Chef Kyle Ogden knows defending Alabama‘s title at the Great American Seafood Cook-Off is a tall order, but he’s confident it’s possible.
Ogden, the chef at Odette in Florence, recently won the 2024 Alabama Seafood Cook-Off, held in Orange Beach. That makes him the successor to Voyagers chef Brody Olive at Perdido Beach Resort, who he won in 2023 and became the second Alabama chef to be crowned the “King of American Seafood.”
The state victory is a great honor for Ogden and Odette, a go-to place for elegant and creative cuisine in Florence. She worked there as a sous chef when it opened in 2013. She then left for a few years and returned as chef de cuisine, working with Josh Quick, the restaurant’s original executive chef and now owner.
Alabama chefs taking that title two years in a row may seem like a long shot, but Ogden disagrees.
“I definitely feel a little bit of pressure,” he said. “I would like to bring him back. I feel like it would be pretty surprising if it were two years in a row for Alabama. I know some of the other states have won back to back, so it’s definitely not unheard of.”
To be exact, it has happened once in the event’s 20-year history. Louisiana chefs won in 2018 and 2019. One thing’s for sure: It’s going to be intense, as Ogden and others work to execute ambitious dishes while working against the clock in open environments with plenty of spectators.
Chef Kyle Ogden of Florence restaurant Odette won the 2024 Alabama Seafood Cook-Off with a dish titled “Spring Tide,” featuring pompano fillet with crab and shrimp mousse. (Billy Papa/ADCNR)
Ogden, with the help of sous chef Taylor Bradley, won the state cooking contest with a dish titled “Spring Tide.” She started with a pompano fillet, peeling back the skin and layering it with shrimp and crab mousse and a filling made with rosemary focaccia bread from Esther’s Eatery, a sister restaurant to Odette. “We press the skin side down, turn it over and bake the filling side down to finish the fish,” she said.
Then he took arugula from Kodachrome Gardens, a nonprofit community garden located near the University of North Alabama campus, and made a pesto, prepared a Fresno chili emulsion, and served the steak on a bed of Gai Lan (known as Chinese broccoli or Chinese broccoli). kale) that had been cooked in a version of agrodolce, an Italian sweet and sour sauce, in this case made with local honey and balsamic vinegar. She decorated everything with flowers from Gai Lan.
“There are a lot of different textures, a lot of different flavors,” he said. Although elaborate, the dish reflects Odette’s cooking, she said.
“We try to strike a great balance with a lot of our dishes,” he said. “We try not to do anything too heavy. We use a lot of vinegars, a lot of vinaigrettes and sauces like that. We tend not to make too many thick cream- or butter-based sauces here.”
These types of competitions allow chefs to play around and go to unusual extremes, resulting in some self-imposed challenges. For her 2023 win, Olive started with a humble oak-roasted crab sail catfish. That meant she had to come up with a way to grill in a competitive environment.
Ogden said he knows he will have to make some changes for the Great American Seafood Cook-Off, which will be held in early August in New Orleans. For one thing, he won’t have fresh Kodachrome Gardens produce on hand, and even if he did, there would be different things in season.
“I’m going to try to replicate it as much as I can,” he said. “My production will be a little different, simply because they won’t have the same thing growing in August. I have to contact you, my fish supplier, and see if the pompano will still be good that season. But I’m going to stick with the same idea of layered fish and the same flavor components. “I will make the agrodolce and the vegetables and the chili emulsion again.”
He hopes to serve some version of the dish at Odette’s as well, although things have been a little hectic lately. When she returned home from the state competition, she had to deal with Mother’s Day and UNA graduation. “We’ve been firing on all cylinders ever since,” she said.
Ogden said he enjoyed the state competition and believes such challenges benefit both restaurant customers and the chefs competing. Among other things, he said, he helps familiarize chefs with the possibilities of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico.
“It definitely came from what we do here. Every weekend we have some kind of special fish, and probably 95% of the time it’s Gulf fish,” she said. “Unless we get them scallops or something, that’s not really available in the Gulf. That’s why we work with the product weekly.
“My goal with the dish we made was to turn it into something a little more elevated,” he said. “But as similar as possible to what we do in the restaurant weekly. You know, I focused a lot on seafood, but I also focused a lot on things that went with seafood, that accentuated seafood. “We have a really great working relationship with a couple of local farms and with Kodachrome Gardens, we have a good working relationship with them.”
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