Day 30, New Iberia Louisiana, Comfort Suites

I realize many have visited Avery Island and the McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce factory. But we started off our day crossing onto the Island by stopping at the guard shack paying a dollar to proceed. What was cute was the way the information sheets and our dollar were handled. Pointed towards us and slide through the passenger window was a stick with a small board and a clothes pin attached to it. You took the information and clipped your dollar to the clothes pin and the transaction was completed. To the right were the gardens. Through a dusty windshield.

The Jungle Gardens is a 250-acre botanical garden and bird sanctuary located on Avery Island. We walked the entire sanctuary of 2.5 miles plus some trails, in the afternoon we drove through the garden to see how far we walked. We saw no others walking the roads as we did. Or as they say: Four miles of gravel roads are lined with live oak trees and Spanish moss. There are also many walking paths.

The gardens were created by Edward Avery McIlhenny, second son of Edmund McIlhenny, the inventor of Tabasco sauce.

An alligator eyeing us, but we both parted company.

Shirleen's favorite blossom until the next one.

Elephant shot for Michelle, notice the change laying on the top of the dish. I even shelled out. A nice Japanese Garden in the interior of the gardens. Close to the picture of us on the bridge.

Shirleen's favorite blossom, until the next one. An azalea tree blossom.

One of Jungle Gardens' primary attractions is a bird sanctuary called Bird City. It provides roosts for snowy egrets and other wildfowl species.
In 1895 McIlhenny raised eight egrets in captivity on the island, and released them in the fall for migration. They returned the next spring with other egrets, and have continued to do so over generations. Today thousands of egrets inhabit the island from early spring to late summer.

What a neat tree trunk, there were many like this one, some even had brick or concrete patching up the holes.

Shirleen's favorite flower, a Camellias, beautiful form and color.

One of the 200 types of bamboo the garden had.

Here is the lake I reference below.

This noon we drove to The Rip Van Winkle garden for lunch at the Jefferson Restaurant. It looks out to Lake Peigneur its main feature of the location and site of a major disaster. Lake Peigneur was formerly a 10-foot deep freshwater lake until a 1980 disaster involving oil drilling and a salt mine. The lake is now a 1300-foot deep salt water lake, having been refilled by the Gulf of Mexico via the Delcambre Canal. A short movie with real on-the-spot movies of the happenings showed houses buildings and semi-trucks being sucked down the ever expanding hole and later the lake. The people working in the salt mine were able to flee, as the implosion took 45 minutes to reach the 1,000 foot level of the mine where they made their escape via the elevator. There never was a settlement about where the fault lied but I have my guess, if I was drilling I know who they would blame.

We ate at the Jefferson Cafe, named after the original owner of the properties. A glass of cabernet each with Shirleen's hot panini grilled ham and cheese, i a cup of chicken and sausage gumbo with a quarter of a muffeletta.

Tabasco Sauce - What a neat place to visit.

Avery Island is one of five salt dome islands rising above the flat Louisiana Gulf coast. These islands formed over the eons when alluvial sediment covered a vast plain of salt left behind by an ancient saltwater ocean. Surrounded by the swamps and marshes of south Louisiana, Avery Island stands the highest at 163 feet above mean sea level.

Surrounded by swamps and marshes, Avery Island is a mysteriously beautiful place where the pepper fields grow, the factory hums, and the McIlhennys and their employees continue to live and work much as they have for generations.

The diet of the Reconstruction South was bland and monotonous, especially by Louisiana standards. So Edmund McIlhenny decided to create a pepper sauce to give the food some spice and flavor — some excitement. Selecting and crushing the reddest peppers from his plants, he mixed them with Avery Island salt and aged this “mash” for 30 days in crockery jars and barrels. McIlhenny then blended the mash with French white wine vinegar and aged the mixture for at least another 30 days. After straining it, he transferred the sauce to small cologne-type bottles with sprinkler fitments, which he then corked and sealed in green wax. (The sprinkler fitment was important because his pepper sauce was concentrated and best used when sprinkled, not poured.)

“That Famous Sauce Mr. McIlhenny Makes” proved so popular with family and friends that McIlhenny, previously a banker, decided to embark on a new business venture by marketing his pepper sauce. He grew his first commercial pepper crop in 1868. The next year, he sent out 658 bottles of sauce at one dollar apiece wholesale to grocers around the Gulf Coast, particularly in New Orleans. He labeled it “Tabasco,” a word of Mexican Indian origin believed to mean “place where the soil is humid” or “place of the coral or oyster shell.” McIlhenny secured a patent in 1870, and TABASCO® brand Pepper Sauce began its journey to set the culinary world on fire. Sales grew, and by the late 1870s he sold his sauce throughout the U.S. and even in England.

The pepper sauce that Edmund McIlhenny created in 1868 on Avery Island is much the same TABASCO® Sauce that is produced today, on that very same site. 139 years later, TABASCO® brand Pepper Sauce is made much the same way, except now the aging process for the mash is longer – up to three years in white oak barrels. Labeled in 22 languages and dialects, sold in over 160 countries and territories, added to soldiers’ rations, and put on restaurant tables around the globe, it is the most famous, most preferred pepper sauce in the world.

Edmund McIlhenny was given seeds of Capsicum frutescens peppers that came from Mexico or Central America. And he first planted them on Avery Island, Louisiana, over 130 years ago. Today, just as then, when the peppers reach the perfect shade of deep red and are at their juiciest, they are carefully picked by hand. (Young peppers are green, then turn yellow, orange, and, finally, deep red as they age.) When in doubt, pickers can gauge the color by comparing it to a small wooden dowel, “le petit bâton rouge,” painted the preferred hue of TABASCO® red.

After the peppers are picked, they are mashed and then mixed with a small amount of Avery Island salt, extracted from the salt mines that lie beneath the Island. The pepper mash is placed in white oak barrels, and the wooden tops of the barrels are then covered with more Avery Island salt, which acts as a natural barrier to protect the barrels’ contents. All done in one day. The mash is allowed to ferment and then age for up to three years in the McIlhenny warehouse.

The mash is inspected by a member of the McIlhenny family. When approved, the fully-aged mash is then blended with all natural, high-grain vinegar. Numerous stirrings and about four weeks later, the pepper skins, pulp and seeds are strained out using 3 different-sized screens. Then the “finished” sauce is bottled by modern methods, labeled in 22 languages and dialects, and prepared for shipment to over 160 countries and territories around the world.

Salt cultivated from the salt mines that lie beneath Avery Island plays an integral part in the TABASCO®- making process. It is used to seal the top of the white oak barrels that they buy from Jack Daniels Distillery where it is fermented in for the 3 years.

Neat sign on this highway.

Tonight we had little to choose from, many eating establishments were closed. We ended up at Chili's and split a rib eye.