Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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New Orleans" was provided by... -This time on "Kitchen New Orleans," three poultry and game dishes, that give delicious meaning to "fowl play." First, a serious charcuterie board featuring smoked duck breast from master butcher Leighann Smith of Piece of Meat, next, Southern-style crispy quail salad with bourbon molasses dressing and spiced pecans from chef Susan Spicer of Bayona, and finally, teriyaki chicken in lettuce wraps, a classic spice with Korean red chili paste prepared by Chef Lenora Chong of Morrow's. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans kitchen queens. Centrally located Mid-City is home to Piece of Meat, a butcher shop and bistro that was named one of "Food and Wine Magazine's" best new restaurants for 2019. Owned by butcher Leighann Smith and her partner, Daniel Jackson, the corner shop has become a hotspot for meat-centric specialties prepared by Meat Mama. -And so we are going to cure a duck breast that we smoke and slice thin. Then we serve it on our charcuterie board. The first thing that you're gonna do is mix together your salt and your sugar. We use a local raw sugar from a cane syrup producer right here in Louisiana. They produce a really nice rich, like, sticky, dark brown, very sweet, but kind of cane-syrupy, bitter sugar. And it's really, really delicious. We add black pepper and then we add just a little bit of pink salt. And you're just going to mix this together really well. And you're just looking to have everything kind of finely mixed together, kind of smash any of the sugar lumps out. And then something that's very important. Whenever you hear anything, you want to separate the cure into another container so that your main base of cure, if you don't end up using the entire thing, is not contaminated with meat product. So all we're gonna do is we're gonna take our duck breast, and you are just gonna smash this salt right into the duck. Pack it in there really nice. And what we'll do is we'll cryo-vac them. But if you don't have a vacuum sealer at your house, you can honestly just wrap them in plastic. And you want to leave it nicely packed in the salt for two to three days, depending on the weight of the breast. It's also very important to remember whenever you're letting things sit for a couple of days, you let them sit in the refrigerator. It is still raw meat. After your duck's done curing, you're going to rinse it under just cold tap water. All you're trying to do is remove any excess salt or sugar. Let it dry so that you end up with a nice smoke color on it. And we usually smoke them around 200 degrees for about 45 minutes to an hour, also depending on how big the duck breast is. We have one here that is smoked. And you're looking for, like, a nice tight color. It should be golden brown, not too dark. We smoke with white oak, which helps maintain that lighter color and it keeps a really consistent temperature. So we're going to cut it in half. Once we cut it in half, what you're looking for is that nice dark smoke ring around it with a nice, beautiful pink center and all the fat is still intact. The internal temperature while you're smoking it should be right around 145 degrees. We used this on our charcuterie boards. So we just slice the duck nice and thin. Another application for this duck, because you're probably not going to eat that many charcuterie boards, is to make a grilled cheese out of it. This with some really rich, stinky cheese and some nice sourdough is probably one of my favorite things to eat. So we're going to lay that duck out. And then on our charcuterie board, we're gonna add some cured coppa. Coppa is the neck muscle of a pig. And we cure it for about 18 days, and it hangs for roughly two to three months, all depending on size. Everything that we serve on our charcuterie board is available out of the case. So it's a nice way for people to try and figure out what they like. This is a salami cotto, which is a fresh poached salami. These are soppressata. So it's a chili flake and a little bit of fennel, Italian style, dry, cured salami. And then this is a pork rillon which is similar to a rillette, but it's made with the pork belly instead of the pork shoulder. But all of these recipes, for the most part, I've spent, you know, the majority of my life sitting somewhere reading a book about how to cure meat. There's -- no one knows how to do it for sure. Like, it's still such an open field where even me and my business partner, when we break down chickens, we break down the chickens completely separate. We do it in completely different ways, but we both end up with the exact same end result. So as far as, like, these, it's all lots of testing. Times and temperatures are really key. Everything -- like every batch of salami we make tastes different than every one we've made before, 'cause what temperature it is outside when we make it, what temperature the air conditioning's set at, how long it incubates for, All of those things make such a large impact on the actual final product. The base flavor tastes the same. So like your fennel's there, your chili flake's there, your base ingredients are there. But if it's -- Like the salami that we make in the summer time is probably going to have a higher, like, ferment flavor than the salami, say, we make in December because the temperature's are hotter, so it's a shorter incubation. But it's all just a real interesting guessing game. And like we just have notebooks where we just write everything down. And I'm like, "well, last time I made it on November 2nd, it took this long, and I did this to it, and it tasted like that." We always serve it with some whole-grain Creole mustard and we serve it with some local peach jam right now because the peaches in Louisiana are absolutely amazing this time of