The Soulard Mardi Gras, a regular event on the winter dining-and-drinking calendar, kicks off its celebration with a Cajun Cook-Off a week or so before most of the events begin, and we’ve been judges (one score for the two of us) for enough years to have worn a T-shirt from the 1998 contest during the most recent competition. Our little herb garden also sprouts the bricks that used to be Mardi Gras giveaways.
We were oneof three judges (Judith Evans, food editor of the Post-Dispatch and Mindy Jahn of Whole Foods Market were alongside), and we worked the professional division, as we usually do, with 10 pros and nine amateurs in the mix.
Competitors, representing restaurants, caterers and cooking schools, were in top form. It was a tasty crop, so we’re showing off professional winners and some photos of their entries.
These contests are no longer the sort of thing where Auntie Cecile’s bread pudding shows up in solitary glory. (As a matter of fact, we’ve never seen bread pudding at the Cook-Off, which is odd, considering its status as the queen of New Orleans desserts.) Nope, this is a series of elaborate Creole-Cajun riffs using traditional ingredients and some new stuff, and old names on what we imagine are relatively new recipes. Sometimes it works, and, well, even the dishes that don’t, are always interesting. Everyone has a good time, with music and dancing and food and drink, although visitors shouldn’t look for get samples of entries because the Department of Health won’t allow it.
The winners, for the third or fourth year in a row, were Mark and Patty Johnson of Hot Plate Dinner Parties, a catering company. The entry was a trio of dishes, beginning with a Cajun-seasoned bronzed scallop with wilted zucchini-leek slaw (delicious, even to those as zucchini-phobic as we are), fire-roasted jalapeno pesto and cayenne oil. That was accompanied by a wee oyster poor boy with puff pastry instead of bread, spring greens, andouille vinaigrette and a smoked tomato remoulade, and finished with jumbo chipotle shrimp atop a remarkably good smoked cheddar and chive grits cake with a Creole romesco sauce. That involves preparing about a dozen separate dishes to put this together. And obviously it tasted great.
The second place winners were two students from L’Ecole Culinaire Tracy Stewart and Albert Polacios, whose foie gras beignets with a savory caramel sauce were served with a tomato etouffe. In terms of single dishes, we think the beignets may have been the best single item we’ve ever had at one of these competitions. A slice of foie gras and a slice of very ripe banana were sandwiched together and dipped in the beignet dough before being deep-fried and served with a caramel sauce that had more foie gras in it.
A trio of veals from An American Place‘s Joshua Galliano finished third with some delicate preparation of some difficult dishes. Pink veal tenderloin was smothered in a flavorful gravy, an inch-thick cube of tender, almost sweet rare liver rubbed and sauced with Creole mustard before grilling, charmed us as well as the other judges (we like rare liver – there, we’ve said it), and "grillades and grits," a traditional Creole breakfast/lunch dish, was made with veal cheeks instead of cutlets, making it unctuously rich and tender.
In the amateur division, Doug and Debbie Searcy won with their beef tenderloin with crawfish dressing, followed by Dean Gallagher and Shane McVay, who served crawfish eggs Benedict and crawfish beignets, and had the courage to bring groans by entitling the entry, "Can I Bayou Breakfast?" Amy Peck Abraham finished third with with peppers stuffed with a corn and shrimp stew.
