The Best Tastes of New Orleans

New Orleans, Louisiana (April 2016)

We visited New Orleans few weeks ago only for a weekend. Well, New Orleans is a heaven for food lovers. In such a short time, we had to manage getting all good flavors that we can find nowhere else. With the help of some friends who have been there before and lived there and with some help from websites, we accomplished our mission. Following are the flavors; I would like to suggest any one who is looking for what to have in New Orleans during a short visit.

Étouffée:

There are many varieties of Étouffée. It is basically cajun or creole dish of seafood or any meat cooked in thick gravy made with vegetables and/or meat stock and is eaten as it is or with rice or bread. If you are in New Orleans, you better get seafood Étouffée. I was very excited for Crawfish Étouffée. It was not hard to find a place, which serve this food. Each and every other restaurant in New Orleans has Étouffée on their menu. We got one on the Bourbon Street in the French Quarter called Olde Nola Cookery. I was totally satisfied with the taste, though I had to get help to pronounce it right; pronounced as AY-TOO-FAY. It’s French word, which means 'smothered' as the food looks like. It is spicy and full-of-flavor kind of food.   

Beignets: 

Beignets are deep fried bread dusted with powdered sugar. There is an unbreakable link about New Orleans and Beignets. On my first thought, its just fried little breads dusted with sugar. However, when we went to get Beignets in Caf'e du Monde, the most famous place to get it, I was surprised to see the place so much crowded and the line so long outside the cafe. After waiting for about 30 minutes, we literally squeezed ourselves on a small table because we wanted to sit down there and eat it there. The menu didn't have much variety. It was only and only Beignets and coffees simply. The taste was great of course, after all people are not crazy to wait in line for so long just to get a bite. Well, at the end, I understood that the cafe and the tradition, and Beignets make it a must have experience if you go to New Orleans.  Beignet is also a french word pronounced as BEN-YEY which literally means 'bumps'. They are synonymous to English fritters.

Jumbo Oysters:

Nowhere I have seen such huge oysters as in New Orleans. There were great oysters bars and oyster houses where you can get great oysters raw or prepared. The one we got our char-grilled jumbo oysters was in Iberville Street in the French Quarter called Acme Oyster House. Each of the oysters were mouthful and tasted heavenly. This place also happened to be the best place to get oyster. Here also, we waited in line for an hour before we could be guided to our table. The wait was totally worth it.

Banana Foster Bread Pudding: 

I have a huge sweet tooth. I guess the whole world knows about it. It was impossible for me to miss this desert when I am in New Orleans. We actually found it in a food stall in Mississippi River-walk Market. You can find it in any restaurant as well. Its basically banana bread pudding and comes in different varieties. Some comes with banana sautéed in butter or with bread pudding sauce or just sugar powder or with ice-cream on the top or with any of these combinations. The one I got was banana pudding bread split into halves like a hot dog bun and sautéed-banana on it with vanilla ice-cream. It was really really sweet but so addictive in taste. You can ask not to put sauce on the top, if you don't want it be as sweet as I had.

Shrimp and Grit:

I love shrimps and shrimp-flavors. Grilled jumbo shrimps are always great. They are even better with grit. You might have shrimp and grit before or have just grit in meat stock or just water and salt. That’s what I normally know how to eat grit. 'Shrimp and grit' the combination you cannot miss when you go to try southern food. Hence, we thought of trying the best-made shrimp and grit in Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse in French Quarter again. Jumbo shrimps were grilled and served with bbq sauce. Grit was made into jalapeño cheddar cake. It was not like regular grit-taste at all. It was creamy, spicy and melted in my mouth. I could describe it as savory, warm cheesecake. Well, you see I am not finding good way to describe it. You will know when you try it.

Steaks:

Steaks are not the specialty of only New Orleans. We have some great places for steaks in Texas too. However, it will not be fair at all if I do not mention steaks we had there. Since I cannot finish all 32 Oz of steak, I prefer 4-6 Oz steak with a glass of semi dry red wine. It was the best piece of medium rare steak I had in a long time. This was in again Brennan's Steakhouse. It was totally worth the price. It was totally flavorful, the Louisiana flavor, and juicy.

