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Poche’s Market Floyd Poche 3015A Main Highway “A six pack of beer and a pound of boudin. That’s the traditional Cajun seven-course meal. So I guess beer is about the best product to eat with boudin, but there’s nothing wrong with an RC Cola either.”
The inception of Poche’s Market occurred sometime in the 1940’s, when Floyd Poche’s grandfather, a first-generation American, began to sell pork, boudin, and crackling from pigs that he would slaughter himself. He had a small store in Poche Bridge, an area along the Bayou Teche near the larger town of Breaux Bridge. Floyd eventually bought the business from his father in 1976, and he has since expanded the operation more than tenfold. With the help of his son, Scotty, he now produces several additional products for retail sale (andouille, turducken, and crawfish boudin are among them); he added on a lunch service restaurant that specializes in one-pot cooking, such as pork backbone stew and crawfish étouffeé; and he opened a USDA processing plant, which allows him to ship his products throughout the United States. The family boudin recipe has also changed, conforming to contemporary palates and the availability of ingredients: the liver component is milder, and the heat now comes from fresh jalapeño, rather than cayenne, peppers. What hasn’t changed is Poche’s steady focus on Cajun cooking traditions. This may bear out most blatantly down the road at the family’s RV park, where Cajun families—and often the owner Floyd Poche himself—can be found simmering courtbouillon in cast iron pots and boiling crawfish over campfires.
Subject: Floyd Poche Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Thursday July 19, 2007, and I’m Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. And if you could for me say your full name, and your birthdate, and how you make your living, Sir? Floyd Poche: My name is Floyd Lee Poche. I was born August 17, 1952—almost 55 years-old—and in Breaux Bridge, and I make my living by having a meat—specialty meat processing. We have a retail store that we’ve been having for, since 1962, that my dad had before me. So, and I bought it in 1976, so it’s 31 years that I’ve been doing it. And about 15 years ago we got into shipping the boudin and other Cajun products across the country. We opened a USDA processing plant, which allows us to ship our products all over the continental United States. And we also have an RV park that we have further from here. So I actually have three businesses, so I earn a living from all three. Could you tell me, to start out, a little bit about your heritage: where your parents or grandparents came from, and how they might have gotten into this business? Yeah. Actually, our great-grandparents and stuff came from the border of Germany and France, so we’re actually—we’ re not from the Nova Scotia part of—. The Poche family is from that region and they came, well, a long time ago. I And so the side of your family that’s from the German and French border, that’s which side of your family? The Poche—the Poche family, and then my mother is from North Louisiana. She was a Chapman, so I guess that’s kind of Irish. So it’s kind of a strange mix. Yeah. You said that your grandfather made boudin. Do you have any idea how long that’s been a tradition, boudin making, in this area? Shew, I—probably as long as, gosh they go back, probably you know that’s—the Cajuns were famous for using up a whole pig, you know and making—using everything on a hog. Like the song says: everything on a hog is good. So they—they used everything to make boudin and cracklings, and then you know whatever else they’d use the pig for, like roasts and stews and stuff like that—salt meat. So when you were growing up, on what sorts of occasions would you eat boudin? Probably to stay alive [Laughs] because we were poor back then, and you know—and they made boudin. It was just something you ate you know, and you know rice was pretty cheap and plentiful, and so—. I mean, you know the basic Cajun cooking is like really a well-cooked, cheap form of food in a sense that’s—it actually comes up good after you cook it a long time, you know. Kind of, that’s the tradition of Cajun food. It’s not the most expensive food they have in the world. [Laughs] Can you describe what boudin is and what it contains? Yeah. The boudin we—we make has pork and pork liver, and you know onions and green onion tops, and a little bit of jalapeño peppers that we added over the last 10 years or so, you know. Before it was made with the green cayenne peppers, but it’s kind of, that’s something that’s hard to get in this area now, whereas the jalapeño peppers took over. So we use that and red cayenne pepper and salt, and that’s basically it, you know. It’s real simple ingredients. So the green cayenne pepper, did that use to be prolific in this area? Right. Almost everybody back 30 years ago had a pepper field, you know. It was like a cash crop, and the Cajuns used to go and—and they’d grow cayenne peppers and process them and make hot sauce and send them to the other areas of the country. But all this now has probably moved to Mexico [Laughs] and became jalapeño peppers. Is that where you get your jalapeno peppers from, Mexico? I imagine that’s where it comes from, you know. We buy from the local produce people and stuff like that now. And how does the boudin that you’re making today compare to the boudin that your grandfather and father made? Well you know, of course it’s changed quite a bit because the ingredients has changed a lot. You know, you try to keep it as traditional as possible, but as—as the years go by you know, younger people that’s eating boudin, I don’t find they like as much liver in their boudin. So you know, naturally we slowed down on putting as much liver in boudin. And