BOURQUE’S SUPERMARKET

Shannon & Chad Bourque

Bourque’s Supermarket
581 Saizan St.
Port Barre, LA 70577
(337) 585-6261
bourquespecialties.com

“People who just walk in the store…if they don’t have time to cook supper, they just walk up to the counter and buy five, six, seven pounds of boudin. That’s supper because it’s like a whole meal. You have rice, you have your meat, you have onions, your bell peppers, your vegetables and stuff. It’s just like a meal.”

— Shannon Bourque

“Oh, I love our boudin. I probably eat boudin probably four or five days out of the week—anywhere from two to four links each day. That’s a good bit of boudin. But I can tell you this, there’s a lot more people that eat a whole lot more boudin than what I eat…It’s good on crackers. That’s how I like it, on crackers.”

— Chad Bourque

Adolph “The Boss” Bourque raised a menagerie of livestock at his home in Port Barre, Louisiana, to feed his family. In 1948 he began selling cuts of meat, eggs, and vegetables to neighbors out his front door. Eventually, he turned his living room market into a freestanding business, with his three sons working at his side. In the 1970s, brothers Carl and Lester Bourque worked together to develop a family boudin recipe for Bourque’s Supermarket. Today, Adolph’s grandsons, Shannon and Chad Bourque, are at the helm of the family business. Under their watch, the boudin got some extra attention; they put their aprons on and got to work, and after approval from the Bourque family, the new boudin recipe made its public debut. It also made its nationwide debut. Bourque’s Supermarket now has an online store and ships boudin everywhere from Houston to Hawaii.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Shannon Bourque talking about the important steps needed to make a good boudin. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

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: Shannon & Chad Bourque (cousins)
Date: October 10, 2006
Location: Bourque’s Supermarket – Port Barre, LA
Interviewer: Amy Evans

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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Tuesday, October 10th 2006. I’m Port Barre, Louisiana, at Bourque’s Supermarket, and I’m with Shannon Bourque and Chad Bourque. If you gentlemen wouldn’t mind stating your names and your birth dates for the record, please?

Shannon Bourque: Shannon Bourque, September 14th 1970.

Chad Bourque: And I’m Chad Bourque, December 21st 1982.

And y’all are first cousins, correct?

SB: Yes, we’re first cousins—born and raised on the bayou. We live about a mile from each other.

Can you tell me a little bit of history about Bourque’s Supermarket and your grandfather whose image is all around us here?

SB: Our grandfather was a very hard worker. He started this business in 1948 on the bayou bank of his house. And since that store, I want to say we’re in our sixth store and he—he never—never tried to put down anybody. If somebody wanted to compete with him he just said, you know, good luck with, you know—he was never bad to anybody or just—he was a very outgoing person as far as for business. He stayed on top of the game, and he was always on top.

What was your grandfather’s name?

SB: Adolph Bourque was my grandfather’s name, which he is still living and his birthday will be on the 15th of October, which is in a few days. He will make 91.

So when he first started his business in the [nineteen] ‘40s, do you know anything about what that store was like and what he carried? Was he working with meat at all?

SB: Actually, he raised chickens, he raised his own cows, and he fed them and everything and he butchered them himself, and he sold them out of his house. That’s exactly what he did.

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When your grandfather was raising livestock, was he raising hogs also?

SB: Yes, he did that for a while but once he kind of got away from that, he just stayed with the cows and stuff. He started buying the hogs from butcher shops and stuff. They would butcher them for him and just deliver it to him; it was a little easier.

Was he making boudin then?

SB: Back then, no. Actually, the boudin probably started here—let’s see, if I had to say, we’ve probably been making boudin about 30 years over here—about 30 years.

So was your father, then, part of the market business as well?

SB: My dad [Lester Bourque] started working in here when he was about thirteen, fourteen years old. He was about a freshman or sophomore in high school. He’d go to school, he’d do whatever he had to do, play his sports and everything and he’d come back in—in the evening and my grandfather would leave and he would close up the store.

So who would you say, then, it might have been your dad who was responsible for putting boudin in the store?

SB: Probably my dad and Chad’s dad, Carl [Bourque].

And so just so I kind of have the timeline of how the store has grown over the years, when your grandfather was working with livestock and then kind of the evolution of the store, when did it really become a grocery store with lots of different items?

