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>> ANTHONY BOURDAIN: In this episode, Chef Sean Brock samples just a little of the magic that is Louisiana.

Chef Donald Link takes Sean to the swamps looking for bullfrogs.

(thunder rumbling) >> LINK: I feel like we're hunting a frog.

>> (Brock laughing) >> BOURDAIN: Makes frog legs and grits with sauce piquante.

Sean cooks an African gumbo, cooks his version of shaved catfish with Chef John Currence... >> CURRENCE: I don't think they're gonna take your Beard medal back, but... >> (Brock laughing) >> BOURDAIN: And joins John T. Edge at the legendary Middendorf's where the shaved catfish was invented.

>> EDGE: You don't understand it until you taste it here.

>> BOURDAIN: Enter The Mind of a Chef.

♪ ♪ >> SEAN BROCK: Louisiana should really be its own country.

Right now, Louisiana has my full attention.

It's an extremely vast and diverse area when you're speaking of music and culture and food, and not only are there so many different aspects of all those things, all of them only exist there.

Southerners look at Louisiana as its own little world.

It's just so different, such a different way of life than anywhere else in the South.

What's so intriguing and interesting about that is, is it the swamp, is it the history, what is it?

You can go anywhere in Louisiana and have completely different experiences.

Everyone that I've ever met from Louisiana has just been the coolest, most country, most fun to be around, enjoying life type of person.

Donald Link, to me, in my opinion, is the undisputed world heavyweight champion of Cajun cuisine and Cajun cooking.

So he's the guy that if I have a question about Cajun cooking, Donald's the guy I go to.

(thunder rumbling) >> LINK: Hey, Sean, you ready?

>> BROCK: Hell, yeah.

>> LINK: What are the odds of getting struck by lightning?

>> BROCK: Ooh.

>> LINK: I think it's getting closer.

>> BROCK: Yes.

So if you grow up in Louisiana, you hunt for your food.

One of the funnier hunts you can go on is frogging, or going to catch frogs.

>> LINK: Everybody good?

>> BROCK: Yeah, let's make it happen.

He ain't scared, is he?

>> LINK: No, he's just sitting there.

He doesn't give a (beep).

>> BROCK: Frogging in the bayou is a whole different ball game.

When I was a kid catching frogs, I didn't have to dodge alligators.

>> LINK: Lotus flowers.

>> BROCK: Wow.

>> LINK: Pretty cool, huh?

>> BROCK: Look at that one.

>> LINK: You can eat those.

>> BROCK: No way.

>> LINK: So what you do is if you're cruising around, you do the banks like this, you'll see their eyes.

And that's what you're looking for, so when you're looking around, if they're on the banks, their eyes should shine.

I mean, you can look down in the water and every now and then you'll see one swimming.

Those are fun catches, though, if you can find one swimming, grab your hand down there and snatch it.

(creature noises in background) Just so y'all know, that sound is not the frog we're looking for.

>> BROCK: What you're looking for is this deep, manly frog groan.

(laughing) My mama has this really strange fear of frogs so that's all I did as a kid, was catch them and chase her with them.

One time I thought it'd be funny to put one in the fridge so it would jump out at her when she opened the fridge.

And it just died, and she got mad as hell and had to throw all the food away.

(thunder rumbling) >> LINK: I heard one.

>> BROCK: The elusive bullfrog.

>> LINK: I feel like we're hunting a frog.

>> (Brock laughing) >> LINK: Like somewhere, there's one frog in this swamp.

>> BROCK: I hear him.

Here it comes.

>> LINK: Is that the sound of rain?

>> BROCK: Yep.

>> LINK: Maybe we should turn around, we're about to get dumped on.

>> BROCK: Yeah, that's serious, man.

>> LINK: I think we're within five minutes of rain.

>> BROCK: Oh, yeah.

>> LINK: Yeah, we need to get out of here.

>> BROCK: Here it comes.

(laughing) That's no joke, man.

That came in quick.

>> LINK: Got it, let's go.

Let's wrap, there you go.

>> (Brock laughing) >> LINK: At least I can say I caught a frog tonight.

>> (Brock laughing) I spotted it!

