-Funding for "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy" was provided by the... -When Chef Leah Chase entered the kitchen of Dooky Chase's restaurant, she found her niche.

Her natural talent, ambition, and ferocious work ethic transformed a small, family restaurant into a dining destination.

A tireless ambassador for her community, Leah Chase put Creole food on the international map.

Today, in the Dooky Chase Kitchen, chefs Dook Chase and Cleo Robinson prepare three dishes that continue the traditions of the Queen of Creole Cuisine.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -Our first dish is a Leah Chase classic, shrimp Creole, prepared by Cleo.

It starts with a roux, a traditional thickener for sauces and soups.

-We're going to begin with a little cooking oil.

Not much.

It's not a heavy dish, and it's not going to be a heavy roux.

So we're just going to let that come up a little bit, and we're going to add a little bit of flour.

And I don't want a dark, dark roux, but I don't want it blond either.

Just a little color on it.

And this is a dish that works really well, since we are so wealthy and our seafood industry.

We had this in the Lenten season.

The Catholics were pretty strong with their religion and on Fridays, they wouldn't consume any meat.

And the older generations, I know, in my grandfather's period, they carried the Lenten season throughout the whole year so they didn't eat meat on any given Friday.

So seafood was something that we always had on a weekly basis, and Shrimp Creole was one of those dishes.

I think that's about as far as I'm going to take it.

And then I will add some onions to slow that down so it don't brown too much on me.

I'm going to add onions and then I will add some celery.

-You know, when you talk about our pantry, that is the essence of Creole cuisine, right?

We use everything that we have, whether it was in the garden, coming out of the Gulf, white shrimp, brown shrimp.

So when you think of the classics, it was the classics that they were able to get right in their back yard.

And these were one of those dishes that we were able, you know, being grateful in New Orleans and on that coast of Louisiana and having the Mississippi run through, I say we have one of the best food pantries in the world.

-And we're going to go with a little garlic.

I didn't want my garlic to burn, so I will put it in at the end.

We'll put a little -- a little bit of garlic.

It's always good in seafood.

And to help me get that nice, deep red color that I'm going to require, I'm going to put just a tad bit of tomato paste.

Nothing like shrimp and tomatoes.

And I'm going to elevate it even a little bit further with another tomato product in a bit.

Oh, this is looking great.

And then we're going to add our shrimp stock.

And this is something that we always have.

After you get your seafood and it's all been cleaned up and they peeled the shrimp and put them in the freezer for a later date, and that's what we use.

We have a little bit of red color, but not enough.

My aunt believed in her colors.

It had to look the right color.

So to that, we are going to add some cayenne pepper, just a wee bit.

Don't want it too hot.

And some paprika.

That's where a little bit more color is going to come in.

-You know, when you talk about the the Queen of Creole Cuisine, I can remember growing up when y'all would go to different events and do cooking demos with Jon Folse and really showcase Creole cuisine all over.

-It was an important task for her, to bring her culture and expose it to the world, and she did a phenomenal job.

She didn't pass up an opportunity to enlighten the world as to what Creole cuisine was, the foods that we came up on, and the things that she became famous for.

So we're going to add a little fresh thyme here, a little salt, of course.

Not too much.

And I love basil, a little dry basil.

I love basil with shrimp.

And we have a little Creole seasoning, seafood seasoning.

Just one, maybe, bay leaf.

Bay leaf and fresh thyme and seafood is just a given.

Has to go.

Alright.

Now, as that simmers, we're going to add some diced tomatoes.

I love the diced tomatoes right at the end so I can have a little texture to the sauce.

This was another staple that was preserved when we had fresh tomato season.

We just put those in jars and pull them out at a later date or pull them out when you needed them.

Alright, so, chef, if you would, taste that and see where we are before we add the shrimp.

-Love to.

It looks beautiful.

♪ That's right on.

And we're getting ready to add the main part of the dish.

-Now that we have our sauce all together, we're going to add our lovely shrimp.

A nice Gulf shrimp, 21-25, and we'll add those in.

We'll be generous.

-The shrimp that we use here is a 21-25, and there's -- When you look at the store and it has the count, that means how many shrimp you're going to get per pound.

The higher you go, the smaller the shrimp.

Just know that the smaller the shrimp, the quicker it's going to cook.

