
Hot Brown Recipe
Clip: Season 1 Episode 13 | 5m 5sVideo has Closed Captions
A chef at Louisville's Brown Hotel explains how they cook their signature dish.
A chef at Louisville's Brown Hotel explains how they cook their signature dish.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Inside Louisville is a local public television program presented by KET

Hot Brown Recipe
Clip: Season 1 Episode 13 | 5m 5sVideo has Closed Captions
A chef at Louisville's Brown Hotel explains how they cook their signature dish.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch Inside Louisville
Inside Louisville is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipWell, the law will help.
Brown, born here at the Brown Hotel back in 1926.
Very famous this year for us at the hotel.
We on average, 7800 a week going into Derby season.
A very popular time of the year for us here in Louisville.
We can serve around 1200 hot Browns that week.
So quite well known around the country.
Very popular item.
And I've even served back in Australia for my family.
So it's actually, well renowned.
You could say our basic ingredients for our hot brown.
We start with a really great piece of turkey breast beat up and roasted turkey breast peas, some really great cut bacon.
We like a hickory smoked bacon with our high brown, some good meaty tomatoes.
We're going to cut those up here in a little bit and into quarters.
Originally, it was served in white bread, but we've gone the route of a Texas those Texas toast style breads a little bit, take a cut a little bit sweeter in flavor.
And then we use an ice base to turn into a mornay using the heavy cream in that mornay sauce with some nice sharp pecorino cheese finish off with some fresh parsley, some more pecorino and a little smoked paprika.
All right, Why don't we go ahead and put one together then, for you?
You want to cut the turkey on the thicker side just so when you get a nice forks fork worth of hot round, you get a nice big chunk of turkey with your heavy mornay and the bacon.
So we'll cut this in half.
I'll cut it again and do it in a nice thick slices.
We like to trim off the the crust of the toast first, just to make it a little bit nicer.
Presentation of tomatoes.
We just cut off the edges to square off the tomato and get a nice thick piece.
Usually cut into quarters is a nice couple quarters of tomatoes there.
Let's go ahead and build one.
Start with a nice look at a nice ceramic brown dish to go with the theme of a hot brown.
So we have a nice heavy dish.
They're going to start with our squared off piece of brioche and then we'll add a nice couple bits of the thick, thick sliced turkey.
This next we got our tomatoes, which is quartered up.
I mean, they're nice.
Finish off with our triangle pieces of brioche.
So what we do now, once you've built up our ground before this in the oven for 10 to 12 minutes, get that really warm through, get that toasted nice and brown and crispy.
We like to get our tomatoes roasted through so they get a little bit of sweetness and then we can just nicely cut through that with a fork and get our turkey nicely warm through.
So we'll get that hot brand out here just to make sure everything's mostly warm.
Sorry.
So I'll just flip these over, see how the tomatoes starting to wrinkle off a little bit, which is perfect.
They're going to get nice and rich in flavor back in the oven.
Maybe like three more minutes and then really finish off nicely with that mornay, some of the smoked paprika and that bacon will go on top and get nice and bubbly and crispy on top there for us.
You may notice that the mornay sauce is not on off on the stovetop, but what we try to do, we have warmed it through.
We want to kind of have it a little bit on the thicker side.
So when it is warm through by the very hot oven, it'll just nicely gently collapse over the sandwich.
So I'm going to show you now this is this is sort of the thickness we're going for when we serve it onto the brand itself.
And then it's just going to collapse once it goes in the oven and coat, coat, all those ingredients for us.
And then what we like to do, I like to eat it with a little of the paprika.
And this paprika is a smoky paprika and had our bacon here on top.
Nice little crisscross of bacon.
And now we'll go back in the oven and got another three or 4 minutes and we'll see the finishing touches when the round comes back out.
Get a nice healthy pinch of pecorino cheese and then some nice green Italian parsley just to give it a bit of more color and freshness on there for you.
And that is Global's original Paul Brown.
Some people use Ham instead of Turkey, some people use cut for him up in Lexington.
You might see that there or yellow cheese sauce, but nothing beats the traditional white mornay.
A great piece of turkey, really good smoked bacon and tomato.
And that's just why it works.
Well, really simple ingredients that are comforting and just a fun option.
After a couple of cocktails to say.
- News and Public Affairs
Top journalists deliver compelling original analysis of the hour's headlines.
- News and Public Affairs
FRONTLINE is investigative journalism that questions, explains and changes our world.
Support for PBS provided by:
Inside Louisville is a local public television program presented by KET