Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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Queens

New Orleans" was provided by... -This time on "Kitchen New Orleans," three iconic shrimp dishes that capture the flavors of the Big Easy. First, andouille-spiced Gulf shrimp, a signature of Chef Meg Bickford of Commander's Palace. Next, down-home shrimp and grits by Nicole Mackie of Ma Momma's House of Cornbread, Chicken & Waffles. And finally, shrimp Clemenceau, a favorite dish of Chef Leah Chase prepared by her niece, Cleo Robinson. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans kitchen queens. Our shrimp review begins in the Garden District at the renowned Commander's Palace where we'll meet Sous-Chef Meg Bickford, who has called the restaurant's kitchen her culinary home since 2008. A graduate of the John Folse Culinary Institute, Chef Meg became the first female executive chef in the Commander's Palace family of restaurants. -Today, we are going to be cooking Louisiana white shrimp with red beans and rice, my style. So, we are gonna start with our wild white shrimp. These are Louisiana shrimp right out of the Gulf. I'm gonna season these shrimp with andouille spice. So, this is actually the same spice that we use to make our andouille sausage here at Commander's Palace. Gonna generously season our shrimp. And put a touch of vegetable oil in our cast-iron pan. Allow that to get hot. And then we are going to add our shrimp to the pan to let these sear. There's plenty of garlic in this rub. There's lots of cracked red pepper. So, these shrimp -- we have removed the head, and we've removed the shell, but we've left the tail on. I like to keep the tail on. It allows the shrimp to stay a little open while they cook. It also makes for a much prettier presentation. We have deveined the shrimp, of course, to make them a lot easier for you to eat. Like most of us, I'm a huge fan of Louisiana shrimp. Gulf shrimp, in my opinion, are the absolute best. They have a nice, beautiful, clean flavor. They're a little on the sweet side. These shrimp are just, in my opinion, by far, knock it out of the park, So here we are. We're gonna start our saut. So, we are gonna kind of break it down a little bit and turn it a little more fine-dining style. So we're gonna start with our house-made andouille. This is a smoked-pork sausage that has a generous amount of heat added from red pepper. I'm gonna lightly allow our sausage to render in the pan, get out some of that good pork-fat flavor into the pan, so as we add the rest of our vegetables, they'll coat everything really nicely. Over here, we're getting a nice great sear on our shrimp. Interesting how I started my career here at Commander's. I was actually just about to graduate culinary school. I went to Chef John Folse Culinary Institute in Thibodaux, which was a fantastic experience. I absolutely loved the school. I was just about to graduate and started talking about, you know, what was gonna be the next step, and one of my instructors had my rsum and actually gave it to Ti Martin. And I had no idea, was completely unaware. So, I got a phone call from a sous-chef here at Commander's asking me if I wanted to come in for an interview. And I said, "Why?"

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Said, "Well, because we have your rsum. We'd like to talk to you." I was terrified, to be perfectly honest with you. I, you know, growing up had come to know Commander's so well but definitely did not think that I was ready to step foot in this kitchen, so I was very fortunate that I got a nice big shove. And I really did. I was very surprised that that's what kick-started my career here, and I'm very fortunate that it started that way. But I did start back in the summer of 2008 and worked my way up from the salad station to executive sous-chef, which is pretty awesome. I also had the opportunity to be the first female executive chef for the restaurant group. So, in our andouille, we're adding our shallots and garlic, and we're letting that toast in the nice pork fat. Here I have some trinity, what we call the holy trinity. So, it's onions, celery, and bell pepper. I have cooked these down a little bit, actually, on the grill, so they have, like, a nice, smoky flavor to them. Just gonna add just a little bit of that, allow that to heat up in our pan. It's really starting to smell good in here, right? So, this is Louisiana popcorn rice. So, this is personally one of my favorite rice. I really, really enjoy Louisiana jasmine rice. Popcorn rice has a really, really nice, fragrant smell to it similar to jasmine rice, but it's really, really buttery, So, we're kind of gonna use the rice just as a binder to kind of pull all of our ingredients together. And again allow that to kind of fry a little bit in our pan. Here we have some Louisiana red beans that have just been boiled in a little bit of vegetable stock to soften them up, but we really want to keep their individual integrity. And these beans we actually get fresh from a farm in Ponchatoula, Johndales Farm, so we've become very, very close friends with over the years. But it's this little farm in Ponchatoula, and they actually sell fresh red beans. I mean, everybody has grown up eating red beans. I'd never had a fresh red bean until I had one from Johndales Farm, so I think that's really, really cool. Saut all this down. Gonna add a little bit of sweet corn. We're gonna season this. Generous amount of black pepper and salt. And we are gonna add a little bit of our house Creole seasoning. Our shrimp here.

