Recently I got a little free Amazon credit and decided to use it on John Besh’s My New Orleans. It showed up Tuesday while I was home sick from work and desperately in need of some entertainment. I spent a few minutes leafing through it when it came in and got a total food woody. What a stunning collection of Cajun culinary porn. It’s on par with Ad Hoc at Home aesthetically.
It’s clear that Chef Besh and his crew put a lot of effort into making an excellent resource for home cooks. My first thought was that if the recipes are half as good as the production values this one is poised to become a favorite. This weekend’s test-run didn’t disappoint.
Flipping through it, I noticed a lot of ingredients that are difficult for me to come by. Most noticeably many recipes use shellfish stock, which is made from leftover shells and heads from shrimp, lobsters, crabs, etc. I don’t have ready access to that so I had to order some lobster stock from Bar Harbor. Thanks to Amazon Prime I had the stock in time for this weekend’s meal, Belle River Crawfish Pie and Red Beans and Rice.
I started with the Red Beans and Rice since they take a couple hours to cook. This recipe didn’t work out very well for me. Even though it is one of the simpler ones I’ve made since I began this experiment a few months ago, it ended up being a trial.
Everything started off well. I sweated some onions, bell pepper, and celery in bacon fat which I luckily had on hand. Then I added kidney beans, ham hocks, bay leaves, and cayenne pepper, then covered with water.
The recipe calls for simmering over low for two hours. On my stove, a cheapo electric piece of junk that came with the house and which I hope to soon replace with a gas range, I usually dial everything up one or two notches. Most recipes are made for gas burners, where the low setting is probably equivalent to about the third notch on mine. But these beans had to cook for two hours, so I figured what the hell and set it all the way down to low. Big mistake.
Two hours later the beans hadn’t absorbed any of the water and were still very crunchy. I kicked it up to medium-low and about an hour and a half later (long after I’d eaten the Crawfish Pie) they were almost the right consistency. They still hadn’t absorbed much water though, and it came out a lot soupier than I think it was supposed to.
Also I was unable to find Louisiana White Rice, which the dish calls for. After looking around online it appeared that the closest thing was enriched long-grain white rice, which I found in a ratty looking bag for $1 on the bottom shelf at Giant Eagle. Given the importance of rice in the dish I probably should have just gone with a high quality long grain of some other type, and the rice I had bought just didn’t taste very good.
So epic fail on the Red Beans and Rice. No biggie, it’s not one of my favorite dishes anyway. I really only made it because it was on the page after the Crawfish Pie and looked damn good in the picture. I usually find that dish a bit too bland, and between the soupiness and the poor rice it came out that way. Oh well.
The Belle River Crawfish Pie (pg 37 of My New Orleans), however, exceeded expectations, and I have high expectations of anything with crawfish in it. It’s one of the best meals I’ve made yet. I brought my coworker one today (we have a toaster oven at work I could cook them in) and he said it was the best thing he’s ever tasted. He’s prone to hyperbole, but I don’t think he was exaggerating much.
I was dreading making it because it begins with a pie crust, and for whatever reason pie crusts are my kryptonite. They just never, ever work for me. Give me a recipe for Rabbit Agrodolce and I’m good. Ask me to mix flour and butter and I fail every time. I feel like I could probably tackle half of the recipes in the Alinea cookbook but a simple pie crust that any 70 year old lady could make in her sleep sends me running for the hills. Some things in life just can’t be explained.
Chef Besh’s pie recipe (a pretty standard one) seemed to work well enough this time. It didn’t come out perfect, but it wasn’t a disaster either. The last time I tried to make one was for Thomas Keller’s Chicken Pot Pie recipe, and I had to send the wife out to get a couple frozen crusts at the last minute for me to stitch together. This time the worst that happened was I cut them a bit too small.
Chef Besh calls for one nine-inch pie crust. He suggests, however, making six pies in three- to four-inch tart pans instead. A little math (remember the area of a circle is πr2) however shows that when you account for a little extra area (the crust has to be probably six inches round to reach up the sides of a four-inch pan) you’ll pretty much need two pie crusts.
I had ordered some tart pans from Amazon, but the picture just didn’t illustrate how shallow they were. I took one look at them and one brief glance at the recipe for the filling and realized right away that I was going to need something much deeper. I ended up using a mix of 3-inch and 4-inch Corningware ramekins. Those worked out well, and I got 4 smaller pies and two larger ones out of it.
But enough about me and my crust phobia, you want to hear about the recipe. I started off by making a light roux in a large skillet.
I then added onions, cooked until the roux was a little more golden, and added celery, salt, pepper, cayenne, a chopped tomato, and a bay leaf.
Then I put in the lobster stock and some heavy cream.
Then I cooked to reduce by about half and added in the crawfish tail meat, some cayenne pepper sauce I have (the recipe calls for Tabasco, but Tabasco is for weenies) and some Worcestershire. I stirred it up and removed the bay leaf.
Then it was time to fill the pies. It was just about the right amount, though I probably could have ditched one of the smaller ramekins if I had cut the pie crusts large enough.
Then I baked for 25 minutes.
I probably should have baked it a little more or maybe finished at a higher temperature so that the crust browned a bit, but I had tasted the filling and just couldn’t wait. It still came out pretty flaky and tasted like a perfect pie crust; it just didn’t really change color very much.
The filling was the star of the show anyway. The combination of the roux and the cayenne gave it a wonderfully smoky, spicy kick, while the roux, cream, and lobster stock gave it a velvety texture accentuated by the vegetables.
It was pretty close to perfect. Chef Besh, if you are reading this (and you’re pretty much one of only three Twitter followers who aren’t a caviar-selling spam bot) thanks for one of the best recipes I’ve found in three months and six cookbooks.
