Billeaud’s Grocery
111 E Main St.
Broussard, LA 70518
(337) 837-6825

"When I was younger, you know, it was a treat to go get boudin. We probably did that once every couple weeks or so. And then when I was driving, when I was in high school, we’d go—me and my buddies would go hunting or fishing; we’d always stop and get a link of boudin on the way back." – Billy Billeaud

A Cajun through and through—from his surname to his passion for fishing­—Billy Billeaud decided as a young man to transition from the profitable fast-food business to the more regionally focused grocery, meat market, and fuel stop that he has been running for the past 17 years. At Billeaud’s Grocery, you’ll find tubs of hog lard beside cans of Steen’s cane syrup; jarred roux beside Tony Chachere’s gumbo mixes; packets of beef jerky smoked on the premises beside T-shirts emblazoned with a crackling-maker’s motto: “Pop ‘Em When They’re Hot.” Billy doesn’t consider himself a cook, though with the advice of trusted friends and tasters, he developed the recipes for many of the store’s most profitable products, including its boudin, jerky, and rice dressing. Billeaud’s boudin is made with medium-grain rice, boneless pork butts, pork liver, an array of seasoning vegetables, and the dry seasoning mix that also flavors roasts and chops on sale in the store’s meat case. Billy doesn’t eat much boudin anymore, but when he does, his preference is to throw it on the barbecue pit at home, which imparts a smoky flavor and favorably dries out the casing.

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Billy Billeaud
Date: August 20, 2007
Location: Billeaud’s Grocery—Broussard, LA
Interviewer & Photographer: Sara Roahen

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Sara Roahen:  This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, August 20, 2007. I’m in Broussard, Louisiana, with Mr. Billeaud at his business Billeaud’s. So if I could get you to say your name, please, and your birth date, that would be great.Billy Billeaud:  Okay, my name is Billy Billeaud, and I was—my birthday is September 13th—oh you want—September 13, 1960.

Thank you. Maybe you can just tell me, to start out, how you got into the boudin business?

I bought this store 17 years ago, and my background prior was fast-food. And I know the profit margin in fast-food is much greater versus groceries. So the first thing I did was start plate lunches over here as a way to, you know, just make better margins. And the second thing was hotdogs, and then the third I think was the boudin. And one of the meat companies that delivered to me also wholesaled boudin; that’s where we bought it prior. The guy that delivered was—I can't even think of his name, but I respected his opinion and I kept changing my seasoning. And he gave me some ideas on different ingredients to add and so forth. And we finally got it where we thought it was ideal after about two months of trial and error, and I’ve never changed—altered the recipe since.

I’d like to go back to the boudin eventually, but maybe you can describe the store overall.

We’re a small community grocery store with a real good meat market, and I’ve developed a fast-food, you know—. I’m here to make a profit, so—about a 25-percent profit margin in groceries or less; the meat department does probably 35-percent profit, but cooked prepared foods are where the real profits are. But our biggest deals would be boudin, crackling, plate lunches, and hotdogs—well it’s right at 42-percent of our sales. Last year I bought a smokehouse to start making beef jerky, and I’m hoping that will become number five on the big player of profit-making.

Can you tell me some things that are in the regular rotation of your plate lunches?

Mondays she always has beef steak and chicken stew, black-eyed peas, peach cobbler, you know rice and gravy—that stuff. Monday is a good seller. Thursdays, we normally have pork roast or beef roast, and those are real good sellers. The other days, you know Friday we’ll have barbequed chicken or barbequed pork chops and—as one of the meats—and then we’ll have étouffée or shrimp stew as the other.

When people order boudin, like for lunch let’s say, will that be their only lunch, or do they order a plate lunch and boudin, or is there some kind of pattern?

Some people get a couple links of boudin, maybe $2.00 worth of crackling; some people order a link of boudin and a hotdog; some people get a plate lunch and a link of boudin. The bulk of our sales tend to be in the mornings prior to lunch. We’ll probably sell 65-percent of our boudin in a day by 10 o’clock in the morning, and the other 35 throughout the rest of the day, lunch and evenings included.

