Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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New Orleans" was provided by... And by... -It's a taste of summer today on "Kitchen Queens" New Orleans." First, a unique watermelon martini by chef Cynthia Vu Tran of Cafe Minh. Then, celebrating garden season drunk shrimp with summer succotash by Chef Amarys Herndon of Palm&Pine. And for dessert, muscadine wine jello by chef Allison Vines-Rushing from NOCHI. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans kitchen queens.

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We begin in centrally located Mid-City on the Canal Street car line, where Cafe Minh offers Vietnamese/French fusion cuisine. Chef Cynthia Vu Tran, who escaped Vietnam in 1979, settled in New Orleans East, then went on to graduate from the Johnson & Wales culinary program. -Well, today I will prepare for you a watermelon crab martini, and this dish, we serve it in our restaurant. In summertime, we have wonderful watermelon and crab meat, and it's wonderful -- light and healthy. And what I'm doing right, I'm just dicing the watermelon. This is how Asian people hold a knife. So don't be surprised that I hold the knife like this. You put in a jalapeo -- fresh jalapeo. This is not too spicy, but it's an option -- if you don't like jalapeo, you don't have to put it in. But it has that kick to it, so it's very nice. Then you have cilantro. Asian people love cilantro. So we have seen some chiffonade cilantro. Now we have avocado. Just peel off the skin. Using a small knife is easy to cut... My family and I, we were here in 1979, and we came -- the first state we came to is Louisiana, New Orleans, and we stay in New Orleans East 'cause my uncle, he sponsored us, so we stay in the East, New Orleans East. Which had a lot of Vietnamese community then; they had a lot of Vietnamese people. Here I have a pound of crab meat, but recipe say half, but we love crab meat, so we're going to put in a pound of crab meat. And then you add a little dash of salt and pepper. Like I say, this is just for taste. After that, squeeze in a little bit of lime. Or lemon. We love limes, so we put lime in there -- have a little different flavor, texture, and the juice is nicer than the lemon. So after that, you mix it up gently. You don't want to break the jumbo lump crab meat. You want to show off your crab meat, right? And so to serve, you can put on a bowl. I'm sure everybody have a martini glass at home, so you serve on a martini glass. So that's what we call it crab watermelon martini. Like I say, martini glass, everybody have one at home, I hope. And you serve it... Just like this. See, on the bottom of the plate, I have some shrimp chips. You can get these at an Asian market. There you have it, a crab watermelon martini, during the summertime -- bon apptit. -Our next stop is the top of the French Quarter to visit Palm&Pine, a bright spot near the Saengar Theater on North Rampart Street. Chef Amarys Herndon, who hails from New Braunfels, Texas, says her restaurant's cuisine represents the South and south of that. -We're gonna make the drunk shrimp today that we serve on the plates portion of our menu at Palm&Pine. So it's an entree. It is loosely inspired by barbecue shrimp. The flavors are completely different, but it's that same style of making a pan butter sauce. And I would say that this dish kind of shows a marriage of where I'm from in Texas, the Tex-Mex flavors I grew up with, and then the things I learned when I moved to New Orleans and trained in those classic New Orleans kitchens. We're going to start out with a chili butter, which has a ton of flavor and is really delicious, but is actually quite simple to make. I'm making a big batch because we're gonna be using it in the restaurant and I like to make the most of my time. So we have six pounds of butter here that I started softening yesterday, and then I have some chilies that I softened up in hot water. We have New Mexico chilies, which are a dried version of like red Hatch chilies. And then this is chipotles, dried chipotles is that I've rehydrated. I like to use the dried chipotles in certain dishes because they don't come with that adobo that you get in the can, which I love adobo, but we don't need it in this dish. And the chipotles bring a little more heat and some smoke. So we're gonna put these in the blender with the liquid that we softened them up in. There's definitely flavor in that. And it's also gonna help us make a nice chili paste to add to our butter. We put those in and then we're gonna put some cumin in as well. I like to add a little salt to the butter, not too much, because we're using it in the pan sauce and I want to control the salt when I pick up the dish, but it's hard for me to taste the butter and know what it tastes like without any salt. So I just add a little bit so that I can taste it for balance. All right, so we're going to blender up. And now we have a nice puree. And we're adding it to the butter now. So, so far, we have one, two, three, four ingredients. We just have a fifth, which is cilantro. And we're just going to do a chop on this cilantro. I've already picked it and washed it. So cilantro is definitely something that I grew up eating a ton of -- salsa, breakfast tacos... We put it in our chili sometimes just 'cause. And it's my favorite herb. I, like, add it to salads, add it to sandwiches. That's like the one herb that's always in my fridge at