Kitchen Queens: New Orleans

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New Orleans" was provided by... -Today on "Kitchen New Orleans," we'll salute the city's iconic second breakfast with three brunch gems. For a starter -- raw vegetable salad with artichokes and asparagus by chef Jana Billiot of Restaurant R'evolution. Next, Italian fried eggs with Gorgonzola sauce by chef Haley Bittermann of the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group. And finally, a bacon, egg, onion and cheese Mornay crepe from Cara Benson of Tartine. Stirring the pot with creativity and style, they're the New Orleans Kitchen Queens. We're off to Bourbon Street, the French Quarters' liveliest thoroughfare, and Restaurant R'evolution, where we'll meet Chef de Cuisine, Jana Billiot, a graduate of the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University. Chef Jana honed her skills in Chicago before returning to Louisiana and joining the team of the Royal Sonesta's fine-dining establishment. -Well, today, I'm gonna be preparing a raw vegetable salad with a preserved lemon vinaigrette. And to start off, we're gonna make our vinaigrette. So, here I have our preserved lemon. So, let's talk about preserved lemons for a moment. We actually preserve our own lemons in-house in the restaurant that we use. This is what they look like when they're done. So it's a very simple process here. It's basically pickled or brined whole lemon. And you really need to let them preserve for up to 30 days. What we do is we take a lemon, we trim the end, we cut four slices deep down in that lemon, and we pack it with salt. We also like to add some aromatics such as toasted cinnamon sticks, cardamom, clove, bay leaves, peppercorn -- can really add whatever spices you like. And then before you can use these lemons, you have to make sure that you rinse them very well because they're literally packed in salt. You can use the pulp, you can use the whole lemon, but here we're just simply gonna use the rind on the outside. So I'm going to take my preserved lemon zest, add it to my bowl. I've got some brunoised shallot. A brunoise is just like a nice, small, fine dice. But really, take your time with it. You don't want to bruise the shallot. We also have a little minced garlic that we're gonna add. I'm using fresh lemon juice as well as champagne vinegar. I'm gonna start whisking in some extra virgin olive oil......as well as just some blended vegetable oil. I don't like to necessarily use 100% olive oil sometimes with these more delicate vinaigrettes. Depending on the quality of the olive oil, it can become a little bitter, and then we're already working with a bitter ingredient with that preserved lemon. So that's why we're cutting it with just some plain vegetable oil, as well. This stays good forever in your fridge, and the longer it sits and marinades, just the better the flavor's gonna be. I'm just gonna season it now with some salt and pepper. And I've got some fines herbs that I'm gonna add. So, fines herbs, that's just a fancy French term for fresh tarragon, chives -- preferably chervil, if you can find it -- and parsley. So we have some already chopped up here. I'm gonna add that to my vinaigrette. And then this is basically done. Good to go. So now we're gonna go back to our raw vegetable salad. I'm gonna add some shaved fennel. I've got my mandoline -- very useful tool. Nice and sharp, affordable. So, I've got the shaved fennel. Now I'm gonna shave some asparagus. Now I'm gonna also add some shaved artichoke. I like to use fresh artichoke hearts and we just get the whole artichokes in. We peeled them, we trimmed them down, and this is what you're left with. So, I'm gonna take the artichoke here and I'm gonna thinly slice it on my mandoline. Gonna add that to our salad bowl. I'm gonna go ahead and add some of our frise. It's kind of like a bitter lettuce. This is just a nice, light, refreshing, healthy, crisp... beautiful salad. It's very elegant. We're adding some fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano now. Alright, now I'm gonna add some more of my fines herbs to my salad mix. Salt and pepper. Gonna drizzle on my salad with my vinaigrette. Give it a little toss. Ideally, you should dress it right before you're serving it, but the longer that these vegetables sort of marinate in this vinaigrette, the more delicious and luscious and all the flavors will really come together. So, now we're gonna plate our salad. The salad could easily become vegan