Food

Quail with Watermelon Molasses and Cornbread Dressing

Lesson time 28:28 min

Mashama describes her family traditions around the holidays and suggests serving quail instead of turkey. She then demonstrates the preparation of her cornbread dressing, followed by the making of watermelon molasses, which she uses as a glaze.

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: Cornbread Dressing · Watermelon Molasses · The Quail · Searing · Plating

Mashama Bailey

Teaches Southern Cooking

James Beard Award–winning chef Mashama Bailey teaches you techniques and recipes for nutritious, flavorful Southern dishes—from grits to gumbo.

Preview

[GENTLE MUSIC] MASHAMA BAILEY: The reason why I'm doing this quail dish with cornbread dressing today is because it's a way that connects my ancestral cooking along with Black cooking in America, and it uses modern techniques that just elevate the whole dish. We always have cornbread dressing around the holidays, and we always have it with turkey, but you don't want to have turkey all year round. It's nice to have a little alternative to such a big bird, a seasonal bird. So you can have this cornbread dressing with the quail throughout the year. [GENTLE MUSIC] The first thing I'm going to tell you is we're making a cornbread dressing. This is a family recipe that I would love to share with you. It is one that every year I get better at doing, but it's something that my grandmother made for us and very few family members. My uncle and my mom really do a good job. I'm still learning, so this is a great opportunity to just let you know that we're always still learning. And this is the great part about life and great part about taking MasterClass, is because it's about elevating, and learning, and growing. So there's a few steps that you have to do beforehand in order to get to where we are right now. The first thing you need to do is bake off your favorite cornbread recipe. Bake it off. Let it cool. The next thing you're going to do is you're going to have some onions, some carrots, and some celery, and you're going to sautée it down. This combination is mirepoix. It's okay if it gets a little color. You want that. You want a little bit of caramelization. Once it gets to this phase, there's a little bit of color going on. Then you want to add some chicken stock on hand, and you want to deglaze your pan with the chicken stock. This is a chicken stock that we've reduced down, so it gives us a really deep, rich, chickeny flavor. Going to stir that in. Then the next thing you want to do is add some cream. So right now, we just incorporating the cream with the caramelized vegetables and making sure it all gets mixed up in together. We're keeping it at a very, very low heat, and this is going to act as the base flavor of this dish. We're going to add some fresh herbs, some thyme. You can also add dried thyme to this if you'd like. But we'll add four sprigs of thyme, that good old bay leaf that keeps us where we need to be. Stir and keep an eye on the heat. We don't want this to overflow. That cream is going to want to come up on you, so you want to keep the heat low. And as soon as you start to see it bubble up a little bit, you just want to give it a stir to cool it off. So now, we're going to move over to the cornbread part. We have our cornbread that's been cooked off, cooled. It's also been refrigerated, and we want to crumble it up. I like to do this with my hands. Sometimes you can cube it if you want and dry it overnight, but this is how my grandmother did it, so this is what I'm going to do un...

About the Instructor

Through her award-winning Savannah restaurant, The Grey, Chef Mashama Bailey has brought worldwide acclaim to the rich, layered traditions of African American Southern cooking. Now the James Beard Award–winning chef shows you traditional and reimagined techniques and recipes for nutritious, flavorful Southern dishes. From pork shank and collard greens to gumbo and grits, explore a world of history, texture, and taste.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Mashama Bailey

James Beard Award–winning chef Mashama Bailey teaches you techniques and recipes for nutritious, flavorful Southern dishes—from grits to gumbo.

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