Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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Queens

New Orleans" was provided by... -Today on "Kitchen New Orleans," we'll dig into hearty one-dish crowd-pleasers, savory pies and tarts. First, we'll sample artichoke-bacon hand pies, a specialty of Chef Megan Forman of Gracious Bakery + Caf. Next, English pasty meat pies, a nod to the heritage of Chef Haley Bitterman of the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group, and finally, a French-inspired tomato tart prepared by Chef Melissa Araujo of Saveur Catering. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans kitchen queens. Uptown New Orleans is home to one of three Gracious Bakery + Caf locations established by Chef Megan Forman. Following her passion for cooking, the New Orleanean headed to New England to study culinary arts, working as a pastry chef in New York before returning home. Stints at Bayona and Sucre inspired Chef Megan to open her own artisan bakery. -Now we're going to make artichoke-bacon hand pies. I've got my all-purpose flour that I'm going to put in a bowl, and then goes my salt. Want to make sure I've got my salt. I'm going to share a secret that I don't share usually outside of the four walls of the bakery, but traditionally when you make pie crusts, you use cold butter, and you cut it in with your fingers or a knife to pea-size pieces. So I use room-temperature butter, and it's faster, and the results are the same, and we're super happy with the flakiness and how good it is. I cut it in with my fingers. I'm really a big proponent of hands as an instrument in baking and cooking. That was what was taught to me, you know, through school and through all the professional amazing chefs that I worked with. So quickly -- That went really quickly, right? I'm -- got my butter to almost exactly where I want it to be, and then I'm going to incorporate my ice water. Pour in the water. And I use a bench scraper to pull the dough together and fold it onto itself. I'm not overworking it. I'm just combining it. So this is my dough, which I am going to wrap up and put in the refrigerator to let rest and become solid hard from the butter about 4 hours. -After refrigeration, the dough should sit at room temperature for about 20 minutes before rolling. -Now I'm rolling out the dough. 1/8-inch thickness. What I want is to have that -- the dough encasing the filling, but not too much around it so that it's in a good ratio. So I've got my cutter. This looks large, but it's actually perfect when you fold it over and have the filling. So I'm going to cut these circles. I'm going to lay them out on a sheet pan and let them refrigerate for a little while, while we make our filling so probably about 4 hours, and then they'll be rested and ready to fill. Now we're making the filling for the bacon-artichoke hand pie. I already have my bacon cooked and chopped. I'm recrisping the bacon, kind of pulling out some of the extra fat that's in it, and I'm going to get that going, and them I'm going to saut my green onions with those. I'm just heating my bacon back up just enough to get some of the fat out. I'm going to pour in my green onions. I have just basically sweat the green onions enough to get them just glistening with the bacon fat, and now I'm going to pour in my chopped artichoke hearts. So these are canned. The canned is best drained, but if they're frozen, that's great too as long as they're drained well of liquid. I'm just heating these through hot enough so when I combine the cheese in, it will all melt together. Now I'm going to add my cream cheese. This is all on high heat, just goes really quickly so super fast and easy. I'm going to melt the cream cheese, so I break it apart in chunks. It's going to coat the rest of the ingredients like a nice, creamy blend. Now I'm going to add my cheese. I've got a lot of cheese. I have Parmesan and white cheddar. Actually, turn off the heat when I add the cheese, and I'm going to let the heat, the residual heat, melt all the cheese, and I'm going to add my salt and cayenne pepper. You know, and of course you can adjust the heat as you see fit. All this cheese is just melting with the heat off. And then we'll put this in a bowl and let it cool in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. You'll have your rounds, your pastry rounds, and you'll have your cooled filling ready to put together. So I've just taken out my cold rounds from the refrigerator. They've rested, and the butter is cold, so this is cold. My filling has cooled completely. You do not want to put warm filling into a pastry dough. So we'll put these two together, and then we'll let them rest and then bake them. Filling here. We often use ice-cream scoops as portioners, but I wanted to show with a regular spoon -- This is a soup spoon -- how much we fit in. And so I like to fill it to where it's very close to bursting, but it's not going to burst out once you bake it, so it's a generous amount of filling here, but I can still fold it over, and there's a border here for me to take my fork and push the sides down. This is easiest to do when the dough is still cold, so I do it right after I finish forming it. When my husband and I opened the bakery in 2012, we just wanted to test a concept, and at that time in New Orleans, there wasn't a whole lot of options for good coffee and good food in the same place. Think you could go and get good coffee and maybe some processed food, but not both, and of course now in the last 6 years a lot has changed. There's so many great things available. But now we refrigerate these for an hour to let them rest before we bake them. These have been refrigerated for an hour, and now I'm going to egg-wash them and sprinkle sesame seeds. The key with egg wash is not having too much on your brush so it doesn't pool in the crevices. You don't end up with scrambled eggs in the cracks and crevices of your fork marks so nice and even. So the egg wash is equal parts yolks and water. And the final touch is, we sprinkle them with sesame seeds. And then we bake them in the oven at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. And here we have the artichoke-bacon hand pie. It's golden brown on top, and the filling, you can tell, is hot and bubbling coming out of the side. -The French Quarter is home base for Brennan's and Napoleon House, flagship restaurants under the watch of corporate executive Chef Haley Bitterman. A native of Cincinnati, Chef Haley moved to New Orleans after culinary school and worked her way up in the kitchens of Brennan Family Restaurants. Now, as corporate chef, she oversees the culinary program of the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group. -So we're going to make a dish today. It's called a pasty, and it comes from the southwest side of England in a area called Cornwall, and I'm going to go ahead and get this started and then kind of tell you why it's an important dish for me. So what we're going to do is, we have a nice hot pan. We're going to add a little bit of oil to it. You can see that oil smoking. Now we're going to add -- This is some skirt steak that I had that has just been diced up. And you can use many different kinds of beef. It doesn't have to be skirt steak, but you're cooking it all the way, so you don't want to use something like beef tenderloin, something that's expensive. You can use a cheaper cut of meat. And I'm going to add just a little bit of salt and pepper, and we just want to get it so that it gets seared around the edges, and then we're going to add our diced onions. I have some diced onions here. This is about one onion diced. It's a smaller dice. You want to dice it about the same size that you dice the meat, and we're going to add that in. Get that going with a little salt and pepper on the onions.