home. So I'm just doing like a chiffonade the cilantro, and then I'm going gonna pass my knife through it one more time. I don't want to chop it too fine and bruise the cilantro. I want all that flavor, just trying to make sure that it's well distributed throughout the butter. All right, so there we have a little chop on it. All right, I'm going to add it into the butter now. And then this just all gets stirred together. It takes a little... a little bit of mixing to incorporate it. I won't bore you with all the stirring. I'll just show you the nice, finished product. There we go. You can see the little flecks of cilantro, little bits of chili. and the chili paste is distributed well, so it's a nice, bright orange color. Now we're gonna make the summer succotash. I'm going to start out with the okra. We have this beautiful red okra from Covey Rise Farms. And the okra likes to get a nice hard sear, so it takes some of the slime out of it. So I like to start that in the pan first. And we're just going to you and I slice across. And then it's green on the inside, red on the outside. And as you cook down the okra, it will -- the red will kind of bleed out of it and it'll turn like a darker purple, and eventually turn green again as it cooks, if you were to, like, stew it or cook it for a long time, you would lose the color. And we use green okra, too. This is just what was pretty and nice this week. All right, so I have a nice hot pan here. And you can see that little haziness of the oil, a little smoke starting. And that is totally what we're looking for. So we're gonna hit it with our okra. And let that get a sear. So succotash is generally corn, squash, and then some sort of beans, a lot of lima beans. Because we're doing this summer succotash, we wanted to highlight the corn specifically and okra and tomatoes, other vegetables that are in season. I have this squash also from the farm. We were getting some baby squash earlier in the season that was really fun, too. We'll do zucchini or crookneck, whatever we can get. And everything in this succotash is just kind of bite size. All right, so we got a little color on the okra. You could see in the pan... a little slime, like, dripping from the okra. That's why it went in to such a hot pan so that we can force that slime out. We don't mind a little bit, but we don't want it to be a whole goopy thing. As my vegetables start to get color, I like to start adding salt. This is golden hominy, you can buy it just in the can. It's nixtamalized corn. It's stored in lye. Or you can get dried hominy and cook it yourself. And so we're just upping the corn flavor in this succotash. So, hominy there. I'm going to add my seasonings. So I have cumin. Which we also had in the chili butter. So we're reinforcing that cumin flavor. And then smoked pimenton, and that reinforces the smoky flavor of the chilies and gives a nice bright color for the dish. We're going to add a little more oil to the pan. And then I have some onions, poblano pepper, and garlic that I chopped up. I'm not worried about getting color on those. I just want to sweat them and soften them up a little bit. So I'm adding them towards the end. We have some cherry tomatoes. These are purple Cherokees. They have a nice bright acid. And finally, I'm going to add the corn. This corn has just been shucked from the cob. And I like to add it towards the end and keep that, like, sweet, crunch, fresh flavor. We don't need any roasting or caramelization on it. So I'm going to add that, add a little more salt. And we should be just about business with a couple minutes of flavor opening up. All right, so succotash is ready to go. All right, let's brle some limes to garnish the dish. So this is just a little torch, you could also just grill the limes. And that's all we're looking for, just a little caramelization of the lime flesh -- just adds another depth of flavor. We'll set that to the side to garnish the dish with when we're done. Now we're gonna cook the shrimp. Getting my pan hot here. Let's get a little seasoning on the shrimp. I'd like to serve them head on. There's a lot of flavor in the heads. We do take the tails off. So it's a little easier to manage in the bowl. There's all that sauce in the bottom of the bowl. If you were, like, trying to cut off tails and heads, then you'd be splashing sauce up on the rim of your plate. And I just like to blot them a little bit. Any extra moisture -- when you put, like, a moist ingredient into a pan, it sometimes flames up on you and gives you a little char flavor that's more acrid and not that kind of char we're looking for. So like to make sure they're nice and dry so that we don't get that that acrid flavor. And I'm just using canola oil to cook them in. I do want to hot pans so I can get a good sear. Just move around a little and let them sit there and get a sear. Our next step, once they've been seared on both sides before they're quite cooked, will be to add shrimp stock and mescal as the base of the sauce, and then we'll finish with the chili butter. Now you can see a little sear happening. I'm going to turn them all. If the shrimp were really large, then I would let them cook longer on the side before deglazing, but they're pretty small, so they'll finish steaming through as we cook them. When you add alcohol, you want to take it off the flame so you don't... We all like to see it on TV when a big flame blows up, but you don't really want it in your face. There you go!

