-Funding for "Louisiana Coastal Cooking" was provided by... ...and by the Plaquemines Parish Tourism Commission.

A short drive from New Orleans, Plaquemines Parish offers a diverse variety of fishing, fresh seafood, rich history, and environmental activities in Louisiana's Delta Country.

Learn more at visitplaqueminesparish.com.

[ Birds chirping ] -Celebrating Louisiana food and culture through public television.

-Louisiana cooks take pride in their recipes and enjoy opportunities to show off their skills.

Today on "Louisiana Coastal Cooking," we go ringside as chefs slug it out in competition for the chance to reign as seafood royalty in the state.

Then we visit three seafood hotspots for a taste of dishes with bragging rights as fare for creativity and change.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ For some extreme seafood cooking excitement, we head to northern Louisiana for the 17th Annual Louisiana Seafood Cook-Off held at Bayou Pointe, an event center at the University of Louisiana Monroe.

The culinary competition showcases Louisiana's vibrant seafood culture, bringing together 12 chefs from every corner of the state vying for the title of King or Queen of Louisiana Seafood.

Event hosts Chef Cory Bahr and Gerald Gruenig count down the start of the contest, where chefs prepare signature dishes highlighting the bounty of Louisiana seafood.

The clock is ticking as competitors race to present their dish to a panel of judges.

For Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser, the cook-off is a celebration of the state's culinary identity.

-Louisiana, besides the seafood and the great dishes, it's the love and passion those chefs have for Louisiana, for the seafood, for their restaurant, for their dishes, and to be able to highlight that, bringing all the great chefs and selecting the King of Queen of Seafood to represent Louisiana for the year is an incredible honor, but it also gives us a chance to highlight that special flavor that comes in Louisiana.

I don't know what it is.

It must be something in the crawfish boil or the ground.

But whether it's music, football, or food, we just seem to overdo it.

And it makes me incredibly proud of every chef here tonight, because you'll see that love and passion go into the dish they're preparing tonight.

-The culinary experience spotlights conservation partnerships.

Rachel Kimmel is the education coordinator for Audubon G.U.L.F., Gulf United for Louisiana Fisheries, the sustainable seafood program for Audubon Nature Institute.

-For the last decade or so, we've been primarily working with the fishing industry out on the water, improving the sustainability.

We also work with the community as well.

So we do everything from boat to plate, and that includes consumers.

One of the reasons we're here today is actually because Cory Bahr is on our chef council.

So we have a restaurant partnership program, which is kind of aiming to create a community of local chefs in Louisiana.

So they source directly from our local fishermen.

They know where their seafood comes from, and they're dedicated to supporting that and to educating everyone who comes through their doors as well.

-The evening is a chance for attendees to feast on dishes from area restaurants and regional guest chefs.

Sharon Ross, a military veteran and University of Louisiana Monroe alumni, joined seafood-loving friends for the event.

-We're here to support ULM.

We support festivals.

We go everywhere for festivals.

The seafood we love.

So of course when they said seafood cook-off, we were ready for that.

I am aware of a lot of our coastal area eroding.

We're losing a lot of crawfish, a lot of the seafood that we have here in Louisiana.

So yes, I am concerned and I am aware of that.

-Representing Acme Oyster House in the cook-off is Tony Rodrigue, food and beverage director for the New Orleans-based chain and a second-generation member of the Rodrigue family team.

-In Louisiana, we're so lucky to have, you know, the best seafood available at all times when it comes to fresh fish, crabs, oysters.

Crab is something that kind of hits close to home, going crabbing as a young kid and loving it.

You know, we would always go fishing.

But, um, no matter how big the fish was, I was never as happy as I was when I pulled up a crab net and it had crabs in it.

So we're very lucky here in Louisiana to have fresh seafood everywhere we can look.

My dish was a crab fat tagliatelle.

It was pasta that was made with crab fat instead of egg yolk.

And then it was topped with caviar, fresh-caught Louisiana crab, and, uh, like a tomato beurre blanc sauce.

Acme sells 5 million oysters a year.

We recycle all of those oysters in the state, at least.

It helps the coastline.

It helps create more oyster farms.

Oysters grow great on oyster shells.

So it's a great program to be a part of.

And we're proud to be a part of it.

-And the winner is Chase Woodard, chef de cuisine at Parish Restaurant in Monroe.

The newly crowned king will serve as an ambassador for Louisiana seafood.

-Tonight, we prepared a seared yellowfin tuna straight from the gulf.

Placed it on top of a summer salad of local peaches I actually picked out of the garden from the restaurant, tossed it with some blue crab that we marinated in our vinaigrette for the salad, and then plated that up with a yellow curry that I made by hand.

