Chicken and Sausage Gumbo.
One chicken, whole
1 lb link sausage, any type
couple of onions, chopped finely
couple of bellpeppers, chopped finely
1 stem celery, chopped finely
teaspoon fresh garlic, minced
1 cup oil
1.25 cups all purpose flour
That's about it. You can get fancy if you want to, and add other things, but this is a basic gumbo recipe.
First, clean the chicken, taking out all giblets and boil it in a stock pot. Cook the chicken thoroughly, drain and set aside. Save your broth. Half of the flavor of that chicken is in the stock you just made.
Make a roux. Roux is an oil and flour mixture, cooked on medium high heat on a stove, traditionally in a black iron skillet. There is a good tutorial here. I like a dark roux for my gumbo, but I know how to make a white roux, a medium roux, and a peanut-butter roux. When your roux is done to your liking, set it aside to cool. It'll continue to cook when you take it off the heat, so you'll need to continue to stir it for a few minutes.
Slice your sausage into rounds, and put it in whatever pot you're going to use to make the gumbo, begin cooking it, stirring regularly, add the garlic, stir, then add the vegetables. You're going to let this cook on a medium heat, stirring regularly, until the veggies are cooked through, clear and sweet. Then, turn it down and add a little chicken broth.
Peel your chicken from the bone, adding the meat into the gumbo pot. Add the cooled roux and enough chicken broth to give the gumbo the proper consistency. It should be a soup-like concoction. Salt and pepper to taste, then turn the fire down and let it simmer for an hour.
Junior has a great recipe for a tomato based gumbo. He says it's traditional to put okra in gumbo, and my own mother made a lot of gumbo with okra. I can take it or leave it.
Here's what my basic gumbo looks like:
Make a pot of rice. Gumbo is traditionally ladled over rice. Serve with iced tea and crackers, or garlic bread. Or brown and serve rolls.
4 comments:
Arright. I scoured my kitchen for the necessaries. No whole chicken but I found a frozen package of breasts with bone and skin, tossed the works into my big kettle and put it on. It's boiling now. I found a smoked ring sausage, and sliced up half of it. Diced up a small onion, it's what I have. There was a yellow bell pepper in the crisper, it is now diced and in a bowl with the onion, same with three ribs of celery. Made a peanut butter roux out of light olive oil and unbleached flour. Easy peasy. Why I keep reading about how hard it is to do a roux, I dunno. You just gotta pay attention, and show some patience, you will burn it if you try to do it by remote control.
My momma told me that you can't cook and watch TV too. You have to stay in the kitchen and cook. When I have my chats with God each night, I always thank Him for giving me to my Momma and Daddy. They had me, my brother and five girls. She taught us all how to cook. The girls needed to know 'cause they were gonna be taking care of families of their own, and us boys needed to know 'cause mean and unruly kids like us were gonna be hard put to find girls dumb enough to marry us so we were gonna have to be able to take care of ourselves. Momma had a sense of humor. She always told us things like that while she was grinning and giving us hugs. You couldn't make better parents if you wrote specifications, even if Dad was a Democrat. Of course a 1960's Democrat would be a far right extremist now.
I have the sausage and veggies cooking in a smaller pot with the roux waiting for the chicken to be done and cooled a bit. All I had was minced garlic, so I put in a tablespoon. OK, now the chix is cooling a bit, the stock and all the other stuff is in the kettle, simmering. This stuff smells wonderful. Fishing around in the pantry I found a can of Ro-Tel, that's going in along with a can of S&W diced roasted tomatoes.
I'ts 9 pm now, I just put rice in the cooker, brown rice tonight, Mama's not home and she doesn't care for it. I do.
OK, it's about 10:30, everything's been simmering since about 7. Getting out a big ol' bowl and a couple pieces of pilot bread.
HORRY CLAP ! This stuff is GOOD! The Ro-Tel gives it a bit of snap. I don't have any Tabasco, so I splashed half a dozen drops of Sriricha in my bowl. Man alive, dat is some kinda good.
Thank You for the recipe.
I'm gonna make up a kit of prepped ingredients to take to Rendezvous in the Spring, cook up a chicken for stock and pull the meat a day or two ahead. Make up a roux and put it in a freezer bag, and cut up the veggies. Then all I'll need to do is heat up my Dutch Oven and simmer it all for a couple or three hours.
I'm not using okra, though, that stuff is awful. There's only two veggies I've found that I cannot abide. One is okra and the other is eggplant. Too bad too, some of the dishes made with 'em look and smell wonderful.
Gerry N.
Sounds like my gumbo except that I do like the okra. I also put a can of tomato paste into the roux, then work the stock in. It seems to help it all mix/bind better.
Spices for mine are thyme, black pepper, poultry seasoning, salt. Maybe some other stuff depending on how adventurous I feel.
I always thought that sassafras went in … file gumbo in the gumbo?
Drew458
Where's the critters? Gotta have some crawfish in there.
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