Chop Chop Red Pot
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
So, I'm Chef Erick Crawford. I am the executive chef and owner of Chop Chop Red Pot and also Marley Jean's Raw Bar in Davidson, North Carolina and Chop Chop Red Pot on 7th. We'll be opening shortly here April 1st as our go-to date.
One dish that I really... have nostalgic feelings about is grits. Growing up in the South, you know, they're going to every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You know, we could have gone in all those directions. So that really, really hits home for me when I think of a particular dish that's always, always around, whether it's at my grandma's house service at the little country breakfast diner that we're eating breakfast at or even at dinnertime when we're eating shrimp and grits.
So, the recipe I wanted to talk about would be our shrimp and grits. It really resonates home with me and a lot of this recipe comes from different parts of my childhood growing up. We grew up on the Chesapeake Bay. We were all on the boat, fishing, shrimping all the time, every weekend with my dad. He was a traveling salesperson back in the day. And when we came home on the weekend, going out on the boat was such a big deal. And it just takes me back so much. and then from the fishing, and then from being around with the... all the places that with the grits, it just was a second nature for me, my culinary adventure here, to have the shrimping grits come to play together. Two different parts of my life but now putting it all into one dish and to make it our own.
And we really like to work with local farmers and the community around us. So, the fresh peppers and fresh onions and stuff that I can get, we don't cook it all the way down on our dish for our peppers. We're putting them in kind of raw towards the end and not really sweating them out. We want that nice little bite and crunch to it, so it keeps it nice and bright and vibrant. So, a little bit something funky and fresh and then we'd make like an old bay cream sauce, old bay, Chesapeake Bay, just as hand in hand. And again, we built this order every single time we're not making batches of this all.
Being able to have that scratch-made dish made every single time, that was the way that I was taught to cook, and that's the way we wanted to deliver the food on plate. And I really believe that the ingredients in a pan and making it all come together and all married together at one time and really lively. Keeps it, keep the dish jumping if you ask me and I just really want to nail that down.
On my food truck journey, it was about four years ago, and I didn't want to be dubbed that barbecue truck. So, we did full pork and full chicken, mac and cheese. I had all the collard greens, and we wanted to change up a little bit, so we did the shrimp and grit. Shrimp and grits are really... something special on that food truck that kind of guys dubbed that gourmet food truck was because I was literally making a pan sauce every single time someone order these grits. And we all started off with throwing a little andouille sausage down the pan, getting that working a little bit, throwing the shrimp in the pan, let it sear off, added a little bit of cream, and just let it all marry together. And then that really took off like way more than I thought it was going to you put me in the weeds all the time because those shrimp and grits really had four burners and three sauté pans and trying to stay up with it.
But that was what really took it off and now it's just with a staple on the truck and now leading up to... walking into 7th Street Market into the bigger kitchen where we can produce a lot faster and more efficiently. I think that's really going to be one of our highlights and one of our key dishes at 7th Street, even though we will be smoking all our old meats. We're going to smoke our own breast, get our own pork or the wings. We're trying to make uptown smell like that hickory barbecue that's kind of missing from uptown Charlotte.
But when I was working on this dish and working in several different restaurants around town that we'd serve shrimp and grits and having to produce that every day. And I was like; there's always could be something more that I could put them all in twist on. It was the salt a lot of times I've had a tomato gravies type of sauce, and I just wanted that deep heavy cream sauce to go with it and to actually approach the shrimp in that cream and then just sucking up that cream, it was like, okay, this is something different and this was mine now. And that really, instead of adding pre-coated vegetables into that dish and meat throwing fresh vegetables. At the very end of the dish, we're adding the peppers. We're adding the, you know, fresh herbs. And that was like that crunch that bite of a fresh sweet bell peppers. I kind of leave the green peppers out and we just use yellow and red and orange because it's a little bit sweeter. I think the green peppers are really overpowering.
So that was like starting to become a little more and more every time I made it. It's awesome. It's like the dish is always evolving cause it kind of like, every time I'm making it, I feel like I make it better. So, it's like, it just keeps going on and on. I've got the recipe down but at the same time it's like... Whenever it gets a little bit better and we never make that little mistake, that mistake becomes the key ingredient. And that's really what nails it down. It's like the mistakes are what makes it happen for us, especially.
When I was working on the food truck, there have been times I forgot the grit. at the commissary kitchen. So we're gonna have shrimp over top of potato wedges. And it was like a big play, but we had to make those pivots in life and they all in the truck in at the restaurant. That evolution of being able to make those pivots, that's my key ingredient to the dish, is being able to pivot on a dime and still make it taste great. So I wanted to make a legacy for this dish here to pass on.
Since, you know, I am an old man with grandbabies and children, it's all going to start. We need some fresh stone ground grits. We're going to make sure that it's really, really creamy and it's not going to just on the plate, but we want it creamy. If you're really feeling froggy that day, we're gonna throw some pimento cheese in there and make the pimento cheese grip. You keep on adding and keep on evolving the debt. We use big 812 shrimps. We don't use... I'd rather give you big boys than and I really think being able to make sure that they mail this and keep it in the family is to do it and make it taste good, But do what they like and make it their dish and keep evolving it and keep evolving it.
Because at the end of the day, everyone's taste is gonna change a little bit and the style of cooking gets more creative and more creative of every generation that comes up and just to keep grinding and making it their day dish now but to allow them to be like okay this is the handwritten thing but let's scratch this out and add this. Let's play around with it to keep their true roots to the dead. But at the same time, make it their own and have fun doing it.
Marley Jean is my granddaughter, so that's how we came up with Marley Jean's raw bar. The red pot from Chop Chop Red Pot was my dad's pot, but the red pot was my dad come home from a business trip, he's on home on the weekends, there's a red pot stew and something's brewing, something good, whether it be a chicken soup or a vegetable soup or shrimp and grits or whatever it is, so that's where the red pot came from. Chop chop all the chef in the kitchen like chop chop let's go hurry up hurry up you know so chop chop red pot that's how that came to birth
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