year. And then, as always, Marcona almonds to finish it off. They are the most expensive and most delicious almond in the universe. So there's our charcuterie board. -We travel now to New Orleans, French Quarter and Bayona, a restaurant housed in a 200-year-old Creole cottage. Opened in 1990 by Chef Susan Spicer and Regina Keever, the complexly flavored dishes of the fine-dining establishment helped redefine local cuisine. In 2010, This trailblazing chef was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America. -This is a dish that we've been doing at Bayona for a long time. Bayona's been open pretty close to 30 years, and I don't think we've been doing it the whole 30 years, but it's been quite a long time, and it has become a real signature customer favorite. We have beautiful Mississippi quail that we take out the thigh bone and the breastbone. You can buy them, what they call semi-boneless so you don't have to do that. I take off this first little -- first joint, they call it, just with a little knife in between that. Then we do a simple marinade of honey, soy sauce, a little bit of canola or plain vegetable oil, and a small amount of bourbon. And we pour that over the quail. When you're marinating something, it doesn't need to, you know, swim in marinade. The amount of marinade you need is really just enough to coat whatever it is that you're trying to flavor. And we go ahead and put the quail bones in because we are going to use these later. Set that aside. Really doesn't need to be longer than about, you know, 20 minutes. Or overnight, you know, is fine. And what we're going to do with these quail, which I won't be doing on camera, but we do a process called cold smoking. It's done at a low temperature so that essentially you have smoky raw quail. when you're finished. This is what they look like. They get a little -- We've cut these in half, you know, for ease of frying. You can tell that they've been smoked. You want to do it till you can smell smoke. We do it on a rack. It is an extra step, but it really just makes the dish so delicious. We have some pickled red onions, which are just red onions that are sliced and then sort of marinated in a honey and red wine vinegar with a little pinch of salt. You just heat that up with a bay leaf, and we put a jalapeo in there just for a little spice. But you just heat that mixture up and pour it over the red onions and just let them sit for a while. And then here's one of my favorite things is spiced pecans. What I've done is I've already melted a little bit of whole butter and tossed my pecans in it. And it's not -- again, not swimming in butter, but enough to lightly coat. And then we're going to throw some sugar in there. A little bit of Worcestershire sauce. And then cayenne pepper, which gives it that little bit of -- And as far as I'm concerned, I want to just be able to taste that cayenne pepper right at the end. I want to know it's there, but I don't want it to be the first thing I taste. And I'm going to give it a little bit more sugar. You want a nice amount of sugar. Not trying to... make it caramel-y, But it should be enough to coat the pecans. You can lay it out on a little baking sheet if you want, or you can do it right in the pan. You're going to take them and put them in a 325-degree oven for about 10 minutes. What I think makes this salad kind of special is the dressing. It's a bourbon molasses dressing. But there's one little step in there that's, you know -- takes a little extra time but makes it worthwhile. Remember those quail bones I was showing you earlier? What we do with those quail bones after their smoked is we cover them with chicken stock or water. We make a little a little broth out of them. Then we strain it and we reduce it. And we use that in the dressing. It's a protein. And, so, it acts as a binder to make a really smooth, creamy dressing. And this is the stock with some finely diced shallots. I'm going to put molasses. And there's, of course, one other secret ingredient. This is cane vinegar. We use cider vinegar. But I use another kind of vinegar. It's a walnut vinegar that's available online. And many, many years ago, I discovered this product, which is a basically a white wine vinegar flavored with a walnut essence. And it's really delicious. And a little goes a long way. So you don't need a lot. A pinch of salt, pepper, then we're going to add our oil. So we're gonna whisk. This can be done in a blender if you want to do it in a blender. And what I want to show you is this kind of creamy, really viscous consistency and how it has a nice body to it. And that's -- that's the stock. That's a secret. The oil we use -- you can use canola oil, but we use a pure olive oil, which has a nice flavor, but not as much pronounced olive-y flavor as an extra virgin. So once we get it to that, then we're going to add a little splash of bourbon. Maybe a little more. And that molasses and the bourbon tastes really good. And we're gonna... So we're going to set that aside, and I'm going to check those pecans. So you just turn them onto a platter or a plate. So they're a little bit sticky when they're warm. As you can see, they're nice and sticky. But they will -- you know, they'll crisp up and then you can kind of separate them. Next, we're going to do our rice-flour batter. And it's two elements -- rice flour, soda water, little salt and pepper. Once you make the batter, you can throw a couple of ice cubes in there to keep it cool. That'll help make it crisp. You want it to where it's going to lightly coat the quail. And it does have a tendency to thicken up if you make it a little bit ahead of time. That's why I like to throw the ice cubes in there. A little pinch of salt and pepper. We can go ahead and throw our quail in the batter. See how it's kind of running off? You want that better to run off and you want to have a very light