SB: Probably have to say—probably around ’62—1962 it became a pretty good-sized grocery store.

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So let’s talk about the boudin now. I know that you’ve changed it recently, but can you talk about, since y’all have been managers here, what people’s demands and tastes for boudin are and how you’ve accommodated that?

SB: People around this area would travel away from here to get boudin because it was just something about our boudin that we just couldn’t meet their needs, so we took about two-and-a-half to three months to try to get it down to where we wanted it. And I think we did it successfully because we probably had a good 30-percent to 35-percent of this town would leave this town to travel six or seven miles down the road to get boudin from other places. So what we did is well, you’d say we revamped the boudin and we have it probably as—I would say it’s excellent now. And the Boudin Link [website, which is www.boudinlink.com], who recommended us, gave us an A-plus [rating on the boudin]. We had an A-minus, but they gave us an A-plus now, and I think we did it for the better of the business. We’re selling probably three to four times more boudin than we were before.

So can you describe what it is that changes the boudin from an A-minus to an A-plus [rating]?

SB: Well people—people like to have a good spicy taste in their boudin. I mean boudin—you don’t want boudin to be overly spicy—you know too—too hot and too peppered because it will take away from the flavor, so when we re-did ours, ours was—it just had an okay, you know—it was like a mild to medium hot; now it’s probably a medium to hot, which one link of boudin is about 10 to 10, 11, 12 inches depending on, you know—it’s an average size. If you sit down and eat the whole thing it’s just going to be that same taste the whole time, whereas a lot of other people make their boudin—the first two bites it’s—you can't taste the flavor anymore, the pepper overcomes it. So when we re-did our boudin, we tried to make it—each bite tastes just about the same and maybe just gets a little spicier each bite but not too spicy to where you cannot eat or taste, you know, the whole length while you’re eating it.

So what did you, Shannon and Chad—did y’all do that yourself? Did you change the recipe yourself?

SB: Yeah, we changed the recipe ourselves. Like I said, it took us about three months to just make little 12 to 25-pound batches because we—a batch of boudin consists of about probably 130-pounds, so we didn’t want to make too much at one time to where you know we—we didn’t want to—we couldn’t sell it or it didn’t taste right, so we just took our time and made some little 12-pound batches that we finally got it right and we—as we would call it we brought it in front of the board, which is Lester, Homer, and Carl [Bourque], and they finally approved it. And the taste, you know, we went ahead. They said it’s good, so we started making it and there—from there on, which is probably spring of 2006, we’ve been selling so much more boudin in the last fifteen years than we sold ever.

So was the drive to change the boudin—update it and make it better—that specifically came from your involvement with the www.boudinlink.com, is that right?

SB: Well when the guys came over here and tasted our boudin, it’s not that I was upset that we had an A-minus. Before they came here I knew that the boudin needed some attention, you know, because I could tell—I mean with 20 years of experience just sitting behind a desk and seeing who buys the boudin, you know, seeing who likes it and who doesn’t like it, comments from around the little small town of 3,000 people—I mean I thought it was time to do something about it, and we went ahead and did something about it and it worked for the better of the business.

So but for 30 years that you’ve had boudin here and it’s been the same, are there people that have been upset that you changed it at all?

SB: We hadn't had any complaints since we changed it. We have all the—I think just about all the town is buying our boudin now. And we have people coming from Bossier City, Shreveport, Ville Platte, Bunkie—all over because they heard we have real good boudin. And I think, like I said, changing the boudin really helped out.

So can you describe, without giving away any family secrets or anything, what goes into your boudin and how you make it—the process?

SB: Well before the—the old process was—it was a—a season that we had patented by people that mixed our season which is Targil and we—we got in touch with them, and we tried to get them to help us change it and stuff; but they couldn’t quite get it to where we wanted it, so we said well we’re going to start doing it ourselves. So as far as for seasoning-wise we—we quit getting that seasoning and we just hand-mixed our own seasoning to the taste that we wanted it. And we put—as far as for meat and stuff, boudin is made with some real good cuts of pork, some lean pork meat, not too much liver because you don’t want it to taste too much liver, but you have to put liver in it to—so it will keep its moisture and we put some—some great rice. We use some—some real good rice; we don’t use, you know, a downgrade of rice. We use some okay rice and we put our ingredients—it’s pork, liver, our own special seasoning, onions, bell peppers, onion tops, that’s about it and mix it with rice…But before we changed our boudin we made the boudin with it was—just an old conventional meat grinder mixer. Now we’re making the boudin by hand, and it gives you such a better product and it’s stuffed with a—it’s called a water-hydraulic stuffer and all the product doesn’t get battered and, you know, ground up to what you would call a minced—you know, it stays all together and it’s all full and it comes together better, you know, instead of being a mushy product. And that’s another thing that’s helping us sell a lot of our boudin.