Sizzling

Queens

And then you just want to let this cook for maybe about 4 or 5 minutes or so to let those onions start to sweat down, and while that's going, we are going to grate our potato and rutabaga, so we have -- These are actually Kennebecs. You can use Idahos. You can use russets. This you just want to grate on a box grater on the largest hole, and you just grate these potatoes. I have peeled these. You don't have to peel them. You can leave the skin on if you would like to because when you go to England in Cornwall, you will see all kinds of pasties. This is a pretty simple one, but after you learn how to make them, you can get more adventurous if you like. I'm also grating a rutabaga, and this rutabaga gets grated in, and really you can use a lot of different root vegetables if you want. The rutabaga to me is one of the things that really makes me... think about England and about pasties and my mom. My mother was English. Is the flavor of the rutabaga, so I've had lots of different kinds of pasties, but the ones with the rutabaga always bring back the memory of me being little with my mom in England eating Cornish pasties. And this actually, by grating it, makes it cook a little faster... and it also allows the starch to come out, which helps keep your pasty meat together. So we're going to take this grated potato and rutabaga, and we're going to add it into our... skirt steak and onions. You spread those around on the top like so. Now I'm going to turn the heat back up a little bit more again to high and let this start to cook. So this is a very special dish for me. As I said, my mother was from England, and these are so popular in Cornwall in England. You know, these originated in, like, the 13th century, and in Cornwall, there's a lot of mines all over the countryside -- coal mines, tin mines -- and this is what the wives used to make for their husbands who worked in the mines because they could take these meat pies with them, and because it was a completely sealed little lunch, it didn't get coal or dust or anything on them. Also, the really fancy wives used to actually put their husbands' initials in the dough when they baked them so that they knew which pasties were theirs. Now that that's cooked, we are going to take it off the heat, and we're going to... kind of spread it out a little bit. So now we're going to cool this down for about an hour, hour and a half or so until it completely cools down. You can make this a day ahead if you want to so that it's already ready for you to handle, and while this is cooling down, we're going to make the dough for it. Okay. Now we're going to make the dough for the pasties, pretty simple dough, four ingredients, five if you count the ice water. So this is all-purpose flour. I'm also adding some barley flour, and this recipe calls for about 25 percent barley flour and then 75 percent all-purpose flour, and the reason why you're adding the barley flour is that it helps make a more tender dough because there's not enough gluten in it like there is in regular flour. We're just going to mix our flours together. I'm just stirring them up with a fork. It's kind of important when you make doughs that the ingredients are all pretty cool like the butter, the ice water that we're going to add in a few minutes. Now I am going to add just a pinch of salt to this, mix that in, and then we're going to add our butter, which has been chilled. And now we're just going to incorporate these cool chunks of butter into the flour. Cincinnati, Ohio, is where I grew up and actually went to culinary school. I came from a family of -- Well, my mother did cardiac research. My grandfather was a doctor. My father did research. Everybody in the medical field in one way or another, not in the restaurant industry. So now we've got the butter. As you can see, it's kind of in much smaller pieces. It's incorporated into the flour so that you get this nice, flaky dough for your pasty. So now we're just going to kind of make this little well in the center, and I've got some ice water, and I'm going to add it into the center, and you're just going to start to incorporate the flour and the water, and you'll see that the dough will start to come together. Now I am going to stop at this point and start to use my hands so that I can form the dough ball. You do want to work kind of quickly when you start to work with your hands because, again, the heat from your hands is going to start to melt this butter, but you really want to get everything incorporated... and you'll feel -- it feels like pie dough. Now I'm going to dump this out here. And you don't want to overwork the dough. You just want to get it to where it comes together. So now we're going to wrap the dough in plastic wrap, and we're going to put it in the refrigerator for about an hour to an hour and a half and let it rest, and then we'll be ready to make our meat pies. I don't like dealing with this whole thing, so I'm just going to cut a chunk off for right now. See, maybe I'll do two. Okay. And it is ready for us to make our pasties. So we're just going to make this into a little ball and flatten it out, and, again, a little flour so it doesn't stick too much. And get it started. So I'm going to put a little flour on. And we're just going to start to roll the dough out from the center. I like to turn it and flip it just so that it stays coated lightly with the flour, and that seems to help that work so that you don't have to put so much flour onto your rolling pin. For today, I have -- I believe this is a 6-inch cutter. You can