Over the last several years, the dining category of breakfast and brunch have simply exploded across the nation. On this week's show, we’re looking at the popular weekend ritual in New Orleans and beyond.
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The beignet. That simple square of fried dough is undeniably one of the Crescent City’s most famous foods. Few visitors leave town without a ceremonial dusting of powdered sugar that occurs with every beignet bite. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the ubiquitous donut has been sold from French Market stands accompanied by steaming hot cups of café au lait. Twenty-first century chefs and restaurateurs have taken that simple fried dough to new heights, filling them with ingredients both savory and sweet and featuring them on menus far from home.
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It's graduation time in Louisiana and the horizons are wide for this year's culinary students. The New Orleans Career Center is celebrating the first graduating class of their Hospitality, Restaurant, and Tourism Academy – and Louisiana Eats is joining in.
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Building a cookbook is a lot of work. From recipe testing to photography sessions to finalized editing – the process can be grueling. On this week's show, we hear how it gets done from beginning to end and meet some authors who fell in love with cookbooks at an early age.
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Cajun Nation is a Louisiana made seasoning blend that is catching fire in the world of flavor. Created by brothers, Alfonzo and Troy Bolden who grew up on a working plantation in the 1970’s, their voyage from sharecropper’s cabin to owning and operating a successful seasoning business makes for quite an amazing tale.
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If you've ever had a New Orleans poor boy, then you know it's all about the bread. Real New Orleans French bread is something you can't get just anywhere, or at least that's what we thought. On this week's show, we get down to the dough of it and see what's happening with bread in the Big Easy.
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It's full-on festival time in the state that knows how to fest better than most – except once again, due to pandemic restrictions, there are no fests right now. Though with vaccines widely available, and the recent easing of Covid-19 rules, a future with safe public gatherings suddenly doesn’t seem so implausible. Inspired by WWOZ and local restaurants whipping up everything from cheesy crawfish bread to high-proof strawberry lemonade, on this week's show, we look back at some of our favorite festival experiences as we gaze hopefully into the future.
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Children's picture books often contain stories that grown ups can benefit from too. That's certainly true of Andrea Wang's new picture book, Watercress, an autobiographical tale of a child of immigrants discovering and connecting with her heritage. With illustrations by Jason Chin, Watercress takes taste memories to new highs and lows as Andrea recalls a moment in her childhood when her family foraged for the perennial plant on the roadsides of her rural Ohio home.
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From beignets to poor boys, gumbo to jambalaya, and crawfish to boudin, Louisiana’s cuisine is as eclectic as it is delectable. On this week’s show, we explore our state’s rich food culture, based on centuries of Creole and Cajun traditions.
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One of the hidden gems of St. Tammany Parish is the Tammany Trace. Originally a well-travelled corridor for the Illinois Central Railroad, today the Trace travels 31 miles through five Northshore communities – accessible only by bike or on foot.
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On this week's show, we meet some folks who have moved on to new adventures in their lives. We begin with Chef Steve Himelfarb and his wife Becky Retz. In the summer of 2020, they closed their beloved bakery, the Cake Café, after 13 years of business. But this isn't the first major life change for them.
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On this week's show, we meet farmers, distillers, and plant breeders who are pioneers in their fields – and celebrate peas on earth. We begin with Ben Branson, founder of Seedlip – a distillery that produces non-alcoholic spirits using peas grown on his 300-year-old family farm in Northern England.
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How many varieties of bitters are stocked in your bar? Once upon a time, there were only two choices – our beloved, local Peychaud bitters and Angostura – originally crafted in Angostura, Venezuela. Today, there are literally hundreds of varieties – a dizzying selection to say the least.
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On this week’s show, we meet some individuals who are working to tackle the widespread problem of food and water waste. Laid off during the pandemic, hospitality workers Adam Orzechowski and Emily Shoemaker combined a zero-waste commitment with a fermenting obsession that resulted in a new business they aptly named Farm to Funk. Adam and Emily are now bubbling up internationally based concoctions using refuse from local farms that customers are snapping up at pop-up markets across the area.
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One of New Orleans' greatest treasures are the legacy businesses that have kept locals wined and dined for generations. On this week's show, we learn about two institutions that share both an area code and the devotion of family required to keep a legacy going.
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Located just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, the area widely known as Louisiana's Northshore is a mere 40-minute drive from the French Quarter. As close as the Northshore is geographically, in every other way it is a world apart. Made up of multiple small towns, each with its own identity, St. Tammany Parish is a wonder to wander – which is exactly what we’re doing on this week’s show.
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If you’ve ever had an encounter with a celebrity, you know you can dine out on that story for a long time. On this week's show, we hear from notable writers and chefs in their own right, whose brushes with fame come with a host of tales.
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Here in Louisiana, we have more than our fair share of delectable heritage foods. Many of them are harvested from the wild. On this week's show, we go Down on the Batture with Tulane University environmental professor Oliver Houck. He explains the ecology of this small sliver of land, the bounty of foodstuffs found there, and the opportunities it provides for fringe living.
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Food is an inspirational muse for artists of all disciplines. On this week's show, we explore the many intersections of food and art from the visual to the written word. We begin with muralist Zac Maras who recently turned the exterior of Toups Meatery on North Carrollton in New Orleans into a riotous celebration of Louisiana foods. The story behind the mural is the subject of a new documentary by filmmakers Jonathan Evans and Marian Gay. Video of the mural being made can be seen on the Louisiana Eats YouTube channel here: Mural.
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It’s Mardi Gras season in Louisiana in a year like none other. The coronavirus pandemic brought an abrupt halt to annual balls and parades, and "donning a mask" has taken on a whole new meaning. But that hasn’t stopped revelers from finding safe and innovative ways to celebrate.
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