How important is the casing? Is there a grade of casing that you like to use?

SB: As far as for the casing, being as we—we started doing it by hand compared to mixing it with the machine when we used to use the—the machine and—and grind it more than once, the casing would bust because it was just too much pressure on the casing. Now we do it by the hydraulic machine and we have no problems with the casing whatsoever and it—when you heat the boudin, the casing kind of cooks a little bit, and it seals around the boudin and that way the boudin can't bust or leak out, which holds—you don’t lose too much of your product.

Can you talk about heating the boudin and how that works and what you’re looking for?

SB: Basically, the way we heat our boudin, we have a—probably a 20-cup rice cooker, steamer attachment. We put a little round steamer attachment at the bottom and we put about—oh, we probably heat about 25 links or so at a time, and we put it to where the water is just over the top of the boudin. And you bring the water to a boil, and it probably takes about three to four minutes boiling to get the boudin hot because the boudin is already cooked. And after you—you steam it for, you know—boil it for three or four minutes or so then you shut it off, and you let it sit for about two minutes in the water. And then we take it and we transfer it to a perforated steamer and it just sits in the steamer, and people just come and buy it as we have it in the steamer.

Have you ever tried smoking boudin?

SB: Yeah, we—we smoke boudin on occasion if somebody on the Internet basically calls in for an order, “Do y’all have smoked boudin?” And we go ahead and say, “Yes, we have smoked boudin. We can smoke it. How many pounds would you like?” And we’ve smoked—we’ve smoked five, ten, fifteen, twenty pounds at a time already, you know, for customers—online customers. We don’t—we don’t—I mean people around here, for some reason, they just don’t like—they like the regular boudin; they just don’t like smoked boudin. But people all over the country, they want smoked boudin; they want crawfish boudin, shrimp boudin, which I’m in the process of making crawfish and shrimp boudin right now.

Now your Internet customers, if they’re ordering, you know, like this order over here on the wall that’s ten pounds of boudin to Hawaii, do you have any idea if those people are native Louisianans [Laughs] and they have a taste for boudin and they live somewhere else? Or are they people that have come through? Do you have any idea what their story is?

SB: Well basically, this order that you’re talking about to Hawaii it’s a customer—another customer that’s buying it and purchasing it and sending it to these people in Hawaii. But no, not really. We first started this probably in February; we started shipping boudin and all our specialty meats all over the country. We had to advertise on Google. We had to advertise on Yahoo. We got a hold of the great site of the www.boudinlink.com, which is that’s what we’re on now and it recommends us, you know. And we first started out, we would get an order and we would ask them, “How did you hear about us?” you know? And we did that probably for, I guess, a good four to five months we’d ask, “How did you hear about us?” But our business has grown so much on the Internet, you know, online sales on the website we don’t have time to ask how—how did they hear about us. So we just don’t ask anymore.

But that’s so interesting to me that because boudin is so localized; I mean it’s so specific to this part of Louisiana—that you can have that large of an Internet business. Can you explain that at all?

SB: Well what you can do with computers these days is unreal. I mean you can get on a computer in Louisiana and start surfing the net and type in “boudin” on Google or—or boudin on Yahoo and it—when you type boudin on Yahoo you come up and we’re on the first page and you can see Buy Boudin at Bourque’s. Well if somebody in Mississippi sees that, “Man, let us go to this site and click on this site and see the great Cajun atmosphere,” and how we got the Cajun music playing and we got the great pictures and, you know, I mean everybody likes our site. I think that’s why we’re selling a lot of boudin and we also have a very good—very excellent boudin.

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Y’all make other sausages and whatnot. And on the building it says Home of the Original Jalapeno Sausage Cheese Bread. So what was it about boudin that you really wanted to generate some Internet business and kind of highlight that product?