Salesmen are probably our biggest purchasers of boudin. We have salesmen come in here now; they call in advance: Give me three five-pound boxes of boudin, or, Give me two ten-pounders, give me 30 hotdogs and five-pounds of boudin—that kind of stuff. All morning long we’re selling bulk boudin, hot boudin. These salesmen bring it to their shops where the laborers eat—have that break at 9:00 or 10:00, and they’ll eat a link of boudin or whatever.

What kind of salesmen do you mean?

Oil field salesmen. You know this whole area is oil field driven, and it’s nothing but service—service companies up and down Highway 90. You know the oil fields it what brings all the money in, so we’re trying to capitalize on the oil field money.

So they butter them up with the boudin?

Oh yeah. [Laughs] I don’t know if they’re buttering up to get sales or they’rethanking them for the sales that they’ve already gotten, but they sure are good customers.

Did boudin play a part in your growing up?

We ate boudin. I was never—I don’t eat the stuff now. I bet you I haven’t eaten the equivalent of a whole link in 10 years. I guess just making it so much—. When we first started I was, you know—when I was—didn’t have much volume, I was the head boudin-maker and the crackling cook and the hotdog server and the cashier and everything. So I think so many years of making it, it’s gotten to where I really don’t have any desire to eat it. But when I was younger, you know, it was a treat to go get boudin. We probably did that once every couple weeks or so. And then when I was driving, when I was in high school, we’d go—me and my buddies would go hunting or fishing; we’d always stop and get a link of boudin on the way back.

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How often do you make crackling?

Oh every day, Monday through Saturday; we don’t make them on Sunday. But my crackling guy—this is the hot part of the year, so crackling and boudin volume is kind of down. He cooks probably eight cases of crackling—eight to ten every day now. In the wintertime he’ll cook 10 to 14 cases every day.

So it’s a case of what—what is that product called?

It’s pork bellies, the same thing they make bacon out of, but it has the skin on it. We trim a little bit of the excess meat off, and then we’ll slice—cut them diagonally or long ways—and then come back and cut them in one-inch squares—cube it. And you try to make a one-inch square crackling, ‘cause that tends to cook the absolute best…If it’s any larger it’s hard to get the fat in the middle cooked. If it’s smaller, then it cooks too fast and the skin doesn’t cook properly. I don’t know. I’ve tried a bunch of different sizes, and the one-inch square seems to be the actual perfect size for my cooking.

And so it sounds like your crackling still has some meat on them, versus—?

Oh yeah, the crackling have a lot of meat on them. In fact they have so much—some of the bellies that we get in have so much that we trim them, and we use the trimmings to make boudin. We’ll cook probably 25 cases of boudin meat a week, and three of them would be—or four of them would be trimmings from the crackling. So as the guy is trimming the crackling, we’ll fill up a box to make it weigh 60 pounds, which is—I kind of centered my recipe around a 60-pound case of boneless pork meat.

Is that like Boston butt or—?

It comes from the butt, but we buy it boneless, you know. It’s boneless butts, basically what it is.

Without divulging any secretes, could you take me through the process of making a batch of boudin?

Certainly. We’ll use a 60-pound box of boneless pork meat, and it comes in pretty good sized chunks, so you cut it up a little bit to help it cook faster; and 10-pounds of pork liver, and then from there we’ll add onions, bell pepper, and celery and water and boil it until it’s completely cooked and falling apart. And then we’ll take it out of the pot and grind the meat, and at the same time we’re cooking rice—so for 60 pounds of pork meat I’m cooking 60 Hitachi cups of rice, and we have these big gas rice cookers. And the way I kind of developed the recipe was one cup of rice per pound of meat. While—when we take the meat out and grind it, we’ll then skim all the grease off of the boudin, the juice that’s left in the pot, and then we’ll add the seasoning to the rice—to the juice. And after we get that dissolved real well, then we’ll put the rice in, and then when the rice all breaks up you kind of stir it around to get all the rice seasoned completely. There’s no more clumps or anything in there. Then you add the meat back in after it’s been ground and stir that up until everything is a consistent texture. And then we’ll put it in the sausage press.

