Authentic Louisiana Gumbo

all right ladies and gentlemen today I'm going to be making a uh gumbo and right now I'm just kind of showing you some of the prep work that's involved with uh making this Gumbo from scratch right now I have some sausages rendering down on a very very low heat I put a little bit of oil to starten them and then I'm just letting them render down trying to render the grease and the fats out of those SAU sausages and I keep them on low heat because I don't want it to burn because I'm going to take that I'm going to strain that grease and I'm going to use that as part of my root because it's going to have those deep sausage flavors in there it's going to help season up that root and the overall pot and here in the back I got about five chicken thighs that I'm stewing down but I'm using those to create the uh stock that I'm going to use for my roof instead of just using water or pre-boil stock I got those chicken thighs in there with a uh one onion about three stocks of celery and I put a spoon of garlic then I put a spoon of that granulated Chicken bullan in there too to uh give it some flavor some shakes of red pepper flakes and some black pepper and you can also see in there that I have shrimp shells in there I got some fresh uh uh South Georgia white shrimp and I peeled and thein them and I got those shells in there too just to add to that stock since we're going to have some seafood in there as well it won't just be a chicken based stock it have a little Seafood based stock as well so that's the beginning prep works that go with everything you have to do to make a gumbo from scratch and when we come back we'll have all this his stuff kind of put together and we'll start actually uh going over the ingredients I put in there overall and then we'll start the cooking process all right so let's go to the ingredients that we're going to put into this Gumball today we're going to we got our granulated onion garlic powder black pepper tomato paste some sea salt Teragon leaves bay leaves Hungarian peera OE seasoning gumbo filet powder some crushed red pepper flakes that's the seasonings I'm going to use and then here's my flour and butter I'm going to use to make my roof and then this is my emergency kit it's some corn starch and some Kitchen Bouquet on the very back side of this dish if my turn out that okay my gumballs a little it's too watery I'll add just a little bit of corn starch to thicken it up and if I didn't get quite the brown that I wanted out of the room I'll add just a little bit of that Kitchen Bouquet Browning Sauce to darken up that R color so call it cheating call it what you want but that's my emergency kit now the other ingredients that we're going to have I got my bowl of red and yellow of pepper some green onion scallion down there I got two white onions and two velia sweet yellow onions three stocks of celery here's my crab meat this is the uh select and the uh claw meat you can see I've already picked through it to make sure there weren't any shells in it it's relatively shellf free when you buy but it doesn't hurt to go through it and just pick the shells up CU nothing like jumping down on a nice hard crabshell when you're trying to enjoy some gumbo um one other thing I did add to the stock that I forgot to mention when I took this uh crab meat I squeezed it to get the Liquid out of it and I poured that liquid into the stock as well so this has been squeezed out so it's really dry at the moment so when I put it in the gumbo it'll absorb that flavor back into it instead of it being already wet and not absorbing as much those are the sausages that I rendered down in the pan there's a chicken that I pulled off the bone and there's some nice uh large almost jumbo siiz Georgia white shrimp fresh from the uh fresh from South Georgia so those are the ingredients we're going to put in the gumbo when I come back I will uh have processed those vegetables and we'll be ready to start the roof all right folks we're back as you can see I got the sausages all rendered down got the pan cleaned out and now I'm going to uh strain the oil so that's all of the sausage drippings it's been strained out so now I got that nice flavorful oil without the burnt particles so I'm keep this in the pan get on a low heat I'm going to start my uh R in just a little bit go ahead and get this oil warm I don't want it hot but I do want to get it warm and in the back here you can see that I still have my uh stock going I've taken the thighs out and I've deboned them but um I still got everything else in there and I took all of the skin and the fat and the bones back out of the chicken and I put it back in the stock and I even took those bones and broke them down so that marrow could seep out and help flavor up that stock so it's going to be a nice rich stock um not really sure how much it's going to be you know but if I need a little bit of more fluid I can add water but I will already be started with this nice flavorful stock so I think this uh Dumbo's going to have a really good taste to it all right folks welcome back I am now starting my root this root is a 50/50 mix of oil and flour the flour is just just allpurpose flour nothing special about it and as you know the oil that I'm using today I am using butter um so this is one cup of oil which was a half of that block of butter that you saw earlier and um one cup of flour and I had the cup of flour kind of running over because I did have that uh additional oil that I had from the bacon renderings I'm sorry the sausage rendering so that is included in here as well now I got this fire on low because uh well not low low but you know it's only on it's eight out of 10 but eight is really not a high heat you can see right there that's not really really high um again this is that uh super giant burner that will go about three times as high as that one when you get it on the Searing setting so I show you what that flame look like I'm going to keep it about there or lower because I am using butter and butter does burn uh quicker than oil does so I don't want that butter to burn I just want this R to thicken up and uh start to darken so as you can see you just got to keep it moving and this process can take up to an hour