do bigger ones. You can make smaller ones. If you wanted to do these for a party where you had some appetizers out, you could make much smaller little hand pies. So we're just going to cut that dough out. Dough can be rerolled, as well, so that you don't waste any of your dough. We have our filling. We have our dough rolled out. I have my cookie sheet with some parchment paper, and I also have some egg wash, which is just a beaten egg, and it's going to make a nice glaze on top of the pasty. So this is our skirt-steak filling that we have with the rutabaga and the onion, and it is completely cooled down. Starch helps hold all this together, especially when it cools down, so it's not too difficult to work with. You want to mound that in the center. And then what I'm going to do is just dip my fingers in the egg wash, and you just go around the edges. It helps seal it so that when you bake off the little pasties, they don't split open. So now that I have that done, what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to fold it over, and once you get the hang of this, it's actually pretty fast. And roll and fold this over until I seal up the edges. And then you just want to gently press down the edges to where you have that egg wash. You want to make sure that none of the filling is out. You just want to gently seal those edges up like that. And then what I do just to really make sure it's right is, you take a fork and just crimp the edges. That helps it stick together as well. And then we're going to put this on our cookie sheet. At this point, we're going to egg-wash them, and then we're going to bake them off, but if you wanted to, you could make them to this point and freeze them, and then when you're ready to bake them off, you could do that then. And we're just going to kind of gently... brush the pasties with the egg wash. All right. Now the one last thing you want to do is, you do want to put a couple of vents in here to let the steam come out when they bake so that they don't split on you. You put those little vents. Now we're going to put them in the oven. We're going to bake them off for 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Our pasties, we've taken them out of the oven. They baked for 20 minutes or so at 350 degrees. You can see how they're nice and brown and kind of shiny on top. These are the finished pasties. And again, they're pretty simple to make. You can put all kinds of different fillings in them, so I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy them and as much as they remind me of England and my mom. -Our next step is New Orleans' Riverbend neighborhood and Saveur Catering, a boutique catering company that taps into the Honduran roots of Chef-Owner Melissa Araujo. Chef Melissa honed her culinary skills for 6 years at a restaurant in Milan, Italy, before returning home to New Orleans and pursuing her craft locally. -Now we're going to cook a tomato tart. This dish is actually one of my favorites to cook. I learned this dish when I was living in Italy. I took a trip to France, and I found this spot that needed a cook for the week that I was going to be there. It needed a person to help, and the lady looked at me, and she was like, "You will do," so I was her helper all through the week, and I was learning unbelievable stuff. -Roasted garlic and balsamic vinegar are added to the tomatoes. -So basically you get heirloom cherry tomatoes, or you can go to your local supermarket and get cherry tomatoes. You're going to get a skillet, heat it up to medium. You're going to put a little bit of olive oil. Put the cherry tomatoes there, a little bit of thyme, salt and pepper to taste, and then roasted garlic. So for this tart, we're working the tomatoes. We're basically just going to sweat them, let the ingredients get in them, and then we're going to do -- The crust is very simple. So we have about 2 cups of flour in here. We're going to get some salt, about a tablespoon, and this is the part that I love -- the French butter. You have a pound. You're going to move it all around. You're just pressing that butter into the flour. The way that I cook, it's very rustic. I don't do five layers, six layers of ingredients. My job is to bring out the flavor of the ingredient that I'm working. Especially in this tart, what I want to bring out is the sweetness of the tomato. Right there, that's what we're looking for. So with this, you come in. I don't change the recipes. They teach me. This is a very old recipe. I'm doing it with my hand. Now that you have the butter in it, you're going to come, and you're just going to get it in there. You will serve this, like, in the middle, actually, of the summer because it's not a very heavy dish, so August in New Orleans, this is perfect. So...now you have it. You see the extra oil in there? You want that. You get now... uncooked cherry tomatoes, and you put it on top. You can do this any way you like. The key is beautiful, fresh...herbs. This is oregano. So we get a little bit of chives. And that's it. You get your roasted garlic, and you put them on top. I would recommend the max four. So once this is ready like this, it goes in the oven for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees. After 45 minutes, this is the end result. Cool it off for about an hour or so, and after that put it in the refrigerator for 2 hours, then take it out, cut it, and you can enjoy it with a nice iced tea or a mojito, and, I mean, it's hot in the South in August, so, yeah, that'll be good. -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...