Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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New Orleans" was provided by... -Rise and shine. It's breakfast time, today on "Kitchen New Orleans." We start with aebleskivers, spherical Danish pancakes from Chef Cara Benson of Toast. Next, Mexican-inspired shakshuka, a spin on a popular Middle-Eastern egg dish by Chef Maribeth del Castillo of Taceaux Loceaux. And for a deluxe finish, bacon-crusted coffee cake with seared foie gras, prepared by Chef Meg Bickford of Commander's Palace. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans kitchen queens. Our first destination is the Fairgrounds neighborhood, the namesake of a historic thoroughbred racetrack located in Mid-City. A short walk from the track is Toast, a casual breakfast spot established by Chef Cara Benson and her husband, Evan. Cara, who grew up in New Orleans, is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute of New York, where she trained in professional pastry arts. -I'm making lemon curd. So, I'm gonna mix my sugar, whole eggs. Get that whisked up a little bit. This is gonna go with our aebleskivers. It's like a lemon custard, and it'll be used as a dipping sauce. Gonna pour in some fresh-squeezed lemon juice, lemon zest, and butter. Now we're gonna put it on our double boiler. I usually just stir this up until all of my butter melts and then occasionally stir until it's nice and thick and it's gonna coat the back of a spoon. And then we're gonna strain it and chill it, and it'll be ready to eat. So the aebleskivers are -- It's a Danish puffed pancake. So, the batter, it's similar to a pancake batter, and then at the end, we fold in egg whites. Makes them light and airy. We have a special aebleskiver pan that we put them in and do little turns until it makes a sphere. I was opening Toast, the first Toast, and I was writing the menu, and my husband was the chef of a catering company. And he called, and he said, "I have this Danish couple, they're getting married, and they want aebleskivers" -- which I'd never heard of them before -- "at their wedding." He's like, "We got to put them on the menu." So we looked them up and started trying out different recipes and... So they're pretty popular. Kids love them. So the lemon curd, you'll know when it's ready. It'll thicken up a bit, and then it'll coat the back of your spoon. So, we're just gonna bring it over here to strain it. -The lemon curd is refrigerated until serving. -Okay, we're gonna make the aebleskivers now. We're gonna mix our wet ingredients, which is milk and egg yolks. The eggs are separated. So the egg whites are gonna be whipped to soft peaks, folded in at the end. And then we'll mix our dry ingredients. We have AP flour -- this is all-purpose flour -- salt, sugar, and some baking powder. We're gonna mix the wet into the dry. And then we're gonna mix in our melted butter. Then we have some egg whites that have been whipped to soft peaks, and we're just gonna fold those in. You're just looking for -- for everything to be kind of uniform. Once the white streaks are gone from the egg whites, it's ready. I'm just gonna pour it in this pitcher, and we'll use that to pour it into the aebleskiver pan to cook them. So, this is an aebleskiver pan. You're gonna preheat it. You're gonna spray it. And then just fill up your divots. And we're gonna let those just cook for a couple of minutes. And they're gonna get nice and brown on the bottom, and then we're gonna do a half turn, let them cook a little more, and then finish them. This is exactly how we do them, except we have a bunch of them. And then we have one person that just does aebleskivers all day, especially on the weekends. It kind of took off right away, so we were lucky with that. It's like you're cooking a pancake, but you're looking for the bigger bubbles around the edge. And you'll kind of see that it's getting a little brown in there. And then you're just gonna turn them like that. Then once you cook all the sides, you're gonna turn them in there so it'll get uniformly brown all the way around. I grew up in New Orleans. I went to Loyola. I majored in political science. And then after graduation, I moved to New York to go to the French Culinary Institute, and I studied pastry. We have a lot of different toppings. Maple syrup and lemon curd are the most popular, but we also have a homemade chocolate sauce and a homemade caramel sauce. The kids like Nutella. And we do a homemade strawberry jam, as well. So you have your choice of toppings. Okay, and then we'll just give these a couple turns to make sure they're cooked all the way through. And you can kind of feel them. Once they're nice and light, they're ready. Just give it a sprinkle of powdered sugar. And it'll get a side of lemon curd. And that's how we make our aebleskivers. -Next, we'll travel to Uptown New Orleans for a stop at Taceaux Loceaux, a laid-back eatery on Octavia Street, owned by Maribeth del Castillo and her husband, Alex. The couple earned a following for the creative street fare served at their Taceaux Loceaux food truck. At their bricks-and-mortar restaurant, Chef Maribeth's life-long passion for food is reflected in the expanded menu of inventive Mexican cuisine. -We're making a Mexican-inspired shakshuka. And what this basically is is a tomato-based dish that we'll crack some eggs into. It's a nice breakfast, and it's traditionally Israeli, so, obviously, I'm taking liberties with some of the things that we're doing. But some of the ingredients match up really well, and it's a nice place to kind of riff off of and give us a really great dish for the restaurant for brunch. So all you do is you take a nice onion. We're gonna dice this. This one's organic, so he's got a lot of extra stuff on him. And so, we'll peel this off. And this is a really wonderful dish. Very flavorful and really easy. You can actually -- I'm going to cook it on the stove, but you could certainly finish it in the oven, as well, if you preferred, and we'll get to that. So, once the onions are diced, we've