Cookin' on Hwy. 1

By Tim Acosta, Advertising & Marketing Director

When you grill boudin, you want to use medium heat. If you put it on a too-hot grill, the casing will bust right open. I grill it over indirect heat — that will keep the casing from splitting — somewhere around 350◦F. Grill each side of the boudin for 10 to 15 minutes to heat it up. The skin will also get a nice, crisp brown.

Boudin is one of Louisiana’s most celebrated sausages. But as any Cajun will tell you, boudin is not really sausage. It’s just another way to eat rice, which we eat and grow a lot of here. Louisiana is America’s third-largest rice-producing state. We plant more than half a million acres in the southwestern and northeastern parts of the state. Our own Rouses Rice is grown and milled in Crowley, Louisiana.

Boudin is made with cooked pork, rice, seasonings and spices — without the casing, it resembles rice dressing. Sausage is meat-based, with seasonings and spices, and sometimes other delicious things, but not rice.

Our butchers make our fresh sausage in-house, daily, as needed. Fresh sausage should be grilled over direct heat at up to 400◦F for 30 minutes. Turn fresh sausage occasionally so the bottom doesn’t burn.

In May, we have a limited-time Taco Sausage made with fresh pork, cheese, salsa and our own Chef Nino’s Make It Mexican seasoning. You’ve probably met Nino before at one of his popular cooking classes and demos held at Rouses Markets locations all over the Gulf Coast. Or maybe you’ve seen him on our cooking segments on TV stations like WALA in Mobile, Alabama. Chef Nino is a bit of a ham, which is perfect for sausage.

I like smoked sausage, too, because it has a delicious smoky flavor and smell. Smoked sausage grills differently than fresh because, for one thing, smoked sausage is already cooked in a smoker, so you are really just heating it up.

Different brands cook differently. Some have a higher fat content. Conecuh (pronounced Cah-NECK-ah) sausage is made with pork shoulder and bacon trimmings, and when it’s cooked, that extra fat translates into a juicer sausage.

Conecuh also has a higher sugar content, which helps the sausage char and crisp well. I recommend grilling Conecuh over indirect heat to avoid flare-ups, or putting it higher up on the grill, turning often to get a crisp and crackling casing. Double D is another one with a higher fat content — 14 grams per serving — so keep it away from the flames.

Smoked sausage is a must for several Cajun dishes — gumbo, jambalaya, white beans — and so is rice, by the way. We make our Rouses naturally Smoked Sausage with premium pork butts. It’s a denser sausage. I also like the local smoked sausages we carry. You know Best Stop for their boudin, but you should also try their andouille and smoked sausage; both are delicious. Lil Butcher Shoppe, which is out of Mississippi, has so many unique flavors. I go way back with brothers Tommy, Bobby and Steve Yarborough of Manda Fine Meats. Their grandfather and his brothers combined their Sicilian background and Cajun influences to start the company in 1947 — in much the same way Anthony J. Rouse, Sr., founded Rouses Markets in 1960.