-I butterfly the shrimp and then I like to get them, just as they're cooking, they'll start to curl and you'll see the inside to the middle curl up.

So I'm pretty much to the end of this cooking process.

-And here, like many of our Creole dishes that we love, we're rice and gravy folks.

So this dish goes beautiful with white rice, brown rice, you know, whatever is the rice of your choice.

Look at these beautiful shrimp.

-And we'll clean up a little bit.

And as always, we want to always make it as appealing as it is tasteful.

So there you have it, Creole cuisine, shrimp Creole.

-Leah Chase helped shape the cuisine of New Orleans and became a culinary icon, penning cookbooks, making television appearances, and even inspiring a Disney princess.

-Of course, the "Princess and the Frog" movie is, in a way, after my mother's dream of owning a fancy dining room of her own where people would come and her musician husband would play the horn like the frog guy plays the trumpet.

That was a portrayal, supposedly, of my daddy.

-It really tells a story of who she was and who my grandfather was, right?

And they're merged together, and that beautiful musical culture and that beautiful culture of cuisine and culinary mix.

-So my mother loved the restaurant business.

She loved waiting on tables.

She loved fine dining.

She loved cooking then, because she experienced success cooking, and so now she wanted to explore those things a little bit more, and she did.

-Our next dish is an entree that showcases a Creole dressing, oyster-stuffed chicken breast.

-We'll get started by working this oyster dressing.

I have some butter here that I have cubed.

Going right into this pot here, let that melt a little bit.

and I'm not going to use all the butter, but I'm going to keep it here just in case I need to bring it back.

So my butter's melting.

I have my onions here that we'll get sautéing.

I'll have our celery here.

-And here in New Orleans, we like to stuff things.

We can stuff just about anything there is.

We stuff the chicken breast.

We stuff the pork.

We stuff quails.

We stuff pork chops.

We stuff fish.

And in the Creole cuisine, we have lots of dressings.

We always have a dressing.

If you hit the holiday time or just regular seasons, we have dressings on top of dressings.

-And this is what you wanted it to be.

I softened up those onions and celery, I'll add in the garlic.

You notice every time we're cooking with garlic, that's our last little vegetable we add, just so we don't burn it.

I love garlic.

♪ And while that's wilting down, we're going to chop up the prize of the show.

This is our oysters here in New Orleans and Louisiana, especially on the Gulf.

You eat them raw.

You eat them on a grill, char grill.

You make a dressing with them.

I mean, oysters is just something that we love here.

And you just want to rough chop.

When you put them in that dressing, all that good oyster flavor kind of coats all those good vegetables that we have here.

And you can see I saved some of what we call here that liquid gold.

That's what we want, 'cause that's also going to give that great oyster flavor.

-And of course, if you want to be nice and dainty at home, you can just throw them in the food processor and give them a little swirl.

But we like to get physical every now and then and flex our muscles and do a little chopping.

-Keeps us back to when my grandmother was having to do this, go back to the old-school ways.

-A lot of our people were fortunate enough to go down to the bayous.

They would dig for oysters.

Seafood was just so bountiful back in the days.

-We have our oysters in and now we'll start to add our seasoning, our spices.

So I'll get in a little bit of our salt here.

I got a little bit of our dry thyme leaves.

Another staple in our Creole dish is dried thyme, fresh thyme, ground thyme.

A little bit of our cayenne pepper.

This is a little Creole seasoning with celery salt.

And always, for a little color, we're going to do a little paprika in here.

Like we always say, you cook what your nose, your eyes, and then at the end, you got to taste it.

So we'll let that go a little bit here.

And you can see when your oysters start to cook, their edges start to curl.

That just brings me back to holidays when we just make a dressing out of everything.

There's oyster dressing, theres's mirliton dressing, cornbread dressing.

Oh, man.

I'm going to let that cook for about two more minutes.

We'll pull it together with those breadcrumbs.

And I'm not putting it all in, right?

We're just going to see the consistency and the texture that we want.

This is just to bring some of that liquid together, that good old liquid gold that we call it down here, which is that oyster water.

And you can see it start to thicken already.

And I have it on a medium heat.

I still want it to reduce as I add these breadcrumbs, right?

We're going to go a little thicker.

♪ -This would be a great use of your leftover oyster dressing from Thanksgiving.

