Dale in Louisiana
10-05-2013, 09:16 PM
Okay, here’s a real Cajun recipe - since one of you asked that I post it here.
First, let me state that I was raised Cajun, although Dad’s got 50% Swiss ancestry. It is not unlikely that my first “solid” food was gumbo, although I don't remember. I cook a very workmanlike gumbo myself. In the notes below, I am referring to the gumbos I enjoyed all my life in Southwest Louisiana. They make a sort of gumbo in the New Orleans area, too, and they can call it what they want, but I have tried some, and I find them as close to REAL gumbo as New Orleans is close to REAL Cajun, i.e., not really.
First, let’s talk about ingredients: Traditionally, gumbo is a simple dish concocted out of ingredients either fresh or those suitable for long-term unrefrigerated storage, because that’s the way Cajun homes (including my great grandmother’s and grandmother’s) used to be. So, fresh seafood, from local bayous and lakes, chicken (they were running around the homestead somewhere), guinea fowl (not uncommon in Louisiana), these meats formed the basis of most gumbos. Add to this some smoky Cajun sausage. You hear a lot of talk about andouille sausage these days. As far as Grandma was concerned, sausage was sausage: pork, salt and pepper and other spices, smoked dark and hard, and it would keep forever. Vegetables consisted of onions, both yellow onions and the green onions that usually grew in the kitchen garden, bell pepper, and various hot peppers, and sometimes parsley or celery. The dry ingredients were flour (for the roux) and rice, usually medium-grain. Spices were simple: salt and pepper. Pepper could be black pepper or various fresh, pickled or dried hot peppers. And lastly, there was file’, the pulverized dried leaves of the sassafras tree. These are what go into a traditional gumbo, as I was familiar with. You can find recipes that call for spices not on this list, and strange ingredients like ketchup. You can use these, and you can call it “gumbo”?. You can call your skateboard a Mercedes, too.
The RECIPE:
First, make a roux. This word “roux” rhymes with “boo”. It has been said that the Cajun recipe for angelfood cake begins with making a roux, but this is not true. A roux is simply flour and oil heated and stirred in a pot over heat until the color changes from flour white to varying shades of brown. I prefer my roux to be dark. Refer to the color of your walnut Garand stock (obligatory gun reference is NOW satisfied) for a color reference.
How much of each? Enough is how much. Lemme guess and say start with ¾ cup of flour and enough oil mixed in so that it fills in the furrow left by the spoon in the bottom of the pot. This is enough roux for about 4 or 5 quarts of gumbo. It is easiest to use a heavy pot for this. I prefer a 5-quart cast iron Dutch oven. Making a roux in a cast-iron pot is very good for the cast iron.
Put the pot on the fire. You do use FIRE, don’t you? Man has cooked over flames since time immemorial. It’s the way things should be done. Put the oil and the flour in the pot, turn the heat to medium or medium-high, and begin stirring. Keep stirring. Don’t stop stirring. Over a period of time, the roux will transform from white to tan to beige to brown. Here are some hints. Just as the roux is done, you should begin to see some tendrils of bluish smoke coming from the pot. Keep stirring. If you let it sit, it will burn. If it smells burnt, toss it out and start over. S**t happens.
When the roux is the right color, break it by dumping in your chopped onions (a yellow onion the size of your fist, more or less, and a handful of chopped green onions, often called scallions by the pretentious. You can also add a chopped up stalk of celery and maybe a little chopped bell pepper. Chopped here means pieces about a quarter inch or so. Doesn’t have to be exact.) into the very hot roux. Keep stirring. The vegetables will cook somewhat and at the same time cool the roux down so it doesn’t keep cooking and burn. Make sure your windows are closed when you do this. The smell is wonderful. Traffic may stop on nearby thoroughfares if it gets out.
When the sizzling stops, add water or chicken stock. (Grandma didn’t use chicken stock. She did use a chicken that was usually old and tough and cooking this bird was an all-day process. These chickens had a lot of flavor and the long cooking needed to tenderize these tough old birds produced its own stock) and your meat.
For chicken and sausage gumbo, you can use a fryer, cut into serving size or smaller pieces, or the equivalent amount of boneless chicken, and about a half-pound of good smoked sausage, cut up. I like ¼ to 3/8 slices. Some folks like bigger chunks. Your call. NOTE: Eckrich Farms or Smokey Hollow is NOT my idea of “good smoked sausage”. Good smoked sausage is deep reddish brown or brown, smells like smoke, and you can see the bits of meat in it, not the homogeneous mass that you find in bad sausage. You can substitute a wild goose or two, or a couple of guineas, in place of the chicken.