got poblanos, of course, and these, again, are very easy to work with. These can roast in the oven or on top of a gas burner. Remove all of the pieces in the middle. This gets diced just like the onion. So, I am a self-taught cook, and I grew up cooking all the time in my house. When I lived in San Diego, which was before we moved to New Orleans -- we moved to New Orleans in 2000 -- I was in San Diego, and I had been managing fitness facilities out there, and I was sort of at a crossroads and really wanted to do something with cooking, and I didn't know what to do. So, a friend of mine knew someone who owned a restaurant, and I went in, and I asked her for work, and she said yes. And -- Which, at the time, I was shocked by, but it's not hard to get employees in the restaurant. It's hard to keep them. So, she was fine hiring me. She was a wonderful woman chef. And she was my first culinary boss. So, I started there cooking, basically doing anything that they would let me do. So I like a little bit of heat in this. If you don't like heat, you can stop at the poblanos. If you do, then you can add a jalapeo, which I'm doing now. You could add a serrano, which is a little hotter than that. I'm gonna take the membrane out. I usually leave a little bit behind because I like a little bit of the heat there, and that's where most of the heat is going to be oriented in your jalapeo, is in the membrane. And we'll just dice this, as well. So, all of this just gets diced together. There's a lot of chopping to start off. We've got some garlic, as well. You're gonna want to mince this. And it doesn't need to be precise. As uniform as you can get, but it doesn't really need to be. It can be a little rustic, which is fine. We'll do another. My husband brings a little bit of authenticity to the restaurant because his father's from Colombia, South America. So to this we've got a little bit more heat, and we've got -- in the form of chipotles. So these are canned. They're so easy to find canned. This is basically a smoked jalapeo. So we've got a little bit of layering of the flavor here. We've got the raw, kind of fruity jalapeo, and to that I'm adding the smokiness of the chipotle. This almost always comes in an adobo sauce. It's just that red sauce you can see, sort of brick red. It's great. Don't throw it away. It's wonderful in the sauce. And so, I will add some of this to it, as well. And I think now we're finished with most of the knife work, so we're ready to saut. So we've got olive oil in the pan. We're gonna let that heat up for a minute. So once the olive oil is heated, we're gonna add our chopped ingredients.

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And into this, I like to add the spices right away. This is cumin. We've got some cayenne for even more heat. Not too much. And I've got some chili powder, as well. We'll add a little bit of salt. And so, as this sauts, I've got the spices in, and the reason I do this right away is so that the oil can kind of coax a little bit more of the flavor out before we add the other ingredients. Right now what I'm looking to do is to take the onions down not only to translucent, but to start browning the onions, and that, in turn, is going to cook the poblanos even more. So remember, the poblanos are already cooked because we've already done those on the burner. So the onions will get a little bit brown, but they're not super-caramelized. So this has been cooking for a few minutes. The onions are just -- They've already turned translucent. They're starting to get a little brown on the edges. That's where we want this to be. And then I'm gonna take some crushed tomatoes. I use fire-roasted organic. Whatever you've got -- Canned are great because they're good year-round so you don't have to wait for them to come in season. We're gonna add that to this. So once this is all incorporated, this is going to sit on medium heat for us, and it's gonna cook down for about 20 to 30 minutes. We really want the flavors to start to meld together. Keep it on a lower heat. And then once we've got this where we want it, we'll add some eggs. So, once you've got your sauce simmering -- And you can see that it's simmering really well here. It's been going for about 25 minutes. We've got some eggs. We're gonna make a little well. We'll just kind of do a little well here. I'll do three of them. And we're gonna crack our eggs right into the dish. And so, once you've done that, you have a couple of options for how you want to finish this off. So, we can leave this just like this. And then once the whites start to cook up, we'll keep that yellow, you'll be able to see it. We can cover this with foil or a lid. When you do that, you're gonna lose the yellow color, but your eggs are gonna be cooked a little faster. You could also have had your oven preheated, and you could throw them in there. So once I've got the eggs in the pan, this will take us about 10 minutes. So our eggs have been in here for about 12 minutes, and so now we're ready to plate. We're gonna spoon some of our sauce into our bowl. And so, it's really more like a ragu at this point. And then I'll carefully try to place my egg on top. There we go. We want to garnish with some cilantro. And then today, I'm using Chihuahua cheese. You could also use Monterey Jack if you had that on hand. If you want something a little bit firmer as a cheese, you could use Cotija, which is a Mexican cheese. We'll garnish this with a lime. And that is Mexican-inspired shakshuka. -Our final stop is the Garden District, known for its oak-shaded streets and historic mansions. A centerpiece of the neighborhood is Commander's Palace, a New Orleans landmark since 1893. Today, we'll visit the world-class restaurant to meet Sous-Chef Meg Bickford, who has called the Commander's Palace 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. -Here we're gonna put together a French market coffee cake with seared Hudson Valley foie gras. So, the first step that we're gonna take is take a lovely mixture of bacon fat and butter, because everyone should