food in la/ms/al picture post
I am going to group the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama food pictures together. I've only been in Florida for about 12 hours, but i already feel like i am back in the Taco Belt. The formerly French southern states shall henceforth be known as the Boudin Belt. (The midwest, of course, is the Burger Belt, and the northeast is the Bagel Belt.)
Brace yourselves, this is a big one.
The opening shot is by far not the best meal i had in the Boudin Belt, but it really shows how ubiquitous po' boys are in the region. Almost everywhere sells its food either in a "sandwich" (which is a burger bun) or - for a bit more money - a "po' boy" (which is a longer sandwich). Po' boys are supposedly made with a special type of French bread, but to be honest the bread tastes about as French as a poutine. Which is to say, not at all. It's just a big, soft, floppy, long American burger bun.
Anyway, that first po' boy was a shrimp po' boy from one of the two food trucks which are the only two places to eat (aside from the pizza-serving gas station) in Cameron, Louisiana. They didn't do deep-fried shrimp, which is the most well-known version, instead they had cooked shrimp with melted provolone cheese, crispy fried bacon and some kind of white, creamy jalapeño-spiked sauce. The best thing about this combination was the crispy fried bacon, which added back the texture that was missing because the shrimp wasn't fried. But, for me, this was way too heavy on the dairy. It was so cloyingly fatty, and not in a good, oily way, but in a bad, phlegmy way. The dish was saved by the fries, which were much fatter and more potato-y than the kinda batter-y fries that were more popular in East Texas.
After visiting the first food truck, i visited the second food truck for dinner. Hoo boy, this was something insane. It was fries tossed in Creole seasoning, topped with diced chicken tenders (breaded chicken breast), topped with shredded cheese, topped with ranch dressing (i think), topped with Frank's hot sauce (aka buffalo sauce), topped with pickled jalapeños. It appeared to be a helping of everything you could buy off the shelf in the gas station, melted on top of each other. It was incredibly salty. I felt so fat and gross after finishing it. But there was something there. It was a grand moment of "America, fuck yeah", which people should only eat once a month.
Continuing across the desolate marsh lands of Cameron parish, i ended up at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. They had a "deli" where they served sandwiches and po' boys. I got a BBQ pork po' boy. It was not great. I generally find pulled pork to be an uninteresting dish, but sometimes it's saved by the condiments or fixins. This one had nothing except for undercooked McDonalds-style shoestring fries, which are the worst possible fries.
After three pretty mediocre meals, i was at my wit's end. That's when i ended up at a gumbo cook-off in Crowley. I tried five different homemade gumbos and one "jar" gumbo. To those who don't know what gumbo is, it's a sort of stew that is usually made with chicken and andouille sausage, served over rice. The thing that makes it different from French stews is that instead of using a light roux (flour and butter mixture used to thicken sauces), they cook the roux till it's brown, which supposedly gives a nuttier flavor. I think it just adds a burnt flavor, but what do i know?
Here are the six gumbos. See if you can guess which was my favorite, and which was the jar gumbo.
Gumbo 1
Gumbo 2
Gumbo 3
Gumbo 4
Gumbo 5
Gumbo 6
If you guessed gumbo 6 as the jar, you win. Interestingly, gumbo 6 not only looks the darkest in the picture, but it also was the only one with that strong burnt flavor that i associate with dark roux. I like lots of bitter things, but i don't like burnt flour. If that's representative of the jar gumbos, though, then perhaps it's the most authentically Cajun?
If you guessed gumbo 2 as my favorite, congratulations, you've read enough of this journal to know my tastes just from text descriptions. Gumbo 2 was the only one that offered fresh green onions as a condiment, but you can also instantly see from the color that it was a really tomato-forward broth. I don't think it's traditionally Cajun to put tomato, but it sure should be Creole. It was almost so tomato-y that it tasted like a Spanish dish. Not only that, but the sausage they used was spicier than the other gumbos, where the sausage didn't have any kick at all. Since gumbos are pretty bland by default i really wanted all the spice i could get. Gumbo 2 was a well-balanced mix of fresh and acid and spicy, which is right up my alley.
God, i was exhausted by Louisiana cuisine at this point. It was so relentlessly bland and heavy and salty after Texas. Then i had a beignet. Beignets are... basically donuts, i guess. But they have tons of icing sugar on them, which makes them much more entertaining to eat. You can pretend to be a fabulously wealthy coke fiend.