Drinks:

If you like to drink, I need not to tell you can drink from the morning to the evening while strolling at Bourbon Street. It gets wild all the time. As we were told, weekends start on Bourbon Street from Wednesday and end on Monday morning. So it is less crowded on Mondays. We were not there on Monday to witness what we heard.

If you are a beer lover, like all the places, Louisiana has its own local breweries. Abita brewery is the signature for the state. One another beer we tried that was unique was Louisiana spicy beer. We could taste paprika kind of spiciness in that beer. It is a different thing to try if you are adventurous. I cannot fit a lot of liquid in my tommy. Since we had so many options for drink all the time, more of the potions of drinks were cocktails than beer. Grenade and Hurricane apparently were the most popular drinks on Bourbon Street.

Homemade Yoghurt

If you are a yoghurt fan, I don't hesitate a bit to recommend you to make homemade yoghurt. When you make yoghurt at home, you will save 5-6 times of money as well as get flavor of your choice. I personally love the taste of homemade yoghurt like none other in the market. You cannot go wrong if you know to provide an optimal condition for bacteria to grow in your house. I know I sound creepy here. To understand what I am talking about, let me first give you the background on how milk is converted to yoghurt.


Biochemistry of milk to yoghurt conversion
Milk consists of carbohydrate called lactose and protein called casein. Like our digestive system convert carbohydrate to simpler sugar for our energy and protein to simpler form so that it can be absorbed and utilized for maintenance of normal physiology, bacteria feed on milk carbohydrates and protein for their growth, multiplication and survival. Bacteria utilize lactose to convert o lactic acid, which coagulates milk protein casein, which gives yoghurt its texture. Thus, yoghurt is also good for lactose intolerant people, as it does not have lactose anymore. Usually bacteria that are used in making yoghurt are Lactobacillus species, which are rod shaped bacteria. Some examples of yoghurt forming bacteria are Lactobacillus acidophilus,Streptococcus thermophilus, Bifidobacterium sps. 

Key points to keep in mind: Bacteria used for making yoghurt grow at normal human physiological temperature. If you use high temperature, bacteria will die and if you use low temperature, no reaction will take place or slow reaction will take place. 

Nutritional values:
Serving size : 1 cup 
Servings: 8
Calories: 122 Kcal
Carbohydrates:12 g
Sugar: 12 g (with no added sugar)
Protein: 8 g
Fat: 5 g

Ingredients:
Mother culture; 1/4 cup -1/2 cup of yoghurt (fresh or frozen)
Half gallon of organic milk (2% fat) 
Couple tablespoon of sugar (optional) 
5 pods of cardamom
1/3 cup of coconut (unsweetened grated or powder) 

Note on the ingredients: You can use full fat milk or skimmed milk or non-organic milk. 
Protocol: 
Boil milk at low to medium heat making sure not to burn the bottom of your pot. You can use full fat milk based on your preference. Put crushed cardamon, sugar and coconut. You can try adding other condiments as your preference but keep in mind something like chunky nuts may not give good texture to the end product. Keep stirring to reduce burning at the bottom and also if you want to concentrate milk to make it creamier. Take it off the heat and let it cool normally or keeping the pot in cold water. Make sure to reach the temperature to about 37- 40 degree C (about 104-114 degree F). Now it is time to add mother culture. If you have frozen yoghurt, thaw it first. Do it when you are cooling down your milk. Add few tablespoon of milk to the mother culture, mix and add to the milk. Stir gently. Turn on your oven to warm or 250 F for 5-7 minutes. Keep the milk with mother culture in the oven and turn the oven off. Check after 4 hours. Yeahhhppyy yoghurt is done. If it is still ziggly, keep for more hours or overnight. 

Keep the yoghurt in refrigerator for few hours to chill it and also to make it firmer. The tastiest yoghurt I have ever had is from Bhaktapur city in Kathmandu valley of Nepal. Those are made in clay pots. In addition to keeping yoghurt cool for long time, clay pots absorb water from yoghurt as well making it even creamier. I have saved one clay pot for myself, which I reuse over and over again unlike in Nepal.  However, glassware, steel wares, ironware are all good for making yoghurt.

Yoghurt made in clay pot as traditionally made in Nepal. 

Yoghurt made in glassware.