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The Pittsburgh Dish
069 Coby Bailey and Real Louisiana Cooking
We spotlight Captain Coby Bailey, a Navy veteran, firefighter, and talented home cook from Lafayette, Louisiana who competed on season four of PBS's The Great American Recipe. Coby offers up a classic Cajun gumbo, step by step.
Hey Pittsburgh Dish listeners, Doug here. This week we're serving up a spotlight episode and kind of revisiting our summer recipe road trip, Yet again. When a really kind person that cooks from the heart comes into your life, it's nice to give them a little bit of shine. For me, that is Captain Coby Bailey of Lafayette, Louisiana. Coby is a Navy veteran, firefighter, husband, dad and an amazing home cook. Coby has competed on season four of The Great American Recipe on PBS and I'll just say he's done very well.
Doug:Personally, we've connected through social media, talked on the phone a couple of times and he was gracious enough to send me some of his Cajun seasoning. Let's give him a call and get his masterclass version of of his Cajun seasoning. Let's give him a call and get his masterclass version of a traditional Cajun dish. Good morning, hey. Good morning, Coby. How are you Doing? Fantastic. How are you? I'm doing really well. Thank you so much for taking some time to be on The Pittsburgh Dish. Well, thank you for having me. So, Coby, I'm calling for a couple reasons. Number one I want to thank you for this amazing package of seasonings that you just recently sent me. You have been doing, I believe, a YouTube channel and kind of creating some of these spices for a while. Is that right?
Coby:I do. I have a YouTube channel called Captain Coby's Cajun Cooking and what we do is I try to do a step-by-step kind of tutorial on how to make fantastic Cajun food Fantastic Cajun food.
Doug:You are a lifelong guy from Louisiana, Is that right? Oh yeah.
Coby:Born and raised. I tell everybody I can only hide in Louisiana. I talk kind of bad. So if I had to hide out anywhere I'd have to hide out over here in Louisiana.
Doug:Goodness Well, I love it. Another thing that we have in common, I mean a couple of things we both love to cook. We also have both competed on The Great American Recipe on PBS. I was on season three. You are being featured on season four. How has that experience been for you?
Coby:That was truly an amazing experience for me. It's filled with. Sometimes when you watch it on TV it kind of looks effortless and I think the film crew they do a great job with that. That's right. But it is a lot of pressure on you on there. But it's also exciting. I played sports all through high school and even outside of high school, so that competition, I'm very competitive. So it was, you know, in a different way. I mean, you're competing against other people, but not, you know, it's not rough and tough with it, no. But the great thing about this one is and I'm sure you had the same thing and we were such good friends on there we would I would say, hey, you need some season, come get some. If it's going to help, you come get it. You know, even the, even the film crew was like we love the Great American Recipe, we love this program. It's kind of nice, it's not so cutthroat.
Doug:That's right, not as yelling at you, that's right, I don't want that either. Yeah, everyone becomes kind of a mini family with that shared experience. I want to say a couple of things I really thought you brought forward was not only your family and your Cajun traditions, but really that tradition of service you've always had. You were a retired Navy veteran and then also a firefighter for well over 25 years, is that right?
Coby:It's been 27 years actually. I've been very fortunate in my life that I had a great group of friends that I hung around with in high school.
Coby:We were a lot like family and I think, have your kids a good group of friends that they hang around with. It was important to me. Yes, and I had that exact same thing when I joined the Navy. I mean those guys to me they're like brothers. I feel if I was in a bond and my car wasn't working, Jim from Michigan would come down here and work on my car if I went back home. I mean that. And even in the fire service, same thing. You know it's life and death with those guys. While you're in the fire you depend on each other, you know to do those things and at the end we go back, we have a good time and we cook a lot at the station. So a lot of those things are all centered around food. Not so much in the Navy, even though you have to kind of go mess, cranking what they call mess. You got to do mess duty for 90 days, so I've been cooking in every aspect of my life.
Doug:I was going to say I figured that food still brings all those good people together with you. I was wondering if you could you share one of your recipes for our listeners today.
