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For some, it’s Floribbean — the place cooks use tropical components from the Bahamas and Caribbean islands. To others, it’s Cajun and Creole, the seafood-heavy dishes that hail from Louisiana’s wealthy tapestry. And nonetheless, there’s low-country and soul meals, providing a large swath of dishes we frequently consult with as “comfort” meals, from cornbread and fried hen to biscuits and gravy.
For South Beach Wine & Food Festival visitor chef and Texas native Tiffany Derry, Southern meals goes deeper than its American roots.
“It goes back to Africa, the Haitians, the Caribbean, all those flavors influence my menu. These are also the people who make up the South,” she tells New Times.
Growing up, Derry understood Southern cuisine most intimately, spending countless hours in her grandmother’s kitchen just over the Texas border in Louisiana. On the family farm, her grandmother would turn fresh-picked fruits and vegetables into hearty meals, be it a from-scratch pie or a pot of gumbo.
Today, Derry’s creative approach to Southern cooking landed her here, cooking for the 2023 South Beach Wine & Food Festival (SOBEWFF).
For those that don’t know her, the Beaumont, Texas, native has several accolades to her name. She is a judge on The Great American Recipe on PBS and a 2022 James Beard Award finalist for “Best Chef: Texas” and “Best New Restaurant.” Derry is considered one of Bobby Flay’s culinary titans on Bobby’s Triple Threat on the Food Network and a “fan favorite” on Bravo’s Top Chef Season Seven, the place she completed within the prime 4.
In Texas, nonetheless, Derry’s followers know her because the queen of duck-fat fried “everything.” It’s additionally the ethos behind Roots Chicken Shak, the restaurant she opened in 2017 and has since expanded to 3 places, the place even the bread crumbs on the kale Caesar salad are cooked and crisped in duck fats.
When she opened her formal restaurant, Roots Southern Table, in 2021, Derry’s purpose was to do greater than cook dinner Southern consolation meals — It was additionally to push its boundaries.
Derry’s purpose is to raise Southern meals in an exploratory method, concurrently honoring the previous whereas pushing the boundaries that at present outline it. At her Dallas restaurant, she attracts inspiration from the worldwide cultures that present a historic and trendy context for Southern delicacies, spiking recipes with hints of the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean.
“I would like individuals to grasp that Southern meals is not simply what chances are you’ll understand it to be,” she explains. “Our meals has a historical past, and it is evolving. It’s not one-dimensional, and it isn’t one-sided.”
During the 2023 version of SOBEWFF, Derry will share that mission with Miami when she cooks her favourite dishes alongside cooks who current their meals historical past to company.
At the Cookout, a sold-out occasion hosted by JJ Johnson and D-Nice on Saturday, February 25, that spotlights dishes that give Black tradition its richly layered taste, she’ll put together her well-known duck-fat fried hen. A barbecue should, it will likely be accompanied by her flavorful Scotch bonnet mango ginger sauce.
But she’s saved a particular deal with — her household’s gumbo and cornbread — for the company of the sold-out Eater Event Series dinner on the Bath Club, hosted alongside South Florida cooks Timon Balloo and Jeff Masanz tonight, Friday, February 24.
When Derry was rising up, gumbo was served a number of instances a month, flavored with substances that may change in accordance with what was recent and out there, be it hen, seafood, or regionally caught wild recreation. It was a hearty meal that would feed her grandmother’s 11 youngsters and, later, all 50 of her cousins.
Originally her grandmother’s recipe, Derry’s mom perfected it, ending it within the oven to boost and condense the flavors right into a wealthy, savory broth. Now, her personal tweaks make it extraordinary. Derry cooks the okra to eradicate the vegetable’s naturally slimy texture and prepares hen forward of time to maintain it from shredding whereas the roux cooks down for 36 hours.
It’s additionally a part of why the chef has determined to haul her wealthy, time-consuming roux from Texas to Miami.
“It’s this dish particularly that tells the story of my household, the love, the custom,” sums up Derry. “We all have a unique kind of understanding of meals and a unique method of appreciating issues we did not develop up consuming. That’s why I selected to cook dinner with Timon [Balloo]. Like me, he is unapologetic in regards to the meals he cooks, and it is my hope that folks learn this, or style our meals, and really feel impressed to step into their roots and do what makes them blissful.”
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