Page 43 - South Mississippi Living - December, 2016

Recently I visited three Coast free kitchens, and this is what I found. There can be no doubt that fried chicken is one of the corner stones of Southern cooking. You can get some pretty good fried chicken at local diners, and a few of the up- scale beach side places that have opened recently have fried chicken on the menu as well. Even some
of the fine dining establishments are making fried chicken with the help of their immersion circulator, a process referred to as sous vide (sue-veed). When a food idea is that good, you’ll find it almost everywhere.
But you might be surprised to know that some of the best fried chicken I’ve recently had was at Biloxi’s Loaves and Fishes. Chef Charles Adrian Smith, “Abe” to his friends and co-workers, has some pretty fancy moves in his mostly volunteer-run kitchen, as you might expect from a man who first stepped up to a grill before he was ten years old.
Loaves and Fishes feeds 250 to 300 people a day, with no regard to their social position, employment status or almost anything else.
Smith calls his kitchen “My baby” and gets to work at 6:30 a.m., typical of a man as passionate as he is about what he does for a living. He has been cooking for 20 years and has worked at Morrison’s and Lafont Inn in Pascagoula. He got his start early, when just a kid, or as he
called it “back in the day,” when an uncle came to him and said, “It’s time you learned how to cook.” His
family had an old-style brick grill in the back yard and that was his first kitchen.
For Smith, this job is deeply satisfying and he says his reward is seeing the smiles on the faces of the people who are eating the food he prepared for them. And let me tell you, when he cooks fried chicken, there are a lot of smiles. He makes his chicken in such large batches, it’s hard to translate the recipe for home use, but the basic ingredients are listed below. One special note, Smith seasons his oil with just a little crab boil, it’s a move I have never seen before, but it makes good sense.
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December 2016 • SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living 43
Loaves and Fishes feeds a lot of people, from a ninety-four-year- old woman, to kids being carried by their parents. Gretchen Hart, the executive director, and Bryan Morales, program coordinator will tell you the same thing, “If we can help just one person, then we have done our jobs.”
Loaves and Fishes is not the only free kitchen that has chefs who’re zealous about what they cook and serve. Feed My Sheep in Gulfport has two chefs who divide the duties