-Funding for "Louisiana Coastal Cooking" was provided by... ...and by the Plaquemines Parish Tourism Commission.

A short drive from New Orleans, Plaquemines Parish offers a diverse variety of fishing, fresh seafood, rich history and environmental activities in Louisiana's Delta Country.

Learn more at visitplaqueminesparish.com.

-This time on "Louisiana Coastal Cooking," we'll take a deep dive into the Louisiana blue crab, a prized ingredient in the culinary traditions of the state.

We'll take a trip to Bayou Pointe-au-Chien for an up-close look at the coveted soft-shell stage of the crustacean.

We'll also get a taste of three dishes that demonstrate the versatility of blue crabs, a true seafood delicacy.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Blue crabs are one of the most fascinating creatures in Louisiana's waterways.

These wide-ranging crustaceans can be found in pure freshwater bodies upriver from the coast, in the brackish waters of the marsh, and in the salty seawater of the Gulf.

Harvested both recreationally and commercially, blue crabs are an important part of the state's seafood industry.

Crabbing is a time-honored activity in the wetlands when the water is warm and the crabs are active.

We're off to Thibodaux to visit the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University for our first crab dish, prepared by Chef Jana Billiot, one of the instructors in the culinary program.

Jana's hometown is Johnson Bayou in Cameron Parish.

The remote community's location along the Louisiana Gulf Coast makes it vulnerable to devastating hurricanes.

Through the years, storms have depopulated Johnson Bayou on Louisiana's Creole Nature Trail.

-The house I grew up in, is 11 miles from the Texas border, and also right on the coast of the Gulf.

Johnson Bayou was thriving.

Back when I was in school, we had close to about 200 students, and from what I understand currently, right now, there's around 50.

Our house was 11 feet off the ground, the house we grew up in, and it withstood Hurricane Rita.

However, Hurricane Ike took their home entirely and now they still live there on their property, but they live in an RV and they have a big barn, and they still do a lot of hunting and fishing.

And they've also bought a house in North Louisiana where they escape to when it's hurricane season and time to go.

My Meemaw still lives in Johnson Bayou, along with quite a few great uncles and great aunts.

In fact, I think they're probably a majority of the population that's down there.

We have a lake on one side, and then we have the Gulf on the other, so we really can't catch a break as far as the rising water, be it salt, be it fresh.

We need that brackish water.

We need that salinity in those estuaries for all the seafood to hatch and lay and grow and thrive.

So growing up in Johnson Bayou, I actually worked at a seafood market.

I started working there when I was 14, and every morning, we'd get on the boat 4:30, 5:00 AM.

And I was the crab caller.

So my boss would run the traps, and then I would call the crabs -- the number ones, the number twos, the selects.

And then, after we'd run all the traps, we'd go back and clean up, and I'd operate Holly Beach Seafood Market.

That's where I worked.

Crab is just one of my all-time favorite foods.

It is my favorite food.

Boiled crab, crab stew that my Meemaw makes to this day, some of my favorite food to eat and make.

-Chef Jana showcases the delicate sweetness of fresh crab meat in burrata and crab stuffed ravioloni.

-Today we're going to be making a crab and burrata ravioloni.

And when I say ravioloni, I mean one large ravioli here.

So this is going to be a huge stuffed beautiful jumbo lump crab and burrata ravioli.

And I'm going to serve it with a sauce that's very similar to like a bouillabaisse.

So it's going to be saffron infused, a bit of tomato, shellfish fortified.

And we're actually going to mill some of the fish scrap in there as well.

So think of like a Provencal, French style fish soup.

That's going to be our sauce base for our ravioli today.

We're going to begin with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil.

I'm gonna go ahead and start with some of my aromatics here.

I have onion, leek, celery, and garlic.

We're going to sauté first.

Now I'm going to go ahead and put in my saffron threads.

I'm going to go ahead and add my roasted crab bodies.

I took these clean crabs.

You can buy these at the grocery store in the frozen department.

Or you can go and catch them in the bayous like we do back home.

And then I put them in a 425-degree oven for about 15 minutes.

They should turn bright orange, and you should smell the roasted shellfish in the air when you decide to pull them out.

This should be very aromatic.

I've got... ...some salt-cured anchovy fillets that we're going to add.

As well as some fish scrap.

Ideally it would be like a whitefish, maybe a drum, perhaps a redfish, speckled trout.

I've got some bay leaf, parsley, and thyme going in now.

Now I'm adding brandy.

Quite a bit of white wine.

I've got some San Marzano tomatoes here that I'm going to add.

And a shellfish stock that was premade.

You could use crab stock.