We are so blessed to have what we have, especially seafood-wise, from the yellowfin tuna to the redfish in the brackish waters to the crawfish that we get all the way up here.

It's just -- It's amazing what we have and it's definitely something to be cherished.

-Next we travel to Spahr's Seafood in Des Allemands, a town about 30 miles southwest of New Orleans that was declared the catfish capital of the universe by the Louisiana legislature.

At the restaurant, perched on the banks of Bayou Des Allemands, we join Ryan Gaudet, executive chef for Spahr's Seafood and 3 Piers Seafood Market and a competitor in the 2022 Louisiana Seafood Cook-Off.

-Our primary focus is gulf seafood.

It's also a USDA-inspected processing facility for wild-caught catfish.

The local fishermen, they go out and they catch fish, and they want to be able to unload their fish.

Their job is hard enough to go out there and fight weather and different conditions for fishing.

We kind of step in and we're kind of that middleman from the fishermen to the communities.

We can take in a lot of the fish that they catch and turn around and offer it right to the community, just -- just right then and there.

-Today, Chef Ryan prepares an appetizer made from wild-caught catfish from Lac des Allemands, smoked catfish dip.

-We've got a couple of fish tails here.

We've already removed the fillet.

Most people would typically throw this away.

So we'll take our seasoning.

And we don't have to use a whole lot of this.

It's just to give it a little bit of flavor.

Most of the flavor is going to come from the smoke and some of the seasonings that we add to our dip.

These come from local fishermen right here in Des Allemands.

So these are ready to go into our smoker, which we've got set at 250 degrees.

At about 250 degrees for about 45 minutes.

Typically smoking fish, if you're smoking just a little fillet, it's going to dry out, right?

And so that's one of the reasons why we like using those big tail pieces.

It's going to preserve a lot of those natural juices.

Some of the fat is going to -- is still on there.

So it's going to -- it's going to keep that meat a little bit more moist.

You know, smoking meats was always a way to -- meant to preserve meats.

But down here, we just -- we just like the way it tastes.

We like the flavor that it adds to our proteins.

So these tails should be about done.

And we can tell that they're done because they're nice and dark.

And that meat just kind of pulls right off.

So next we'll head into our processing room.

We'll get all of the meat off of these tails and we'll blend it up with our dip ingredients.

So we've let our catfish tails cool just a little bit so we can handle them.

We don't want to let them get too cold because then the meat is harder to pull off.

Um, but we're just going to grab everything that doesn't have a bone in it and throw it in our little bowl here.

We only need to take about a pound of meat off of these tails because we already have a little bit of tail meat started.

We're going to break it up a little bit more.

Just to double-check that there's no -- no bones.

And here's the catfish that we had started earlier.

We just added that smoked catfish to some other catfish that we had already had ready to go.

So now we're ready to mix up all of our dip ingredients.

We've got some whipped cream cheese.

We've got some mayo.

We make this at least once a week.

Blend these two together.

And then we'll season it.

This is just some local Cajun seasoning.

It's very low in sodium and salt, and it's, uh -- it's like a blackening seasoning that has some herbs and some essence to it.

So it gives it a very unique flavor.

We've got some blackening.

Hot sauce.

Any hot sauce works.

We've got some minced garlic.

And some Worcestershire sauce.

Alright.

And we're gonna blend all of this together.

Now that that is all blended together, we can add our smoked, wild-caught Des Allemands catfish.

And we want to just fold this in, kind of preserving some of those beautiful chunks that we just pulled off.

This dip is complete.

There's our smoked catfish dip.

-We're off to Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House in New Orleans French Quarter for another stellar seafood dish, redfish on the half shell, prepared by chef de cuisine Devan Giddix.

-We're going to cook our signature dish today -- redfish on the half shell.

Southeast Louisiana, the mouth of the Mississippi River is just so fertile, teeming with some of the best seafood.

So we have some fillets of our redfish.

Now, we cook them on the half shell, which means we leave them on the skin in the scales.

The scales are still here, so they don't break up.

Keeps them nice and moist.

We're gonna spill a little bit of oil on the fillets just to get them a little moist, have the seasoning stick to it.

And then we have our house Creole seasoning blend.

Uh, it's a mix of peppers, all different types -- red, black, white, garlic, onion, paprika.

Good Creole love we call it.

So we just season them pretty liberally.

We're only going to season one side and that's it.

Now we're going to stick our fillets on the grill.

And again we still have the scales and skin on.

That's going to kind of insulate the fish as it cooks.

We're going to cook those for about seven minutes just until they're almost all the way cooked through.

You can see the white coming up.

And we'll finish them under the broiler just to get a little color.

We're going to start with our balsamic onions.

We have some medium-sliced red onions.

We're just going to again start with a little oil in the pan and get them cooking.