keep that in their refrigerator. With a paper towel, we are going to generously line our little muffin tin. So, the reason we're adding so much fat to the exterior is because when we bake our coffee cakes, they're gonna get, like, nice and crispy on the outside and be really, really soft on the inside. All right. So here I have a coffee cake batter. This is a relatively simple batter. It consists of cake flour, eggs, brown sugar, granulated sugar, just a little bit of baking powder and baking soda. So we're gonna pour that into our grease-lined cups. We are gonna top these with rendered bacon. So this is bacon that's been browned, and it hasn't been cooked until crispy, but it's nice and soft, and the bacon's cooked through. One of the reasons I love this dish so much is because we really like to play with flavors in the sense of savories and sweets and salties. Here we have a little caramel we're going to top. So the reason I'm putting all of these on top of the cakes raw, my intention is, as they bake, all of this heavy stuff is kind of gonna sink just a little bit into the cake. So as we break the cake open to eat it, it's gonna be, like, super- super-moist and delicious and have a lot of fun little surprises inside. Our coffee cakes are ready to go into the oven. So we're gonna bake these at a relatively high temperature. We're gonna bake them at about 375 degrees, but we're only gonna bake them for about 9 minutes. So the reason that we're doing that is that we want them to stay really nice and moist on the outside, but we want to give the opportunity for all that fat that we lined our muffin tins with to get the cake nice and crispy on the outside. So, moist on the inside, crispy and hot on the outside, okay? So, while our coffee cakes are baking, we have made a peach confiture. So we have Alabama peaches that we have quartered and we have put into a simple syrup. So we've done about 25% sugar to about 75% water. We've allowed that syrup to come up to a light simmer. We added plenty of bourbon, a few cinnamon sticks, and a few whole cloves. We've allowed that liquid to simmer to really, really allow those aromatics to release, but we didn't burn off any of the alcohol. So we've added our peaches to it, and they've cooked at a very, very low temperature, just to kind of break down the peaches just enough where they're gonna keep their integrity and keep their nice skin on them, but they're gonna let into -- As soon as we break open those peaches, they'll be nice and creamy, and they're really gonna soak up that sweet bourbon taste. -As executive chef of the now shuttered Caf Adelaide, Chef Meg received seasoned advice from her boss, the late Ella Brennan, who was the recipient of a James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. -When I became the first female executive chef, I was extremely honored, and I was extremely proud of myself. And it was definitely something to talk about, but it also made me hesitant because I didn't want to talk about it too much because I didn't want that to be what people talked about. I wanted people to talk about how hard I worked to get there and why I deserved it. And Ella, without being provoked, came to me and told me how proud she was of me, and this is coming from, you know, "Women have run this restaurant in this family of restaurants for generations." So, to her, it was a big deal, but it wasn't a big deal, and it was kind of like, "Okay, just don't let that be the only thing they have to talk about. Don't let that -- don't let that mask all of what you're about to do and what you can prove." And that really meant the world to me because it was very much on the same page that I was on. To hear her say that to me was like, "Okay, so we're doing something right. You know what I mean? It's -- Yes, we should celebrate it, and it is something to be extremely proud of, but we -- let's get to work. You know, like, let's show people why it's important. Let's show people why it's something to celebrate." So here we have our finished coffee cakes. I'm gonna set these aside. We're gonna sear our foie gras, and then we're gonna pull the whole dish together. So here we have a cast-iron pan. We're gonna get this to where it's almost smoking, or to a smoking point, before we add our foie gras. Our foie gras is going to be generously seasoned with salt and black pepper. So we have our cast-iron pan. It's almost to a smoking point. We're gonna add our foie gras.

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Hear that nice, beautiful sear almost immediately. So the fat content of foie gras is so much that you kind of want to think of it as searing an ice cube. So, the faster and the hotter you can do it, the less time it's gonna spend in the pan, so the less fat you're actually going to lose. All right, nice golden brown. Gonna lower our temperature a little bit and allow it to cook the rest of the way through. To accompany our coffee cake, we also have a bacon and onion jam. This is bacon and onions that have been stewed down for a very, very long time together. They've been seasoned with a little bit of hot sauce, some brown sugar, again marrying those spicy and sweet flavors together. Now our foie gras is nice and soft. We can now assemble our plate. Here we're gonna take a nice muffin. If you see, the outside is nice and golden brown from our fat. Gonna kind of break the muffin a little bit open. Next to our muffin, we're gonna add our bacon and onion jam. It's really, really rich and smoky. Gonna add house-made Creole cream cheese. So this is something we make here. It, for generations now, has been made, of course, in Louisiana. It is vegetable rennet and skim milk. We allow it to set, and the milk actually sours, safely, to make a beautiful tart cheese, something that we use a lot here in our kitchen. Ooh, these peaches are boozy. Our nice peach confiture, a little bit of chopped pecans. Our seared foie gras. Here we have our French market coffee cake with seared Hudson Valley foie gras. -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...