I have to say that i'd never really enjoyed Creole or Cajun cuisine outside of Louisiana, so i wasn't really expecting it to be all that much better when i got here, but i had been hoping to find some secret dish that had never been exported... Kinda like when i went to Italy, hating pretty much all Italian food, and then i discovered bread and tomato soup, which is the only Italian dish in the world that doesn't suck, and somehow they never exported it. Well, i'm gonna let the cat out of the bag. Here is the secret Cajun breakfast that never got exported: eggs and rice. It is exactly what it sounds like. Eggs. And Rice. Plus a meat of your choice, and i chose bacon. It was all tossed through each other perfectly, so every bite had a little bit of each ingredient inside. The rice was a bit "dirty", so, seasoned. Plus Crystal hot sauce, which is a Louisiana-style hot sauce like Tabasco - heavily vinegar-based. But that kind of sauce works well on eggs. It was a very salty dish, but it was so filling and satisfying. Secret's out.
Passing through Hammond, i stopped at a soul food place, which was closed. I couldn't find much else open that wasn't a chain, so i ended up at their local BBQ joint, who were most well-known for their messy sandwiches. I ordered the pork po' boy "fully dressed", which means with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. It was extremely messy. Everything dripped out and my hands and wrists got filthy. And, somehow, that made it taste better. Yeah, it was still that typical "canned tuna with ketchup, salt and pepper" flavor that essentially every pulled pork in the world tastes like, but if you're going to roast up a whole pig shoulder like a fucking caveman, then you might as well eat like a caveman as well. It worked. This BBQ worked for me. It wasn't spicy. It wasn't interesting. But it was dumb and dirty and made me feel simultaneously heroically manly and boyishly naughty. I think that means it's good BBQ.
I wrote about boudin already in my previous entry. It is a kind of sausage made out of pork and rice, and it is delicious. Some of the donut shops in the Boudin Belt bake it inside a bun, and it is the best thing i have found at any donut shop in America so far. I don't know if you're supposed to put mustard on it, but it tastes a lot like Dutch bitterballen to me, and those little snacks always have mustard on them, so i put mustard on this. Scrumptious.
Oh fucking joy, joy of joys, the very last meal i had in Louisiana, i finally got the kind of food that i had been hoping to find the whole time. This is a "fish dinner" from a soul food place in Slidell that is only open for lunch. The menu was fried chicken, various po' boys, or the "dinners". The difference between the dinners and the fried chicken or po' boys is you got two sides instead of one. Of course i had to get two sides. Yams and greens. The yams are sweet potatoes cooked with cinnamon and brown sugar. The greens are collard greens, i think, cooked with bacon. Drink is lemonade. They even gave me a little slice of bread to help grab the fish and mop up the juices. I could've used two or three slices, but either way it was fantastically delicious.
So, now we leave Louisiana, and immediately the food got better. To be fair, i left mostly rural Louisiana for one of the more touristy parts of Mississippi, so it's probably not fair to compare. I'm sure New Orleans has plenty of great food, for example. But tough shit, i didn't go there, so you're going to get an unfair comparison. Bay Saint Louis, it had a bakery. A real bakery, that sold fresh bread. And hummus. And scones. It was mildly disappointing that they didn't have any brown or wholegrain bread, but that's America for ya. The disappointment was vastly outweighed by the pleasant surprise of finding a proper bakery in the first place.
Gulfport, Mississippi. I went to a BBQ place, but i ordered fried chicken tenders. This is about as close as you'll get to me ordering actual fried chicken. One of the reasons i don't like fried chicken is because i hate when restaurants serve you food that you can't eat. That is - bones, antennae, exoskeletons, gristle, rind, pits, you name it. If you put it on my plate, i should be able to eat it without fucking around. If i can't eat everything on the plate, you failed as a chef. This makes fried chicken a bullshit dish, in my opinion. Too fiddly. The diner shouldn't have to work that hard for food that they already paid for. The good news is, these chicken tenders were battered and fried in the same batter as fried chicken. Obviously they were a bit drier than a leg or a wing because they cooked a quarter breast. If it was me, i would've cut them into thinner strips so there would be more batter to meat ratio, but it wasn't terrible. Not that it really matters because the real star of the show here was the baked beans and the collard greens. The greens here were cooked a little sweet, somehow. The beans were cooked with bacon. Not pictured was the choice of three different in-house BBQ sauces - vinegar, sweet and spicy. I tried all of them. They all tasted like ketchup. One was vinegar-y ketchup, the other was sugar-y ketchup, the other was.. not spicy ketchup. American BBQ continues to suck. But never mind. The sauces counteracted the slight dryness of the chicken. And i got a single slice of bread! How generous. This was actually a pretty solid meal.