Tidy the turkey, then you switch to the other bird and get in some chicken.

-You can see it's still a little loose, but know that we have to put this in a cooler to chill a little bit.

And when you put that dressing in the cooler, it's going to tighten up a little more, right?

So I'm not going to add any more breadcrumbs to this mixture.

So this is going to go in our refrigerator to cool.

And while that's cooling, Cleo will get started on working that chicken for us.

-We are fortunate enough to have airline chicken breasts that we use to stuff the chicken.

Airline chicken is just a chicken breast that they leave the little wing, the drumette to the wing on it and the skin on.

But if you can't find airline chicken in the grocery, you can use the boneless chicken breast that has no skin.

But as we all know, the skin is going to add a little bit more flavor to it.

If you get it in the grocery store, just a split chicken breast, you can just take it off the bone yourself, and we will put a pocket in them so that Chef can stuff his dressing once it has cooled.

And as you see, we just take the knife and we just -- just make a nice little pocket.

Get it nice and deep, so we can get ample amount of dressing in there.

We like it stuffed and we like it stuffed up real good.

-And, you know, if you were doing this with a pork chop, right, because it goes well as well, you're doing the same thing.

You're getting that thicker pork chop and you're coming around and you're creating that pocket similar to how we did to this chicken breast.

-And then we're going to take just a wee bit of salt and some black pepper.

-So now that we have the dressing cool, it's time for us to stuff our chicken breasts.

-We want a nice, little, healthy portion, but don't overstuff it so our pocket won't close.

When we do them here at the restaurant, we have enough of them that's going into the pan and that they are close enough that they won't fly open and all of the dressing will come out.

But at home, you may not be doing that many of them, so we can use a skewer and close them up.

Or you can use toothpicks and you just kind of thread it in and out until you have it sealed up.

And then we put them into a pan that I have sprayed with some cooking spray.

-You know what I love?

When you have some oozing out, right?

Because at the end, we're going to create a gravy for this.

So as it cooks and some of that stuff in that comes out, that's perfectly okay.

That's actually great.

So when we go to finish that sauce and it's oozing out, you still get a little bit of that oyster dressing flavor.

-And a little, final touch.

You want to make sure that we season the outside of the chicken as well.

Just a little salt, a little black pepper.

and for, always, a little color, a little paprika.

It's going to give us a little color and we're going to do a final touch of butter on the top to help cook and to enhance our gravy.

-So we'll put this into a 350 degree oven uncovered for about 35 minutes and we'll be ready.

This is what you're creating, right?

You can see I have some of that dressing that came down, the juices from that chicken that just kind of ran out as it cooked.

And then you have that good butter, so it's just a fabulous gravy as is.

You can see it's a little light.

When your pan comes out, you're going to add that gravy right in here.

Add in just a little mushrooms.

-My aunt took her cooking role and used it as an instrument to unite the community.

She was thrilled beyond measure when she got the James Beard Award after all of those years of cooking.

And here she was, self-taught and she carried her weight and she carried it well.

-And this is what you're looking for right here.

You see, I reduced some of that gravy.

We'll cream it up with a little bit of butter.

And as I put that in there, I just want to give that butter a nice swirl, and then we can get our plate, ready to plate these puppies up.

You can see the thickness that's happening when you cream that up, right?

It's getting thicker and thicker.

I always like to hit it with just a dab of parsley, add a little color.

And just look at that beautiful gravy.

That's ready.

We'll take these chicken breasts, put them right here on this plate.

♪ ♪ -Oh, that looks fabulous.

-You talk about your Queen of Creole Cuisine and your classics here and the beautiful oysters that we have.

I mean, just look at this.

You're thinking about just cutting into that chicken breast and sopping that beautiful oyster gravy up.

-In the early 1990s, Leah Chase was invited by Julia Child to appear on her "Master Chef" series, "Cooking with Julia" in the kitchen of her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home.

The Creole chef prepared her fried chicken and sweet potato pie.

-The Queen of Creole Cuisine.

That was something that my grandmother humbly embraced.

My grandmother was very special.

She did really take Creole cuisine on a world tour.

And a lot of that was just her upbringing, her knowledge, her even coming into this restaurant.

You know, my great-grandmother, Emily, was a great cook as well, and they learned from each other.

But you talk about putting Creole cuisine on the map.