depend on how much you do and how much heat you use so I'm not going to have you watch a whole hour of me making this R I'll just periodically take snapshots as the uh color darkens so you can see the uh consistency of the color as it goes through now one thing you can do if you're going to use the butter if you plant ahead you can go ahead and make yourself some clarified butter which has a much higher um burning point because you've basically took all the impurities out the salts and everything else that they put in there you taking all of that out and that butter is more close consistency to oil but I didn't have any clarified butter today so I'm not going to use it I'm just going to do it this way take it low and slow until I get the r that I want um additionally I got my okra over here I'm just going to basically flash boil it just going to get it up to a boil Let It Roll for about 2 to 3 minutes then I'm going to take it off and let it strain and run some water on it and what that's going to do that's going to deslime the o or something I personally I'm a fan of the Slime and most of my dishes I will just take that ochre and put it right in the pot without the slim it but my wife really doesn't like it so in order for me to get her to eat it I'll desim it so I'm desliming it for her and you can see I still got that um stock in the background just simmering down and absorbing those flavors from those bones and the marrow and the shells and everything else so that ought to be really good when I put it in this gumbo so here's what the rul is looking like now you can see it's starting to get a little Rumble in there I'm going to keep it right like that all the way through see it's relatively thickening up a little bit and that's what I want and you just can't stop this room you can't stop it you got to keep it going cuz it will Scorch so here it is and I'll just take snapshots until I get it like I want and I'll tell you how long it took once I'm done all right ladies and gentlemen welcome back as you can see from my uh pictures those pictures will taking on just about every 5 minute intervals so I'm 30 minutes into this R now and you can see I have a nice chocolate brown color so it actually didn't take as long as I thought it would to get here I am going to let it go for a little while longer but I didn't want you to know that I have turned my heat down once I got to this 30 minute point I cut my heat down in half because this is once you get to this point gets a little more Mission critical it's easier to go from good to ruin so I just slowed it down so that I could continue to get the color that I'm looking for I'm looking for just a little darker color I like my gumballs really really deep chocolate brown so that's what I'm looking for like I said I turned down the fire because I didn't want it to burn cuz I don't want to have to start this 30 minute process over again so in the end I'm probably still going to go about 40 45 minutes before I get that color that I'm looking for I don't want a black room but I want a really really deep deep Brown rof so this is what it's looking like I just wanted to let you see what it look like you know 30 minutes in what that consistency look like in the pan as you can see I've been constantly moving this for the last 30 minutes so it's a good workout for your arm as well if you do this a lot a lot you can get a automatic rof stirer and it'll go in the pan and just keep this thing moving for you but I don't do it enough to uh pay for that apparatus so I'll just get the work with my hand and sometimes I go up and down left and right and other times I go in circles just anything to keep it moving and keep me interested so there you have it I will still take pictures every 5 minutes or so until I get to the consistency color that I was looking for so this was just a 30 minute update all right ladies and gentlemen we are 1 hour in and I have gotten this through right where I want it um from the 30 minute mark down to the hour I didn't gain a tremendous tremendous amount of Darkness as far as getting Browner but I do have that dark chocolate rud color that I wanted like I said at the halfway point I did turn the Flames down because I did not want to ruin this thing but I do have the brown that I was looking for and I could have stopped about 45 minutes but I just decide to let this R continue on as I got some of the other things together so couple things that I've done since in that last 15 minutes while I let that R go I went ahead and I strained off my okra like I said I did uh you know par boil it flash boil for about 2 to 3 minutes and then I Des slimed it I just sat it in the colander that colander right there rinsed it off let it drain they drained out a bunch of that slimy stuff and then I uh rinsed it maybe two times and just let it continue to drain to get that snot out of there and then I took the first round of stock and poured it on there so that I could start creating the second round the second round is not going to be as uh flavorful as the first but it will be better than just putting straight water in the pot and then the last thing I did I just took that and I took that little can of tomato paste that I had and I went ahead and uh mixed that tomato paste up inside of that Seafood chicken stock with the okra there's no flame on that I just went ahead and mixed that up so that when it's time to add it to the pot it's already mixed up and Blended so now you see I'm still over here stirring this Ro as we talked now you know do it at your own risk multitasking like that because like I said this R can turn from good to ruin in a split second so you know multitask at your own wrist is no harm and just doing things one thing at a time time especially if you're inexperience so don't bite off more than you can chew cuz you don't want to ruin this thing after you've been going for 45 minutes to an hour and have to start over so now the next thing I'm going to do is go ahead and put my onions in I'm going turn my heat up cuz I want these onions to uh start to caramelize [Music] ex halfway through I turned my uh heat down to four and now as soon as I put these onions back in I turn that heat back up to eight and that's about the max