo Robinson prepare three dishes representing the multicultural gumbo of New Orleans that piqued the curiosity of the Creole chef.

-Each year on Saint Patrick's Day, the restaurant salutes the Irish of New Orleans with corned beef and cabbage.

-Today is my lucky day.

And what I mean by that, we're celebrating Saint Patrick's Day, and you know what that means -- corned beef and cabbage.

What I want to start with is show you how to make this brine that we do here for our corned beef.

You can see I have a little salt.

I have some sugar.

I have some red pepper flakes, bay leaf.

Here's a mix of all spice, cloves.

You're going on a stove with about three four cups of water, depending on the size of your brisket.

You're going to add in your sugar, your salt, and all your different spices.

You want to dissolve that sugar and that salt and that water.

Right?

Take it off of that fire and let it cool.

You want to put it in a refrigerator and cool it before you add it to your brisket.

Put your brisket into a pan.

You pour that brine over, and you can see, that's my liquid here.

You cover it tightly, right?

You want to reduce the amount of air that can get to that brisket.

Put it in your refrigerator, I would say for three days.

So this is a dish, as you get prepared to celebrate, you want to start this a little early On the second day, I want you to flip that brisket over, cover it tight again, put it in a refrigerator and what you'll get at the end of that third day is something like this.

You can see that brine, my liquid kind of reduced a little bit.

It soaked up into that brisket.

And this is what you're looking for.

Also, with this brisket, right?

We didn't trim any fat off.

What we want to do, as we slow cook it, we want that fat to render down into that brine because at the end, we're going to use that brine, a little bit of that brine, to make our glaze.

Cover this guy up and we'll get this brisket into the oven for about 3.5 hours.

This is a perfect time to get started on our lock, and that's the cabbage.

And Cleo will take us there.

-I don't like a fine, fine chop on the cabbage.

The bigger the cabbage, the smaller you may have to cut it.

We're getting that cut up.

I am going to add to a pot some ham stock, that I have already taken some ham shanks and boiled them.

I don't want to use the ham meat in it because I want the corned beef to be the center of attention here.

To that, we are going to add some onions.

And a little garlic.

And we'll let that come up to a boil.

Cabbage is one of those things that's pretty quick to cook pretty easy.

And Ms. Chase was pretty fond of saying that in order to know people, you had to know their culture, and food was a very viable part of people's culture.

And I truly believe that's how she became the Creole Queen, because she was very good at putting different cultures together to make a dish.

We're going to add a little thyme.

I'm going to add the carrots because they are hearty and it's going to take them a little while.

And we like the carrots in here, not only for the color, but it's going to give a little extra sweetness to the cabbage.

It won't take long for them to cook at all.

-And you can see, that's the key, right?

As we build those layers of flavor, it's important to know which item takes a little longer to cook.

-Then we will add our cabbage.

And of course, it's going to cook down.

May look like a lot, but it's going to all fit.

It's going to work just lovely.

And we're going to be careful with the salt since I used a ham shank.

So we're going to add that sparingly in the beginning.

So we'll add just a little bit more.

But we like the red pepper flakes here.

It's not going to be spicy spicy, but we will get some kick to it.

And a couple of little bay leaves that we'll put down in there.

And that is the sum of the seasoning until we get our cabbage to wilt on down.

And we're going to add some potatoes that I had soaking in water.

I just didn't want them to oxidize.

So we're going to add them, and it will take just a few minutes for them to get fork tender.

And we will have a finished product in no time.

And I will take this moment to see if I have enough salt and enough pepper.

-And I'm jumping in because I can't pass up this smell.

-I think that's perfect.

-Oh, that's right on.

-We're going to add just a little red bell peppers.

Add a little bit more sweetness to the dish, and it's going to add a wonderful color.

-So I'm getting ready to take out that corned beef, and I'll show you how to finish it off with that glaze that we'll do, a pepper jelly, and we'll be ready to serve this wonderful dish.

So here I uncovered it.

I want it just to cool a little bit, let those juices settle in, because we will have to slice it.

But I'll show you how to make our glaze.

