This Creole Chef Is Claiming a Spot in Your Spice Cabinet

For Jeremy Nagin, cooking is personal. The New Orleans-born, now Dallas-based chef and product developer has always had one foot in and one foot out of the food industry, but his passion for innovation always drew him back in. From working at McDonald’s at just 15 years old to finding his way in the kitchens of Emeril's, Bourbon House, and Nick and Sam’s Steakhouse in Dallas, Nagin has finally found his footing. The product-driven food industry is largely white and generally ignores the importance of Creole cuisine in the broader scope of American home cooking. But Nagin is staking a claim with his newly launched company, Beaucoup Flavor.

Beaucoup Flavor is a Black-owned spice mix company that offers three different Creole blends—St. Beaucoup, the brand’s signature flavor made with sea salt, garlic, and the Holy Trinity (onion, bell pepper, and tomato); 3:30 Sunday, which takes barbecue culture and mixes it with Nagin’s Creole roots; and Tu Sabes, a Tex-Mex-meets-Creole blend of French sea salt, chipotle, cayenne pepper, cumin, and cilantro. “How do you take an already rich culture and mesh it with another rich culture?” he asks, rhetorically.

Tex-Mex flavors can easily stand on their own, as can smoky barbecue rubs, but when mixed with Creole-inspired ingredients, magic happens. Sprinkle Tu Sabes on popcorn or French fries, or rub 3:30 Sunday on slow-cooked pork shoulder—“there’s no wrong way to use it,” he says. Take Food52’s recipe for Slow-Cooker Pork Shoulder With Brown Sugar & Balsamic Glaze, for example: “swap those dried spices for Beaucoup and keep adding it until you hear jazz bands. Now you have something that’s culturally distinct and unique to you. It doesn’t even resemble Creole food, but it’s something awesome that you’ve made by mixing Beaucoup with your own ingredients,” says Nagin.

Nagin didn’t want to just make something flavorful; he wanted to make something flavorful that was also low in sodium, made without the use of GMO products, and free from any additives. “We are healthy-ish,” says Nagin. “Coming from New Orleans, my baby food was full of flavor so this just transcends into the brand.” His hope is to help address the burgeoning health crisis, particularly in the Black community, with what he calls a “clean label” of high-quality flavorful products. According to a 2018 study from the National Institutes of Health, non-Hispanic blacks are twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to die from diabetes and African American adults are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to be diagnosed with diabetes by a physician.

“At the end of the day, we just make food that tastes good. My uncle might not care that it’s healthy, he just wants it to taste good. Our products are surprisingly healthy, whether you care about it or not,” he adds.

Nagin won’t stop at spice blends, at least not yet: while he hopes to continue introducing professional chefs and home cooks to Beaucoup, he wants to collaborate with artists and designers to create a functional, stylish collection of kitchen workwear (think: aprons and dish towels) that match the soul of New Orleans.

Which Beaucoup Flavor spice blend do you want to try first? Let us know in the comments below!