For seafood gumbo, after the roux is broke with the vegetables, add water, a pound or two of peeled raw shrimp, a pint or two of raw oysters (add the liquor that they come in, too.) and cleaned crabs, or combinations of the above. Even small crabs, too small to be eaten, can be cleaned and thrown into the gumbo, where they add immeasurably to the flavor. To this day, crabs too small to eat boiled are often called “gumbo crabs” in Cajun country.
Whichever version you make, after the meat is added, add salt and pepper to taste. You have to temper this to the lowest common denominator. Lightly salted and peppered is best. After all, you might be feeding small children, the infirm, and Yankees, and too much pepper would cause damage. You can always add more to your individual bowl later. After the pot is boiling, turn the heat down to just above a simmer. Stir occasionally. Taste and adjust salt and pepper. If you used a fat goose or chicken, or fatty sausage, you can skim off excess grease as it rises to the top.
While the gumbo is simmering, prepare a pot of rice. Traditionally, this would be medium-grain rice, prepared on top of the stove, one cup of rice to one and a half cups of water, brought to a boil, then the heat turned down to just above a simmer, until all the liquid is absorbed. Many Cajun homes today use Japanese rice cookers. These do a good job, but the pot on top of the stove is best, because if it is left just a little time past when all the liquid is absorbed, a little of the rice next to the pot will toast, forming a deliciously crunchy brown “gratin”, which many of us love to add to the gumbo.
After the gumbo has simmered, the meat is tender, flavors have time to develop, which is maybe an hour and a half after the roux was finished, serve the gumbo up. Put a scoop of rice in the bowl, dump gumbo over it, making sure you have meats in there. Sprinkle a little file’ on top, add salt, black pepper, and red pepper sauce to taste and enjoy! My family’s traditional sides include potato salad and saltine crackers. Enjoy the beverage of your choice with gumbo. A good, piping hot, spicy bowl of gumbo makes a beer taste wonderful.
By the way, gumbo is even better after being refrigerated overnight.
Further comments:
The file’ gumbo I gave here could be summer dish, too, but in days before air conditioning, standing over a kitchen stove in the summertime, patiently stirring a roux for a big gumbo would definitely be a labor of love.
As a matter of fact, down here a colloquial expression for a cold, blustery, rainy day is “gumbo weather”. That big pot of gumbo simmering on the kitchen stove dumps a lot of heat and humidity into the house, a big plus when the temperatures go down, and a bowl of steaming gumbo will warm your cold body fast!
As for your roux burning, well, try this. First, use a vegetable oil. Traditionally, lard was used, but it will burn at lower temperatures, so making a roux with lard took a looooong time. Second, check your heat. I have used a gas stove, and I use a setting just a little above “Medium”, and it typically takes me over half an hour to make a roux. It has to be stirred constantly. Somebody has to stand there with a spoon or a whisk and keep the flour and oil moving from the beginning to the end. Having your onions, etc. chopped and in a bowl, ready to add, that’s a big help, because the minute you reach walnut color, you can dump them in and KEEP STIRRING,
Incidentally, there are commercially made roux available in local stores, typically in pint jars. ( you can search them in Google) I have tasted some darn good gumbos made with this bottled roux, and they might well be the way to go for somebody who doesn’t have the opportunity to watch one being made from scratch.
Here’s another tip: Add your liquid opposite to your roux. If you made your roux from scratch and it’s hot, add cold liquid. If you use bottled roux, or roux made ahead of time, then add the cold roux to simmering liquid. (Yes, you can make a big batch of roux and use some now and some later)
For beginners, the best hint I can give about making a roux is that less heat is better than more. You’ll stand over the stove stirring a lot longer, but things will not happen as fast, so it’s more forgiving. Also, if you’re unsure about how much roux to make for a dish, make more than you need. It keeps in the refrigerator for a week, easily.
Let me tell you folks, Cajun cooking is NOT rocket science. It couldn’t be! These folks worked for a living on family farms and stuff, and Grandma didn’t have time for endless cutesies with multiple pots and pans and critical cooking techniques. This is stuff you spent a bit of time up front getting started, and then it could simmer on the stove while you went about the rest of the business of taking care of home and family. So if you want a bunch of frou-frou cooking ****, go to New Orleans or someplace like that. We Cajuns didn’t have time for it!
File’! It’s made from green sassafras leaves, dried and pulverized. It GOES with the gumbo I showed you in the recipe above. That’s why this is called a file’ gumbo. It NEVER goes in the cooking gumbo. If you do that, you may end up with something closely akin to gumbo-flavored snot. The file’ will get all ropey when cooked. So just buy a bottle, put it on the table or the serving area, and advise everybody to sprinkle a little on their individual bowls when served. While you’re at it, put a few varied bottles of Louisiana hot sauce for individual application, too…
dale in Louisiana
(LeDoux, LeBoeuf, LeBlanc, Fontenot, etc...)