I'll kick us off some butter right in here to melt.

And let that melt down just a tad.

So it's melted right there.

I'll bring this right here.

Get a little bit of my brine here.

We're not looking for much, and just a little.

Remember that brine has all those great flavors.

You don't want it too much, right?

You don't want it to overpower your pepper jelly.

You can see right here, we're going to take that pepper jelly, and I just want to kind of bring it down.

And you talk about a glaze -- I mean, this pepper jelly, this is something that can go over so many different proteins that really just makes it stand out.

And as we start to melt that jelly -- But you can see this is what we looking for, right?

It's thickening up.

While that's going, we're going to get ready to work this corned beef.

I'm going to take this beef out here.

Put it right on here to cool.

So I'm getting ready to slice up this beef.

And the reason I put it on the pan is you can see some of the juice is still coming off as you let it rest.

Right?

You want to keep that captured.

So you can see the grain that's coming around here.

You want to cut across that grain, right?

That's what you're looking for.

And you can start to see, look at that fat.

That juice is all in there.

So now you have that little bit of fat at the bottom.

If you're at home and you want to trim that off, you certainly can.

I didn't do it while we're cooking because I wanted that great flavor as we rendered it.

So I'll clean these pieces up for you, Cleo.

-So we'll plate up our cabbage, and then we can have our corned beef right on top.

And our potatoes are nice and tender.

So we're going to get some cabbage.

And some carrots.

Have to get all of our vegetables in there.

And a potato.

Make sure we can see all of our little goodies.

-Top you up with this beautiful corned beef.

And no, we did not forget.

The finishing touch to this beautiful dish is going to be that beautiful glaze that I have.

You can see that pepper jelly just coming down.

And this here, you talk about a celebration of culture, celebration of Saint Patrick's Day.

Every time Saint Patrick's Day is coming around, not only with the parades here, but just diving into a great corned beef and cabbage.

-Chef Leah Chase was an inventive cook who was always ready to spread her wings to make something unexpected and delicious.

-My grandmother was a student of food.

She read magazines.

She studied people's culture.

She went out and tasted different cuisines.

And she loved to dig in and put her spin on those cuisines.

That's how she learned.

That's how she grew as a chef.

She said, "If you would sit down and really enjoy a meal with somebody from a different culture, you will start to understand them, where they're from, and you can converse and dialog over that."

So that was her way of continuing to learn.

She would go out and taste so many different cuisines and bring them right here in the restaurant.

And us in the kitchen would say, "We're cooking what today?"

-I don't care where I would take her or where any of us would take her, she'd come back and try to put her twist on it.

And she was definitely a natural -- a natural cook, right?

-Next, Chef Leah's take on an Italian veal scaloppini dish, veal with tomatoes and basil.

-We are going to prepare veal cutlets with some fresh tomatoes and some herbs, and we're going to begin by heating up a skillet.

We're going to add a little bit of butter to our skillet.

And we don't want it too hot as to brown the butter.

We're going to salt and pepper both sides of the veal cutlets.

Great.

And then we will add our cutlets.

It's always important that you get something in your repertoire that can be done quickly but tastefully when you need that little quick, go-to dish.

And as you can see, it doesn't take any time to sear these off.

I don't want them crispy.

And we're getting just a little bit of the juice coming off of those, which is going to add to our little sauce that's going to be made right in the same skillet.

And as we get them cooked, we're going to remove them.

That's looking great.

Perfect.

And to this same skillet that we have already rendered down, we're going to add just a little bit more butter, and then we're going to add some onions.

And some tomatoes so that they can cook down and release their juices.

This is going to be our little sauce here that's going to give us some wonderful flavors there.

Looks great.

And we're going to take a little fresh basil.

Oh, that smells wonderful.

And our tomatoes will exude their juices.

And to that, we will add some red bell peppers.

More wonderful color.

Lots of freshness from the garden.

And a little bell pepper -- green bell peppers.

Ooh, the colors are great.

Nice Italian colors.

Get us some red and some green.

And I like to hold back on my garlic right till the end because I don't want it to brown in there.

