Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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Queens

New Orleans" was provided by... -This time on "Kitchen New Orleans," the chefs reel in three dishes from the bountiful waters of the Gulf of Mexico. First, grilled redfish on the half shell from Executive Chef Haley Bitterman of the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group. Next, crispy-skinned red snapper prepared by Chef Allison Vines-Rushing of NOCHI. And finally, cast-iron seared Gulf fish from Chef Meg Bickford of Commander's Palace. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans kitchen queens. From the lush Mid-City setting of Ralph's on the Park to the Bourbon Street locale of Red Fish Grill, the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group has the city's bases covered. But whether the focus is globally-inspired local cuisine or seafood, Corporate Executive Chef Haley Bitterman's mission is to maintain the excellence of the group's culinary program. "Our whole focus is making people happy," she says, "and cooking is the way to do that." -Now we are gonna do one of my favorite dishes. So, this dish, to me, represents south Louisiana at its finest. And we're gonna do a dish that is called redfish on the half shell. And one of the accompaniments that goes with the redfish on the half shell is a compound butter. And so, this is a really simple butter that you can make up ahead of time and you can just have in the refrigerator. It goes great on grilled fish, chicken, vegetables. You can do all kinds of different things with it. So we're gonna start off with some unsalted butter that has been brought up to room temperature. So you can see it's pretty soft, right? And we're gonna put that into the bowl. And we're gonna add, of course, a little salt and pepper because you got to season everything. And I don't like using salted butter because the salted butter is actually too salty, so I prefer to use unsalted butter for this dish. And we are going to add some minced garlic. We are gonna add some minced shallot. All that. We have some fresh thyme that has been picked and rough chopped. So we're gonna add a couple of pinches of that. And then we're gonna add some minced parsley. That, again, you add quite a bit of that. And then what you want to do is you just want to incorporate all those ingredients into your butter. I really do recommend using fresh herb as opposed to dried in this preparation. Okay, so the last thing we're gonna add is our lemon juice. And so, we have half a lemon here. And I'm just gonna squeeze it in my hand so that I can catch any seeds. And the lemon juice adds a nice brightness to the butter. That. We're gonna incorporate that in. Now we're gonna roll the butter. So I have this piece of parchment paper here. So you're gonna take your compound butter. We're gonna line it up. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna fold the parchment over, and you're just gonna pat the butter down a little bit. It's very soft, so it's easy to maneuver. And what you want to do is you just want to kind of pull back a little bit. And that butter will start to make a little log, like you can see. And then we're just gonna roll it. You're gonna twist one end one way, and the opposite end you're gonna twist the opposite way. So now we have it rolled, we're gonna go ahead and refrigerate this and let it chill, and then we'll bring it back out when we're ready to do the fish. All right, so now we are going to cook the redfish. So what I have here is I have four sides of redfish. So this dish is called "on the half shell." And what it means is that the skin and the scales are still on the redfish. And you're gonna cook it skin side down directly on the grill. So we've got our redfish fillets. They've been trimmed up. We're gonna add a little bit of oil just so that we can put some Creole seasoning. And this helps the Creole seasoning stick. I'm also gonna make sure I get a little oil on the back of the fish here. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna sprinkle it with some Creole seasoning. So, Creole seasoning is a mixture of spices that you find in New Orleans. And, you know, everybody kind of has their own Creole seasoning mix that have little differences in them. But, for the most part, they're based in paprika and cayenne. There's granulated garlic, granulated onion. There are dried herbs in here. So, dried oregano and dried thyme. And this is definitely -- You want to use dried herbs in this, in making a spice mix, as opposed to using fresh ones. But everybody's varies a little bit. There's also salt in here -- salt and regular black pepper and white pepper. So, even though it has cayenne, it is a little spicy, but it's not terribly spicy. All right, so we just want to dust this piece of redfish with it. So I'm not gonna salt and pepper because it's already in the spice mix, in the Creole. