[Cover Story] Chef Paul Prudhomme

With a flourish, Chef Paul Prudhomme added his name to the inscription in the cookbook, then looked up and said, “Tell your daughter the first part is my personal philosophy. The second part is how she should live her life.”

His philosophy — “Good cooking. Good eating. Good loving.” — and accompanying grin is familiar to almost anyone who has met Chef Paul, seen his TV program or even picked up a catalog of his Magic Seasoning Blends. But it is his words to live by — “Quality gets all.” — that brought Chef Paul himself from a farm in Opelousas, La., as the youngest of 13 children to world renown for his ability to blend just the right spices for just the right taste and produce a blended product that holds prime real estate in grocery stores across the nation.

At Prudhomme’s 125,000-square-foot Magic Seasonings blending plant in New Orleans, 20 products and thousands of custom blends are created, packaged and shipped to retailers, foodservice chefs and food manufacturers around the world. The plant is managed by President and CEO Shawn McBride, but Chef Paul continues to be the creative force behind the blends, with a research center, literally, in his own backyard and an innate taste for the perfect blend.

THE FLAVOR. Enthusiastically describing one of his most recent custom blends, Prudhomme said, “I hope they understand it because it was super complex. What is complicated is that when you start chewing on it, it just constantly flips the flavors. It just turns them over and over.

“I can usually get a flavor that dominates and it’s at the end, not in the beginning, so you taste other things. But it was the first time that I felt that we had hit another level,” the Chef added, unable to hide his zeal. “For three or four days, I’d wake up excited, saying, ‘Can we send it out yet?’”

It is this understanding of the human palate that puts the “magic” into the company’s blends. “It’s balanced. There isn’t one ingredient, like salt, that hits you smack in the face,” McBride said. “Whatever you’re cooking, he wants you to taste that first, then the seasonings just enhance it. It’s not meant to hit the front of your tongue. He thinks about where that flavor is going to hit your tongue, how it is going to travel through your mouth and where it is going to end up.”

“You can eat a plain piece of meat, but when you season it, you open up a whole new world,” Prudhomme said.

While Prudhomme maintains a role in the plant processes, it is the research and development that is really the best job for him, he said. “It’s more fun doing the creating. I really enjoy constantly doing new blends and getting flavors out, but if I can get something out for a customer that will make their customer really happy, that’s the goal always.”

But, Prudhomme added, it is more than just the taste of the blends. “One of the things that is most important to me is that we are putting things in people’s bodies,” he said. “I feel very strongly that herbs and spices are one of the best things we can put in our bodies, because it’s where medicine generally comes from.”

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS. Chef Paul’s appreciation for the magic of good food started at an early age. The kids could all have been outside fighting, then come to the dinner table mad at each other; but once they started eating, you could tell when it was a really good meal. “In no time at all, in minutes, they had forgotten they were ever mad at each other. Everyone was talking and having a good time,” Prudhomme said. “I recognized that probably by about seven or eight years old. I remember thinking, ‘Food did that.’ And it’s still with me.”

After completing his schooling, Prudhomme traveled, working in restaurants around the country learning different styles, techniques and ingredients. He then came back to New Orleans in the early 1970s to open his own restaurant. He had four restaurants fail, “then I started understanding the restaurant business — thank God!” His current restaurant, his eighth, in New Orleans’ French Quarter, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, opened in 1979.

It was from this restaurant that the seasoning company evolved. Customers would commend the food’s flavor, asking “What are you putting on it? Can I get some?” So the restaurant started giving a bit of seasoning wrapped in foil. But soon, those customers began coming back asking to purchase the seasoning, so K-Paul’s put together hand-labeled, plastic, zip-close jewelry bags filled with the seasoning. As demand grew, Chef Paul realized the business potential, and opened the Magic Seasonings plant in 1983. 

While maintaining his role as formulator of the Magic Seasonings Blends, Prudhomme has become a national figure, appearing on talk shows, hosting a cooking show, consulting with restaurant chains and major food manufacturers to develop specialty dishes and cooking for heads of state, including President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 inauguration, and at the Congressional Barbecue on the White House lawn in 2007.

“It’s a tough industry,” Chef Paul said of blended seasonings. “But I think it’s very rewarding to be able to, literally, make people happy. That is one thing I know that hasn’t changed. If you put something in somebody’s mouth that’s really great, it makes them happy.”

The author is Staff Editor of QA magazine.