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Give 'em a quick little brandy bath. That's just a little bit of fresh herbs. A decent amount of parsley in there, a little bit of green onion, and a little bit of basil for some sweetness. I really, really enjoy this dish because, to me, it's kind of a "constructed put back together" red beans and rice for me, so you have this awesome, great, highly spiced andouille sausage, Louisiana popcorn rice, local red beans, our grilled trinity. It's all these great, amazing flavors that you would find in a big old pot of red beans, but it's kind of all broken down, so you can kind of individualize all those amazing flavors. And paired with andouille-spiced shrimp, and it just -- It knocks it out of the park. We are gonna add to this dish a little bit of smoked-tomato butter. So, this is Vidalia onions and Creole tomatoes that we've let in the smoker on a very low temperature for about 2 or 3 hours, so we let them get really, really smoky and soft, and then we throw everything into a pot and cook it all down with a little bit of white wine and some fresh herbs, a little bit of heavy cream, and then we butter the whole thing out, so that sauce is really gonna bring all these flavors together. All right. So, to put this dish together......I do a nice tight line of our red beans and rice. Gonna lay our shrimp right over. Nice drizzle of our smoked-tomato butter. This is a infused smoked-paprika oil. So, we've just heated oil and added a little smoked paprika to it. Really give the dish a nice zip. And then here we have some crispy garlic chips. Just very, very thinly shaved garlic cloves that we flash-fry. We're gonna finish the dish with some nice fresh parsley. And here you have my take on red beans and rice with Louisiana Gulf shrimp. -Our next destination is the eastern section of New Orleans known locally as "The East." Located in this suburban area is Ma Momma's House of Cornbread, Chicken & Waffles where Chef Nicole Mackie, or "Ms. Nicky" as she's known, serves down-home Southern cuisine based on family recipes. -All right, guys. Today we're gonna have shrimp and grits, a New Orleans favorite and my family's favorite. And in New Orleans, we like our grits creamy, okay? So what we're gonna do first, we're gonna show you how to start that pot of grits and get it going. We already have our water on, and it's boiling. Once the water gets to a rapid boil, we're gonna take our grits and we're gonna pour it in. Yes, yes! And we're gonna take our handy-dandy whisk, and we're gonna stir it, and that's very important because we don't want lumps in the grits. Nobody likes a lumpy grits. So, we got the grits going. And the next thing we're gonna do, in our shrimp and grits, we have bell peppers. So today we're gonna be a little festive. We're gonna use our green bell peppers and red bell peppers so we have a lot of color. So, we're gonna chop this up into slices. Take out the middle. We don't eat that part. Mnh-mnh! We're gonna cut it nice. We're gonna do the same thing to the green bell pepper. Cut it in half. Slice it up. We would have shrimp and grits on special occasions at my house. The good thing also about shrimp and grits is that you can eat it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. And if you're eating it for breakfast, it pairs well with some good scrambled eggs, or, as my husband loves, eggs over easy. Now we have our yellow onion. So we're pulling all the extra layers off. We're gonna cut it into thin slices. So, once all that's ready, another staple item in New Orleans is the cast-iron skillet. We're gonna actually blacken our shrimp in there, and we got that good old real, real butter. So, we're gonna put some butter in the pan. And it's not margarine. It's butter. Because margarine don't taste like butter. Once our butter gets hot and melted and warm in the cast-iron skillet, we're gonna put our onions and bell peppers in. The shrimp and grits is actually my grandmother's recipe. My uncle was a cook, as well, at a charity hospital for many years. He was the head chef, and he would come home and make shrimp and grits on special occasions. It sounds like our butter is sizzling, so we're gonna go on ahead... and put our onion and bell pepper in.

