T-Boy’s Slaughter House featured on Cooking Channel

When Canadian chef and recording artist Roger Mooking came to Ville Platte the day before taping an episode of Cooking Channel’s “Man Fire Food” at T-Boys in Mamou a couple of months ago, he knew right where to go.

He went straight to a Ville Platte meat market, but it had just closed. “I knocked on the door and said, ‘Please let us in.’” And they did.

He took a good bit of crawfish back to his hotel room and just couldn’t stop eating it. He remembers it was perfectly spiced.

And that’s high praise indeed from someone who has articles and televised pieces on the Food Network, HGTV, The New York Times and many others, nationally and internationally.

His first trip to Evangeline Parish was to have an episode of the Cooking Channel’s "Man Fire Food" series taped.

The show will be on the Cooking Channel Sunday, August 11, at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, and on September 10, at 7:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.

The Cooking Channel promotion of the episode describes T-Boy’s as having “a big time smokehouse filled with five hundred pounds of Southern smoked favorites. Roger helps owner T-Boy fill the dark, cavernous room with sausages, tasso, ribs and jerky, and then they fire up the smoker. A selection of smoked meats is then stirred into a pot of T-Boy’s famous red beans and served over white rice.”

It’s no wonder people far beyond the parish’s boundaries have been noticing what T-Boy’s has been up to. Last October, T-Boy’s secured the First Plate title in the People’s Choice Best Boudin Award at the Boudin Cookoff in Lafayette, sponsored by BoudinLink.com, a web site that rates boudin from across the world.

T-Boy’s also got First Place in Best Traditional Boudin and First Place in Best Specialty Boudin for his “Special Jalapeno Boudin” recipe at the same event.

Those achievements were all over the Internet, and when the Cooking Channel found out about T-Boy’s, they knew they had to see it for themselves.

T-Boy Berzas said he had been in contact with the Cooking Channel production crew for more than two weeks before Mooking and the crew arrived. They went over every last detail, even to what color shirt T-Boy would wear, so as not to clash with what Mooking or others would be wearing on camera.

And the shooting itself took all day, from 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., with only a break for lunch.

T-Boy described Mooking as a “fun guy,” and they got to know each other between taping segments of the episode.

Mooking, during an interview last week, said he was fascinated by how T-Boy created his fresh, specialty and smoked meats, which Mooking described as “farm to table.” He was also impressed with how the smoke room was built, how the air circulated there and how the room’s hot spots were used. “Those were interesting techniques,” including how the spices were made and used, Mooking said. “I really like T-Boy,” and learning about the traditional methods he uses to prepare, smoke and spice meat.

T-Boy described the production crew as “hard working and professional.” When a segment of the episode was ready to be shot, the director would tell them what to talk about, and they all got to work.

Mooking, like T-Boy, is building his reputation. For him, it’s on television, in print articles and with his first cookbook, published in 2011. He’s also recording “Soul Food,” blending music and food.

But TV production was all a new experience for T-Boy, and he smiled as he said he hoped the parts where he might have seemed nervous would be edited out of the episode.

He also seemed a little nervous, in a good way, about how public exposure of his food products is going national.

First it was the national awards in Lafayette last October and several times before, now the Cooking Channel exposure, and soon, a new web site, www.tboysboudin.com will put his products on an on-line store where people all over the world will be able to see what’s there.

The new web site will have descriptions of the lines of food products T-Boy’s now sells, plus new items, like the new line of sauces and marinades available at T-Boy’s.

Looking forward, T-Boy is not sure what it will all lead to, but looking back, he said, “I started out 19 years ago without one dollar.”

He knows, as Mooking learned when he visited the parish, the success of T-Boy’s Slaughter House is due to the freshness of the meats he uses and not, as Mooking noticed, the curing of the meats that others use.

But T-Boy sees something else at play, along with working hard. “We are very blessed by God.”