SB: Well as you were talking about our world-famous original—actually, it’s called original jalapeno sausage cheese bread. My mother, when she worked here, came up with this recipe and she saw this probably about like that’s a good—a good 30 years we’ve been making that bread, too, and what makes the bread so good is our homemade smoked sausage that we make over here…But as far as for the boudin, the bread was an outgoing thing. It just—you didn’t have to push the bread like we had to change the boudin, and I thought that the boudin needed to catch up with the bread. And the boudin has caught up with the bread and that’s why we place it on the—the building, we call it “World Famous Boudin” because we built this website and we’re shipping it all over the country.

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Do y’all have an idea about how boudin came about, how it was developed—the history of it?

SB: To my knowledge, I was—I’m—I’m 36 years old. When I was a kid growing up, I was probably three—four years old when I started going to LSU football games, and as far as I can remember, everybody would—everybody over there had—always would bring boudin and stuff and that’s over 30 years. I mean boudin has been around for a long time. But I think what people have done in the past is they just tried to keep making their boudin better and better and better and it—over the years, I guess, boudin was harder to make because they didn’t have the products that they have to make it now—the machines. They had to make it all by hand—hand-grinders and stuff like that. Because I mean we make thousands and thousands of pounds of boudin a month, and I couldn’t imagine making as much boudin as we make by hand. It’s—no way.

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Well what about Cajun culture and boudin; can you maybe talk a little bit—how those things go together?

SB: Cajun culture and boudin, hmm. All I know is a Cajun seven-course meal would be a six-pack of beer and a link of boudin. That’s one thing everybody looks at it as but—around this area for the 25-mile radius, I mean if you were in my supermarket on a Saturday or a Sunday, there’s people that drive 25 to 30 miles to come buy our boudin and they’re waiting in line. And like I said, we’re off of the highway. No telling how much we would sell if we’d be on the highway but they know we have a good boudin, so they’re going to drive; they’re going to come get it. They have people that eat boudin for breakfast, you know. I mean boudin just—it goes—I know it goes way back past 30—35 years; I know that. I’m only 36 and it probably goes back 50—60 years plus but it’s just something about that boudin, I guess. People—if you had to take a—a—I’d say like a ratio on how much people eat pork to beef, people eat more pork meat than they do beef meat for some reason around South Louisiana.

And what is it about boudin—I mean before we were recording, I mentioned that I had some boudin in New Orleans, which is not [Laughs] boudin in y’all’s eyes. But what is it, do you think, that—that can't be replicated? Like you—you have to have boudin here in South Louisiana? What is that?

SB: Well if someone is going to stand by their boudin and say they have a good boudin, you have to take pride in your boudin making…For an example, if you were at home cooking a steak on a pit and you left that pit, eventually that steak is going to burn, you know, if you don’t watch it. So the way boudin is made, the way we make our boudin, it’s step-by-step. Everything has to fall into place every single time you make it for it to be the same consistency over and over and over again.

What do you love about boudin?

SB: Boudin to me, I guess I’d say I like the flavor. I like pork better than I do beef for some reason. I just—I like—as far as for the liver that we put in there, you can't really taste the liver; you won't taste the liver because it’s just there to keep the moisture. I just—I like—I like to cook more or less and that’s why I try—I thought that the boudin needed some attention and, you know, some great—that’s what I call it when you put it in—in your mouth; our boudin gives you an explosion, you know, from the time you take that first bite to the last one, it’s the same consistency bite after bite after bite.

And Chad, what do you like about boudin?

CB: Oh, I love our boudin. I probably eat boudin probably four or five days out of the week to—anywhere from two to four links each day. That’s a good bit of boudin. But I can tell you this, there’s a lot more people that eat—eat a whole lot more boudin than what I eat because, you know, I could see it. And they got a little boy—they got a little boy that every evening he gets out of school he comes to the front butcher counter and asks us for two or three links of boudin every day so—. But you know, I think it’s a good product and it’s like Shannon was saying, you know, we sell a lot of it and all I want to do is sell more, you know—just keep selling more.

What is it that you like about it so much, the taste or the flavor or the warmth or the—?

CB: I guess you can say the taste, you know, it’s just good. It’s—plain and simple, it’s good on crackers. That’s how I like it—on crackers.