And so you make kind of a stock as you’re boiling the meat?

Correct, definitely. All the flavor comes out of the juice from the meat, but you know we do skim all the grease off. The grease actually has the most flavor, I think, but it sure is nasty looking, and I couldn’t sell that, so we get rid of all that.

The onions and the celery and the bell pepper, they get sent through the meat grinder also with the meat?

Correct, they’re cooked down to almost nothing with the meat, and then they’re ground. So all of the flavor is there; you just don’t see it ‘cause it’s—once it goes through the grinder it kind of disappears, I guess. And then we’ll add green onions that are not ground. We chop the green onions at the end and add that in there when we’re adding the meat.

Is it a certain style of boudin, or is it regional or how did—I don’t know, what characterizes it.

You know I don’t—I know different places do it differently. Some places like it real hot; some places like a lot, you know—some people make it with a lot more rice; some people make it with a lot more meat. I think we’ve found a real good consistency. I’ve been accused of having too much meat in my boudin, you know. Some people claim it’s too rich. But Dr. C and Coach T gave us an A-plus, so—; they’re the Boudin Linksters [www.boudinlink.com]. I like the way it is. The customers apparently like it, and I don’t see us really changing it. I don’t know how we can improve on it.

You can't please everyone.

Correct, you surely can't. Some people do want more seasoning, and then there’s other people that say it’s just right, and it’s other people that say it’s, you know, too hot. Like my mother doesn’t eat it ‘cause she can't take any seasoning. So you know, you really—ours is kind of a middle of the road. It’s seasoned enough to where, after about your third or fourth bite you’ll want something to drink. And I try to—the guy I used to work for in fast-food, his family has got a long history of fast-food, and they own Popeye’s franchises and Mr. Gatti’s and this and that and everything else, and he told me once something is seasoned properly if at your third bite you’re desiring something to drink. And so I’ve always tried to season everything according to that, and it seems to really work well.

What kind of rice do you use? Is it—what size grain?

We use the Water Maid short grain—or medium grain it’s called now. It used to be short grain, but it’s—for whatever reason they changed it to medium grain. Once or twice we’ve run into rice problems and could not get the bulk—we buy it in 50-pound sacks; couldn’t get it in and had to from a different supplier, get long grain rice, and it just is different. It’s nasty. It makes the boudin dry, the rice shows in the casing. It looks like—I don’t know, it looks gross and it doesn’t taste near as well, and it definitely—the long grain rice will dry it out. I guess it absorbs more moisture than the medium grain does.

Do you have customers—or do you know of people—who, after they buy boudin, they don’t just eat it in the link but they actually cook with it in some way?

I know people stuff pork chops with them. We have customers that request that and stuffed chicken breast. As far as for doing something, I’ve of heard people using it and taking it out of the casing and stuffing bell peppers and things like that with it. Or they’ll—the duck hunters, they’ll stuff their ducks with it before they cook it. I have some friends that hunted out of the Wax Lake Outlet—it’s been 10, 12 years ago. And they used to stop here every Friday afternoon on their way to going hunting for the weekend. And they’re staying on a houseboat, you know, with a little generator to run the electricity and so forth, and every week they’d buy several bags of cold boudin to take to their camp. And finally I asked them; I said, How y’all cooking this stuff? He said, Man, on the pit. I said, On the barbeque pit? He says, Yeah, it’s delicious. And since then I’ve cooked it that way. We cook it in our smoker now. I mean there’s a million ways to cook it. I know people cook it in the oven a lot, and it’s really good on the pit. My wife loves to cook boudin on the pit; my kids love it that way. It dries out the casing and you know, you bite the casing and it’s like biting into the boudin.

You have children?

Two boys, 12 and 15.

And do they have any relationship to the store?

