Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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Queens

New Orleans" was provided by... -Today on "Kitchen New Orleans," three pasta dishes that reflect the city's diverse food culture. First, an Italian classic, tortellini in brodo, prepared by Chef Rebecca Wilcomb of Gianna. Then, fresh Gulf shrimp and crawfish star in Pasta on the Bayou by Chef Tanya Dubuclet of Neyow's Creole Caf. And finally, baked spaghetti, NOLA-style, by Chef Nicole Mackie of Ma Momma's House of Cornbread, Chicken & Waffles. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans Kitchen Queens. We start today's pasta experience in downtown New Orleans at Gianna, a grand dining spot from the Link Restaurant Group. The restaurant is named for the grandmother of chef/partner Rebecca Wilcomb, who is second-generation Italian. The food of her family's home in the Veneto region of northern Italy helped shape the menu. But at Gianna,

the James Beard Best Chef

South winner mines the broad sweep of Italian food traditions and flavors. -So, we're making our tortellini filling. The chicken and half of the beef and half of the pork have been poaching in water with some carrot and celery. And then the other half of the pork and beef has been poaching in just water. It's really important not to poach all of it together -- otherwise, your broth is less chickeny and too porky and beefy. There are three elements in this dish -- tortellini, Parmesan, and the broth. So, the broth has to be perfect. It has to be really flavorful, but, mostly, tasting of chicken. So, I've just pulled the chicken and pork and beef out. So, now we're going to strain the broth, and this is what we're going to use to cook off the tortellini, but we're also going to serve it in this broth. Alright, now we'll make the filling. So, I'm just going to pull this into smaller pieces. And this is just beef chuck that we've used. I like chuck. There's a lot of flavor. You can poach it for a long time. Keeps its nice texture. The beef we're getting from a company called Creekstone. The pork is coming from a farm in northern Mississippi called Home Place Pastures, which have a really great animal husbandry program. They're a bunch of younger farmers. I think they're in late 20s to early 30s. Not only do they have great-tasting meat and humanely treated animals and raised animals, it's also great to see younger folks kind of continuing on the tradition of responsible animal husbandry. That was just pork belly. Yeah, the fat is really important in this filling to kind of counter -- it balances out the chicken in the filling. So, again, I just broke it up into small pieces. I'm going to do the same with the chicken. These chickens here are coming from Joyce Farms. They're actually located in North Carolina. Again, they have a really great animal husbandry program... with a focus on animal welfare, which is really important to me and to what we do here. I like using the dark meat of the chicken, so from the legs and the thighs. It adds a lot of really great flavor. I poached a whole chicken because I wanted a really flavorful broth. So, I'll use both of the legs in the filling. It's a little bit too much chicken for the filling, so we'll save the rest of it for anything you want, chicken salad, whatever you want. It's always the pursuit of those fresh ingredients. You know, my grandmother uses a lot of stuff from her garden. You know, there's a market in town every -- every week, every Friday. There's also, you know, markets in the surrounding towns. A place like Italy, you go to the butcher to get your meat. You know, you go to the market to get your vegetables and your fruit. You know, you go to a certain place olive oil. There's still a lot of trade that's going on too, in terms of, you know, people bringing over cherries or plums or apples from their yard and, you know, trading it for homemade wine or salami or things like that. Or maybe there just is in my family. I don't know. Once you have your pork belly broken up into more manageable pieces and your beef chuck broken up and both your chicken legs and thighs picked, then it's time to mix it all in the food processor. You can also finely chop it by hand if you don't have a food processor. It just takes a little bit longer. You can also put it through a meat grinder. I just really like the texture that the food processor gives the filling. It's a little smoother. So, we're just going to pulse it. You don't want to, you know, beat it up so badly that it's this kind of paste, but you do want it to be finely chopped and well mixed.