heat I'm going to put on this pop so I'll just continue to uh add ingredients until I get where I want to be one little onion didn't get cut up as much as I [Music] wanted so I don't want these to get you know soft I just want them to get a little uh translucent and you won't really be able to tell the caramelization because it's maked into this dark chocolate rof but I just don't want them to be white I I just want them to go ahead and cook down a little before I put the rest of the uh ingredients in woo smelling good smell like a thick french onion soup at the moment you see that heats up that Ro going continue to get dark so you got to keep it moving still just cuz you add the onions don't mean you're done you still got to keep this thing moving so you don't ruin [Music] it I don't know if you can hear that in there you should be able to hear it it smells as good as it sounds right now too all right so now I got those kind of cooking down a little it's time to add in the rest of the uh vegetables um one thing you can see in the top of there that I didn't talk about before I forgot to tell you that I did have a uh sweet chili pepper that I added to that when I was telling you what all those ingredients for I forgot to tell you about sweet chili pepper I have two of those in there I like those um they do have a little bit of heat but they don't have enough to make it overpowering cuz we're not a very we don't like a lot of heat in our food Savory good spicy for no good reason not good so you can add hotter peppers if you want you know do do what works for you this is just a basic recipe so you can see the ingredients that go into this the best part about gumbo is gumbo basically means anything you got that you want to use so whatever you want to put in here you put in here I got other things that I could add in here I got some scallops some uh smoke baby uh clams different types of Seafoods you can add to it if I was going to do just a true seafood gumbo I would put all of that in there as well but since I'm going to do the chicken I'm going to lay off on some of that Seafood so I can have a nice balance in the flavors so I'm going to just go ahead and uh continue to render this down a little and I'm going to transfer it into the uh my stock pot and then we'll pick up from there so that's what we got going on now we got the r the onions were in there for maybe 3 minutes or so it's doing uh simmering down in that R kind of starting to cook to get translucent and then I poured in the yellow and the red bell pepper with the celery the green scallions along with the two Chili Peppers and now I'm just turning them and keeping it moving oh you can see that Darkness in that rof just look how deep Brown it is I wish you could smell it oh my goodness I wish you could smell it so like I said I'll be back in just a little bit we'll be in a different pot and adding the rest of the ingredients and starting this thing to simmer down and let it cook and let all those uh flavors marinate into each other and make one nice pot of Gumbo all right folks here we go you can see I have that uh R rendered down with my uh vegetables in there now that's just like I want it see that steam coming up off the pot I have uh kind of got the heat still up on that eight setting even in this part cuz we're not done yet we're just going to now take those sausages just get those Blended in and I didn't have to put the sausages in right with the onions and stuff because they were already cooked they were already pre-rendered now so I don't have any grease or anything that to pull out of those and I need didn't want to have to cook them to get them crispy cuz I already did that previously so that's that I'm also going to take this chicken and that ended up being four chicken thighs and that was one box of sausages one whole box of sausag you can uh add or reduce the meat as you like but I'm a mearian so all my dishes will always have a lot of meat in them cuz I love that meat so we got all of that in there getting it mixed up good and I again I pull that chicken I pulled it in uh not big chunks but not little fine pieces either so you'd have some consistency when you bite it just like you would have with the sausages and I cut the sausage on a bias it's a uh culinary trick makes you think you got more than what you really have it's still the same box of sausage but when you cut it that way that long way it looks like it's more sausage than if you just cut it you know straight across and make little circle pieces with it so this is my pan that I did the other stuff in um see nothing stuck to it so it was perfect heat if you're ever cooking in your pan you see it start to stick stop immediately take it off the heat get you a fresh pan pour the ingredients off the top in the pan do not scrape it and just uh start from there and just go to your your next pan before you ruin if you catch it right when it starts you won't uh ruin everything in your pan and you can just leave that burnt stuff in the bottom of that pan do not scrape it it's not worth it just ruining the flavor of your whole pot to save a couple ingredients so like I said that pan I didn't have anything sticking and again I'm still moving it around in this big stock pot as well cuz I don't want it to stick before I put my liquids in there uh I cook with a lot of stainless steel pans and they're not very forgiving so if you not comfortable with them get you some non-stick pans by all means they work great and they are a little more forgiving a lot more forgiving so that'll help with uh scorching stuff and uh getting it stuck to the pan and burnt and things like that so got all that mixture mixed in there now I'm going to take my pan of fluids again that's the okra the stock and the tomato paste man look at that look at that rich brownness in there oh yeah and again the chicken was cooked as well I kind of missed that part so I didn't have to sauté the chicken with the onions and the vegetables either because the chicken was precooked you can just uh same way I render down that chicken you can render down I'm sorry the same way I render down those sausages you can render down that chicken the same way and use those drippings to uh make that room but I also