With a little bit of salt... ...a little bit of pepper and a little more of that Creole seasoning.

To top off the fish, we finish it with a jumbo lump crab and a lemon beurre blanc.

Really simple sauce, but it's really elegant.

A tiny bit of oil.

Some shallots.

Thyme, bay leaf and some black peppercorns, and two lemons.

Our onions are pretty much cooking down.

At this point, they are tender.

They've lost that bite.

And we're going to finish them with a little bit of balsamic vinegar.

Just a little vinegar, and as that reduces down, it's going to sweeten up and really almost taste like candy.

Our white wine is almost reduced.

So at this point we're going to add a little bit of heavy cream.

And that's just going to help stabilize this butter because we're going to add some butter to this.

And it's really, really, really going to be elegant.

Add a little bit of cold butter to the pan.

And I'm just going to move the pan over here.

We're just going to keep moving it around till that butter emulsifies in and it's nice and silky smooth.

As you can see, the fish is almost all the way white.

It's a little opaque still on the top.

So we're just going to take it off and throw it under our broiler or in our oven.

That's just going to finish it off.

Now the onions, all that vinegar's kind of reduced down.

It's getting syrupy.

They look perfect.

Another quick tip -- We have some lemons.

We love to garnish and finish this dish with some lemons.

But we like to do is get a little caramelization of the sugars on there, the natural sugars, so we'll just throw our lemon right on the grill.

So our sauce, all of our butter is pretty much incorporated.

And we're just going to smash some of the lemon up that was in there, the pieces of lemon.

Make sure all the juice is out.

Make sure everything's emulsified together and pull that off the heat While we remove our onions from the heat as well.

They're beautiful.

And then we're going to just heat this lovely jumbo lump crab meat because it's elegant, it's sweet.

And it really speaks of the bounty of Louisiana.

So just to heat this up, it's already been cooked.

It's beautiful.

It's picked.

We just take a little bit of crab meat, put it in a pan, and we're going to strain this fresh lemon butter sauce right on top of it.

We're just gonna hit it with a little bit of salt and a little bit of white pepper.

We have this beautiful red fish fillets.

We can just plate them like this.

And that beautiful charred lemon.

And we have those balsamic onions that we just tossed with a little bit of frisée.

It gives it a little bit of bitterness that kind of offsets and contrasts to the sweetness of these beautiful onions.

So frisée is a chicory green.

It's a bitter green.

It's beautiful in the fact that it has a lovely, bitter characteristic that helps cut the sweetness of the balsamic onions.

Got our beautiful jumbo lump crab meat and this lemon butter sauce.

I just want to make sure the sauce goes all over the fish and just... ...don't want to let any of that go to waste.

And we just have some simple crab-boil potatoes.

We take some crab-boil seasoning, boil the potatoes.

Real simple.

Let the fish showcase itself.

Alright.

We have a little bit of just sliced green onion.

Garnish it up.

And there you have it.

Redfish on the half shell at Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House.

-Our final destination is GW Fins, a French Quarter establishment known for its inventive seafood dishes.

Executive chef Mike Nelson is a nationally recognized expert on gulf seafood.

-So about 12 years ago, when I made the decision here at the restaurant to butcher all my own fish, it was strictly based on the idea that I wanted to get the freshest possible fish.

But really quickly I realized how little of the fish we actually use.

And from a chef's perspective, we don't like wasting anything.

So I kind of made it my mission to find ways to use the whole fish here at the restaurant.

We like to highlight stuff that uses parts of the fish that are not part of the fillet.

And I've called those ocean conservancy cuts.

-This time, Chef Mike prepares an entrée featuring a less traditional part of a popular gulf fish, red snapper tempura fry with crispy noodles.

-So, now we're going to do a red snapper breast.

This is a cut we like to use at the restaurant that utilizes part of the fish that doesn't involve the filet.

-Chef Mike uses a unique method for breaking down the redfish.

His tempura-fried fish wings utilize part of the fish typically considered waste, a cut of tender white meat with a fin handle.

-And that's going to help create this new cut that we call the breast.

So let me just go ahead and show you what this looks like.

So here's your whole side of the fish.

Typically you're only going to see this.

This is what you traditionally fillet.

This cut right here represents almost 40% more meat on the fish if you utilize it just right.

Kind of trim out the normal fillet that you would get by the traditional method.

Here we have two different cuts.

One of them I call the wing.

And by giving it a little trim and a little tug, you basically get a little chicken wing.

The snapper breast a little bit more tricky, but this is the belly, or if you think about it, because these are the rib bones, this is actually the breast of the fish.

What we do is we just take a pair of pliers and we'll manually pull out each of these bones.

There's about five of them.

