As one of America’s best-known chefs, Paul Prudhomme has been featured in dozens of prime-time television and cable programs, and has been the subject of many magazine articles. A best-selling author, he has written nine cookbooks and produced six cooking videos.  But Chef Paul is just as well known for his extensive line of Magic Seasoning Blends® – packaged dry spices, rubs, bottled sauces and marinades that can be found on major supermarket shelves throughout all 50 states of the U.S. and in 29 countries around the world.

Food-service and Food Processors

Located in the outskirts of New Orleans, Magic Seasoning Blends is also well known for its extensive line of distinctive seasoning products packaged for restaurants, institutional foodservice, food processors and co-packing operations, which combined represent 65 percent of the company’s total sales volume. Packaging ranges from one-quarter of an ounce to 50-pound bulk containers, with an emphasis on consistent quality.

Recipe R&D for Food Processors

Originally set-up more than 25 years ago within the celebrity chef’s popular New Orleans restaurant – K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, it has expanded over the years into a every productive research and development kitchen, staffed by several chefs under the personal direction of Chef Paul, and has rolled out more than 10,000 recipes for herb and spice blends, creating custom flavor profiles.

“What is really great about herbs and spices, is that when they are balanced there are so many directions that you can go,” explains the Chef. “When one of our clients says they want a certain kind of chicken flavor, we will come up with four or five original samples for them to try. Then they pick out the one they want and we adjust it to their particular taste.”

To meet the increasing demand for its products, Magic Seasoning Blends recently consolidated its two separate manufacturing and warehouse operations into a new 125,000 square-foot facility.

“There is absolutely no end to developing herbs and spices,” says Chef Paul.  “And my real passion is to make something that is healthy and exciting for our customers.”

For more information on Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Magic Seasoning Blends, Inc., visit their website at www.chefpaul.com.

Jim McMahon writes on technology in food processing. He can be reached at jim.mcmahon@zebracom.net.

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Soon we will be in London for another event with Pat Chapman, England's King of Curries, on May 15 (read all about it, here).  Pat and I go back a long ways.  He's come to Albuquerque several times to make appearances at the Fiery Foods & BBQ Show and once created (with wife Dominique) a gigantic Indian feast at our house for about a dozen friends.  They still talk about that night.  Mary Jane can't forget it because she had to clean every pot, pan, dish, and utensil in our house!  Then, we took a culinary tour of India led by the Chapmans, which involved about a dozen Brits, two Yanks, a bus, and some of the best food we've ever eaten.  There was also the incident of me in a turban and a camel.  You can read about that trip here. Then, on a trip to England to visit the Chapmans, Pat, a former RAF jet pilot, drove us around Cornwall at nearly supersonic speeds on the left hand side of the road, which is always disconcerting to Americans.  We went to Land's End, the Eden Project, Mousehole (pronounced "Moussel"), and stayed at some great B&Bs with wonderful food (lamb shanks in wine and currant sauce, yum).  We might have had a few beers and some scotch--I forget!  And then there were the Indian restaurants.  Pat, as The King, was comped at every single one of these he took us to, and they were spectacular--the decor as well as the food.  Read all about that trip here.  So you can imagine how much we anticipate our upcoming visit.

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My book tour continues with appearances in New York City, Milan, and London.  On April 8th at 6:30pm I'm giving a multimedia presentation, "Growing Chiles in Containers" at the New York Horticultural Society, 148 West 37th Street. Details are still being worked out for the Milan appearance, but it will most likely be at a cooking school.  And on May 15 in London, it's "The Pope of Peppers Meets the King of Curries" at Cafe Spice Namaste, 16 Prescott Street. At this event, which runs from 10 am to 3 pm, Pat Chapman and I will both give multimedia presentations on chile (chilli) peppers, with Pat discussing chillis in Indian cuisine while I will discuss, as usual, chile gardening. The event includes a superb luncheon.  See here for more details on the London event.  It will be great to see Pat and Dominique again, as it's been years since they hosted us on our tour of England--mostly Cornwall. Read about that trip here. And here's a shot of me with chilli plants in the Temperate Biome at the Eden Project, one of the largest greenhouse complexes in the world.

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Apparently because of all my work over the years on chile peppers, the Swedish government has made me a "Hero of Sweden."  You can watch an inspiring video of the announcement here.

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Thursday, February 11 09:00 PM

Friday, February 12 01:00 AM

Thursday, February 18 08:00 PM

Friday, February 19 12:00 AM

With Americans eating more than 85 billion tortillas a year, Mexican food is very popular. But did you know that a donkey is a key to great tequila? Ever wondered how many times they refry refried beans? And what do sound waves have to do with guacamole? Watch host Bobby Bognar as he travels south of the border to help an old artist make a classic Mexican cooking dish from volcanic rock. On the high seas, he'll try to keep his cookies in a rough and tumble hunt for mahi mahi. And he visits El Pinto's salsa processing plant in Albuquerque and talks with Jim Garcia and John and Jim Thomas, "The Salsa Twins" as they process their best-selling salsa. And he'll show us how a fruit that resembles a human brain becomes a classic Mexican after-dinner drink.