(thunder rumbling) (frog ribbiting) (laughing) I remember as a kid, like, my mom would always cook frog legs, and to me it was like this adventurous thing to eat.

And for me, sitting there eating frogs, you get cool points.

It's like, "I'm eating a frog, I'm eating something I've been chasing around all day and grabbing."

(lively horn music playing) >> BROCK: We're here at the Ducote-Williams house in Abbeville, Louisiana.

And we attempted to do a little frog hunting yesterday.

I think it was the first day in the history of Louisiana where there was no bullfrogs in sight.

>> LINK: A little rough last night.

>> BROCK: We're gonna make a really cool dish with these crazy, enormous, wonderful bullfrogs.

>> LINK: Yeah, luckily somebody went out and caught some.

>> BROCK: This is a pretty classic Cajun dish.

>> LINK: I think sauce piquante and etouffee are probably what you see the most of out here.

So I've got a bunch of different peppers here.

This is the hard part of cooking with chilies for me, but you could really ruin a dish if the chilies are really hot.

>> BROCK: Some people will see a recipe with two jalapenos and they'll put two jalapenos in there, but they're not tasting the jalapenos to see if they're... >> LINK: They could be completely bland or they could be ripping hot.

Wow, they're good.

See, that's not too hot.

This is our Cajun spice that we use at the restaurants, but the idea of this spice mix is not really to make the food spicy, but to give it that snap, a little bit of heat.

And to me, that's what these fresh chilies do, is you can really impart the chili flavor without burning your mouth up.

>> BROCK: It's funny when you ask people what is Cajun food, and you'd be surprised how many people don't really know the difference between Creole and Cajun.

>> LINK: What do you think the difference is?

>> BROCK: My opinion is Creole is more refined with a little more French influence, more of a city, downtown sort of thing that you would find at a restaurant, and Cajun being a little more rural and country.

>> LINK: I'd say that's accurate.

And it's just really from the land.

The real gist of it is they're raising their own food and they're growing their own vegetables, and I think that's the true spirit of true Cajun cooking.

>> BROCK: So you rarely see them whole like this when you buy them from a... >> LINK: Yeah, when you get them from a purveyor, they're usually cut.

The bright side of not catching frogs last night is we got to skip the whole bloody mess of frog cleaning.

The meat is so clean.

And I just really love the flavor of it, it's so... You know, you could say frogs taste like chicken, but they don't, they taste like frogs.

>> BROCK: Some of my earliest memories of food were eating frog and just being a kid and always catching them and chasing them around and scaring people with them.

And it was just so cool to eat something that someone was terrified of.

>> LINK: That's a good catch right there.

We really did catch all these yesterday, it's just the cameras, they couldn't get the battery working, something about the audio... >> (Brock laughing) >> LINK: By the time the cameras got on, we were all... couldn't catch anything after that.

>> BROCK: All right, fry time.

>> LINK: Fry time.

You could just make a roux and throw the vegetables in and do it like that, but... >> BROCK: You're gonna get so much more depth of flavor.

>> LINK: Yeah, I like searing it first because it almost makes a fond in the bottom of the pot.

Sometimes they kick.

>> BROCK: Whoa.

(sizzling) >> BROCK: They're looking good.

>> LINK: That's some good focus there >> (Brock laughing) >> LINK: How does it feel to be cooking something?

>> BROCK: Love it, man.

>> LINK: Cooking is why I got into this in the first place.

>> BROCK: Hey, what is better than drinking beer and cooking frog legs?

Nothing!

It's the best.

>> LINK: It's gonna be good.

Let's see, how did these come out?

Got any cooked?

>> BROCK: Oh yeah, a couple are falling apart.

>> LINK: These, we're not even going to make sauce piquante, we're just gonna eat all the frog legs right now.

>> BROCK: Once you taste something like that, that's what motivates you to get out there for seven hours and hunt those things down.

>> LINK: Let's go back tonight.

>> BROCK: Yes, exactly.

>> LINK: Somewhere else.

>> (Brock laughing) Yeah, a new spot.

>> LINK: All right, so I'm gonna use a spatula.

