I went to Mardis Gras once. That is a story for another day though. Point is I freaking loved New Orleans and tried my best to make one of the dishes that I had there and decided to post it on the internet.
Disclaimers: I am a white boy from New Jersey. I have no illusions or pretensions about my cooking ability. I eat meat because it is tasty. I am doing my best to honor the culinary traditions of the general region of the Louisiana bayou through shameless imitation and know that I am probably failing miserably.
Disclaimers: I am a white boy from New Jersey. I have no illusions or pretensions about my cooking ability. I eat meat because it is tasty. I am doing my best to honor the culinary traditions of the general region of the Louisiana bayou through shameless imitation and know that I am probably failing miserably.
The internet says that the most important part of gumbo is something called a roux. From what I understand it is just melted butter and flour cooked in a pan for a while. I cooked the meat I was using before the roux. I am pretty sure that most gumbos have Andouille sausage so I used that and shrimp. My mom told me to use white wine to keep things from sticking to the pan. The wine went really well with the butter and it all smelled great.
Once the meat was cooked I chopped up the sausage and some vegetables. You can get pretty creative with the veggies and spices but I kept it pretty simple. I used a jalapeno and a habanero to make it spicy. The finished product was pretty mild so if you like some heat you can add a bunch more. Next time I will probably use six habaneros.
I was pretty confident with the cooking up until this point. It was all pretty simple stuff. The roux was tough to get right. I can't really say how to make it correctly because I don't know. I slowly added flour to the butter then screwed up and had to add more butter. Fortunately I had enough flour and butter to mess around until I got the consistency right. I was not really not sure what kind of heat to use. I settled on high heat and occasional medium heat because low heat was taking too damn long. Stirring the roux constantly got kind of old but it smelled amazing so I didn't really mind. Recipes say it should be a deep chocolate color but I went with more of a dark peanut butter because my parents were getting hungry.
It was actually a little darker than this but I forgot to take a picture.
Once I got tired of mixing the roux I tossed in all the veggies with some chopped garlic. I threw in the spices too. If I were to guess how much of each spice I used I would estimate it to be about three quarters of a butt load each. I added the meat a little later because it was already cooked. The rest of the cooking process is just adding water and mixing until the gumbo is the thickness that you want. I went pretty chunky and mixed it with rice that my mom made earlier. With enough water you can get it to be a soup. Also if you keep gumbo in the fridge you can heat it in a pan and add a little water to make it good as new. Pictured below is the finished product. Not pictured below is the hideous gumbo omelette I tried to make this morning..
So there you have it. I had no idea what I was doing but I made a pretty tasty gumbo. It made me want to go back to New Orleans to go a gallivanting with my chums. I plan on making some more foods that I have no idea how to cook soon. Figuring it out as you go along is much more fun than following a recipe.
Except when it isn't.