First, let me state that I was raised Cajun, although Dad’s got 50% Swiss ancestry. It is not unlikely that my first “solid” food was gumbo, although I don't remember. I cook a very workmanlike gumbo myself. In the notes below, I am referring to the gumbos I enjoyed all my life in Southwest Louisiana. They make a sort of gumbo in the New Orleans area, too, and they can call it what they want, but I have tried some, and I find them as close to REAL gumbo as New Orleans is close to REAL Cajun, i.e., not really.
First, let’s talk about ingredients: Traditionally, gumbo is a simple dish concocted out of ingredients either fresh or those suitable for long-term unrefrigerated storage, because that’s the way Cajun homes (including my great grandmother’s and grandmother’s) used to be. So, fresh seafood, from local bayous and lakes, chicken (they were running around the homestead somewhere), guinea fowl (not uncommon in Louisiana), these meats formed the basis of most gumbos. Add to this some smoky Cajun sausage. You hear a lot of talk about andouille sausage these days. As far as Grandma was concerned, sausage was sausage: pork, salt and pepper and other spices, smoked dark and hard, and it would keep forever. Vegetables consisted of onions, both yellow onions and the green onions that usually grew in the kitchen garden, bell pepper, and various hot peppers, and sometimes parsley or celery. The dry ingredients were flour (for the roux) and rice, usually medium-grain. Spices were simple: salt and pepper. Pepper could be black pepper or various fresh, pickled or dried hot peppers. And lastly, there was file’, the pulverized dried leaves of the sassafras tree. These are what go into a traditional gumbo, as I was familiar with. You can find recipes that call for spices not on this list, and strange ingredients like ketchup. You can use these, and you can call it “gumbo”?. You can call your skateboard a Mercedes, too.
The RECIPE:
First, make a roux. This word “roux” rhymes with “boo”. It has been said that the Cajun recipe for angelfood cake begins with making a roux, but this is not true. A roux is simply flour and oil heated and stirred in a pot over heat until the color changes from flour white to varying shades of brown. I prefer my roux to be dark. Refer to the color of your walnut Garand stock (obligatory gun reference is NOW satisfied) for a color reference.
How much of each? Enough is how much. Lemme guess and say start with ¾ cup of flour and enough oil mixed in so that it fills in the furrow left by the spoon in the bottom of the pot. This is enough roux for about 4 or 5 quarts of gumbo. It is easiest to use a heavy pot for this. I prefer a 5-quart cast iron Dutch oven. Making a roux in a cast-iron pot is very good for the cast iron.
Put the pot on the fire. You do use FIRE, don’t you? Man has cooked over flames since time immemorial. It’s the way things should be done. Put the oil and the flour in the pot, turn the heat to medium or medium-high, and begin stirring. Keep stirring. Don’t stop stirring. Over a period of time, the roux will transform from white to tan to beige to brown. Here are some hints. Just as the roux is done, you should begin to see some tendrils of bluish smoke coming from the pot. Keep stirring. If you let it sit, it will burn. If it smells burnt, toss it out and start over. S**t happens.
When the roux is the right color, break it by dumping in your chopped onions (a yellow onion the size of your fist, more or less, and a handful of chopped green onions, often called scallions by the pretentious. You can also add a chopped up stalk of celery and maybe a little chopped bell pepper. Chopped here means pieces about a quarter inch or so. Doesn’t have to be exact.) into the very hot roux. Keep stirring. The vegetables will cook somewhat and at the same time cool the roux down so it doesn’t keep cooking and burn. Make sure your windows are closed when you do this. The smell is wonderful. Traffic may stop on nearby thoroughfares if it gets out.
When the sizzling stops, add water or chicken stock. (Grandma didn’t use chicken stock. She did use a chicken that was usually old and tough and cooking this bird was an all-day process. These chickens had a lot of flavor and the long cooking needed to tenderize these tough old birds produced its own stock) and your meat.
For chicken and sausage gumbo, you can use a fryer, cut into serving size or smaller pieces, or the equivalent amount of boneless chicken, and about a half-pound of good smoked sausage, cut up. I like ¼ to 3/8 slices. Some folks like bigger chunks. Your call. NOTE: Eckrich Farms or Smokey Hollow is NOT my idea of “good smoked sausage”. Good smoked sausage is deep reddish brown or brown, smells like smoke, and you can see the bits of meat in it, not the homogeneous mass that you find in bad sausage. You can substitute a wild goose or two, or a couple of guineas, in place of the chicken.