-That looks great.

And then we're going to add just a touch of salt.

Not much because we've already salted our meat there, but we're going to balance those vegetables out a bit.

And we're not big on pepper, to say the cayenne pepper or the red pepper flakes in this dish.

We just like all of our vegetables to stand on their own.

And that looks terrific right there.

And then we will return the meat.

And we're going to bury them down in there for a minute just so they pick up some of the flavors of the vegetables.

So as you can see, that's pretty much done.

We have a nice, wonderful color with our vegetables, and our meat is cooked.

And our tomatoes have released all of their juices, but they're still standing.

You can still identify them.

And we will taste it to see if we have enough salt and enough pepper.

Tastes pretty good to me.

You can serve it with some potatoes or rice.

So we have completed this dish, and we're going to plate it up, and we're going to bring all of our cultures together.

Little Italian, little Creole, but easy to do.

And get us all at the table, and we can sit down and discuss homework, how the day at the office was, what we going to do tomorrow, how we going to learn a little bit more?

How are we going to help out the community?

And we're going to bring it all together.

A little Creole, a little Italian.

And as we say here in New Orleans, little bit of this and a little bit of that.

And there you have it.

-Chef Leah Chase had an unlimited fascination for the food world.

She was captivated by new taste and unfamiliar menu items.

-You know what a cala is?

-Tell me.

It's a rice cake.

It's a donut, and it has rice in it, you know, with powdered sugar.

And they would make those, and then they would put -- come around on Sundays with baskets, and they would be shouting "Calas.

Calas.

[ Speaks in Creole ]" Always hot.

And, "Beautiful and hot calas."

You know, they used to shout that, and they would -- people would come out and buy those calas.

I remember that very much.

-She loved the city of New Orleans and everything that was prepared in every neighborhood.

She embraced everyone's cultural talents as it relates to cuisine.

You know, if she wanted Chinese food and no one was taking her fast enough to her favorite fine Chinese restaurant, then she's going to cook it and we're all going to eat what she wanted to have.

So she would cook, you know, Chinese, you know, shrimp fried rice, loved her pepper steaks, you know, things like that.

She would cook it here and try to honor all the cultures as best she could.

-Chef Dook finishes with an old New Orleans tradition, cala, or Creole rice fritters.

-We're talking French Quarter and we're talking Creole sweet treats, as somebody would put it, a Creole beignet.

But we're talking cala, right?

And this is a dish that many Creoles used back in the day, when you talk about street vendors and you're talking about the uses of everything.

You have leftover rice, right?

What can we turn that into?

I started here with a little warm water, and we just want that water to be a little warm because what we want to do is just activate our yeast here.

So I pour it in, our yeast, and as soon as it hits that warm water, you'll start to smell it.

It's just hitting you, and you're just stirring it around, looking through, making sure it's all dissolved.

It is here.

I'm going to set that right on the side just to cool down just a little.

While that's cooling, we have a little flour here.

So when you're baking or doing anything, remember dry first, it helps you to mix it in and make sure you got got it all even around.

This is a little sugar that I'm adding here.

With the little sugar, I'm going to add a little bit of baking powder.

And again, you're thinking beignet, right?

You want that pastry, as you fry it, to puff up a little bit.

A pinch of salt.

Then we're going to add a little bit of cinnamon here.

We going to make sure all that great flavor is folded in.

And now that we got our dry, we'll start to add this yeast mixture to our rice.

Now I have two eggs, beaten, that I'm going to add to this rice, too.

So you can see I'm putting the wet with the rice, and the flour's still dry.

We'll fold this in.

And I have a pinch of vanilla.

You know, I love, when we're making dessert, those staples -- sugar, vanilla, cinnamon.

Then we'll add a little bit here.

And we'll start to fold it in.

And I'll add a little more.

Just fold it in, right?

I didn't add it all at once because I'm looking for a certain texture, and I want to mix it around.

I'll add a little more in.

And you're probably looking at this and saying, "a rice beignet," but this is something that's just awesome.

I do have my pot on the fryer with oil, getting ready.