Coby:I would love to, and one one thing I did when I got to the show. I wanted to make sure that when people think about Louisiana they always think about gumbo and crawfish and jambalaya. So I wanted to make sure I made those things on the show to showcase what people have a general idea about Louisiana and kind of the right way to do it. You know there's a lot of spinoffs of jambalaya and they put some crazy things in there. I would never, not never eat that, but I'm like man, I don't know about that, but everybody has their spin. So what I would like to do for you today is just give you a good traditional Cajun gumbo. All right, Chicken and sausage gumbo, that sounds perfect.
Coby:That is the most made gumbo down here in Louisiana. It's cheap. I did do a seafood gumbo on the show but it's a little pricey when you start getting the seafood. We all know that. You know kind of hurt the wallet a little bit. But chicken and sausage fairly simple. Okay, you have to start out with a roux. All you need is equal parts. So if you're going to do I always make two cups of flour, all-purpose flour with two cups of coconut oil and you can use whatever you like. I try to do the coconut oil. It just burns cleaner and hotter a little bit faster. I like that. And what you're going to do when you're making that roux you have to stir that continuously and you want to get that just a little bit darker than peanut butter.
Doug:Oh, that's a good tone. I like this. I like cooking where I get a visual.
Coby:Just realize this the darker your roux, the darker your gumbo. Okay, so if you go lighter, you're going to have a light gumbo. If you go a little bit darker, you'll have a darker gumbo. But a good rule of thumb is just a little bit darker than a peanut butter. Now you got to be careful and you got to stir this constantly so that you don't burn it. If you burn it, everything's going to taste burnt. So that's why you got to kind of stir constant, make sure your corners of your pot is getting stirred, you know pulled up all those things.
Coby:You got to stay on that. Okay, what else you need to do is have your two onions and one bell pepper cut. I would cut that before I start my roux, and that way, when you get your roux to the color that you want, you turn it off and you dump your vegetables in there immediately, kind of helping to soften those veggies.
Coby:Oh, it's going to soften. It's going to soften, but what it's going to do is going to stop that cooking process of that and it won't get you root darker and burn it. That's a great tip, right? So once you, once you get that done, you'll see it, it'll be cooking for another good five, maybe 10 minutes. You'll still start cooking down those veggies. Ok, then you can add, you probably about, I would say, a gallon of water and you stir that together and you're going to have to get that. You have to wait till that water starts boiling. Once the water's boiling, you can kind of you can kind of let it go a little bit, cause it's going to boil that root out. But if, if you let that water set or the root set on the bottom, it's going to burn on the bottom. So again, you can't constantly stir that until that water starts boiling pretty hard. Okay, once that's done, you have to let that boil for at least one hour, one hour minimum. The longer the better, but one hour minimum.
Doug:And right now we just have the roux, the water and those veggies, that's it.
Coby:Okay, wow. So while that's boiling, you need an hour. You're going to take your chicken and you're going to season it with some preferably some Captain Coby's.
Doug:You know we'll link to that, We'll remind folks of that, that link at the end. So yeah, we'll get the Cajun seasoning on it.
Coby:I like to put a little mustard. Mustard is a fantastic binder and it's so flavorful, so you don't have to drown it in mustard. Get a good mustard on your chicken, season it heavy with your Cajun seasoning and you're going to put that in the oven for one hour. Oh okay, so while your water's boiling, your chicken is also cooking in the oven for one hour, all right, and when you get to that one hour mark, you'll take your chicken out and what happens is you'll brown that chicken. If you don't brown your chicken, you can put it in raw. It's not wrong to do it that way. But once you let that chicken cook for longer than an hour, then it just starts falling apart in your gumbo.
Coby:Yeah, or you can do boneless, skinless, however you like, but that brown food, that roasty flavor too would add something to the gumbo, for sure, Absolutely.