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our redfish fillet. And it's very important that the grill is nice and hot. So we're gonna lay this directly on the grill. And you just want to make sure -- this is a gas grill -- but you want to make sure, if you're using a wood grill, that the flames aren't flaring up around it, because you don't want it to burn the fish. You just want it to cook it nicely. You're not gonna turn this fish, so it's gonna cook the entire time on this side. It's gonna take maybe six, seven minutes. It really depends on the size of the fillet you have. One thing to note about redfish is that you don't want a piece of redfish that is too big. The smaller pieces are nice, they're tender. They cook up almost like crabmeat, actually. And the bigger the redfish gets, the fish gets a little tougher. So, a lot more fun to catch but not as good to eat. So we're gonna let this cook, and I'm gonna add just a touch more oil to the top just to keep that top nice and moist. One of the reasons why I picked this dish is, you know, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, so we did a lot of fishing on the lake. Not nearly as fun as fishing the marshes of south Louisiana. So I've completely fallen in love with fishing here. It's one of my favorite things to do, when I have the time and I'm off. You can start to see the juices start to come out. And when you press it, it's firm but not too firm. You don't want to overcook it because it's a really moist fish. But you can kind of feel that it's ready to come off the grill. So, again, I haven't moved it. I haven't done anything to it. It just sat just like that. Take it off. Now we're ready to serve it. Now we're ready to plate the redfish on the half shell up. So we have our nicely-cooked piece of redfish. We're gonna go ahead and put that down. This is a super-, super-simple presentation. Hopefully you're doing this at your fishing camp. You've just pulled your redfish out of the water and you don't feel like cleaning up, so you're gonna do this great redfish on the half shell dish. This is our compound butter. So you remember we had put this in the refrigerator so it could firm back up? And what I'm gonna do is just do a couple of slices. And I like to put it on. You want to do this while the redfish is nice and warm. And this butter is gonna start to melt. And we're gonna also add a little bit of fresh parsley. And that's it. Again, just rub it around, let that butter start to melt. As that butter melts, you're gonna start to smell the garlic and the shallots coming out of it. And it's ready to eat. It's very simple to eat. It just comes right up off of that skin. It's really no problem at all. So enjoy your redfish on the half shell. -Downtown New Orleans is home to the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute, known as NOCHI, an educational hub for future chefs in a five-story state-of-the-art campus. Culinary Arts Instructor Allison Vines-Rushing grew up in northern Louisiana and trained in New York City at the Institute of Culinary Education. This recipient of a James Beard Rising Star Award considers her cooking a trifecta of the southern food she grew up with, French cuisine, and New Orleans-inspired fare. -So today we are going to prepare a little fricassee of peas and beans. Right now, it's summertime. We have some lovely beans at the market, especially these beautiful little purple hulls, which are my favorite. These are fresh, but you could, of course, use dry. They just take a little bit longer to cook. And we also have some lovely bright-green haricot vert. I love haricot vert. I love the meatiness of them. The haricot vert we just kind of cut in half. And you want to remove the little tough stem end. You can keep this really nice, delicate tail end on them. We're gonna blanch these in salted water. This is Hannah, my valedictorian of our first graduating class here at NOCHI in New Orleans. She's helping me today, and she is going to blanch our beans. You just want to do a little bit at a time. You don't want the boil to stop. And then, once they're nice and tender, she's going to put them in some ice water -- that's the shocking method -- to stop their cooking. And then we'll reheat them when we're ready to finish the dish. So while she's doing that, I'm gonna add my lovely little purple hull peas to some water I have here. But I want to add some aromatics to the cooking liquid, so I'm gonna add a small carrot, a piece of celery, a half an onion, a nice little bay leaf, and a little sprig of fresh thyme. And we will cook this in with our peas. These aren't gonna take too, too long. We also want to season this water up nicely. Not too too much. So I'm just gonna add a little bit of salt. Not as much as I would if I was blanching. So now we're gonna make a simple little butter sauce to go on our fish. We just need a little bit of water in our pan, maybe a couple of tablespoons. We have our -- our water nice and warm. We are gonna add a little bit of butter......to our pan. And we're just gonna kind of whisk that in. You just want to do a little bit at a time. You don't want to add all the butter to your pan at once. And you don't want to get too hot. So I kind of will come a little back and forth on the heat. This emulsification can be a little temperamental just because there's not a lot of liquid in the pan. So now we have our nice emulsified butter sauce. And we will just season it with a little bit of salt. And then I'm gonna keep it back here where it's nice and warm. Hannah removed our peas from the cooking liquid. We no longer need this mirepoix, so we're just gonna take that out and discard it. And now we just want to heat up a little oil in our pan. Not too, too, too much. And we are gonna add our diced vegetables -- our shallot, carrot, celery, some crushed garlic cloves. We're gonna sweat them. Sweating means we don't really want color on them. We just want to soften them. And they will sweat down really fast. All right, so then we can add our peas.