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And shrimp stock before before the mescal is completely reduced, you want to burn off a little bit of alcohol, but not too much because we love that flavor. All right, starting to get a nice simmer. And I'm going to add the butter. Plenty butter. And then you just want to actively swirl that. Or you could stir it with a spoon. And that's our sauce. All right, so we're gonna put our succotash down first. Make a nice little pile on one side of the bowl so that we can lean our shrimp against it. Very pretty. And then we'll lay our shrimp all nice in a line -- I like to do them all facing the same direction. And of course, these are lovely Louisiana Gulf shrimp. All right, I'm making sure our sauce is still emulsified. Now I'm just going to pour it over the shrimp. And I like to get a little bit on the succotash, too. And then... brled lime. And there you have it -- drunk shrimp. -The New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute, or NOCHI, for short, offers a course of study for aspiring chefs in a 93,000 square foot downtown facility. Today, we meet culinary arts instructor Allison Vines-Rushing, a classically trained chef and recipient of a James Beard Rising Star Chef award. -To make our jello, we have three sheets of gelatin. Now, at home, I know you probably cannot come by sheets of gelatin, so you can use powder gelatin, which is readily available in the supermarket. So first, if you're using sheet gelatin, you have to bloom it in ice water until it's nice and soft. So we're going to start that. Just going to let it hang out there so it can get soft. And in the meantime, we are going to take our muscadine wine and we need to heat it up. It's really the only wine that's created here. And we are going to mix it with a little simple syrup. So, simple syrup is equal parts sugar and water that's just brought up, and hot, until the sugar dissolves. And that's simple syrup. So we're going to heat up... Let's take that off the heat 'cause you don't want it to flame. Right? For this, I'm going to do about a half bottle for today. And I'm going to add a half cup of simple syrup. Now, I am... Since I'm a savory chef, I do love dessert, but I don't tend to make my desserts too-too sweet. You can sweeten this a little bit more for your liking if you like sweet desserts. Every dessert you need just a little bit of salt. Most people don't realize there's salt in dessert, but that salt really balances out, brings that sweetness out just a little bit more. So we're going to heat that up until it's nice and steaming. In the meantime, we've got our pretty peaches from the market. And we're just going to do a nice little dice. This is kind of a rustic desert. It doesn't have to be too fancy. You have a little bruised spots, just kind of trim those off. And then I'm going to dice it. I want nice little pieces to fit in a spoon, and we're using little small glasses, so you really want nice, small pieces so it's easy to eat. It's a dish that was inspired by my childhood, in particular, my papaw. He would make Jello and open a can of fruit cocktail and put the fruit cocktail in Jello with a big dollop of Cool Whip, and it was my favorite dessert. This is kind of a grown-up version of Jello since it's made with wine. I wouldn't advise it for the kiddos. If you do want to burn off the alcohol, you can light the wine on fire when you first put it in there, burn off that alcohol, and it won't be in the final dish. This is Hannah, she was my valedictorian culinary student of our first class here at NOCHI in New Orleans. So she's helping me today. Hannah, if you want to take this spoon and just put in kind of an equal amount in each glass. You want to make sure you have nice, ripe, sweet peaches, right? When you buy them at the farmer's market, you can almost always guarantee they're a great peach. Sometimes in a grocery store, not so great, but there is some sugar to this that helps balance it out. So once we have our wine and our sugar nice and steamy -- you see the steam coming up from it. Thank you, Hannah. We will -- Always protect your board. You don't want to put a pot directly on your cutting board. We will take out our gelatin. It's nice and soft now. You just want to squeeze out the extra water using my very clean hands. I will add it to my hot wine and sugar mix and really dissolve that gelatin in there. You just want to stir it until you don't see any more gelatin. It happens very fast. And then we are going to just add the jello to our little cups. This would be a lovely palate cleanser as well, especially if you're doing like a little wine dinner. You have a little wine jello. You kind of just want to pop any bubbles that are in there... So they're not in your final jello. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna put this in refrigerator. Gelatin, you always want to give it a good amount of time to set up; I like to do this a day ahead, and all you have to do is whip the cream to serve it. We are gonna make some lovely whipped cream. Actually, it's called Chantilly cream in French when when whipped cream is sweetened. So you're gonna add your cream to your mixer. Pull your mixer up. And we're gonna get that going. All right, now our cream is almost all the way whipped. It's nice and thick. So we're gonna stop it and add our powdered sugar. This is confectioner's sugar. so it dissolves really readily in the cream. If you use regular granulated sugar, your cream might be a little bit grainy. So it's best to use powdered sugar for this. So now we're gonna get that powdered sugar in there. And once that is nice and dissolved, we're going to add our vanilla bean. So to use a fresh vanilla bean, you want to take the tip of your knife and just run it down the middle of that bean. Once you get some of it opened up, then you can kind of work with your knife. I'm just scraping these little seeds out of the pod... And adding them to my whipped cream. Then we're just going to whip our cream a little bit more just to incorporate those seeds. Now you'll want to scrape down the side of your... of your mixer if those seeds didn't get all the way down. Scrape it down so you can... Get all of that in there. And then we're gonna whip it until a nice soft peak. Now, be careful, you don't want to put your mixer on high and just let it go because you'll turn that cream into butter. So you want it -- do not walk away. Keep your eyes on it, and when it's nice and thick we'll stop it. But it's still really creamy. All right, and we've got our beautiful little flecks of vanilla bean. So pretty. So I'm going to take... Some of this cream... And, Hannah, if you would bring......our finished jellos up. We will finish plating. Should we put 'em maybe right here? There we go. I'm just gonna get my little spoon, nice and warm, and I'm going to come and shape it. You get a pretty little egg shape. You want to dip it in water each time so you get a nice, clean......shape -- and then we're gonna top it with a little gold leaf. And this is "Kitchen Queens," so want a little gold. All right. A little muscadine wine jello with market peaches and vanilla cream. -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. 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