GONZALES — After a grueling three days of cooking hundreds of pounds of rice and chicken over open flames, the 58th Gonzales Jambalaya Festival is in the cookbooks.
Jared White was picked as the winning chef out of nearly 100 contestants.
This year’s contest was also a family affair with White’s wife, Brittany, serving as his helper and their son, Jayden White, winning the festival’s first-ever junior championship.
Festival Association President Mike Gonzales said it meant a great deal to him and the festival organizers to see a father and son win the junior and regular championships.
“We’re a family festival, and that just says it all,” Gonzales said.
While the jambalaya was as good as ever, there were some changes to this year’s festival. After more than 20 years on South Irma Boulevard, organizers moved this year’s festivities to the Lamar Dixon Expo Center.
Gonzales said the location change proved vital this year as the festival and its cooks were hit with flash thunderstorms and hail on Friday, but they were protected inside the barns at the Center, which allowed everyone to continue the competition like normal.
“The cooking contest went off without a hitch, and it ended up being amazing,” Gonzales said.
In total, there were 93 cooks who entered this year’s competition with 32 of them advancing to a second round and another 12 of them qualifying for the third and final round.
Out of the 12 final dishes, Gonzales said they were all good but judges could only pick one to be the ultimate winner.
“When you make the finals, they’re all going to be good jambalayas. You’ve got to have that something, that rabbit’s foot — something that stands out but they’re all good,” Gonzales explained.
The jambalayas for the competition are only made with chicken and no sausage. Gonzales said festival organizers like to keep everything traditional and said historically, chicken was more prevalent than pork for area farms.
“Jambalaya has always been a meal that’s meat and rice that you can feed a lot of people for cheap. That’s why, back in the day, people cooked jambalaya in this area. But they had to pick what was available, and most of the time it was a chicken in the yard,” Gonzales said.
Cooks must also use whole hens in their dishes, not fryer chickens, which Gonzales said can be tricky to get a good flavor and texture out of.
“It’s a little tougher. It’s on the bone, and it takes a talent to get your chicken tender but not falling off the bone and mixed all up in your rice,” Gonzales explained. “Your rice has got to taste like chicken. It’s got to have a good, rich chicken flavor.”
The festival has become a beloved tradition since it began in 1967. It was the brainchild of Steve Juneau, who envisioned it as a way to promote the City of Gonzales. Originally from Avoyelles Parish, Juneau was impressed by the jambalaya cooked by local chefs in Ascension Parish and pitched the idea to the Gonzales Lions Club.
Over the past five decades, the event has grown dramatically, now drawing more than 40,000 visitors each year. But back in 1978, it was still a relatively modest affair when then-association president M. Paul LeBlanc worked with local leaders to secure an invitation to serve jambalaya at the White House for President Jimmy Carter.
The event, covered by the New York Times and Washington Post, took place on June 18th and was marked as a 25th anniversary celebration of the New Port Jazz Festival with a catered Jambalaya buffet, “prepared on the grounds by award-winning cooks of the Jambalaya Festival Association of Gonzales, La,” the New York Times wrote.
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