One of the main things i wanted to get while cycling along the beach in Mississippi was a stupid fruity cocktail. Not a serious cocktail like a daiquiri or a mojito or a caipirinha, but some dumb Let's All Go To The Med And Get Sunburnt kind of a drink. I found the perfect beach shack in Biloxi, right next door to Margaritaville. This was orange juice, lime and two different rums. It pretty much only tasted of orange juice.
...that's why i had to order another one. This was pineapple juice, coconut milk and two other rums. This one had a bit more of a kick to it and gave me that dumb holiday feeling. Bonus palm trees as a preview for the Gulf Coast photo set which i will put together for a future post.
Alright, back to food. In Pascagoula, Mississippi i found an awesome diner that served American staples but also Mexican breakfasts. This is chilaquiles - fried tortillas in salsa. Served with refried beans, queso fresco (cheese), sour cream, egg and raw onion. Smashingly good breakfast. The drink is horchata. The hot sauce is a proper Mexican hot sauce that has some depth of flavor, none of this "basically just vinegar, actually" Louisiana nonsense.
All that said, Pascagoula is still in the Boudin Belt, as you can see from this boudin-in-a-bun from a local donut shop. I'm including this picture because this one was better than the one i had in Louisiana. The bun was softer and fluffier and the boudin was more firmly stuck together. Excellent post-brekky snack.
Alabama. I only had one dish. It was BBQ. I got it in Bayou La Bartre, a country ass town in the middle of nowhere, except not in the middle of nowhere because it's in the region of holiday homes and beachfront getaways, so you'd think they'd have more interesting food. They don't. The local BBQ shack had their own spin on the now-getting-very-fucking-tedious pulled pork sandwich. It had coleslaw in it, and olives, and pickled jalapeños, and pickles, and maybe even some other stuff too. It went for the same kind of "so messy you are going to get it all over yourself" vibe that the place in Hammond did, so it succeeded on that front, but it loses some points for when i ordered beans and chips as a side, the only chips they had were Cheetos or cheddar-flavor potato chips or BBQ-flavor potato chips (kinda redundant, no?) Of course, i put some of the Cheetos into the sandwich to make it even messier and more ridiculous. It was fun, but it wasn't very good. Further points lost for serving me sweet tea that wasn't nearly sweet enough. Come on, The South, you can do better.
Probably The South can do better, but i ate what i ate. I suppose Florida is still sort of The South, so perhaps it can redeem itself with some more of the good stuff, which so far has been soul food and simple but well-cooked Things With Rice. And, goddamnit, i still haven't found cornbread anywhere. What's up with that?
Brace yourselves, this is a big one.
The opening shot is by far not the best meal i had in the Boudin Belt, but it really shows how ubiquitous po' boys are in the region. Almost everywhere sells its food either in a "sandwich" (which is a burger bun) or - for a bit more money - a "po' boy" (which is a longer sandwich). Po' boys are supposedly made with a special type of French bread, but to be honest the bread tastes about as French as a poutine. Which is to say, not at all. It's just a big, soft, floppy, long American burger bun.
Anyway, that first po' boy was a shrimp po' boy from one of the two food trucks which are the only two places to eat (aside from the pizza-serving gas station) in Cameron, Louisiana. They didn't do deep-fried shrimp, which is the most well-known version, instead they had cooked shrimp with melted provolone cheese, crispy fried bacon and some kind of white, creamy jalapeño-spiked sauce. The best thing about this combination was the crispy fried bacon, which added back the texture that was missing because the shrimp wasn't fried. But, for me, this was way too heavy on the dairy. It was so cloyingly fatty, and not in a good, oily way, but in a bad, phlegmy way. The dish was saved by the fries, which were much fatter and more potato-y than the kinda batter-y fries that were more popular in East Texas.
After visiting the first food truck, i visited the second food truck for dinner. Hoo boy, this was something insane. It was fries tossed in Creole seasoning, topped with diced chicken tenders (breaded chicken breast), topped with shredded cheese, topped with ranch dressing (i think), topped with Frank's hot sauce (aka buffalo sauce), topped with pickled jalapeños. It appeared to be a helping of everything you could buy off the shelf in the gas station, melted on top of each other. It was incredibly salty. I felt so fat and gross after finishing it. But there was something there. It was a grand moment of "America, fuck yeah", which people should only eat once a month.
Continuing across the desolate marsh lands of Cameron parish, i ended up at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. They had a "deli" where they served sandwiches and po' boys. I got a BBQ pork po' boy. It was not great. I generally find pulled pork to be an uninteresting dish, but sometimes it's saved by the condiments or fixins. This one had nothing except for undercooked McDonalds-style shoestring fries, which are the worst possible fries.