You could use fish stock from the store, or you could use those bones in that scrap and those shrimp peelings and those crab bodies.

Gonna season it a bit here with some granulated garlic salt-pepper, cayenne.

So we're going to go ahead and bring this up to a boil.

And then we're going to let it simmer for about an hour and reduce by about a quarter.

And then that's when we'll know it's time to go ahead and puree it.

I'm going to focus now on our ravioli.

So we're going to start our filling.

Here I have a pound of jumbo lump crab meat.

I've got some Parmesan, thinly sliced green onions, burrata cheese, which is going to be like a mozzarella.

Very light and delicate and creamy in flavor.

Then we have a bit of mascarpone and some sour cream.

You're going to add this to your mixer.

However, you could definitely do this in a bowl with an offset spatula.

So I'm adding a bit of seasoning, some salt and pepper.

As you can see inside the bowl.

So we're going to add some diced white bread here I removed the crust.

And now I'm just going to slowly mix it together.

So we're just looking to break up that burrata and fold in that crab meat.

All right, this looks good.

This is a semolina and saffron pasta dough.

We've left the saffron threads in, so they've left a very pretty kind of, I don't know, again, like a sunset.

I guess this whole dish sort of reminds me of the sunsets in Holly Beach and Johnson Bayou.

So I'm going to take my pasta dough, and I'm going to go ahead and grab some of my filling.

You can purchase premade dough as well.

You don't have to make the pasta dough yourselves at home, but I really encourage you to because pasta dough is so simple.

So now that I've got my filling on here, I'm going to go ahead and take just a little bit of water and kind of trace around that boundary where I'm going to overlap another layer of pasta over the top.

Okay.

We want to make sure that we've got that seam nice and tight, tightly sealed.

And now I'm going to go ahead and cut it.

It looks like a crab shell.

I love it.

So there's our ravioloni.

All right.

My pasta water is boiling.

Gonna go ahead and drop my ravioloni.

While this cooks, we're going to go ahead and prepare our sauce for our pasta.

I'm going to start with just a little bit of butter.

Here we have our crab sauce that I've pureed and I've strained through a fine mesh sieve.

And that's going to be added as soon as we sauté some of these aromatics here.

We've got our mushrooms.

Any kind of wild forest mushroom would be quite lovely, along with some red bell pepper and a little bit of onion.

And now I'm going to add some of the julienne oven roasted tomatoes.

-The tomatoes have been peeled, seeded, seasoned, and slow roasted in a 225-degree oven.

-My pot is nice and hot.

My onions are translucent, my bell peppers cooked a bit.

So I'm going to go ahead and start adding my crab sauce.

Season a little bit.

Ravioli's looking lovely.

Sauce is really reduced, probably by about half.

So I'm mounting in some butter.

And this is going to cause our sauce to thicken.

Okay, so this is looking good.

We're going to go ahead and pull our ravioli out.

Beautiful yellow saffron color.

We'll coat it in our sauce.

Kind of just bathe it in that.

Just kind of scattering the mushrooms and the onions and the bell peppers around the ravioli.

Garnish it with a bit of Parmesan.

We have some fresh chive and a little bit more of our julienne oven-dried tomato for garnish.

And here you have it, our crab and burrata ravioloni in a crab sauce.

A tribute to the blue crab.

-We're headed to Terrebonne Parish to meet Donald Dardar, second chairman of the Pointe-au-Chenes Indian Tribe.

As the rapidly eroding coast of the Terrebonne Basin threatens the French-speaking tribes community and sacred sites, the tribe is working with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana to create protective living shorelines made from oyster shells recycled by New Orleans restaurants.

Today, the commercial fisherman is joined in the kitchen of the tribe's headquarters on Bayou Pointe-au-Chenes by New Orleans restaurateur and CRCL supporter Dickie Brennan for pot-fried crabs.

-Today we're on the Bayou Pointe-au-Chien where the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe building, and I'm second chairman for Pointe-au-Chenes Indian Tribe.

And we're getting ready to pot fry some crabs.

I don't know if you all ever had that or not, but that's something that was, to me, it looked like it's come from down the Bayou Pointe-au-Chien here, because otherwise we talk to a lot of our friends on that end, and they never had them.

-Growing up in New Orleans, and all I've done is hunt and fished everywhere up and down the coast.

And like you're saying, a bayou over, they don't even know about this.

I've never heard of this.

And first of all, these blue crabs are so beautiful.

-They come from down the Bayou Pointe-au-Chien here, just in the ponds.

But we could get blue crab right here in the bayou, so they're all over.

-Yeah.

Crabs are everywhere.

-I lucked out, my brother had some in one of his holding pens on the bayou side, so that's how we got the crab.

