Don Genova's Blog

This week on Food For Thought, a visit to the only place in the world Tabasco Sauce is made, Avery Island, Louisiana.  Pictured here are the barrels of ‘pepper mash’, sealed with salt, which ferment for 3 years before being made into Tabasco.  If you want to listen to my tour in streaming RealAudio, click here .

The people who make Tabasco Sauce, the McIhenny Company, have an extensive website.  It’s loaded with facts and figures, myths and lore.

This is Hamilton Polk, master cooper, on the left, and my tour guide, George Segura, on the right. Hamilton has been maintaining the barrels at McIlhenny for the past 35 years.  They get the barrels from whiskey companies, which only use them once.  They’ve been charred on the inside, so Hamilton and his co-workers de-char them and clean them up for the Tabasco mash.  Some of the barrels are up to 100 years old!  I took a whiff inside one of the whisky barrels before it had been de-charred, and nearly passed out from the fumes!

This is what the pepper mash looks like after it has fermented for 3 years in the barrels and has had vinegar added to it.  The peppers used to make Tabasco are so hot I could feel the heat rising from the vat. The seeds, skins and pulp from the peppers are then filtered out before bottling.  The seeds are sold to companies that make topical analgesics like sports rubs.  The dried pulp is sold to New Orleans area restaurants, where chefs like to add it to the water for their crawfish boils.

  The bottling part of the factory is busy and noisy, it can fill up to 600 thousand bottles of Tabasco a day!  There is a smaller, specialty bottling line where miniature bottles of Tabasco are filled, then labeled with the logos of the clients, which include George Bush and the seal of the President of the United States of America.

Special thanks to George Segura for a great tour of Avery Island, Tony Simmons, executive vice-president of McIhenny and the great-great grandson of company founder Edmund McIhenny, Hamilton Polk and Dr. Shane Bernard, historian and curator for the McIhenny Company.  I hope he gets his wish…that is to find a letter that may have been written by Edmund McIhenny to someone that would explain where he got the first peppers he used to make the sauce and how he got the idea to make it in the first place.

I have much more material to share from Avery Island that I couldn’t put in my Food For Thought broadcast…look for it in one of my future podcasts.

This week on Food For Thought, my report on how restaurants in New Orleans have bounced back after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina of almost one year ago.  I was there during the 3rd Annual Tales of the Cocktail.  To listen to this program in streaming RealAudio, click here. 

This city has some fantastic food and cocktail traditions, and traditions die hard.  That’s why I visited the covered courtyard of Café Du Monde, a coffee shop that’s been in the French Quarter since 1862.  Pretty much all they serve here is coffee and beignets.   A beignet is said to be an Acadian creation, basically a deep-fried square of dough which is then covered with about a half-inch of icing sugar.  That’s it.  And yet the place is packed with people.  Café du Monde was back in business just six weeks after Katrina hit.

Other restaurants had more of an uphill battle.  Café Giovanni is owned by chef Duke LoCicero.  He, his wife Kelly, and his kids were evacuated from the city when Katrina hit.  They were staying with relatives in Tennessee, where Duke was able to witness his restaurant being looted while watching CNN.

Because restaurant skills are so transferable, many cooks, waiters and dishwashers who left New Orleans when Katrina hit haven’t come back, they’re working somewhere else in the country.  Some places haven’t been able to open for lunch as well as dinner service because they just don’t have enough staff.  Other places are still repairing damage caused by the storm, or post-storm looting.

I had a lot of casual conversations with people in the city’s hospitality industry during my visit.  All of them had tales of what had happened to their homes, their families, and their jobs.  One of the managers at my hotel told me her house was flooded to the ceiling of the first floor, while her second floor was immaculate.  As time went on, she said the more you get, the more you want.  When the electricity came back on, then you wanted your telephone.  Cable TV was a real luxury, but not so much as getting your garbage picked up again.  Still, she is careful to remind herself that some people don’t even have electricity yet.  The existing grid is fragile, the power went off in my hotel for short periods nearly every day I was there.

But when I hit Bourbon Street one night, all the energy New Orleans is known for was still there. Street musicians giving it their all, music blaring from all the bars and nightclubs, tourists walking with their ‘go cups’ full of booze up and down the street, everyone having a great time.  You can definitely be well-fed, well-watered, and well-entertained in the historic French Quarter, but you don’t have to go too far before the façade starts to crumble.   The city has problems that won’t be solved by just a fresh coat of paint and a new menu, but I hope to return again, just to drink in the spirit of the stubborn survivors. 

To try some of the recipes I’ve recreated from my visit to New Orleans, click here, or here.

This week on Food For Thought, highlights from my recent Cocktail Tour of the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Yes, I even got to have my first taste of Absinthe.  (French absinthe spelled Absente on the glass you see here)  If you want to listen to the mini-documentary in streaming RealAudio, click here.

Our tour guide was Joe Gendusa, a New Orleans native with a head full of facts, figures, trivia and lore.  We started by the railway tracks on the banks of the Mississippi, with a great view of the ‘American’ section of the city.

Unless you get out of the downtown core of the city and the French Quarter, there aren’t that many clues to the hell people went through when Hurricane Katrina swept through last August.

The first bar we visited was Napoleon House, on the ground floor of a house that was built just in case the little emperor ever wanted to visit a far-flung outpost of the French empire.  The interior walls of this place haven’t been touched since it was built in 1797!  The house cocktail is the Pimm’s Cup, one of my favourites, as you see being mixed up right here.

The other highlight of the tour was our visit to The Court of Two Sisters, where Floria Woodward, or Miss Flo, holds court behind the bar these days.  Actually, she’s held court behind the bar for the past 38 years!  She figures she has at least a couple of hundred cocktail recipes in her head.

Next week on Food For Thought, meet some of the folks in the food and beverage industry in New Orleans who have survived Hurricane Katrina and returned to the city to do what they do best.