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by Benay Bernstein
CHEF FRANK BRIGTSEN ROCKS AT JAZZFEST
Forgive me if this sounds sacrilegious but two hundred well behaved devotees of southern cooking lined up row by row to receive Jazzfest communion from the hands of Chef Frank Brigtsen in the form of Crawfish Bisque. Absolution no... but a taste of heaven for sure.
On an afternoon of over the top sensations, Chef Frank Brigtsen supplied the ultimate in taste and smells by preparing a quintessential Creole Crawfish Bisque. Surrounded by eleven musical stages filling our ears with Jazz, Rock, Gospel etc., warmed to mild toast by the southern spring sun, eyes full of joyous dancing humanity and stalls filled with pungent local foods and intricate arts and crafts for sale in every direction, we were psyched for the respite of a glorious cooking experience. Chef Brigtsen rose to the occasion as he always does.
About a month ago, well into one of the best years for crawfish in Louisiana, I started wondering where to find a perfectly prepared, genuine Crawfish Bisque. A few good restaurants came to mind, one of them being Brigtsen's, an establishment owned and operated for twenty-two years by Chef Frank Brigtsen, who trained in the kitchen of Paul Prudhomme, proprietor extraordinaire of the internationally renowned K-Paul's restaurant. Brigtsen is a fiercely local chef. Born and raised in  New Orleans, he cooks Acadian style using mainly local ingredients. Seafood, he told us, is the only wild food left. Every other protein we eat is farm raised. We were warned very clearly that his recipe for Crawfish Bisque would not work if made with imported crawfish!
(Please note the chef on the left. She is Susan Spicer, award-winning owner of Bayona, a top tier New Orleans restaurant. Susan is the creator of the fabulous smoked duck and cashew butter sandwich I described in the Destinations article about New Orleans.)
Why is Crawfish Bisque a rare pleasure? Talk about labor intensive! Peeling crawfish is about as painstaking as picking crabs. Preparing roux (a mixture of browned oil and flour) is very time consuming and the process of cleaning and stuffing the heads with crawfish cornbread - over the top. In fact no New Orleans restaurant serves Crawfish Bisque with stuffed shells any more. It is my opinion that Crawfish Bisque disappeared from menus for about fifteen years because it was too difficult to prepare and inconceivable to serve without the stuffed heads. Brigtsen promised us bisque that could be prepared in forty-five minutes and was true to his word, teaching us a few simple shortcuts on technique with no reduction on flavor.
No recipe was distributed. Instead, Chef gave proportions for ingredients and stated, "Food preparation is more intuitive and taste directed than prescribed." Cook. Eat. Drink. Live. In fact when Brigtsen trained with Prudhomme, they had no measuring utensils in the kitchen; in the bakery, yes, but not in the kitchen.
 What is Acadian style cooking? I came up with three answers in this demonstration, but there are certainly many more to be found.
First: Build your recipe. Each series of ingredients adds to the complexity. Like building a house, use a foundation, a roux, and a basic sautéed seasoning including chopped green pepper, celery, and onion in 1:2:3 proportions then punctuate with garlic. Prepare these elements separately before combining. Note the humble ingredients - Acadian style uses simple, accessible foodstuffs to create incomparable flavor.
Second: Use dry as well as fresh herbs and seasonings. There is a place for both. Often fresh herbs are too dominant. Brigtsen uses green bell pepper because it is less intensive in flavor than red and yellow pepper. In Crawfish Bisque salt, black pepper, white pepper, and cayenne pepper are added to the vegetables and stock mixtures as well as lots more garlic and bay leaves.
Third: Creole bisque differs from classic French bisques in that no cream is used. The roux serves as the thickening and flavoring agent. Most important is to use a good stock - in this case, it is easy. Merely boil crawfish shells fifteen minutes and strain the liquid. Chef Brigtsen takes this a step farther, in an action not for the faint hearted, he boils broken up live crawfish for a rich stock full of orange crawfish fat. For this demonstration, Chef admitted that his original broth did not taste just right. He did not hesitate to dump it and prepared fresh broth made that very morning from crabs, and it worked just as well. Shrimp Bisque, by the way is prepared in the same way as Crawfish Bisque, merely substituting shrimp for crawfish. These days, locally harvested and packaged crawfish are readily available. The chef carefully rinsed the good juices in the bag into the bisque when combining ingredients.
Is your mouth watering yet? Can you smell this treat? Visualize the roux deepening in color on its own after the superheated cast iron pot is removed from the flame. See the hand held immersion blender puree the wonderful mixture of ingredients, crawfish included, right in the cooking pot. These days roofs in New Orleans signify many things, FEMA, blue tarps, waiting in the hot sun to be rescued, etc. but for our house of Crawfish Bisque, the roof is lagniappe*, that little bit extra that truly satisfies. Chef Brigtsen takes two more packages of crawfish, a bunch of chopped shallots and garlic, sauté’s the mixture briefly in butter and adds it to the bisque just before serving. He calls the finale of adding crawfish to crawfish bisque "a redundancy of flavor".
For a 12-serving recipe of the bisque please see our Cook’s Corner.
Jazzfest, wonder what I'll eat next year. Ah, Creole Tomato Fest is just a month away. See you soon.
*for those unfamiliar with New Orleans slang, “lagniappe” literally means an extra or unexpected gift or benefit.
© June 2007 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
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