-You took off the leg?

You just -- -Oh, yeah, I cleaned them.

Whenever you go to take the back off of a bull crab, a lot of them, that's the only way you seen them.

And then they got all the gills on them.

-Yeah, you take them off.

-I cut the legs off, and then, take the back and wash them and clean them and get ready for the pot.

-Yeah.

They definitely clean beautiful.

-Mm-hmm.

-And tell us about the orange.

-That's the difference between the male and the female.

-Right.

So the orange is the roe.

-Mm-hmm.

-But I like that.

I like that beige that's in there.

That's the fat.

-Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

-And then we got some roe in that.

It's gonna -- It's gonna be like she crab soup.

-Yeah, it'll be good.

They're all good.

-So you just laying them on top?

-Mm-hmm.

I usually put a whole layer around my pot.

The first layer.

And then I'll add a layer of salt because I'll never measure.

I just put it to where I think it's right.

-That's the difference between cooking and baking.

-Yeah.

-We don't measure anything, cooks.

-No.

And then I put me another layer.

Two dozen of crabs right here.

-So when do you typically crab?

What times of the year are you crabbing?

-Crabbing, you do that year round.

A lot of our fishermen here, they crab year round.

-Yeah.

That's a beautiful picture.

-Mm-hmm.

-There's nothing like fresh seafood.

-They're ready to put on the stove.

Now I'm gonna add my cooking oil in there though.

The crabs are gonna make their own water and then they're gonna, like, steam.

-Yes.

-You can fry with onion or without.

-In Louisiana, all we do is put onion in everything.

-Yeah, I usually put the cover on them, that way it, like, steams them and boils them, in a way, first.

-So you brine, you roast them.

-Yeah.

After about, oh, I guess maybe 15 minutes or whatever, I'm gonna take the cover off and then it's just gonna fry all that water out.

-When we were kids, my mother and my aunt would take me and my cousins and we'd go crabbing, and we didn't have nets.

We had a string with a pipe fitting tie and a chicken neck.

-Yeah.

-And we'd drop down about eight feet, and you'd pull it up slow, it was brackish water.

And then, when you said, "Oh, I got one," and the older cousin had a net, would come over with the net, catch it, and we'd fill up, you know, a bunch, and then we'd take them home and we'd steam 'em.

We'd boil them.

-Yeah.

-And then we'd put them in like an Italian dressing my Aunt Claire used to make.

And it would sit in that all day, all afternoon.

And that night, man, all we did, we just sat at big tables outside and all we'd do is pick crabs, eating crabs.

That's good, slow living to sit around and pick crabs.

We gotta figure how to make that popular again.

-Yeah.

-Sitting at a table and sharing food.

is the best thing you can do.

Oh, man.

That's golden.

-Mm-hmm.

-So, Donald, you got the color you want now.

-They look like they're done to me.

Ready to eat.

-That's beautiful.

Those onions are so perfectly caramelized.

Beautiful dish.

We should eat some.

-Yeah.

-Dickie and Donald sit down with Donald's wife, Teresa, for a traditional meal of pot-fried crabs and shrimp served with rice.

-[ Speaks native language ] The food's ready, so let's eat.

-C'est bon.

-When blue crabs molt, their shells become soft and papery so the crustaceans can be eaten whole.

No need to pick meat from the shell.

Valued for their delicate texture and buttery sweetness, there's a strong demand for soft-shell crabs, but their labor-intensive limited run makes them a high-price commodity.

We crossed the bayou to meet crab fisherman Russell Dardar, the brother of Donald Dardar.

Russell dabbles in soft-shell crabs, producing enough for the family to eat, but not enough to sell, at least not yet.

Soft-shell crab harvesting is a painstaking process that involves transferring crabs into different holding tanks.

Molting often takes place at night, which requires trips to the tanks after dark.

Also needed is a keen eye.

-This one's not ready right now, but it's going to be swapped.

Changing out probably later on tonight.

Because it's purple, purple.

I mean, you gotta watch that and then you can't put them -- If they're too far, the other one's going to eat them if you don't watch them.

And this one's gonna change later.

Now, you see this one here?

It's cracked.

And, uh, he's going to be coming out of the shell.

When it's cracked like this, it's going to be changing.

It all depends how fast they change, but the next hour or so, it's going to be out.

-Russell shares two crab leases with family members and sells blue crabs at market.

The rising waters of the Terrebonne Basin have had an impact on the lives and livelihoods of the Pointe-au-Chien Tribe.

-The last few years after the storm, the crabs had their own place to go change, and they wouldn't come in the cage.

and it was harder to catch.

But now all that stuff is washing away, and now you're catching a few.