I'm looking for 325 degrees.

And this is the consistency that I'm looking for.

Now, the other key, as you're frying cala, is this scoop.

It's about a half an ounce, right?

I would go -- half ounce would be the biggest one I would use.

If you have one smaller than a half ounce, that's going to be perfect.

Because it's going to puff up, right?

When you look at this, you may think it's too small, but that cala is going to puff out.

So you don't want nothing too big because as it cooks and it browns, right, you want to make sure that inside is cooked.

If you go too big, it's going to brown before that inside cooked and it'll be too doughy.

So you can go right in here.

And you're just releasing.

Always, when I'm frying, I'm going in a pot with the oil just about halfway up.

Because as you know, when you put things in, that oil will rise a little bit.

And another thing to be careful when you're frying cala, right?

You think about popping -- that rice is going to pop a little bit, right?

So if you have kids and you're doing this, you don't want them around this stove when you're frying it because that rice is going to pop.

I want you to be careful a little bit, too.

You can see that beautiful color that's happening on there.

Let me get a few more guys in here.

Something to plate up for our dish.

And if you listen, you'll hear that rice pop.

And this is a dish, if you have enough oil halfway, you don't have to move it around, turn it around.

It's just going to brown evenly on all sides.

That dough is going to get cooked, and this is a dessert that's just going to be beautiful.

So think of that Creole rice beignet we call calas.

Just leftover rice.

You know, this is another dish that I think about in New Orleans when you had street vendors going around, right?

Well, now we have grocery stores, but back in the day, you had the milkman coming around.

You had so many people servicing food on the street, walking around, and you had ladies walking with hot coffee and hot chocolate.

And you can see this is the brownness that we're looking for.

I'm going to take these guys out here, drain them just to get some of that excess grease off of them.

I don't want them to cool because I want to hit them right when they're hot with that powdered sugar, right?

That's when that sugar will not only start to adhere to them, and then you come on top with that powdered sugar.

Ooh, good beignet that I'm looking for.

So here we going right on this plate here.

And this is the part where you can bring your kids back in, after you're done frying.

And they'll love this part, right?

You get your little powdered sugar here and just... And if you had any warm syrup, you can mix a little syrup with butter or you can warm up some honey as a dipping sauce.

Even if you wanted, you know, you had something at breakfast time, right?

And you wanted a little preservative, a jam -- fry these bad boys up, and you can dip it in a jam.

This is just something that's fantastic.

You think of a -- a sweet dessert or morning breakfast with a hot, good cup of coffee.

And you have it.

So when you talk about our deserts, after the celebration of all the beautiful cultures that we have here in New Orleans, the reason why Creole cuisine is what it is -- it's a celebration of culture.

We have so many different cultures that really mixed and made Creole cuisine what it is today.

And why not end it off with some beautiful cala for dessert?

-Chef Leah Chase spent a lifetime uplifting the community and building bridges through food.

For more meals that bring people together, join the Chase family next time on "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy."

-Leah Chase's iconic book, The Dooky Chase Cookbook, has been updated and includes all new recipes from this series you're watching.

The cookbook is available for $27.95 plus shipping and handling.

To order, please call 1-866-388-0834 or order online at wyes.org.

-Whatever my mother decided to do, she wanted to be the best at it, and so therefore, she would never give up.

She would read books.

She would associate herself with people who knew about the culinary world and how you can make different dishes.

And that's what she did.

She was a lifetime learner.

-I don't care where I would take her or where any of us would take her, she'd come back and try to put her twist on it.

And she was definitely a natural -- a natural cook, right?

-My grandmother was a student of food.

She read magazines.

She studied people's cultures.

She went out and tasted different cuisines.

And she loved to dig in and put her spin on those cuisines.

-She would love to hear of people that traveled from Australia, and what was the latest cooking trends wherever people were coming from?

She thrived off of that.

And then you would see her creative juices going and go, okay, she's going to try this, it's coming soon.

So let's just brace ourselves for it.

-For more information about "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy," visit wyes.org.

Funding for "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy was provided by...