Rating: TVPG

Running Time: 60 minutes

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My good friend, Rick Browne of "Barbecue America" on PBS, has launched a new project entitled A Century of Restaurants and because he has to travel to 100-year-old (and older!) restaurants all over the country and photograph them, he needs help funding the project.  He has found a publisher and has rounded up about 25% of the funds needed, but needs more help with the production of the book.  I am helping him with a donation and I urge everyone else to assist, especially restaurant people. Here's Rick describing it:

I'm starting an exciting new project that will involve a book and later a TV series about America's oldest restaurants. The book is tentatively titled: A Century of Restaurants, but that may change before it's published. To be specific we'll pick 100 century old restaurants from our list of 213 restaurants located in 50 states, and in fact some are 300 years old, a bunch are over 200, the rest have merely been serving up vittles for ten decades!

In a profession where the failure rate for restaurants is upwards of 60% after 3 to 5 years, these centenarian eateries stand way above their newer competitors. We're going to try and find out why they've outlasted hundreds of thousands of other restaurants by visiting these centenarians in person and talking to the owners, chefs, wait staff, and (perhaps most importantly) customers, as to why they think their restaurant has survived and flourished in one of the most competitive businesses in the country. Oh, and yes, we'll probably grab at bite at most of them as well.

I've launched the project on the Kickstarter website, a site which helps authors, movie makers, artists, and other creative folks find funding for their projects, and I would love you to go there, watch my short video, read about the project, and hopefully be inspired to throw a few bucks our way. Here is the web address.

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<At left, Mike ferries Renate Zoschke 
around on his cooler train.

We have just learned of the passing of Mike Cates, which is another blow to Hot Shots, the company that lost their leader, Dave Lutes, late last year.  Mike worked for Dave for many years and was a familiar face every year at the National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show.  We do not as yet have details about his passing, but it was unexpected.  Mike made a lot of friends at the show and would constantly entertain us with his antics.  He will be sorely missed.  Our condolences to his wife and family.

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Dave Lutes, owner of Hot Shots in Charlotte, North Carolina passed away on October 22, 2009 at the age of 59. Dave was born on June 3, 1950 in Dayton, Ohio. Dave and his wife Cathy founded Hot Shots, a fiery foods distribution company that ships products worldwide, in 1983. His longtime employee, Mike Cates, wrote to me: "A compassion for the industry and his fun nature and outgoing personality helped him grow the company into what it is today.  Big Dave fought his battle against pancreatic cancer with courage, passion and a positive mental attitude.  We'll miss you always, Big Dave."

Dave and his wife were longtime exhibitors in our National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show, and Hot Shots will continue to exhibit with us.  Dave was a perfect customer—loyal, fun to talk to, never complained, and was always positive, as Mike pointed out.  After I was told Thursday, I could not sleep for many hours, thinking about him.

Harald Zoschke comments:
Many fiery-foods manufacturers and vendors that we know owe a good portion of their success to "Big Dave" and his Hots Shots business.  Early 1997, Renate and I moved to Florida for our hot sauce adventure.  We started with two sauce products and basically no one to sell them to.  Until we met Dave Lutes, that is. Dave helped us out with advice, and more importantly, he picked up our products and got us started, allowing us to develop and add more sauces, which he sold. When we started our retail hot shop on the St. Petersburg Pier, he also became a trusted supplier, and it stayed that way when we took our "hot" business to Germany in early 2001, until the very present. While traveling the U.S. last week, we had a chance to briefly talk to Dave. He was already very weak, yet the first thing he said to us was "thank you for the order" (which we placed had a week before). He tried to stay on top of things until the very end.  We met Dave almost every year  at the Fiery Food Show, and besides business, we always had a good time with him. His generosity and great sense of humor will be missed.  It is somewhat ironic that Dave was always very lucky when playing blackjack, and now life has handed him such a bad hand of cards.

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I have been exchanging emails with chilehead Dexter Holland, lead singer of The Offspring, who just bought a copy of The Complete Chile Pepper Book. He writes, "Got the complete chile pepper book in the mail today...nice one! Looks great, very professional, very informative.  I might even try some growing now!"  I wrote back and suggested hydroponics under grow lights aboard his private jet!

I'll be off to the Bay Area November 10 for Round Two of Kingsford University.  I graduated a couple of summers ago when it was held in Arizona (see the article here), but apparently this one is graduate school.  Melanie Yunk of Melanie's Fine Foods will be a student with me and two of our instructors are the delightful Corinne Trang, author of Noodles Every Day: Delicious Asian Recipes from Ramen to Rice Sticks,

and Chris Lilly, author of Big Bob Gibson BBQ Book: Recipes and Secrets from a Legendary Barbecue Joint.  I shot this pic of him at the last Kingsford University class. Read all about him in this article.

And finally, my hobnobbing with the stars continued a few weeks ago when I was a Green Chile Stew Cookoff judge during Navy Week at El Pinto.  I was rough work to be paired as a judge with KOAT-TV news anchor (and incredibly cute) Shelly Ribando, but somehow I survived.

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For those of you who missed it, here is a link to "Extreme Conventions" that ran on the Travel Channel, as posted on You Tube by a fan, not by us.  It's great publicity and I really appreciate it, but it only portrays the superhot component of the show, which in reality is a very, very small part of the show, which focuses on gourmet spicy products that won't burn you out.  My niece Emily complained that I was not given enough coverage, and my 21-minute interview was cut to 8 seconds, but hey, the program was not about me, as I'm not particularly extreme.  At left are the "German Chilli Police" with the folks from CaJohn's Fiery Foods.

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