For seafood gumbo, after the roux is broke with the vegetables, add water, a pound or two of peeled raw shrimp, a pint or two of raw oysters (add the liquor that they come in, too.) and cleaned crabs, or combinations of the above. Even small crabs, too small to be eaten, can be cleaned and thrown into the gumbo, where they add immeasurably to the flavor. To this day, crabs too small to eat boiled are often called “gumbo crabs” in Cajun country.
Whichever version you make, after the meat is added, add salt and pepper to taste. You have to temper this to the lowest common denominator. Lightly salted and peppered is best. After all, you might be feeding small children, the infirm, and Yankees, and too much pepper would cause damage. You can always add more to your individual bowl later. After the pot is boiling, turn the heat down to just above a simmer. Stir occasionally. Taste and adjust salt and pepper. If you used a fat goose or chicken, or fatty sausage, you can skim off excess grease as it rises to the top.
While the gumbo is simmering, prepare a pot of rice. Traditionally, this would be medium-grain rice, prepared on top of the stove, one cup of rice to one and a half cups of water, brought to a boil, then the heat turned down to just above a simmer, until all the liquid is absorbed. Many Cajun homes today use Japanese rice cookers. These do a good job, but the pot on top of the stove is best, because if it is left just a little time past when all the liquid is absorbed, a little of the rice next to the pot will toast, forming a deliciously crunchy brown “gratin”, which many of us love to add to the gumbo.
After the gumbo has simmered, the meat is tender, flavors have time to develop, which is maybe an hour and a half after the roux was finished, serve the gumbo up. Put a scoop of rice in the bowl, dump gumbo over it, making sure you have meats in there. Sprinkle a little file’ on top, add salt, black pepper, and red pepper sauce to taste and enjoy! My family’s traditional sides include potato salad and saltine crackers. Enjoy the beverage of your choice with gumbo. A good, piping hot, spicy bowl of gumbo makes a beer taste wonderful.
By the way, gumbo is even better after being refrigerated overnight.
Further comments:
The file’ gumbo I gave here could be summer dish, too, but in days before air conditioning, standing over a kitchen stove in the summertime, patiently stirring a roux for a big gumbo would definitely be a labor of love.
As a matter of fact, down here a colloquial expression for a cold, blustery, rainy day is “gumbo weather”. That big pot of gumbo simmering on the kitchen stove dumps a lot of heat and humidity into the house, a big plus when the temperatures go down, and a bowl of steaming gumbo will warm your cold body fast!
As for your roux burning, well, try this. First, use a vegetable oil. Traditionally, lard was used, but it will burn at lower temperatures, so making a roux with lard took a looooong time. Second, check your heat. I have used a gas stove, and I use a setting just a little above “Medium”, and it typically takes me over half an hour to make a roux. It has to be stirred constantly. Somebody has to stand there with a spoon or a whisk and keep the flour and oil moving from the beginning to the end. Having your onions, etc. chopped and in a bowl, ready to add, that’s a big help, because the minute you reach walnut color, you can dump them in and KEEP STIRRING,
Incidentally, there are commercially made roux available in local stores, typically in pint jars. ( you can search them in Google) I have tasted some darn good gumbos made with this bottled roux, and they might well be the way to go for somebody who doesn’t have the opportunity to watch one being made from scratch.
Here’s another tip: Add your liquid opposite to your roux. If you made your roux from scratch and it’s hot, add cold liquid. If you use bottled roux, or roux made ahead of time, then add the cold roux to simmering liquid. (Yes, you can make a big batch of roux and use some now and some later)
For beginners, the best hint I can give about making a roux is that less heat is better than more. You’ll stand over the stove stirring a lot longer, but things will not happen as fast, so it’s more forgiving. Also, if you’re unsure about how much roux to make for a dish, make more than you need. It keeps in the refrigerator for a week, easily.
Let me tell you folks, Cajun cooking is NOT rocket science. It couldn’t be! These folks worked for a living on family farms and stuff, and Grandma didn’t have time for endless cutesies with multiple pots and pans and critical cooking techniques. This is stuff you spent a bit of time up front getting started, and then it could simmer on the stove while you went about the rest of the business of taking care of home and family. So if you want a bunch of frou-frou cooking ****, go to New Orleans or someplace like that. We Cajuns didn’t have time for it!
File’! It’s made from green sassafras leaves, dried and pulverized. It GOES with the gumbo I showed you in the recipe above. That’s why this is called a file’ gumbo. It NEVER goes in the cooking gumbo. If you do that, you may end up with something closely akin to gumbo-flavored snot. The file’ will get all ropey when cooked. So just buy a bottle, put it on the table or the serving area, and advise everybody to sprinkle a little on their individual bowls when served. While you’re at it, put a few varied bottles of Louisiana hot sauce for individual application, too…
dale in Louisiana
(LeDoux, LeBoeuf, LeBlanc, Fontenot, etc...)