The New Orleans Brunch Experiment

The Food Experiments originated in Brooklyn, NY, but it didn't take them long to begin a national tour with stops at major culinary destinations across the country.  The food competition involves creating a themed dish to be passed out in individual servings to the numerous attendees.  For the April 3rd tour stop in New Orleans, brunch served as the inspirational theme for each team of chefs.

I partnered with Jeremy Wells of the blog Faire Les Courses to enter Team Bite and Booze into the New Orleans Brunch Experiment.  We thought, strategized, and planned for hours on our experimental dish, and finally came up with what we thought could be a winner.   We conceived a Southern-style biscuit loaded with homemade boudin, topped with cane syrup and bourbon marinated Louisiana strawberries, and served with thin-cut cinnamon apple frites.  Every biscuit and a cauldron of Cajun boudin were made from scratch.  I could tell you all about it, but it's easier to just show the video!

Jeremy and I weren't the only team to travel to NOLA from Baton Rouge.  The Louisiana Culinary Institute had a couple students represented in the competition, and Team Brunchcakes also made an impression.  Actually, that would be an understatement:

In the end, Jeremy and I were really happy with the whole event.  We felt like we did our dish justice, and despite not winning, we still had a great time.  We also rolled out the Bite and Booze carpet for this one, so it couldn't have been too bad!

After the competition we had a ton of extra boudin.  However, it tasted far too good to let it go to waste.  Stop number one was a visit to Theo's Neighborhood Pizzeria in Mid City where my buddy Andrew made a boudin pizza complete with a little buffalo sauce, pepper jack, and mozzarella cheese!

Bite and Boudin Pizza at Theo's

When I got back to Baton Rouge, I met back up with Nick Huftt, owner and operator of Curbside Truck, to discuss more boudin ideas.  It didn't take long to come up with the Bite and Boudin Burger: Curbside's special burger patty topped with my housemade boudin, black beans, divine swine cracklins, a hint of Nick's tasso aioli, and finished with an Acadian sweet heat sauce which consists of a "butter garlic hot sauce cajun spice concoction sort of a thing."  Yes please!

Curbside Truck's Bite and Boudin Burger

I love it when experiments go right!

Thanks to curbsideNICK for almost all these pictures.  Thanks to Brandon Brown for help with the video!