Is there something about it being a warm portable food that—kind of a to-go food that people like a lot?

SB: Yeah, that people who just walk in the store, and there’s a lot of people that get off of work and they drive back to their town you know they’re working 15—20 miles away or so in the area and they—when they drive back to town, if they don’t have time to cook supper, they just walk up to the counter and buy five, six, seven pounds of boudin; that’s supper because it’s like a whole meal. You have rice, you have your meat, you have onions, your bell peppers—your vegetables and stuff; it’s just like a meal, you know.

What would you say is the most important thing to strive for in making boudin?

SB: Basically, like I was telling you before, it has to be—it has to all fall in line. When you make boudin, you can't just throw the meat in the pot; you can't throw the seasoning in the pot; you can't throw all the water; you can't just put it in there and just say go cook yourself. You have to—you have to take care of your meat, and you have to brown it to perfection, and you have to sear the meat and keep the flavors inside, which we season the meat probably 24 hours out before we cook it, and that’s why the seasoning gets in the meat real good. And after the searing of the meat we—we add our—a little bit of water to cook down the meat and we add the liver and all the seasonings, the rest of the seasonings and the onions and bell peppers and then once it’s cooked you—you pour it into the machines and we—we actually pour it into machines and we—we grind it out one time and it’s—from there it’s made by hand; we mix it up by hand. We mix the rice into the meat by hand and we mix the—all the meat and the rice with the juices it makes—all mixed by hand. And then it’s put into a hydraulic stuffer, and it’s linked from there.

How often do you make boudin?

SB: We probably make—we almost make boudin every day—almost every day and we used to only make boudin maybe two to three times a week. It’s gotten to where during the week and maybe once on the weekend, we make it almost every day.

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With all these new developments—the Internet and the new recipe and everything—what do you think is the future of Bourque’s Supermarket and your—your boudin?

SB: Future-wise, like I said, they’re always coming out with these computers. You can do so much with these computers. I mean somebody in Minnesota can be sitting down and type in boudin and say, “Oh, man look at this site. I have to have some of that boudin.” And I mean they’ll call in and say, “How do I go about ordering ten pounds of boudin.” Or some people say boo-DAN, but the way to pronounce it is BOO-dan. But anyway, and like I said, from—from Minnesota to Alaska to Hawaii, Kentucky, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Alabama, Georgia, we’ve shipped almost all over the United States in the last six—six to eight months. It has grown enormously for a two-man operation.

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Well there seem to be such variation in boudins with, you know, the casing being really tight or really loose or the spiciness, the texture—do you think that difference happens from person to person or region to region within South Louisiana, or can you describe that difference at all?

SB: Well when you—it goes by the way you heat your link of boudin. If you heat your link of boudin too long, it will cook the casing and it will dry out the casing. And, depending on loosely packed or tightly packed, we have what you—what the Boudin Link says we have is an excellent packed link of boudin, not—not too tightly packed and juicy. And the casing is not stretchy; it could be broken if you tried to break it. So the Boudin Link says that we have an excellent link, as far as for the, you know, the casing. Most people that come around here, they don’t like their link of boudin to just break; they like to squeeze it out. Most of them like it cut up; that way they don’t have to worry about squeezing it out the link. But as far as with our casing we try to stay—just like making the boudin, I try to stay on top of the game about heating the boudin. It has to be heated a certain amount of time, it cannot sit in the water too long; you have to—it’s all about timing. Just like making the boudin, heating it is the same way; it’s about, you know, the timing that you put towards it.

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Well do you have anything else to add—final thoughts about your boudin that you’d like people to know about Bourque’s and your family and what you do?

SB: All I can say is day in and day out we always try to think of a new idea or some kind of extra way to make an extra dollar, you know, to be successful and as of right now it’s—there’s no use to touch our boudin right now because we’re selling so much of it. You know we can't keep our boudin; as we make it, we sell it, and we’re not going to mess with the recipe as of right now. If we see that it needs some attention, we’ll give it some attention but the only attention that it needs is making batch after batch after batch.

Chad, is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to add?

CB: No, not really. But I’d like to say, you know, we’re just going to continue to stick together as a family and we’re going to continue to try and come up with new ideas, you know, to better the business and sell more and more boudin.

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

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