This is definitely... >> BROCK: That's the good stuff.

>> LINK: This is what we want to get off.

I can't for the life of me bring myself to ever measure this out because it's just basically, what I'm looking for is a feeling.

I think it's two handfuls for this.

(laughing) Trust me, nobody follows a recipe for this.

It's everyone's personal touch and personal character and soul.

>> BROCK: And personal taste.

>> LINK: See, what I'm smelling for right now is that roux.

>> BROCK: I can smell it.

>> LINK: It just turned, so I'd go ahead and say we'll just go for it now.

This is one of my absolute favorite smells in the world right here, when those vegetables hit that roux.

I'm gonna throw the chilies in, too.

This looks so good like that.

I think just a little bit for acid.

>> BROCK: See, that's what's cool about cooking, you just go with whatever feels right.

You look at it and you make a change.

>> LINK: Well, this is to me, we got a nice roux, we got a nice fond... See, I'm just changing the direction from a sauce piquante to a little more of a smothered frog leg.

>> BROCK: Uh-huh, yep.

>> LINK: This is the frog stock we made off camera.

(sizzling) Now this needs to simmer a while.

Two reasons: one, we need to get some of the oil to come up just to let all the flavors marry and to cook the flour taste out of it.

>> BROCK: In the meantime... >> LINK: In the meantime, we'll eat everything that's supposed to go in here.

I always try to aim for the sauce to be thinner than the finished product, because when you put all the floured, pre-seared meat back in it, it adds that thickener to it.

This is delicious.

>> BROCK: I think we're ready to eat this thing, look at that.

>> LINK: Notice how that's changed.

>> BROCK: It's like completely different now.

So we're going to eat it with grits today, which is kind of, I guess, maybe a sin here.

>> LINK: I wouldn't serve it with grits here, because this is obviously rice country.

We're in the heart of rice country.

>> BROCK: For me, this is a cool sort of mash-up of shrimp and grits.

In Charleston, we use grits and rice kind of interchangeably.

And these grits are some of the best I've ever had.

>> LINK: It's what you call a "nap on a plate" right there.

>> BROCK: Yep, it is, this will put you down.

That's what happens when I come to Louisiana.

>> LINK: "Gravy and Grits," sounds like a James Brown song.

>> (Brock laughing) >> LINK: And here we have the frog sauce piquante.

>> BROCK: Not much better than that.

>> LINK: Good job, man.

>> BROCK: Likewise!

(laughing) >> BROCK: Gumbo, the idea of gumbo, the idea of rice and okra in a bowl came from West Africa, and it came with the Atlantic slave trade.

They brought those traditions with them into Louisiana and that translated into, over time, what we know, as Americans, what gumbo is.

I'm here with Morgan McGlone, the chef de cuisine here at Husk.

I'm gonna show him and he's gonna help me cook the original gumbo, the gumbo that I learned in West Africa.

So the base of the dish starts with the fish head.

So literally all they did was dump it into a pot, a little bit of onion and garlic and some bay and then just let it simmer.

So we've already done that.

And I'm going to ask you to pull the meat from the bone, keep it separate, and then we'll use that stock and broth to build the gumbo.

Gumbo is the African word for okra.

One of the cool things they did that I had never seen before is they actually put the okra in, like, a mortar and pestle and, like, grind it, get all that slime out of there.

They embrace the slime.

While you're picking that and I'm doing this, I'm gonna put this broth back on, keep it simmering.

One thing that I found fascinating about the gumbo in West Africa and the biggest difference was there was no pork in the West African gumbo.

And to me, I never even knew that was a possibility.

In order to get that same umami, that same depth of flavor that you would get from a smoked pork product, the way they achieve that is through smoked, dried, salted, fermented, cured seafood.

This is a fish that's been put through almost the same process that we put country ham through.

And they have this bitter eggplant that's really fantastic there.

What I found very, very interesting and cool is that they just drop it in whole and allow it to braise.

So this was very, very cool to see them smashing the okra.

What's cool about it is when you smash it, the seeds that are inside also get smashed, which are very aromatic.

And they have these beautiful, fantastic little chilies over there.