without the Parmesan cheese. We're gonna garnish our salad with some fresh shaved Parmesan right on top. A little bit of fennel pollen. Fennel pollen you can also find in your specialty food stores in the spice section. It's very aromatic. It really doesn't taste like anise or fennel seed. It's very floral. It's kind of sweet. And I'm gonna garnish with a little bit of just fennel frond just for some color, kind of utilizing all of the fennel in this salad. And here we are. There's our raw vegetable salad with preserved lemon vinaigrette. -For over seven decades, Brennan's has been holding court as the bastion of sophisticated morning meals in the French Quarter. The dining landmark is one of several restaurants under the aegis of corporate executive Chef Haley Bittermann. Today's Italian fried-egg dish is a nod to Chef Haley's stint as Executive Chef at BACCO, the Ralph Brennan Restaurant Groups's former Italian restaurant. -Today we are going to make one of my favorite dishes. It's an Italian fried egg. We're gonna actually gonna start with a couple of sauces that go with it, and the first one is a sauce that is just some melted butter. So this is unsalted butter that's been melted. And I'm gonna add just a little bit of white truffle oil to it 'cause it gives it a great perfume. And you really want to add this truffle oil after it's been warmed up. You don't need to heat the truffle oil up. The flavor's a lot better when it's just warm as opposed to being brought to a really high temperature. And we are going to slice some black truffles. And as you can see, these are sitting in rice. And the way I like to store them is in rice, and it helps keep the truffle dry so that it doesn't get too much moisture. And when you're done, if you cook the rice, it has a really nice truffle flavor to it. This is in a regular short-grain rice, but I like to soak mine in -- or keep mine packed in -- Arborio rice 'cause you can make a great risotto with it and it already tastes like truffles. Okay, so, I am using not a traditional truffle slicer. This is just a mandoline that I have, and you want to be very careful. This edge is very, very sharp. And so what you're gonna do is just very gently run the truffle across that blade and let it drop right into the butter. Now, you'll find, too, when you use truffles and you slice truffles, you'll end up with little pieces that you can't quite slice 'cause you don't want to get your finger caught in there. And what I like to do with those is if you chop them up and you incorporate them in some butter, it flavors the butter. So, if you want to have truffle toast, you just butter your toast in the morning with truffle butter, and it's a great way to start the day. Okay, so, these have just been, like I said, sitting in some melted butter with the truffle oil, and you can see the slices. We're gonna let this sit off to the side just in a nice, warm place. And we're gonna move on to the Gorgonzola sauce. So this is another fairly simple sauce recipe. And I actually like to make this one fresh when you're getting ready to use it as opposed to making it ahead of time, so you can just make small amounts of it. This is some heavy cream that has been reduced. So if you take the back of your spoon, you see how it kind of sticks to the back of your spoon? That's the right consistency. So it's probably been reduced by about half or so. And I've got this on kind of a medium heat, if you will. I'm gonna take this off and put it onto a towel so that the pot doesn't move around on me, and I am just gonna break some nice Gorgonzola cheese. Now, I've let this Gorgonzola sit out so that it's already soft a little bit. That way it melts into the sauce a little easier. Gorgonzola is a pretty soft Italian cheese -- blue cheese. It's got a nice, strong flavor to it, and I find it balances well with the egg and the egg yolks. Now, once you incorporate that Gorgonzola, I'm gonna put it back on the heat here just to let it melt, let those lumps come out. And then what I'm gonna add is a little bit of minced fresh rosemary. So, a little rosemary goes a long way. I'm gonna put a couple of pinches in there. I'm also gonna add a little pepper. And as you see, I'm not really gonna add salt because Gorgonzola is a fairly salty cheese to begin with. So, as you can see, the rosemary's incorporated and all the blue cheese -- the Gorgonzola -- has melted, and that's ready to go, too. So, you can put that in a warm spot, as well, and it's ready for plating up. So