The only bone that's left is what holds this fin on, and I love leaving that fin on the fish when we cook it -- and you'll see this in a moment -- how crispy and beautiful this cooks up as part of the dish.

I love incorporating those fins when we cook it.

I actually have a finished one right here.

Uh, this is off a slightly bigger one, but you can see how big these, uh, fish wings can get.

This is, if you ask me, the most flavorful part of the fish.

So this is what we're going to use for the next dish we're cooking.

And it's going to be tempura-fried snapper breast.

So the first thing we're going to do is make our crispy noodle salad.

We got some rice stick noodles.

Pretty fun.

We're going to drop these right into the fryer to make them crispy, and give about 60 seconds to do their magic.

Here we have a little napa cabbage, some cilantro, carrots.

One of the things that really makes this dish, and my favorite is a bun salad, is where I got the inspiration.

It's a Vietnamese salad.

What makes the bun salad to me so good is the toasted peanuts.

The fried chicken skin is kind of the little key ingredient.

Fried garlic, fried shallot.

So that's what I have here.

This is toasted peanuts, fried chicken skin, fried garlic, fried shallots, a little bit of that right in there.

Let's take a look at these noodles now.

They've puffed up nicely.

So I'll go ahead and grab some of those out of there.

That ought to be plenty.

And then right here we just have a kind of a sweet chili sauce.

Don't need much.

Just a little something to give it a touch more sweetness to it.

Just going to toss that around.

But yeah, this is just kind of the flavor profile of a Vietnamese bun salad, which is kind of my favorite thing in the world to have for lunch, so that's going to go underneath this snapper breast.

Alright.

Looks good.

We'll set that aside.

We're going to go ahead and tempura fry this also.

So, when we're frying this, um, it likes to curl up a little bit depending because of the skin.

So I'm just going to take a skewer and kind of run it up through the center and flip it over so I can see what I'm doing.

And that way it'll kind of cook up a little bit more flat.

I have some tempura batter where we just use equal parts flour, rice flour, and cornstarch, and a little bit of soda water.

And we're going to just dip that right on in.

What we're trying not to do is get any of that tempura on the fin itself.

I feel like that's a big part of the presentation for this dish.

So I want to keep that pretty clean, alright?

So we're going to go ahead and take that out.

And for me tempura should be thin enough where you can see through it.

We're going to gently drop that in the fryer.

And I'm going to hold this fin up as it goes down, just to make sure it kind of freezes in that shape, because in the end I want it to be sticking up high off the plate.

So there we go.

That's only going to take about 90 seconds or so to get nice and crispy.

Take some of that crispy noodle salad.

That's alright.

This can be a little messy.

That's okay.

Just trying to keep it on one side of the plate if I can.

And this is just basically like a cilantro puree.

Uh, we call it ají.

But it's like cilantro, canola oil.

A little bit of romaine lettuce, but real fresh tasting.

Okay.

This snapper breast is looking nice.

Golden brown, nice and crispy.

Go ahead and lay that right here.

I'm gonna give the skewer just a little turn and a pull.

And that comes out nice and easy.

Now, this is, um, the Korean glaze that I like to brush on here.

Um, imagine kind of a, um, I don't know -- If they made pepper jelly in Thailand, this is probably what they'd come up with.

Um, I'm not telling you what's in it.

Uh, but, uh, you know, it's a -- we call it Korean glaze because it's sweet, it's spicy, it's salty, it's got all the good stuff in it.

But this is one of these recipes that, uh, I don't give away too easy.

Man, when I tell you it's good, it is so good.

So we're always real liberal with that.

Brush it all over the place.

We're going to set that right on top of that crispy noodle salad.

This is some of the best fried fish you've ever had.

I-I mean it.

-Coastal advocates in and out of the kitchen support Louisiana's historical fisheries, nurturing estuaries, connecting the community directly with family-run businesses that supply the state's seafood, and helping people realize that they're doing the ocean a favor by eating new cuts of fish.

-Reimagining and rethinking the way that we treat and eat fish can really create a lot more food from what we already have.

Most sustainable fish on Earth is the stuff that we're throwing away, that we're not eating.

So until we're not throwing anything away and we're using all the fish we already have, all these other arguments about sustainability are somewhat moot to me because we're wasting so much of what we already have.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -You can find recipes for all of the dishes in this series, chef profiles, and more information about "Louisiana Coastal Cooking" by visiting wyes.org.

Funding for "Louisiana Coastal Cooking" was provided by... ...and by the Plaquemines Parish Tourism Commission.

Nature, tradition, and culture come together in Plaquemines Parish, where the Mississippi River and the Gulf meet in Louisiana's Delta Country.

Learn more at visitplaqueminesparish.com.

[ Birds chirping ] -Celebrating Louisiana food and culture through public television.

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