Desperizing a complicated Cajun recipe for today’s schedule
From
| October 28, 2009
In Kitchen Basics
Featured Recipe: Cajun Corn Chowder
Do you ever take a complicated recipe and whittle it down to fit your busy lifestyle? We’ve “desperized” hundreds of complicated recipes over the course of writing Desperation Dinners, and one lesson we’ve learned never seems to change:
It’s vastly easier to shorten a really good recipe than it is to try and make an already quick (and usually bad) recipe taste good. The chef who first taught us this lesson (from afar) was Paul Prudhomme.
Most of this New Orleans chef’s recipes are complicated with lots of spices. It’s not unusual for the recipes in his cookbooks to require two hours start to finish. Our goal for a Desperation recipe is 20 minutes start to finish, and most of the time, we can hit it -- even with a gourmet recipe from a premier chef.
This recipe for Cajun Corn Chowder is one of our original “desperized” recipes, and we love it still. Kudos to Chef Paul and his Louisiana heritage for our quick, easy and very delicious recipe! We'd love to hear about your experiences. Please leave any comments about recipes you’ve desperized after this blog post!
Related Recipes
Cajun Corn Chowder
March 07, 2009
Thanks for this soup's rich flavor go to New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme. We turned his two-hour recipe into this 20-minute version.
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