After three pretty mediocre meals, i was at my wit's end. That's when i ended up at a gumbo cook-off in Crowley. I tried five different homemade gumbos and one "jar" gumbo. To those who don't know what gumbo is, it's a sort of stew that is usually made with chicken and andouille sausage, served over rice. The thing that makes it different from French stews is that instead of using a light roux (flour and butter mixture used to thicken sauces), they cook the roux till it's brown, which supposedly gives a nuttier flavor. I think it just adds a burnt flavor, but what do i know?
Here are the six gumbos. See if you can guess which was my favorite, and which was the jar gumbo.
Gumbo 1
Gumbo 2
Gumbo 3
Gumbo 4
Gumbo 5
Gumbo 6
If you guessed gumbo 6 as the jar, you win. Interestingly, gumbo 6 not only looks the darkest in the picture, but it also was the only one with that strong burnt flavor that i associate with dark roux. I like lots of bitter things, but i don't like burnt flour. If that's representative of the jar gumbos, though, then perhaps it's the most authentically Cajun?
If you guessed gumbo 2 as my favorite, congratulations, you've read enough of this journal to know my tastes just from text descriptions. Gumbo 2 was the only one that offered fresh green onions as a condiment, but you can also instantly see from the color that it was a really tomato-forward broth. I don't think it's traditionally Cajun to put tomato, but it sure should be Creole. It was almost so tomato-y that it tasted like a Spanish dish. Not only that, but the sausage they used was spicier than the other gumbos, where the sausage didn't have any kick at all. Since gumbos are pretty bland by default i really wanted all the spice i could get. Gumbo 2 was a well-balanced mix of fresh and acid and spicy, which is right up my alley.
God, i was exhausted by Louisiana cuisine at this point. It was so relentlessly bland and heavy and salty after Texas. Then i had a beignet. Beignets are... basically donuts, i guess. But they have tons of icing sugar on them, which makes them much more entertaining to eat. You can pretend to be a fabulously wealthy coke fiend.
I have to say that i'd never really enjoyed Creole or Cajun cuisine outside of Louisiana, so i wasn't really expecting it to be all that much better when i got here, but i had been hoping to find some secret dish that had never been exported... Kinda like when i went to Italy, hating pretty much all Italian food, and then i discovered bread and tomato soup, which is the only Italian dish in the world that doesn't suck, and somehow they never exported it. Well, i'm gonna let the cat out of the bag. Here is the secret Cajun breakfast that never got exported: eggs and rice. It is exactly what it sounds like. Eggs. And Rice. Plus a meat of your choice, and i chose bacon. It was all tossed through each other perfectly, so every bite had a little bit of each ingredient inside. The rice was a bit "dirty", so, seasoned. Plus Crystal hot sauce, which is a Louisiana-style hot sauce like Tabasco - heavily vinegar-based. But that kind of sauce works well on eggs. It was a very salty dish, but it was so filling and satisfying. Secret's out.
Passing through Hammond, i stopped at a soul food place, which was closed. I couldn't find much else open that wasn't a chain, so i ended up at their local BBQ joint, who were most well-known for their messy sandwiches. I ordered the pork po' boy "fully dressed", which means with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. It was extremely messy. Everything dripped out and my hands and wrists got filthy. And, somehow, that made it taste better. Yeah, it was still that typical "canned tuna with ketchup, salt and pepper" flavor that essentially every pulled pork in the world tastes like, but if you're going to roast up a whole pig shoulder like a fucking caveman, then you might as well eat like a caveman as well. It worked. This BBQ worked for me. It wasn't spicy. It wasn't interesting. But it was dumb and dirty and made me feel simultaneously heroically manly and boyishly naughty. I think that means it's good BBQ.
I wrote about boudin already in my previous entry. It is a kind of sausage made out of pork and rice, and it is delicious. Some of the donut shops in the Boudin Belt bake it inside a bun, and it is the best thing i have found at any donut shop in America so far. I don't know if you're supposed to put mustard on it, but it tastes a lot like Dutch bitterballen to me, and those little snacks always have mustard on them, so i put mustard on this. Scrumptious.
Oh fucking joy, joy of joys, the very last meal i had in Louisiana, i finally got the kind of food that i had been hoping to find the whole time. This is a "fish dinner" from a soul food place in Slidell that is only open for lunch. The menu was fried chicken, various po' boys, or the "dinners". The difference between the dinners and the fried chicken or po' boys is you got two sides instead of one. Of course i had to get two sides. Yams and greens. The yams are sweet potatoes cooked with cinnamon and brown sugar. The greens are collard greens, i think, cooked with bacon. Drink is lemonade. They even gave me a little slice of bread to help grab the fish and mop up the juices. I could've used two or three slices, but either way it was fantastically delicious.