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Get that sauted really well. It smells so good! Mmm-mmm-mmm! And once we get that at a nice consistency -- We don't want it too soft, nor do we want it too hard. We want it just right. We're gonna go on ahead and add our beautiful Gulf shrimp that's already been seasoned. For our shrimp and grits, we love to use a blackening seasoning, which is also another Louisiana favorite. If you can't get your hands on blackening seasoning, you can try salt and pepper to taste, maybe with a little paprika. And we want our shrimp to get pink, and that's how we know everything's ready. You can also try this recipe with fish. Fish and grits is really good, as well. Substitute your shrimp for fish. It's almost ready.

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Our shrimp is getting to the right color.

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Like a shrimpy color. And it's so important, guys, when you get your shrimp, either you take the heads off, peel them, take the tails off and devein them, so we make sure our shrimp are deveined. And I think this is looking great! You probably need, for this dish, about 1/2 pound to a pound of shrimp, just depending upon how much shrimp you like with your food. So I think our... shrimp is done. I'll let y'all take a look at it. All that good smoke, Yum, yum, yum! All right. So, our shrimp is ready. We got our bowl for our grits. And, again, I think I'm feeding my son. He's an eat-'em-up, so we put a lot of grits in here. The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna put some cheddar cheese on it. When I was growing up, we actually used American cheese 'cause that was less expensive. We're gonna take this... and we're gonna put it on top. With our onions and bell peppers. And we have... Ma Momma's House of Cornbread, Chicken & Waffles' shrimp and grits. -Our final stop is Dooky Chase, a Trem neighborhood landmark established in 1941. For over seven decades, the restaurant's head chef was Leah Chase, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 96. Carrying on the legacy of the queen of Creole cuisine are her niece, Cleo Robinson, and grandson, Edgar "Dooky" Chase IV. -This dish, I like to think it came up at a soft point in Ms. Chase's life. She's very, very hard and used to like to take dishes that would take a long time to prepare. Her thing was always building flavors, building flavors, building flavors. In this dish, she built flavors, as well, but as you know, in New Orleans, we have special foods that we eat on special days. Red beans and rice you took, because it took you a long time to cook the red beans and rice, was on wash day, so while you were washing your clothes, you were doing your red beans and rice. Well, this dish, I like to believe that Ms. Chase came up with it because we were trying to do something speedy one day, and she says, "Ah, you know, all of these ladies now, they're working, and they can't get home and cook dinner," but her big thing was always that the family should always get together at the dinner table. She didn't want you to go home after work and give your kid a plate of red beans and rice and let them go off to their room and do homework. She wanted dinner at the dinner table, so she came up with this dish, and it's pretty quick. You can really make it in about 5 minutes tops if you're real fast. But it's very, very flavorful. It's rich. It's a one-pot meal. And it's very, very easy to do. And it's shrimp Clemenceau. And, of course, again, we use our local Gulf shrimp. We have butter. Should say my aunt was a very, very big fan of butter. The more butter, the better, but we're gonna try to hold it down and be a little heart-healthy and watch all of that. Got some nice fresh garlic, green peas, salt, pepper, some mushrooms. and some potatoes that I saved some time and already roasted them off a little bit. A little shot of white wine, but if you're gonna do it with the kids, we can leave the white wine off and just go with a little water, or you may not even need the water at all. But to start with, we're gonna melt a little butter.