Sizzling

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We're gonna add our peas first. I'm gonna add a little butter to my peas. Just a little. I'm just gonna add a little bit of salt. Nice fresh pepper. Let's get that all nice and melted. Once that butter is nice and melted, we can add a little of our pea liquid, cooking liquid. We will also maybe add a little fresh thyme now just to get a little more aroma in there. We will add our lovely favas. All right. And then last, we're gonna add our haricot vert because we'll want them to stay really beautiful and bright green. So we're gonna add them at the last minute. All right, now we're at a stopping point, and we can cook our fish and get ready to plate. So I have some beautiful local red snapper. It's in season right now. I love to leave the skin on. Snapper has such a lovely, delicate skin. It's really delicious to eat. You want to make sure all the scales are off, so just be sure to run your hands over that fish, make sure there's no scales. I'm just gonna trim it up a little bit into some smaller portions. Also, make sure there's no bones here. The bones will run along right here. I just take them out with little tweezers. You also want to check and make sure there's none right here. There's always a little bone right there. So I'm gonna trim it into two nice-size portions. And then also pinch the sides a little bit and do a few little slits in the skin. All right. We're gonna use a little quick-mixing flour to dust our skin with. You can also use all-purpose. That's fine. You really just want a nice, light coating of flour. This just helps your skin to get a little more crispy. But you don't necessarily have to use it. So we're just gonna dust it really lightly. And I just kind of shake off that excess. All right. So we've got a nice hot pan, we've added our oil, got a little spatula here. I'm gonna season my skin with a little salt. We're gonna add it to the pan. You want to give it a little shake and then a press...

Sizzling

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...just to adhere that skin. You want to be pretty firm because you want that skin to all adhere to the pan so all of it gets crispy. And then we'll add our other piece, give it a little shake. Alright. Then I'm gonna season this side of the fish. While our fish is finishing, getting crispy on that skin side, we are going to finish our beans with -- this is a little Thai chili also from the market. We're also going to finish our butter sauce and add a little fresh dill, that we chopped earlier, to that. You always want to add your fresh herbs at the very last minute so they stay nice and green. So we'll just swirl that around. And then we're going to flip our fish over kind of finish them on this other side. And we have these beautiful mirliton sprouts from the market that I thought were lovely, so we're just going to kind of saute them in our pan with the fish. Once our fish is nicely cooked, we want to take it out of the pan. We don't want to leave it in a hot pan and overcook. Alright, to plate our dish, we want to mound our pretty beans in the center. Remove that little garlic. So nice and glossy from that butter and stock. Sprouts. Ooh! Kind of gives almost like a little stir-fry feel to it. So now we can plate our pretty snapper. And then we've got our lovely dill butter sauce. All around. Just a little nice, coarse black pepper. Just get a little added spice. There we go. Crispy-skinned snapper with a fricassee of peas and beans and dill butter sauce. -Nestled in the New Orleans tree-lined Garden District is Commander's Palace, a New Orleans landmark with a storied chef legacy. The Commander's Palace Kitchen has been the culinary home of sous-chef Meg Bickford since 2008. A graduate of the John Folse Culinary Institute, Chef Meg worked her way through the ranks to become the first female executive chef in the Commander's Palace family of restaurants. -Today, we are going to cook a cast-iron-seared black drum. It's going to be paired with a miso lemon vinaigrette, some crispy Vidalia onions, shishito peppers, beautiful, sweet summer corn. And let's get started. First thing we're going to do is we are going to season our black drum. We've got a house blend of spices here that we use at Commander's Palace. Going to liberally lay this on the fish. This is a mix of granulated garlic, granulated onion, a decent amount of paprika and cayenne. We've also got some dried herbs in here as well. Little bit of vegetable oil in our cast-iron pan. We're going to lay our fish down. Skin side up. So for this dish in particular, I chose drum because it's a very