Whirs

the James Beard Best Chef

Okay, so once it's pretty finely chopped and well mixed but not a paste, you can add it to a bowl, and we'll mix the rest of the ingredients in from here. We're going to add some freshly grated nutmeg. I think freshly grated is key. When it's preground, it loses a lot of its flavor. It's going to seem like a lot of nutmeg, but it really makes the dish. Italian -- especially northern Italian cooking, you see a lot of nutmeg. It's a traditional ingredient in bchamel, pasta fillings. Super fragrant. Very, very fragrant. Alright, we're going to also add a couple of eggs... to help bind it all together. We use really great farm eggs. As a company, we have a forager, Ashley, who does a really great job of finding us awesome fruits and vegetables but also dairy and meats. You know, we have a wish list every year. We buy seeds and... with the farmers and talk to them about how we want things grown. It's this really great kind of, you know, reciprocating, symbiotic kind of relationship that we have with them, and she's a huge part of that. Alright, we also need a healthy dose of Parmesan. It's probably about two-thirds meat to about a third Parmesan. It's important to use a really high-quality Parmesan, freshly grated yourself. Especially with tortellini in brodo, I mean, there's so much work that goes into it that you really want to use the highest-quality ingredients. Alright, you want to mix and fold everything really well, till it's all fully incorporated. If it ever seems a little bit dry, you can add a little ladleful of the chicken broth. This one seems pretty moist. And we taste it for seasoning. Definitely needs salt. And even a little more nutmeg. You always want to taste it. The freshness of your ingredients, especially spices, is going to vary, so it's important to taste it every time. Recipes are just a base, a guideline to follow, but everything should come from tasting. Great. Good to go. Now we'll make our pasta, fill our pasta, cook it off, and we'll eat it. So, we're making our tortellini. We have to start by making our pasta dough. We use a pasta flour, 00 flour, which is a super, super finely milled, silky flour. We use Caputo flour, which is this really great, high-quality flour from Italy. I start by making a little well in the center of the flour and then adding the egg to the center. So, at the restaurant, we weigh -- everything is by weight. It's definitely a more accurate way to measure. But a general rule of thumb is you want your pasta to be hydrated by a third. So, you have two-thirds dry ingredients, one-third wet. Obviously, most of the moisture in this recipe comes from eggs. Some people add olive oil to their dough. Some people add, you know, just water. For this one, it's just eggs and flour. Alright, we're going to mix it until it all comes together. Right now I'm just bringing everything together, all of the wet ingredients, all the dry ingredients. And then we're going to knead our dough for about -- about 10 minutes until it's nice and elastic and uniform. And again, you just knead it for about five or ten minutes, till it's nice and elastic and uniform. Then we're going to cover it. I usually wrap it in plastic wrap and then let it rest for at least an hour. Resting ensures that your dough becomes completely and properly hydrated. So our dough has rested. So, at home you can use a hand-crank, tabletop pasta machine. You can also hand roll it with a long mattarello, which is a long, straight rolling pin used specifically for rolling out pasta. -Chef Rebecca uses a time-saving professional sheeter to roll out the tortellini dough to the desired thickness. -So, you want to lightly flour your pasta. You don't want to flour it too much 'cause you do want it to stick together later on when you make the dumplings. I consider this part of the kneading process, so you're going to get finer and finer, or smaller and smaller, as you go. If you can see a newspaper through it, it's ready to go. Alright, now we're going to cut our pasta. We're cutting them into about one-inch by one-inch squares. It's okay if they're slightly different sizes. You are making handmade pasta. Okay. Alright, now we take our filling that we made before. The easiest way I find to do this is to roll it into a little rope... and then place a little bit in each one. They don't have to be perfect little balls, we're going to stretch and fill. -Next, the chef demonstrates the fine art of shaping tortellini. -You go corner-to-corner. Squeeze the ends, and then bring it -- bring both points down into one, and squeeze them together. So, the ones I previously made, like the ones my nonna makes, or the ones in Bologna, actually wrap around the finger. It's a slightly different shape. These actually hold best when you freeze them, which is what we do at the restaurant. This is the broth that the chicken and a little bit of the pork and a little bit of the beef was cooked in with the carrot and celery. We've brought it back up to a boil, and we're skimming off a little bit of the fat droplets and any foam that may rise to the surface. I've seasoned it with a little bit of salt. We are going to finish the dish with some Parmesan cheese, which will add more salt, so we do want to hold back a little bit on the salt. So, here are the tortellini we made. I'm going to dump those in, cook them for about eight to ten minutes until they're nice and tender. We're not looking for al dente pasta here. We're looking for really soft and supple little, you know, dumplings. Once they start to float to the surface, you know that they're just a couple of minutes away. And you just want to check them for tenderness. After we make them, we do freeze them. It helps preserve the fresh pasta quality. We dry most of our pastas, but this is one of the few that we -- that we freeze. My nonna freezes her too. So, this is something that is very traditionally eaten, especially in northern Italy, especially in the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, most traditionally at Christmas. So, you always start your Christmas meal with a bowlful of tortellini in brodo. My nonna always has tortellini around, so as soon as I get off the plane and go to her house, the first thing that I eat is a big bowlful of tortellini. And then tortellini's always served in the broth and then finished with a generous amount of Parmesan cheese. And that's it -- Giannina's tortellini in brodo. -We head now to Mid-City, a neighborhood distinguished by beautiful gardens, outdoor attractions, and an