probably the—whereas we buy just the meat we actually use for the boudin; we buy meat especially for it, you know, like pork shoulders and pork butts, which is a real good piece of meat, whereas a long time ago they would slaughter the whole hog and put a lot of the fat, you know, a lot of the jowls and stuff like that; a lot of the pieces that wasn’t good, like to make roasts or steaks or whatever you would—you know, more trimmings. But now we make so much boudin that we buy the meat especially, the—you know, to make boudin. And it’s a better quality of meat than there was 50 or 60 years ago. You know, like over the traditional time, whereas a lot—probably a lot healthier for you and a lot leaner, because when you used to eat boudin 50 years ago it was, you’d get all greased up with all the [Laughs]—the grease coming from the boudin, you know. What about your personal taste? Has that changed? How do you prefer it—with a more livery taste or less? I think I’ve adjusted to the way it tastes now a lot more. I think it’s probably the best—in my opinion the best we’ve ever made, you know, the one we’re making now. But I guess if you were used to eating it back then, it’s an acquired taste, you know. You know boudin, you either like mine or you like the other guy’s, but some people don’t put any liver at all in it, which you know it’s—I’m not saying it’s bad, but you know it’s just more traditional to have a little bit of the liver taste in it. At 9:00 a.m. I saw a man buying two pounds of boudin. Do you think he was eating that for breakfast? Oh I’m pretty sure. We have some that buy it at 4 o’clock in the morning when we open. [Laughs] So I mean, you know in this area there’s a lot of oil rigs, and you know oil rigs are—work usually 24-hours a day. So we sell a lot to the oil field companies and they’ll—they’ll buy trays of hot boudin, and you know 10--12 pounds at a time, and bring it to their workers on the oil rigs and let them eat it. It doesn’t matter if it’s 6 o’clock or 7 o’clock or 8 o’clock in the morning, you know—any time. It’s kind of a product that they eat all day long. And are you open at 4:00 a.m.? Yes, ma’am. 4:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night. I know that you have a seafood boudin. When did that start becoming something that Cajuns did? Probably we started making it, probably about 15 years ago I would say. Maybe a little bit longer than that. And it was just something to add, another—another type of boudin, you know. The one we make is just a crawfish a boudin; it’s not really a seafood. Some places make seafood with crabmeat, shrimp, and crawfish. And then some people make chicken boudin also, with just chicken meat you know Can you tell me, can you describe roughly the process of making it without divulging any big secrets? Well there’s—there’s really no big secrets into making boudin, you know. Everybody has the best boudin. All the local stores you’re going to go to, everybody you’re going to interview makes the best boudin [Laughs] in the country, so there’s really no big secrets. And you know the process we use, we buy boneless pork meat and it’s, you know, it consists of pork sh So you don’t put garlic in boudin, huh? No, we don’t. Some places do, you know, but we don’t actually put it. Ours is real simple. It’s a real simple recipe. [Laughs] We put meat in ours. That’s the secret ingredient we have. [Laughs] I don’t know if you should be telling me that. And then, what—how do you cook it? Well you see, the meat and everything is all cooked once it’s stuffed into the casing, so actually the only thing that’s raw in the boudin is the casing. And that’s real, you know that’s paper thin. So if we like—when we cook it out here we put it in some water and just let it simmer and don’t let it actually boil, you know, and just let it get up to about 180-degrees or something like that, and—and then it’s done. It’s nice and hot, you know kind of steaming but not—it’s not something you can boil in a pot and just let it boil because the casing will bust. It’ll swell up and bust, you know. So you just—. And then some people, you know, put it in the microwave oven and heat it up. Some people put it on a barbeque pit and grill it, so it’s—it’s a bunch of different ways, so you know it’s changed a lot over the years. But the traditional way was just to put it in water and let it simmer, you know, to get it hot again. And then in the olden days they’d actually wash out the hog’s intestines that—of the hog that they butchered you know—and they’d clean out the intestines and stuff it into those. And so, I mean those were real tough so you really had to—then you could probably boil it. Who was the cook in your house? Oh my dad definitely, you know. It was—you know the Cajun type cooking was my dad. And actually my mom was the North Louisiana version with the white gravy and the biscuits and stuff like that, and my dad was more the brown smothered down, you know, the Cajun—the Cajun type cooking; the, what they call it, one-pot cooking, you know. These big black cast iron pots where they would put all their meat and onions and bell peppers and garlic and smother it down. So he was the master at that [Laughs], which everybody in Cajun country is. It’s especially different from other parts of the country. I think that men here cook a lot. Right. You know, and we’ve—we’ve had that discussion before. We were seeing how—you know with having the RV park down the road, and a lot of the local people that go, you know that comes to the RV park, they all have their black pots out on the weekends and each camper is cooking, whereas you probably go to a campground in another state, you would probably see—wouldn’t see anybody cooking, or maybe just grilling. But it’s amazing to see that, you know, like on a Friday or Saturday night at the RV park, how you’ll run into a lot of the people cooking outside in these black pots. And what would they be cooking? What they fished that day or—? 