Jambalaya champ loves dish

• By DAVID J. MITCHELL
• Advocate Ascension section writer
• Published: Nov 4, 2009

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Duplessis — Four-time Jambalaya Festival champion Byron Gautreau burned his first-ever pot of jambalaya.

Then 12, Gautreau said his dad asked him to finish a pot cooking in the front yard while his dad went for an Amite River boat ride with a friend.

Gautreau said his dad told him how to finish the meal, but the future champ did not quite see through the instructions.

“I burned it all up. The only thing you could eat was the meat, maybe,” said Gautreau, who turned 63 Monday.

It was an inauspicious start for the Duplessis native who made his mark on the Gonzales festival in the 1990s with three championships and who again became World Champion earlier this year.

Competitors in the Memorial Day weekend festival, hosted by the Jambalaya Festival Association, cook over an open fire using set amounts of rice, chicken, meat, sausage and onions. Tasters judge the best pot.

Gautreau has also won the festival’s Champ Of Champs competition twice, which pits previous champions against one another and helps open up the annual festival.

In late May, he beat nearly 120 others for what is likely his final competition title. Gautreau said he wants to turn over his legacy to his son, Alden.

“I plan on being retired. The only way I would cook again is if I won the Champ Of Champs (competition) and maybe get in at that time to try to win both of them the same year, which has never been done,” said Gautreau, who is married to Gayle and also has a daughter, Jennifer.

The chances of that are very, very slim, he said.

Jambalaya hasn’t been the only chicken, sausage and festival awards won by the retired facilities management official for Gillis W. Long Hansen’s Disease Center in Carville.

Gautreau has also made a name for himself with charity work cooking jambalaya and other south Louisiana dishes.

Gautreau said that before he first competed in the festival in 1991, he started out by cooking large pots of jambalaya with the Romeville Hunting Club and former festival champ Benoit Braud.