eclectic array of restaurants. Neyow's Creole Caf on Bienville Street stands out for its authentic Creole soul food. Chef Tanya Dubuclet, who runs Neyow's with her husband, Tim, prepares dishes that are based on family recipes. "Whatever my grandmother cooked, that's what I cook," she says. -The dish we're going to be doing is called Pasta on the Bayou. It's just shrimp, crawfish, with a little Alfredo sauce -- secret ingredient, which is butter. Butter makes everything taste really, really good. And that's it. It ain't really no big secret behind it. People like pasta, so we came up with the Pasta on the Bayou. You're going to start off adding the crawfish and the shrimp in the skillet. It's a little popcorn shrimp -- they're already peeled and deveined -- and the crawfish. So, it's no work for us. Just open up the bag, and voil. We put a little Creole seasoning. We're going to add a little granulated garlic. We're going to add just a little water. We're going to let that simmer for about -- maybe about three minutes or so. Born and raised in New Orleans. From the 7th Ward. I lived with my grandmother almost my whole, entire life. That's where all this come from. She loved to cook. I love to cook. And ever since I was two years old, she would have me in the kitchen doing whatever I wanted to do. My mama would get mad because I would make a lot -- I'd make a mess. Flour everywhere. But my grandmother was -- she had the patience of Job. She was extremely patient. She allowed me to do anything I wanted to do. And that's where it comes from, just loving to cook. Didn't go to school for it. Just loved to cook. You know what? I wanted to take my kids on a vacation. At the time, I had three kids. We just wanted to go to AstroWorld, go to Houston and go AstroWorld. And someone told me about doing suppers and how much money they generated from doing suppers. I was already cooking every week. The family would come over every Sunday, and I would feed everybody. So, I did the supper. It went well. We to AstroWorld. We came back. But it went so well, I made so much money, I got excited. I started doing it every week. It went from once a week to twice a week, till it just grew too big. I had to get out of my house. Decided to open up my first location, which was in Gentilly. About 26 years ago. I was 24 years old. And everybody said, "Well, they got too many restaurants. Too much competition." You know, I'm young, didn't know anything about business. The only thing I knew, I loved to cook. Didn't go to school for it. I followed good directions. I gave it a try. I was there for 10 years before Katrina. Katrina hit. I was home for three years after Katrina. Then we came up with Neyow's. Alright, now we're going to add the heavy whipping cream. 2 ounces of Parmesan cheese. You're going to do that two times. You're going to whip that up a little bit. Alright, guys, this is the secret to everything, the butter. After that butter melts a little bit, we're going to add the pasta. Then we're going to have a finished product. That's just penne pasta. My chefs that I work with in the kitchen, they would probably do all this flipping and stuff. I can't do all that fancy stuff. I'm really, really clumsy. If I try to flip it, it'll be all over my clothes. And voil! Pasta on the Bayou. -Our final destination is New Orleans East, a section of the city that began suburban development in the 1960s. Located in the east, Ma Momma's House of Cornbread, Chicken & Waffles is a family business run by Nicole Mackie, her husband, Earl, and Nicole's sister, Rene Guzman. At Ma Momma's House, Chef Nicole -- or Miss Nikki, as she's known -- serves down-home Southern cuisine inspired by the home-cooked meals of the owners' mothers and grandmothers. -Today, we're going to bring you our family's baked spaghetti, NOLA-style. We've already boiled our pasta, and that's the no. 4 spaghetti. And we're going to take the pasta, and we're going to layer it in the pan. I'm going to make sure it's nice and flat all the way across. And we're going to use a lot of New Orleans staple items. We're going to layer the spaghetti first. After the spaghetti, we're going to put the Monterey Jack and cheddar cheese. This is my family's favorite. And, baby, is it good! Next, we're going to add the grated American cheese. So, it's three cheeses in this baked spaghetti. And baked spaghetti is kind of special to New Orleans. Most people around the country do baked macaroni, but in New Orleans we do baked spaghetti. Then we're going to sprinkle with your favorite seasoning salt, and you're going to sprinkle to taste. And we're going to put another layer of spaghetti. The first person that cooked this for me that I can remember was definitely my grandmother. We used to have this on Sundays, with Sunday dinner. It's also great for a potluck meal, if you're traveling to a barbecue. It goes well with barbecue or fried fish. So, we're just layering up right now. And it doesn't take a lot of time, and it's not a very expensive recipe to make. We're putting our... other the cheese, and we want to make sure that the spaghetti is covered. After we do the cheese, we're going to make a mixture that we're going to put in the spaghetti as well. And we're going to use one egg, 1 1/2 cups of heavy whipping cream -- not milk, not half-and-half, but heavy whipping cream. We're going to sprinkle a little black pepper. And normally I would be dancing while I'm cooking. That's what we do at my house. We love to cook to music. It's a family tradition. So, after that's beat really well and the egg is mixed really well, we're going to pour this on top of the spaghetti. And then we're going to pour butter. it's a very rich recipe. So, we're going to put the butter on top. Sprinkle a little bit more of our seasoning salt. And we're going to put it in the oven that's been preset to 325 degrees. And we'll let that bake for 45 minutes, and then you're going to enjoy it. So, we're going to go on ahead and get it dished out. And I'm going to use a spatula so we can get the layers. In my family, they love the corner, so we're going to take the corner out, and it's nice and toasty, crispy on the top. We'll do one more piece... in case you're feeding someone like my son that eats for four. You can eat just like this, or you can pair it with fried fish, smothered chicken, turkey. It goes really well with turkey and gravy. And this is the NOLA-style baked spaghetti. -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

Queens

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...