You know, Chef Leah Chase, the Queen of Creole Cuisine, that's what she did.

And it was her joy of showcasing this cuisine.

It was her love of food, her passion for food, to say, "I want this whole world to taste this greatness that we have going on here in New Orleans here at Dooky Chase."

-No Creole dinner would be complete without dessert, so we'll finish with Leah's sweet potato pie.

-I've taken regular sweet potatoes, I've washed them.

And what you do is put a little cooking oil on them, coat them up real good, put them in the oven and let them bake for about 45 minutes until they get nice and soft.

And that's what we have here.

We've already done that.

We're going to cut that process out for you.

And then we'll take them and peel them and add them to our dish.

I've already begun some, just to show you that they're nice and tender.

And we will add them, and this is going to be our beginning stages of our filling.

And there we have our sweet potatoes.

And what we're going to do is add an egg.

Two eggs.

Let's do two.

And I like to use orange zest and the juice of the orange as well.

I find sweet potatoes and oranges go together so well.

The oranges really brings out the essence of the sweet potato, kind of makes it taste a little bit sweeter.

And to that, we're going to add some regular white granulated sugar.

Some cinnamon.

And to make things a little bit better, as always, some nice, rich, condensed milk.

And we're going to start smashing that up so we can get a nice puree.

And I have already toasted some pecans.

It's always good if you can find some nice, fresh ones during the fall months.

And I'm going to get a little bit of this juice from the orange, making sure we don't get any seeds.

♪ There we go.

And we're gonna use our handy-dandy little nutmeg grater and we're gonna grate us a little nutmeg in there.

You just want about 1/4 teaspoon of that, not too much.

We don't want the nutmeg to overpower the sweet potatoes.

And as always, we have to have some richness to it, so we got to add a wee bit of butter.

♪ And we just mix it up real good.

So this is what I'm looking for.

And these pecans, I've put them in the oven and I've toasted them a little bit.

That brings out the natural oils in them and you get a better taste.

And for the crust, I've taken a pie shell, and what I like to do is add some nuts to the bottom of the pie crust and press them in.

And then I take it and I blind bake it for about 15 to 20 minutes at 350, so I get a nice, little golden brown on the crust.

From there, we will add our filling to our crust.

♪ A nice, full pie.

And I always give it a little, final dusting of cinnamon and a little sprinkle more of nutmeg.

♪ And just a little bit more sanding sugar, and we will place it back in the oven, 350 for about 15 minutes.

And here we have our wonderful sweet potato pie.

It's all finished out of the oven.

It's nice and golden.

This was one of Miss Chase's favorite pies.

And she did this with -- on "Master Chefs," with Chef Julia Child, which was a great experience for her, and it was a wonderful time for her to work with Miss Child.

So we're going to get us a nice, little slice.

And what a wonderful finished touch for our nice dinners.

And there we have it.

Sweet potato pie.

♪ This is a nice tribute to our Queen of Creole Cuisine.

-Chef Leah Chase spent a lifetime uplifting the community and building bridges through food.

For more meals that bring people together, join the Chase family next time on "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy."

-Leah Chase's iconic book, "The Dooky Chase Cookbook," has been updated and includes all-new recipes from the series you're watching.

The cookbook is available for $27.95, plus shipping and handling.

To order, please call 1-866-388-0834 or order online at wyes.org.

-So all the African American musicians who would be performing would come here -- Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, James Brown.

Dizzy Gillespie was my daddy's good friend, because my daddy is a trumpet player and Dizzy, great trumpet player.

-It was always surprising.

You never knew who you would see.

Lena Horne sitting there.

So many of the people.

James Baldwin's in here.

Or even when I was here, when the presidents came, it was like, "Oh, we're here and the presidents are here."

-The Jackson Five used to like her sweet potato pie and stuff.

And we have that upstairs dining room that you've heard them talk about.

So they were up there one time, and I mean, I might have been in teenager, I don't know how old I was, but I went quietly up the steps and I'm thinking, of course, my mother's going to say, "Do you want to meet the Jackson Five?"

You know, my mother said nothing.

And, you know, I stuck my head in and I remember clearly, Michael turned around and just looked my way and nobody said anything, so I just snuck back down the steps.

♪ -For more information about "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy," visit... Funding for "The Dooky Chase Kitchen: Leah's Legacy" was provided by the... ♪