now we're gonna do the fun part. This is the portion of the recipe where we are going to actually bread the eggs. So, these eggs have been boiled for 4 minutes and 45 seconds, and then they've been dropped into ice water. And you want to leave them in that ice water for about 10 minutes or so -- 5 to 10 minutes. It's gonna stop the cooking process. And when you peel them, you need to be very careful because these eggs are still liquid. The yolks are still liquid on the inside. So you can see kind of how soft they are. And you can do them ahead of time. You do want to store them in water once you've peeled them because the water helps keep it so that the weight to the actual egg itself doesn't crush itself 'cause they can split. And I'm gonna just cut this open to show you......how liquidy that egg yolk still is, and that's important 'cause you want the egg yolk to be runny. This is not a hard-boiled egg. Alright, so, when you do it, set your timer and then you trust that it's at just the right temperature when you take them out and you put them in the ice bath. So, what we're gonna do now is we're gonna take one out. And we're gonna put it in a little seasoned flour. And this is just some all-purpose flour that has some salt and pepper in it. And I find it's very important each step of the way to add seasoning. So, once you get that egg coated, we're gonna drop it into some egg wash. This egg wash is just egg that has a little bit of water in it, and it has salt and pepper in it. You just roll it in there 'til that flour is coated and then you're gonna drop it into the breadcrumbs. These crumbs have a little bit of fresh chopped parsley and a little salt and pepper in them, as well. And you just want to make sure that the egg is coated completely. So, we're gonna put that there. I was the Executive Chef at BACCO. That was the first restaurant I was an Executive Chef at. And at the time, I was the first woman to be given the title of Executive Chef in a Brennan family restaurant. So, I was very young at the time. I think I was 27 years old. I've worked for Mr. Brennan for 27 years, so half of my life. So now we can go ahead and fry these. Now, this is something that you want to do right before you fry them. You don't want to bread them ahead of time and put him in the refrigerator. These need to be done fresh. So, what we're gonna do -- This is 350-degree oil. We are going to place the eggs in there. You could do this on your stovetop. If you have a candy thermometer, just measure the temperature and make sure you've got it at 350 degrees or even a little tabletop fryer works fine, but you do need to have enough oil so that the egg is completely covered in the oil and that the oil supports the eggs. Otherwise, they will break. It takes just about 2 or 3 minutes. All you're doing is getting a crispy coating on the outside, and you want that yolk on the inside to be nice and warm when you cut into it and we put the sources on it. So, you can see these have gotten nice and golden brown and crispy on the outside. And I just use a regular soup spoon to get them out of the oil. You need to be a little gentle with them. Put them in a paper towel so it absorbs any oil that might be leftover on the egg. And now I think we're ready to plate this up and eat it. I have a piece of toasted ciabatta bread, and I find that ciabatta works really well 'cause it's a nice, airy bread. You can cut a thick slice and you can put a base for the for the egg in here. So, we have our toasted bread. We have the rosemary Gorgonzola sauce. We're gonna put a little bit that in the bottom. And then we're gonna take our ciabatta, place it in the center. And you just want to make a little nest for that egg to sit in. So that's why you want kind of a nice thick slice. And we're gonna take our egg, sit it right there like that. And then what you want to do is you want to, with a little serrated knife, just gently cut the top of that egg off so that you can see the yolk. Put that there. And then we're gonna take those black truffle slices that we warmed up in some butter and then added a little white truffle oil to. And you just want to......get some of that butter and oil onto the ciabatta bread. And maybe just an extra little drizzle. This is baby arugula, so we're gonna add a little bit of arugula into this 'cause it's got kind of a nice peppery bite to it. And then we've got some pretty thyme today, so we figured we'd use a little thyme to garnish this with. So, there you have it. This