But I don't know for how long.

The difference, it got a lot different.

You almost can't remember what you used to pass at, you know?

If they had a old stump at one spot, now it's gone.

I was catching oysters on the outside of my oyster lease.

Now I can't grow them.

They start, but then, after that, something kills them, and I gotta be on the inside.

And that's coming further and further.

And pretty soon, this will be all gone.

-Our final dish is prepared by Chef Erik Nunley.

As chef educator for Chefs on Boats, Erik leads immersive educational experiences into the Mississippi River Delta for restaurant and food service workers, connecting them with the coastal habitats of regional fisheries.

Breakfast gets a Louisiana seafood twist in Chef Erik's soft-shell crab breakfast toast.

-So we have some beautiful soft-shell crab here.

Soft-shell crab is very, very popular here in the state of Louisiana.

It offers this very beautiful, earthy seafood-type taste, right?

It's almost a mix between like your lump crab and almost a shrimp almost.

Best time for soft-shell crab is summertime.

They shed in early spring and also shed in early fall.

There is a little prep you have to do.

So we cut off the little flapper here.

Also, underneath each side are going to be their gills, right?

You can't eat these.

So we're going to actually take these off.

Get you a pair of kitchen scissors.

So, boom.

East side, they are done.

So now your soft-shell crab is all prepared and ready to be eaten.

So to start our breakfast toast, we're going to get our eggs prepared.

I love using brown eggs.

We're going to pour in a little half and half.

And then we're going to give this a... quick stir.

Make sure our pan is nice and hot.

Tablespoon of butter.

Add in our shallots, our garlic.

We have a bay leaf, sage, and green onions.

And also have some fresh thyme that we're going to use.

Now for our soft-shell crab.

A little salt on both sides.

Some Creole seasoning.

And our pepper.

And we're going to throw our soft-shell crab right in.

Put the bottom side down first.

And we're just looking for color, right?

Just like when you cook most seafood, you're just looking for the nice color.

It's going to start turning nice and pink.

Again, these herbs are going to give it a beautiful taste.

The sage is going to give it a little sweetness.

The bay leaf is going to give it some nice earth tones.

See, it's almost ready.

I'm just going to add a little bit of butter to finish it off.

And look at this beautiful, beautiful color that it gives us.

So now I can move on to my favorite part.

So we're going to make some nice fluffy, fluffy scrambled eggs to go right on top of this.

We're going to make a nice soft scramble.

I find a trick with eggs is controlling the heat.

So I'm going to start this on a nice medium heat.

I'm gonna start off with a tablespoon of butter again.

And give a good pour in.

And we're going to stir this entire time.

You want them nice and soft, fluffy peaks.

Let's go, I'm going to quickly add in our salt and pepper.

And we're going to be stirring.

This recipe I've kind of taken from a couple different other things like a an egg Benedict, like a nice scrambled breakfast toast, things like that.

Most of these recipes, you can always kind of interchange different things.

So you're starting to get some nice peaks starting to form.

Again, keep on moving your spatula around.

So we are almost there.

The pan is still hot enough that it's still cooking the eggs for us, and we're actually there where we want to be at.

That's a beautiful, nice, soft scramble.

So our third component and this is our bread.

Have some beautiful rustic sourdough, freshly cut.

Just a little butter.

And we're gonna give this a toast.

-The bread toasts quickly under the broiler.

-So let's build.

We have our toast here.

I'm going to give it a little base of a little rémoulade sauce.

All type of goodness going on here.

Have these beautiful heirloom tomatoes.

Do a little layer effect here.

Our soft-shell crab.

Our beautiful eggs we made.

I have some Parmesan, and we will finish off with some herbs and some parsley and chives.

A little salt, a little pepper.

There we go.

We have a soft-shell crab breakfast toast.

-Louisiana's vast wetlands are home to a large population of blue crabs, making the state's commercial crab fishery one of the largest in the nation.

The culture of Louisiana is intimately tied to its seafood, but land loss and strengthening hurricanes have battered coastal communities, threatening cherished traditions.

-And it's concerning that my children won't be able to have the experiences that I had when crabbing with a string off the side of the road or down a bayou somewhere.

So I think it's important that we protect what we have so that later generations can have the same experience as we did.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -You can find recipes for all of the dishes in this series, chef profiles, and more information about "Louisiana Coastal Cooking" by visiting wyes.org.

Funding for "Louisiana Coastal Cooking" was provided by... ...and by the Plaquemines Parish Tourism Commission.

Nature, tradition, and culture come together in Plaquemines Parish, where the Mississippi River and the Gulf meet in Louisiana's Delta Country.

Learn more at visitplaqueminesparish.com.