coating on there. So the last thing that we need to do is fry our quail. And we want the oil, if you have a thermometer, for temperature, you want it to be right around 350. Drop them carefully. Again, you want a lot of that batter to come off. They don't take very long to cook. You want to use enough oil that, you know, they're pretty well submerged. You can turn it once. And while that's happening, we're going to lightly dress our greens. A mix of any kind of lettuce that you like. We use pear as a nice, little, sweet component. I usually through some of the celery hearts in. Make a nice tight pile. You don't want to -- It doesn't want to be real heavily dressed. And then these, you can drape around 'cause they're kind of pretty. Going back to the quail. We're just about ready. And we're not looking for a real dark brown here. We're looking for kind of a nice golden brown. You want to just make sure that quail is cooked through. And you can see it's very, very crisp. You know, a tempura batter should basically shatter, you know, wants to be light. What we do is we cut them into quarter pieces. You can do that ahead of time if you'd rather not handle the hot quail. Then we just put the quail pieces around -- two legs and two breasts. We're going to lightly dress the quail. This dressing is pretty good, if I do say so myself. And top with your spiced pecans. That's our crispy smoked quail salad. One of my favorites. -Our final stop is New Orleans Marigny District, a flourishing downriver neighborhood where Morrow's shines on St. Claude Avenue. The polished restaurant celebrates both New Orleans and Korean food, courtesy of owner Lenora Chong, who was born in Seoul. Chef Lenora says that comfort is the common denominator between her two culinary worlds. -So this is our chicken lettuce wraps, which is one of our favorite appetizers at Morrow's. And I'm going to start by making the marinade for the chicken before we take it to the grill and grill it off. So I'll start with 2 cups of soy sauce. And what I've done here is I have some garlic and some ginger. We've got 2 tablespoons of garlic... 2 tablespoons of chopped ginger. I also have a half of a pureed onion. We don't want too much texture in the marinade because we don't want it to stick to the chicken when we grill it. So next we have 2 ounces of sake. You can also use rice wine, cooking rice wine. And then I have 2 teaspoons of the sesame oil. I'm going to add 1/4 tablespoon of black pepper, coarsely ground, and add a little bit of white sesame seeds. And I specify white because we use both white and black here at Morrow's. I'm gonna add 2/3 cup of brown sugar. Give that a little mix. And then I have a pureed kiwi. This, I've used a golden kiwi because it's a little sweeter, so it's for the acidity. But I like this rather than the green one. And then we're going to puree an apple. I didn't want to precut it so it wouldn't turn brown. And by the way, this is a Fuji apple. And we're going to get that pureed. Again, we don't want any texture, not too much texture in this marinade. Give this a little mix. Going to add these apples. Make sure that's mixed really well. I've just added some Asian appetizers to our menu, just as a reminder that I'm also Korean. Korean food is my first love of food. And there are things that remind me of my youth in Korea. So I was born there. And, you know, these are things that I ate as a child. It's comfort food, simple food. So the marinade is done. And I'm going to add the chicken to it. That was four -- They were about 3-ounce chicken thighs. I like to prepare this a night before use, and marinate the chicken, set it in the refrigerator for 24 hours at least. But if you're preparing it on the day of, three or four hours will do. So this is fermented soybean. It's a soybean paste. We have some sesame oil, and a pepper paste, which we're going to combine the ingredients and make it our sauce or paste for our lettuce wraps. I'll take 2 tablespoons of miso, 2 tablespoons of our spicy paste......and our sesame oil. Give it a good mix. It's got that deep red color. And that's ready to use. So I pre-marinated the chicken, and we're ready to walk over to the grill and get that cooking. So now we're ready to grill our chicken for the lettuce wraps. We have our grill nice and hot. And I've already sprayed it so that the chicken doesn't stick to the grill. And we're going to go to the grill now.

Sizzling

Queens

So the chicken needs the grill for about three to four minutes on each side. We want to get the chicken at 180 degrees in the center. And once it's completed, we'll come over here, and we'll chop the chicken and plate it for you. I was always in the kitchen since I was 12 with my father. He worked in hotels in Chicago, and we spent a lot of time in the kitchen preparing scratch food. He was -- he was big on plate beautification, using your surroundings to garnish your plate with. So we were out fishing. He would find some weeds, I called them, flowers to present the plate. Oh, he was -- He was a really great chef. Now, that's Korean barbecue right there. You go to Korea, you'll find a lot of this street food. They'll be on skewers. It'll be served like this with rice. It's fun. I've got to get back to Korea see my relatives. So we've got our prepared chicken. And I've already pre-prepared our Bibb lettuce with a bowl in the center and our paste that I made earlier. So we're just going to go ahead and cut up our chicken. We're going to garnish with a little white sesame and a little fresh scallions on there. You would take a spoonful of the chicken and wrap it in the lettuce. And it's essentially an Asian taco. So we have a saying in Korean which is mas-issge deuseyo, which means "bon apptit." -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 WYES-TV on Facebook and Instagram. -Funding for "Kitchen New Orleans" was provided by...