They both claim they’re going to own it one day, so we’ll see. I know I grew up thinking I would never be in insurance and I would never be in fast-food, and the first two jobs—no, in sales rather, insurance sales. The first two jobs I had out of school were sales and then fast-food. And you know, so I don’t know. They say they’re going to do this, and that means they probably won't, but we’ll see. I hope so. I hope one of my children will want to take over one day ‘cause it’s a nice little business, and you know we have a good lifestyle. They’re going to Catholic schools, and I’m sure they’re going to go to LSU or something. You know, I think it’s a good avenue for a living for them.

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What do you think the component is in your boudin, or what in your process got it the A-plus grade that the Boudin Link guys [gave]?

I really think it’s our seasoning. It’s—I got real lucky with the seasoning. I put a bunch of stuff together and asked several butchers and people—different people I knew that I respected their opinion. And one would say, Try—add a little bit of this, or, Add a little bit of that, or, It needs a little bit more spice, a little bit more kick to it, and so I added more red pepper. And then the last guy, that he was delivering meat here once a week, he said, Man, just a little bit more salt. And every time I change it I write down what I’m adding, so you know—you know a different recipe. And I’d cook hamburgers for them or something like that with the seasoning in it instead of just tasting the seasoning, and make them actually eat something. And I got it where everyone thought, Man this is good. This is good. Don’t change it anymore. And that’s the recipe we’ve been following. And I think that, for whatever reason, gives it—the boudin the flavor it has, you know. And you know consistency is the big part of it also. It’s kind of—it’s kind of hard to mess it up the way we make it. It’s exactly 60 pounds of meat, exactly 10 pounds of pork liver. The only variable would be the bell peppers and the onions—could be a different size, ‘cause you know we put 14 onions and 8 bell peppers and three things of celery in it. So if you have super large onions—we buy the same size every time, but they’re not always consistent. And so the vegetables could vary a hair. Besides that, you know everything is weighed and measured every single time, so its consistency is there.

You ship also. Is that right?

Yes, boudin is kind of a pain to ship. We use Shipping, Etcetera. We refer anyone that wants it shipped to them and they come and get it. They’ll call us and tell us what they want, how they want it packaged, and they’ll come, pick it up, and then they’ll prepare it in their shipping packaging. One time—I used to do it a fair amount until I found Shipping, Etcetera—I shipped 30 pounds of boudin to a woman in New York City, and it cost $100 in shipping, and I’m thinking, This is absurd. I can't justify sending someone something that costs them more to get it shipped to them than the actual product is worth.

What kind of person wants 30 pounds of boudin shipped to New York? Was it a Cajun?

I would think it’s someone that’s traveled through this area and eaten it. We’ve got—we get a lot of people from, you know—people just travel these days. And we have billboards on the highway, and you know they’re coming through Lafayette going to New Orleans or something, and, Oh this is where the Cajuns are kind of thing, and, Let’s see if we can buy something Cajun while we’re going through. And they’ll see my billboard. I have these big double billboards that say boudin and crackling on them, and boy they’ll follow the arrow. They’ll take the turn there, and then they’ll stop when they’re lost and ask someone, How do you get to that place that sells the boudin and crackling? And eventually they’ll get here. We have people every day that walk in here, and you can tell they’ve never been here. They’re looking around like, Oh, you know, and—. Can I help you? Yeah, where’s the boudin, or whatever, you know? And one time I had two women from Michigan come in here. They had seen the sign, and she said, We’re interested in your boudin. I said, Where y’all from? And we started talking, and I said, Have you ever tried boudin? No. So I gave them—I cut up some for them and they took a little grain of rice and tasted it and talked to each other and said, Oh, this is good. I said, It’s not that good? She said, Well it’s just too spicy for us; we can't take this. [Laughs] And then some people take a bite and they say, Oh yeah, give me a lot of that. I want some more, you know. And then they­—Do you have it cold? I want to take it home, kind of stuff. You know some people, you can tell right away they love it, and some people, they don’t want to ever touch that again.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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