So, now we leave Louisiana, and immediately the food got better. To be fair, i left mostly rural Louisiana for one of the more touristy parts of Mississippi, so it's probably not fair to compare. I'm sure New Orleans has plenty of great food, for example. But tough shit, i didn't go there, so you're going to get an unfair comparison. Bay Saint Louis, it had a bakery. A real bakery, that sold fresh bread. And hummus. And scones. It was mildly disappointing that they didn't have any brown or wholegrain bread, but that's America for ya. The disappointment was vastly outweighed by the pleasant surprise of finding a proper bakery in the first place.
Gulfport, Mississippi. I went to a BBQ place, but i ordered fried chicken tenders. This is about as close as you'll get to me ordering actual fried chicken. One of the reasons i don't like fried chicken is because i hate when restaurants serve you food that you can't eat. That is - bones, antennae, exoskeletons, gristle, rind, pits, you name it. If you put it on my plate, i should be able to eat it without fucking around. If i can't eat everything on the plate, you failed as a chef. This makes fried chicken a bullshit dish, in my opinion. Too fiddly. The diner shouldn't have to work that hard for food that they already paid for. The good news is, these chicken tenders were battered and fried in the same batter as fried chicken. Obviously they were a bit drier than a leg or a wing because they cooked a quarter breast. If it was me, i would've cut them into thinner strips so there would be more batter to meat ratio, but it wasn't terrible. Not that it really matters because the real star of the show here was the baked beans and the collard greens. The greens here were cooked a little sweet, somehow. The beans were cooked with bacon. Not pictured was the choice of three different in-house BBQ sauces - vinegar, sweet and spicy. I tried all of them. They all tasted like ketchup. One was vinegar-y ketchup, the other was sugar-y ketchup, the other was.. not spicy ketchup. American BBQ continues to suck. But never mind. The sauces counteracted the slight dryness of the chicken. And i got a single slice of bread! How generous. This was actually a pretty solid meal.
One of the main things i wanted to get while cycling along the beach in Mississippi was a stupid fruity cocktail. Not a serious cocktail like a daiquiri or a mojito or a caipirinha, but some dumb Let's All Go To The Med And Get Sunburnt kind of a drink. I found the perfect beach shack in Biloxi, right next door to Margaritaville. This was orange juice, lime and two different rums. It pretty much only tasted of orange juice.
...that's why i had to order another one. This was pineapple juice, coconut milk and two other rums. This one had a bit more of a kick to it and gave me that dumb holiday feeling. Bonus palm trees as a preview for the Gulf Coast photo set which i will put together for a future post.
Alright, back to food. In Pascagoula, Mississippi i found an awesome diner that served American staples but also Mexican breakfasts. This is chilaquiles - fried tortillas in salsa. Served with refried beans, queso fresco (cheese), sour cream, egg and raw onion. Smashingly good breakfast. The drink is horchata. The hot sauce is a proper Mexican hot sauce that has some depth of flavor, none of this "basically just vinegar, actually" Louisiana nonsense.
All that said, Pascagoula is still in the Boudin Belt, as you can see from this boudin-in-a-bun from a local donut shop. I'm including this picture because this one was better than the one i had in Louisiana. The bun was softer and fluffier and the boudin was more firmly stuck together. Excellent post-brekky snack.
Alabama. I only had one dish. It was BBQ. I got it in Bayou La Bartre, a country ass town in the middle of nowhere, except not in the middle of nowhere because it's in the region of holiday homes and beachfront getaways, so you'd think they'd have more interesting food. They don't. The local BBQ shack had their own spin on the now-getting-very-fucking-tedious pulled pork sandwich. It had coleslaw in it, and olives, and pickled jalapeños, and pickles, and maybe even some other stuff too. It went for the same kind of "so messy you are going to get it all over yourself" vibe that the place in Hammond did, so it succeeded on that front, but it loses some points for when i ordered beans and chips as a side, the only chips they had were Cheetos or cheddar-flavor potato chips or BBQ-flavor potato chips (kinda redundant, no?) Of course, i put some of the Cheetos into the sandwich to make it even messier and more ridiculous. It was fun, but it wasn't very good. Further points lost for serving me sweet tea that wasn't nearly sweet enough. Come on, The South, you can do better.
Probably The South can do better, but i ate what i ate. I suppose Florida is still sort of The South, so perhaps it can redeem itself with some more of the good stuff, which so far has been soul food and simple but well-cooked Things With Rice. And, goddamnit, i still haven't found cornbread anywhere. What's up with that?