light, flaky fish. It lends itself very well to a lot of flavors. And I really wanted the subtle vegetables that we're pairing it with to really shine through and the drum to accompany the vegetables as opposed to the vegetables accompanying the drum. So now we are going to start our vegetables. Here we have some shishito peppers. I love shishito peppers. They're a very mild pepper. They're a little sweet, but every once in a while you get one of those that's really going to light you up. So there are a lot of fun to eat, but one of my favorite ways to eat them is charred. So we are going to start with a little bit of vegetable oil again, and we're going to let this oil get really nice and hot. So we've started with a hot cast-iron pan, so that oil is going to heat up very quickly. We're going to add our shishitos to the pan and they're going to start to pop. And they're going to get a nice blistering on the peppers. You can hear them start to pop already. We're going to go ahead and season them. As they're all in that oil, the seasoning's going to stick to the peppers. Generous amount of salt and pepper. We're gonna let those peppers cook for a little bit. We want them to get nice and golden brown on the outside and soften that membrane on the pepper. You see our fish. We've got a nice light golden-brown sear on the fish. I'm actually going to turn my flame down a little bit to let the fish cook the rest of the way. I was born in New Orleans, but I grew up moving around the South quite a bit. I like to say I got my full of Southern hospitality down in Florida and Georgia, spent quite some time in South Carolina. So really, in my opinion, all the great spots where really, you know, Southern hospitality is really known. But my heart was always here in Louisiana. I came back here for culinary school, and I just could never find a reason to leave. Now our peppers are nice and golden brown, we are going to add some shallots to the pan. We're gonna let those start to caramelize as well, One thing growing up in my family, cooking was such a big deal -- not what you cook necessarily or who was the best cook, but just that food always brought everybody together. Everybody was always around the table or everybody was always in the kitchen. And I think it was more the idea of the familiarity of people and the feeling that it brought more so than the food. The food was just always like, you know, it was always worth the work for the food. Now we have our shallots nice and caramelized, we're going to go in with our sweet corn. So it is summer here in New Orleans, so it is a fantastic time for corn. It's nice and sweet. This corn has been lightly roasted. We're going to add some grilled bok choy as well. Just sauting all these vegetables together. Let them get nice and warm. Got some brandy here 'cause everybody likes a little brandy. Going to again season our saut with a little bit of salt and pepper. We're not using too many different spices with these vegetables because, again, nice and light and bright and summer flavors, and we really like those flavors to shine through and allow them to speak for themselves. I'm going to finish with some chopped herbs for this dish. I really like to use tarragon and a little bit of basil, again kind of on the sweeter side. So now we have our drum that is just almost there. It needs a few more seconds in that pan. So we're going to add our avocado butter right on top. And we can finish this fish in the oven, so that the butter will kind of melt right on top of the fish and keep it nice and moist, or since we are so close to being done, we're going to hit this with a little torch just to get that butter melted right on top of that fish. So now we're going to plate. I'm going to put our peppers, our bok choy, and our corn right down in the center. You want to be careful with those shishitos because they can be a little hot. Next, we are going to add our drum with our beautiful avocado butter right on top. Going to finish the plate with a few things. This is a lemon miso vinaigrette. So here we've taken miso and whipped it with egg whites till it's nice and frothy, spiked it with some lemon juice, and emulsified it with just a little bit of oil. We have crispy Vidalia onion rings because who doesn't like a little crunch and a little sweet? And we're finishing the whole thing with a nice slaw. It's mixed herbs, shaved cabbage, and a little bit of carrot, again for that nice fresh, crunchy bite. And here we have our cast-iron-seared black drum with charred shishito peppers and crispy Vidalia rings and miso lemon vinaigrette. -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...