00:19:39 Do you have kids? FP: Yeah. We [Floyd and his wife, Karen] have, we have a little girl together, and then with my first wife I have a son that is Scotty. His name is Scotty, and my little girl’s name is Rebecca. Scotty is 25 and Rebecca is 13. And is your son involved in the business at all? Actually he’s, he was just here and he was—he works in the USDA processing, you know. That’s kind of his thing. He likes—he mixes all the boudin, the sausages, and the andouille and tasso and all that. So he knows how to make all that already, so he’s doing good. Can we talk a little bit about some of the other products that you make? Maybe we can start with the chaudin. The chaudin is probably one of the—we’re one of the few places that has a USDA inspected pig stomach. It’s a pig stomach that’s stuffed with more pork. You know, it’s ground pork and seasoned with onions and bell—it’s kind of like a meatloaf in a sense that’s stuffed inside of a whole pig stomach, and you can actually smother it down. It’s one of the things you can put in a black pot and you can pot roast it and smother it down for two or three hours, or you can just bake it in the oven if you—if you don’t really know how to pot roast. And actually the stomach serves as a casing, you know that—to surround the meat. Do you eat the stomach casing? Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, it’s kind of chewy, but you know what—especially if you smother it down for awhile, then it will get real tender. How much has the business expanded since you bought it from your father? Well he actually had the business for 14 years, if I can put it in simple terms. He had it for 14 years, and we sell more in a month than he did in 14 years. [Laughs] How many pounds do you make a day, or a week, of sausage let’s say—or let’s say just boudin? Boudin, probably we make about 6,000 pounds a week of boudin, you know, and about 3,000 pounds of andouille and a couple of thousand pounds of tasso. I was going to ask you if there’s a required beverage with boudin? Well [Laughs] that’s—what’s a Cajun seven-course meal? A six pack of beer and a pound of boudin. That’s the traditional Cajun seven-course meal. [Laughs] So I guess beer is about the best product to eat with boudin, but there’s nothing wrong with an RC Cola either. Did you always know that you wanted to go into the family business?
Were you working in the business when you were in school? Oh, we had to. There was no option about it. We were brought up in the business working and peeling onions and peeling potatoes and whatever, seasoning meat and stuff like that you know, ever since we could walk. With my dad, everybody had to work. Yeah. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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don’t know exactly what year but, and they landed in New Orleans and then moved their way up to, to this area and bought some property. And actually the little area we live in right now is actually called Poche Bridge—the same name as our last name. But you know they have the famous Bayou Teche that’s right in back of us that crosses—that’s the longest bayou in Louisiana, and they had built a little bridge a long time ago to cross the bayou right here on my great-grandparents’ land. So they named the little community Poche Bridge because of that, and they had like a cotton gin and stuff like that, you know. And then my grandfather had a little ole shack that he used to slaughter a pig on the side of the bayou and then bring the—bring the pig up to his little store and actually started selling pork meat and boudin and crackling and stuff like that back in the early ’40s or something. Something like that—1940s.
oulder meat. And you know buy liver, pork liver, and we boil the two in water, boil—we actually boil it separate, the pork and the pork liver because—because like I’ve said before, we find the taste overpowering with the liver. So when we drain it out we don’t put any of the broth from the liver. We use the broth from the pork meat to mix in with the rice and onions and stuff. And then after it’s boiled, you know we pass it through a grinder like a quarter inch blade, and we add our onions and stuff like that. We don’t—we don’t boil our onions either. We put them in there, like raw onions you know, and mix it with—. Some places boil their onions and mix with it. And—and then we, after it’s all grind together, then we mix it with the rice and the seasoning and the broth from the pork that has been boiled. And then we stuff it into the casing.
hours until they would get real tender and real good, which you know a lot of people is trying to copy nowadays. It’s—really it turns out good after it’s been cooked for a while, but it’s not like a ribeye. You go into the stores, or some places you go now and they—they cook it in minutes, but it doesn’t happen. Even the kind of meals we serve, it’s—we still do a lot of that one-pot cooking, you know, like the pork stew where you actually cook it for two or three hours, and smothered beef where it’s been smothering for two hours and stuff like that. Which a normal restaurant can't really serve, you know, because of the time. 
I think so, you know. I think from about the seventh grade and high school I was, I was telling it to my brother one day, and—and he was amazed you know, right. Even the guidance counselor in high school, you know said, What you going to do, go to college? I said, Well I’m just going to buy my dad’s business [Laughs] and—and run that. And then she would say, Well I don’t really need to talk to you anymore. You know, so my guidance counselor in school, we lasted five or ten minutes of talking. It wasn’t very long. 