is an Italian fried egg. When you cut into this, that yolk is gonna run all over the ciabatta bread and mix in with the Gorgonzola sauce and the truffles. It's a wonderful dish. -Our final destination is Uptown New Orleans. Tucked in the quiet neighborhood near Audubon Park is Tartine, a French bistro helmed by Chef Cara Benson. After graduating from Loyola University, Chef Cara ditched plans for a law career and headed to Manhattan to study pastry at the French Culinary Institute. She worked in restaurants in New York and New Orleans before opening her go-to brunch destination in 2010. -We're making that crepe better now. We're gonna mix our wet ingredients, which is milk and whole eggs. Okay, and then we're gonna mix all-purpose flour......and salt. And then mix the wet into the dry. And then it just gets melted butter mixed in at the end. You want it to be smooth. So, once we've got everything incorporated, I'm just gonna run it in the blender for a second to make sure we don't have any lumps 'cause the crepes are gonna be cooked pretty thin. So, we'll just pour it right into our blender. And then it'll just go... Pour it in here. It's nice and smooth, and we'll refrigerate it until we're ready to make the crepes. We're gonna make the Dijon vinaigrette next. We have a green salad option on the menu, so we're going to serve a green salad tossed in a Dijon vinaigrette with our crepe. So, we have shallots here, gonna do some fresh garlic......to white balsamic vinegar......honey......Dijon mustard......and fresh herbs. We have chives, tarragon, and parsley. So, all of that is gonna go in here. I'm just gonna chop that a couple times. And then we have our canola oil, and we're just gonna drizzle that in. And here is our Dijon vinaigrette. I'm just gonna pour it into a couple of containers and then refrigerate it until we're ready to use. Okay, we're gonna make a Mornay sauce now, which is a Bchamel, and then we're gonna add some Gruyre cheese at the end. The Mornay goes into the crepe. So, we're just gonna melt the butter. It's unsalted butter. Okay, once that is melted, we're gonna add our flour. And we're gonna make a roux. So, just a blond roux. We don't want any color. We just want to cook out the flour tastes, and that'll thicken up the milk once we add that. I went to The French Culinary Institute, and I studied pastry. I worked in New York. I was a pastry chef of a French restaurant in the theater district. Actually, I went in for a pastry assistant job right out of school. I'd never worked in a professional kitchen before. And the pastry chef and the chef were in this huge fight. And I walked in on it and the pastry chef quit and threw his apron, and the chef said, "Congratulations." So... I was the pastry chef there for about a year. The first two weeks, I went home and cried every day, but I had a great assistant, and I got the hang of it. I ended up really loving that job. So, once your flour cooks out, you're gonna add the milk. So, whisk it in there kind of slowly at first so that we don't have any lumps. It's gonna come to a boil, and it's gonna thicken up a little bit. It shouldn't take too long. Then you're just gonna take it off the heat. Stir in your cheese. And this is Gruyre. And get that melted. And then, it's ready to go. Okay. That's the Mornay, And now we're gonna get ready to do the crepes next. These are professional crepe machines, but at home you can use a home machine or a crepe pan. We're gonna oil the stone right here. We have our crepe batter that we've chilled. It's ready to go. It goes right on there. And then you're just gonna spread it out pretty thin. We're gonna let that underside get nice and brown, and then we're gonna flip it over and fill it in. And then once it's not sticking anymore, I just run this over it and then flip it over. And then we're gonna put our filling in it. We have our Mornay sauce that we made earlier. It's gonna make it nice and creamy. And then we're doing Gruyre, caramelized onions, and bacon. So that'll go just right in the middle. And we're just gonna fold it up. Okay, and then we'll let that get nice and brown on the bottom and flip it. Okay, we'll go ahead and flip it, let that cook for a minute or so to get brown on the bottom, and then we're gonna cut it and plate it up. Okay, we're gonna put some Dijon vinaigrette on some spring mix. Toss it up. That's the bacon, onion, Gruyre crepe served with a tossed green salad and our Dijon 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...