Smell that, it smells so good.

The more you smash it, especially the more you smash those seeds, the more... >> MORGAN McGLONE: ...sticky it becomes.

>> BROCK: Which is what thickens it.

So we'll take this, which is now perfect, and drop it in,.

That will thicken up the broth.

(laughing) I don't know if you're supposed to squeeze it.

So you can see it's already thickening and doing its job.

Yeah, look at that, that's so cool.

So you guys have lots of okra in New Zealand?

>> (McGlone laughing) Zero.

>> BROCK: What did you think about that texture the first time you had it?

>> McGLONE: I thought it was... not nice.

>> (Brock laughing) >> McGLONE: When it gets slimy, that's not my favorite thing.

Textural indifferences, I think.

>> (Brock laughing) Textural indifferences.

I mean, I've eaten okra my entire life.

This slime is comforting to me.

Give it a taste, it's not bad.

You can see how it just thickens it.

>> McGLONE: Yeah, that's awesome, actually.

>> BROCK: So the next thing that goes in is palm oil, so the color comes from this.

The tomato obviously being a Spanish influence, that's how it found its way in, but this also helps thicken it, and I couldn't believe how much they put in there.

For us, that's a lot of oil just to drop into something, but what's cool is it emulsifies with that okra slime once you boil it, and it gives you that red color.

We'll put in fish.

We're gonna dump the clams in.

They'll open up and produce all that great juice.

About seven or eight minutes.

So now it's simmered properly and the clams have opened and we're gonna take just some beautiful fresh Southern squid from Alabama and some shrimp from North Carolina.

And that goes in at the very, very last minute.

Let's grab some rice, traditionally served with some beautiful whole grain rice.

All that fantastic stuff goes in there.

Some of that broth... That's exactly how it'd be served: each person gets a little piece of eggplant.

So what's really cool is you take what we know gumbo to be, and it looks just like that, but what's fascinating to me is the journey that it takes and how it changes from this, what we just cooked, but to follow its journey and to watch how each individual culture changes it just a tiny bit.

What I love about it is it's still gumbo, it's still that color, that flavor, it's the same emotion that you experience when you eat it in West Africa and you eat it in New Orleans.

So good.

It's hangover food is what it is.

(laughing) >> BROCK: Tell me the history of this place, the 1930s.

>> JOHN T. EDGE: 1934.

So it was Louis and Josie Middendorf who opened it.

He was the bartender and he ran back and forth to New Orleans to buy beer, and she was the cook.

And they started it in the height of The Depression, right after Prohibition had been eased, and almost from the beginning, she was shaving the catfish.

You get a lot of servings out of one cat, too.

>> BROCK: What's cool is we snuck back into the kitchen and it's just controlled chaos back there, I love it.

>> EDGE: There are like multiple generations of the same family working the line, slicing catfish.

There are a lot of sustaining employees that have made this place work.

>> LINK: This is definitely the epitome of what I think a New Orleans restaurant is, even though this is 40 miles away.

>> EDGE: Damn, I thought that was us.

(laughing) >> BROCK: I feel like catfish is something that you see all over the South, everywhere, all the time.

It's like the constant.

It's like the constant variable that's always there.

It's in the finest restaurants and it's in a fish camp.

It's all the above, and I think that's what's cool about it.

A lot of people don't like catfish because they've only had farm-raised catfish.

When we opened Husk, we were like, "All right, we're gonna keep catfish on the menu in some form every day."

>> EDGE: Do you think about it as almost like an educational mission?

>> BROCK: That's why we did it.

We said it day one, we want people to really fall in love with this because number one, it's crazy delicious; number two, farming fish the right way is the future of aquaculture.

>> EDGE: Perfect timing.

>> LINK: We had two fins.

(laughing) >> BROCK: Man, that is insane.

It's just beautiful.

>> EDGE: It's like the whole side of the fish.

>> BROCK: So if you really think about it, this was born in the Depression to make the most of what you had.

And people fell in love with it.

>> EDGE: It also shows great technique, you know, when you sit down here and you realize when you bite into this fish that what's sustained this place is the muscle memory of ladies who know how to shave this fish.