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Maybe going a little bit too fast. All right. So, we're gonna have a little butter. And here's where your flavor-building is gonna start. We're gonna start with some garlic. And we're gonna let that just rend down just a little bit. And one of Ms. Chase's big things was -- and I don't know when technology is gonna catch up with her, but I guess she was a little bit ahead of her time. She always said, "We need smell-evision," and this is one of those dishes that smells really, really great. -You just smell the flavors, as the garlic's, the butter's there, and you saw that butter just brown a little bit, that aroma, that garlic. You add -- And when Cleo adds the shrimp and all the rest of them, each layer that hits that butter is just gonna explode with smells and flavor and everything else that you need. This is something that you can do fast, if you're home... -Really quick. -...get ready to go. And you'll see how quick this dish comes together. -And the shrimp, and we're gonna add just a little bit of salt... and a little bit of black pepper and keep it moving because we don't want our garlic to burn because that's an awful taste. But you do want it to brown just a wee bit. Gives you those great flavors. And then you want your shrimp to seal in. -And as you can see, just that cloud of, just, smell and that flavor that hits you. That's really -- When you're cooking this at home, that's when you know you got it. When you can smell that flavor coming off of this pot, you know when you put that in front of somebody, they're gonna taste that flavor, so you have to be able... As this smoke comes up, once it smells and you can smell the garlic, you can smell the pepper, you can smell the seasoning and the shrimp, then you know once you put it on that plate, they're gonna taste exactly all that great flavor that you're smelling. And as you said, it's just layer, layer. So, you have the garlic. You have the shrimp. She's gonna add the peas now. Then you add -- At some point, we'll add those mushrooms. -And we're gonna let those cook just a little while, not too long 'cause we don't want them to break down. We like the little pop that it gives. It's gonna add some great color, but it's gonna add a great flavor. -And that's something my grandmother always -- When we talked about seeing that thing that you add, whether it's peas, whether it's shrimp, whether it's garlic, she wanted you to see it. Not only are you gonna taste it and it's gonna be full of flavor, but I want it to stay just as it is intended, so you know you're eating a pea, but that pea has so much flavor to it. -And then some fresh button mushrooms. And, of course, you could take -- I'm sure you could use other mushrooms if you'd like. Ms. Chase loved her morels. I think morels may be a little bit too strong for this dish, but she loved her morel mushrooms. Now we've taken it to the part where we're starting to get some little "goodies" on the bottom of the pot, as Ms. Chase would call them. And you can deglaze it with the white wine right here if you like. If we're gonna do it for the children, we can leave out the white wine and just hit it with a little -- maybe just a little drop of water. We don't like to leave that on the bottom of the pot. Or we could have added a little bit more butter. -And if you were standing right here, that flavor, that wine, that deglazing just hits you. I mean, I'm right here on this side, and it's boom! So I know as Cleo finishes this dish, this is gonna be full of that flavor that she has, and it's gonna be something that I want to eat right out of this pot, it's smelling so good. But it looks great. -And we're to the final stages. We're gonna add our potatoes that we've already roasted. We could save time, roast them in the oven, or if you have one of those little FryDaddys at home, you could fry them up just to get some of the rawness off of them. And it's just gonna take just a few little minutes. Bring those back up to temperature. Get them nice and hot. And we're gonna add... You know Ms. Chase. You know she liked her color. Give me some color. I like color. So we're gonna add a little paprika for color, not to disappoint. And one more finale of color -- a little chopped parsley for color and flavor 'cause parsley has a wonderful flavor. -And as you can see this dish, you know, that was one of the things my grandmother always said. It has to smell good, it has to taste good, and it has to look good. -It always has to look good. -And so you're adding that paprika with the color, the peas, the parsley, the green. You're having all these different colors. When it hits the table, you see that, you smell it, and then you taste it, and you get it. You get her magic. -All right. We're gonna make sure we get all of those lovely shrimp in there. Don't want to miss out on anything. And you have you a nice quick little one-pot meal. Nice and fast if work kept you a little bit too long. And the good thing about this dish, we found out that we can interchange the proteins. We also do it -- If you are -- have a shellfish allergy, we leave out the shrimp, and we put in chicken, a boneless chicken breast. And here you have Mrs. Chase's one-pot quick meal shrimp Clemenceau. -And the beauty about this dish is when you're cooking it at home, it's fast, but those flavors, they're smelling up from the kitchen to your table. So those kids are gonna be ready for that shrimp, ready for that Clemenceau, and as they sit down on the table, they can dig in, and you're good to go. It has everything you need in this one dish. -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...