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PROFILES

New Roads Old Recipes by Marcy, Rouses Creative Director

“C ooking is all about timing,” explains chef Cody Carroll. So is life. Cody and his wife Sam met in the same way that many chef couples do: in culinary school. “I noticed her right away,” says Cody, “but we were both pretty focused on our studies, so it took a while for us to actually go out on our first date.” Focused- shmocused, says Sam. “I played hard to get.” Most young culinary students dream of a restaurant to call their own. They set their sights on an old convenience store in New Roads near Cody’s parents’ farm in Batchelor, about 20 minutes west of H. J. Bergeron Pecan Shelling Plant. They opened Hot Tails in 2010 just three months after graduating from the Louisiana Culinary Institute. Their restaurant serves “hardcore South Louisiana cuisine” like crispy duck drumettes with pepper jelly and remoulade sauce, an oysters Rockefeller burger, and a seafood muffaletta with shrimp and crawfish. The crawfish come from the ponds on the Carroll family farm. So do the pecans they use in their cobbler. The chefs alsodreamedof having a restaurant in New Orleans. “It’s an extraordinary food community. There’s so much talent there,”

says Cody. “Working around other great chefs makes you a better chef and we want to be the best chefs we can be.” Two years after opening Hot Tails, Cody and Sam got married. Two years after that they opened Sac-A-Lait on Annunciation Street in New Orleans’ burgeoning Warehouse District. The husband-and-wife chef team creates all of the recipes for both restaurants. “We feed off of each other,” says Sam. Sac-A-Lait’s menu is very fish-and-game-oriented with a slate-blackened redfish, and gulf tuna with venison sweet breads, alligator and milirton. “Sac-A-Lait lets us showcase what we hunt and grow on the farm,” says Cody. “And what we hunt for at Rouses,” adds Sam. “There’s a Rouses just a few blocks from the restaurant.” The couple both grew up on gumbo, so naturally it’s on the menu at their restaurants — a seafood version at Hot Tails, a seasonal selection at Sac-A-Lait. (In October, that meant frog legs and alligator.) “My mom made the gumbo,” says Sam, who was raised in Gonzales. “It was mostly chicken and sausage. For me the smell of gumbo brings back memories of her kitchen. I wish someone would come up with a roux candle.

That smell, it just smells like home.” Cody usually makes the gumbo, Sam the potato salad. “In New Orleans, they like a thicker base, but in Pointe Coupee Parish, where I’m from, the gumbo is usually thinner. Not watery, but thinner. The flavor is still there. It’s just that the meat and the stock talk more,” says Cody. What goes in the gumbo depends on the time of year, and where the chefs — both avid fishermen and hunters — are. “When I’m in Grande Isle, I want seafood gumbo,” says Cody. “After a hunt, I want duck or smoked rabbit. My dad cooks a great squirrel gumbo. It’s one of the first things I ever learned how to cook. Cleaning squirrel is similar to cleaning rabbit — it just takes longer.” Whether it’s shrimp and oyster, crabmeat and fish, duck or rabbit, no bowl of the Carrolls’ gumbo is served without Sam’s tangy potato salad, which is made with relish and wet and dry mustard. “Some people think you should only eat potato salad with a sausage gumbo. But you boil and eat potatoes with crawfish. Seafood and

potatoes just make sense.” And so do Cody and Sam.

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