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And this operation is but part of a sprawl- ing Folse food and media empire that in- cludes a catering operation out of Folse’s White Oak Plantation in Baton Rouge and a cookbook publishing and baking opera- tion in Gonzales. His The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine is in its fourteenth printing. And with star chef Rick Tramonto, Folse in 2012 opened a high-end New Orleans French Quarter restaurant called R’evolution. On the menu is his “Death by Gumbo” — roasted quail, andouille, and oysters finished off with a dash of filé and served over rice — that sells for $18.00 a bowl. Folse says that dish comes right out of the Cajun hunting camp gumbo tradition of his Uncle Paul. Folse employs about 160 people in the factory here and 400 company-wide. “Ev- erything here today,” he says, gesturing around his plant, “came out of that restau- rant business.” Beyond hard work and an ability to cook, Folse also had to gin up some old-fashioned Cajun ingenuity to get where he is today. There were no existing kettles to cook 2.5- ton batches of gumbo when he first con- ceived of the idea. He had to invent them. For years, however, he was dissatisfied with his gumbo because he couldn’t produce ample amounts of the dark brown roux he came to see as essential. He needed roux by the ton to make roux-rich gumbo by the ton but, like the cooking kettles before, nothing on that scale existed. So back to the drawing board he went. “Here, you have to see this,” he says as he leads me into his roux room. Inside are two of Folse’s pride and joys, imposing black cast- iron, drum-shaped containers each capable of making 1,000 pounds of roux at a time. He gestures toward them like a proud father. “We use 500 pounds oil and 500 pounds of flour for each batch,” he says. That’s the fifty- fifty mixture used by my own mother and a vast majority of other gumbo cooks. The design challenges were daunting. He had to figure out not only how thick the cook- er walls had to be to hold the superhot roux but what size of drive and transmission ap- paratus you would need to push the paddles to keep a half-ton roux stirring so it doesn’t scorch. “How would you heat it to maintain temperature? How do you push a roux that big? Everybody said it was impossible.” He ended up flying off to Germany af- ter finding a company that could build the roux-cookers to his specifications. Roux sud- denly became a business in itself. The fac- tory these days produces dark, medium, and light oil-and-flour roux along with duck fat and butter roux that mostly get sold to other food companies.

photo courtesy of John Folse

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