>> BROCK: Like 3,500 people eating here.

1,000 pounds of catfish a day.

(laughing) >> EDGE: It's cool too because it's not some temple of gastronomy; it's just everybody's food.

There are many people who dismiss the South and there are many people who even more so dismiss the foods of kind of the working-class South, and I think catfish kind of represents that for people.

>> BROCK: Exactly, it does.

It's a symbol.

>> EDGE: It's a symbol for us in a positive way and for some people it's a symbol of our South in a negative way, and until you taste it here, all the stuff that's happening out in the other states where people are interpreting Louisiana foods, you don't understand it until you taste it here.

>> LINK: Catfish, I think, it is the South embodied in one bite of fish.

>> BROCK: We're gonna make thin-fried catfish.

>> CURRENCE: Middendorf's style.

>> BROCK: Which is a super cool thing that you really only see at that restaurant.

And their thing is taking this catfish and slicing it paper thin.

I love that idea because it's like more breading.

>> CURRENCE: Right.

>> BROCK: And it's super, super simple.

They use cornmeal, right?

>> CURRENCE: Right.

>> BROCK: You want to attempt this or you want me to?

>> CURRENCE: I want you to, chef.

These ladies in their cut room can go through those filets front-handed, back-handed.

They'll take two or three filets out of a side.

And it's cool that it's so popular that they've just continued to build it to where now I think it seats about maybe 700 people.

I could be wrong, but... >> BROCK: Are you kidding me?

>> CURRENCE: Yeah, it's massive.

>> BROCK: Not bad!

(laughing) >> CURRENCE: You're getting cocky now, aren't you?

(laughing) >> BROCK: I'm gonna cut my hand off.

You know, what I like about catfish is it's mostly farm-raised when you get it in a restaurant and I think that's, like, so important for us to embrace because we've overfished the waters.

>> CURRENCE: Catfish has a reputation for being a little bit muddy.

It's sort of the pedestrian seafood or it's not really given credit for being as good as it is.

>> BROCK: Do you think they use tweezers at Middendorf's?

(laughing) >> CURRENCE: We would not get a job there, I don't think.

>> BROCK: No, I would not make it long there.

One of the cool things about this is we're taking something classic and beautiful and something that's been done so well for so long, and when you get it into your kitchen, you adapt it.

You know, we're using this beautiful catfish, we're using Cruz Family buttermilk, we're using Anson Mills cornmeal from heirloom corn.

You smell that, it smells like you're in the field, you know, because that's the way food used to taste.

It all used to be heirloom, it all used to be fantastic.

>> CURRENCE: That's the great thing about what's happening with food now is that from the beginning of careers with guys in the kitchen that are serious about food now, you're learning as much of the history of food.

You're learning about the importance of why we've got to get away from GMO.

>> BROCK: You're learning about agriculture, you know?

It used to be the role of a chef was very simple: you just made food taste good.

Now people are becoming more and more educated about our food system, and therefore they have more questions and they look to us for the answers, you know?

Well, it's not Middendorf's, but whatever.

>> CURRENCE: I don't think they're gonna take your Beard medal back, but... (laughing) So what do you like to serve it with?

>> BROCK: For me, hot sauce and lemon.

That's the way I like it.

And you've got to have some tartar sauce too.

It's not perfect, but... >> CURRENCE: You're the Grant Achatz of fried catfish.

>> (Brock laughing) Awesome.

Beautiful.

It doesn't get much better than that.

>> CURRENCE: Give that to me right now.

>> BROCK: Make it rain hot sauce?

>> CURRENCE: Take two, Mind of a Fry Cook.

(laughing) >> BROCK: I love going to Louisiana, I love going to New Orleans and I'm just now starting to explore the rest of Louisiana.

When you get off the plane and you land in Louisiana and you put your feet on that soil, you just feel like you're in this really special place.

It's one of the last sort of unchanged and untouched regions of the South and, in fact, the entire United States.

(thunder rumbling) And you walk away realizing what a special place Louisiana is.

There's no other place like Louisiana.

I could live there, no problem.

That's kind of my pace.

(thunder rumbling)