Coby:So you're going to take your chicken, you're going to put it in your water mixture with the roux. You're watering your roux together. Okay, dump all that in there. And then you're going to take all the grease that's left over from that chicken, from the chicken. You're going to dump that in your gumbo too. Oh yes, and in your gumbo too, oh yes. So, and a lot of people are like, oh my God, what's happening? But you need that chicken fat and that flavor that's going to bring some flavor into your gumbo.
Doug:Yes.
Coby:Okay, so while that's cooking you go ahead and you get you a good smoked sausage whichever kind that you like, the smokier the better and you chop that up and you put it in your gumbo and you let that cook for one hour and then, right at the end, you take your grease out.
Doug:Okay, like skim it off the top, you mean.
Coby:Yeah, skim your grease off the top. It's going to have a good little, you know, maybe like a half inch of grease over the top. Okay, take that out. And then you taste your gumbo, you taste your gravy. You taste your gumbo, you taste your gravy, you taste your juice. It's like a soup. This is made like a soup, yes, and if you think you need more seasoning, well then you just add it, you season it to taste from there. Perfect, cook you some rice, yes, and serve that over rice.
Doug:It sounds amazing, Coby. Thank you so much. I want to make it for sure.
Coby:Well, I'll tell you what the first cold front that comes, probably in october, is. When we get a cold front, it's only going to get to probably 57 degrees over here. Yeah, yeah, all the gumbo pot is going to be rattling everybody's waiting for that one no cold spell to make a so good. But uh, I love that. Yeah, so that's, that's really how that goes. In fact, my wife made a gumbo a couple weeks ago. She said I'm just hungry for it. Yeah, even though it's 109 degrees heating index over here.
Doug:You guys got and you got the humidity down there, I'm sure, oh, it comes with it.
Doug:Coby, let's just remind folks again one more time. You have been competing on season four of the Great American Recipe on PBS. If folks have missed some of the season or they want to watch my season, season three, they can always stream it on the PBS app and they can also find you on YouTube at Captain Coby's Cajun Cooking and then we were talking about that seasoning. If folks want to actually buy your Cajun seasoning, I think it's Captaincobys. com, is that right?
Coby:That's right, and I a lot of people. There's so many different spellings of Coby. I am 54 years old. When I was a young kid nobody was called Coby. It was such a, I say unique name I kind of didn't like it at first. I love it now but since the fame of Kobe Bryant there's a. There's a lot of Coby's out there. I'll spell it for y'all it's C-O-B-Y, so it's Captain C-O-B-Y, cajun Cooking and same thing as CaptainCobyscom.
Doug:All right perfect.
Coby:If you want to go to the website. And we have all kinds of stuff. We have seasoning and pumpkin seeds and all kinds of things.
Doug:I've had those pumpkin seeds and they didn't last very long either. So thanks again. They're all pretty good.
Coby:I'd like to tell your listeners, if you don't mind, that if you're having a little trouble and you're not, you're not quite sure on how to make the gumbo, I do do a step-by-step how to make a root and I also do a step-by-step how to make the gumbo on my YouTube channel. So if you're not quite sure, you want to follow it. Gumbo on my YouTube channel. So if you're not quite sure you want to follow it, follow along and I promise you you'll have a fantastic gumbo.
Doug:Well, you know, we will post links to that on our blog as well, so people can find you and your step-by-steps Appreciate that. Yeah, Sounds perfect. Kobe Bailey, I just want to say thank you once again for taking some time to be on the Pittsburgh Dish, wishing you all the best and again thanks for all that Cajun cooking so delicious.
Coby:I love it and I hope to bring a little bit of Cajun culture up there to Pittsburgh where you at. I love it. Well, thank you so much.
Doug:Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. If you enjoyed the show, consider buying us a coffee for this episode or supporting the show monthly. You can find links to those options at the bottom of our show description and if you want to follow my own food adventures, you can find me on social media at Doug Cooking. That's our show for this week. Thanks again to all of our guests and contributors, and to Kevin Solecki of Carnegie Accordion Company for providing the music to our show. We'll be back again next week with another fresh episode. Stay tuned.