wanted to use that chicken to uh help create that stock that I was using using now if you can see that consistency there that's really thick so corn starch not going to be a problem here cuz that between the uh the flour and the roof and also the longer you cook the flour the less it's going to thicken up cuz you um so but when I add that tomato paste as well that's very thick biscous substance too so you can see this here is a very uh kind of thick gumbo that's a um it's thicker than I want it but like I said I uh took the other pot that I had before of liquids drained it off and then I made some more so instead of having to add water I just strain that I just strain it I'll turn that fire off now I'll let that strain for a minute and then that's a second partt of stock it's not as strong as the first one so at this point it may be more of a broth than a stock but it's still better than just water so take that put it back over waa second partt of stock if you wanted to go a third time if you needed it you could just remember every time you do it it's going to get weaker so I'll just pour in half of that oh yeah that's right about the consistency that I wanted but I know I am going to let this here it cook down for about another hour and so since I'm going to let it cook down I'm go ahead and add the rest of that stock and make it a little looser knowing that it's going to concentrate and render down some more so there we have that I'm going to get the rest of the ingredients and we'll be right all right folks I'm back now I have uh just stopped to go get my other ingredients I've turned this heat down uh pretty low now it's only about on number two so it's half of the half setting I had before cuz at this point all I need this pot to do is simmer down and let those flavors combine now I am going to add my crab and my shrimp at this point you know some people will prefer to not add the crab and shrimp now I add at the very end but I add mine now because I know that those ingredients have a certain flavor they're going to add to the pot and I want everything in this pot to uh mix up together and just have all a great flavor let it all just combine and taste the same and you know some people say that man those shrimp are going to get you know they're going get tough well I'm going to have it on low heat and they are going to cook but when you think about it even if you put it in there at the very end of the day when you warm this pot up tomorrow they're still going to cook so you know do what works for you I don't mind the consistency of the shrimp when they cook for a little longer in the gumbo so I'm going to keep them in there and I'm just going to do what I do so next thing you're going to want to do is just taste it but we'll give it you know two or three minutes let the shrimp kind of get cooked and we'll taste it and we'll start seasoning it to taste and then we'll walk away and let it simmer so I'm going to let those shrimp cook down let the crab let all those flavors start to blend together so we'll know what we're starting with and we'll know what to add to get where we want to be in the end so we'll be be back all right ladies and gentlemen here's the uh end result of the uh gumbo I got all of the seasonings in I didn't want to bore you with the the seasonings that I put in there just watching me do that but you can see there's one whole bay leaf I use the whole bay leaves and then when you dish it up when you get one on your plate you just pull it out and put it to the side those bay leaves do have a great flavor when you put them in gumbo um soz I got everything in here is seasoned to my liking to my taste taste and I know the taste are going to intensify as it cooked so I didn't overseason it now knowing that those flavors were going to intensify when I get right to the time to serve I can always just add a little bit of this a little bit that at the very end if I find something that I'm missing but for now it's good like it is let me see if I just taste it one last time it's perfect when you can taste all the different ingredients together so you see this is the end result it is uh about an hour and a half since I started making that R to get to this particular point right here add add in another hour or so of prep so you know this isn't a quick fancy meal it's a very labor intensive type dish if you want to make everything from scratch and just try to do it from the beginning to the end there are some um things you can do to shortcut your way through I didn't want to do that I want it just a uh nice original pot of Gumbo it's a cold rainy day here in North Georgia so I'm going to take this Gumball and ladle it over some rice later on in the day and just sit back and listen to the rain and watch some TV with my girls so now as far as the seasonings um my quantities the filet powder I probably use about a fourth of that jar and then the bay leaves I probably used about 10 whole leaves you can see those were the small leaves I used about 10 of those the Teragon I didn't use a lot of it and I'm basically using the Teragon to complement the bay leaves and the gumbo f um you know some people will put oregano and thy and things like that in their gumbo too I find when I use the uh filet powder and the bay leaves I don't need all those extras cuz they already have enough flavor in them that I don't need the other flavors but the Teragon is a sweet Savory green that adds a nice balance to those uh uh the gumbo and the bay leaves the Fila powder and the bay leaves and um check your filet powder because some of them are actually cut with thyme so if you're going to use thyme make sure you account for the thme that's in the uh filet powder I just used very little bit of the old B and Hungarian peera I mean maybe a tablespoon of each the black pepper yeah I just shook that to taste and with the red pepper flakes I'm going to say I use twice as much red pepper flake as I did for the co ground black pepper and then I put just a uh maybe a tablespoon of garlic in there and then salt I just salted it to taste again I didn't put too much salt cuz I know those flavors are going to intensify I did in the beginning I did have the onion uh green L onion but between the onion that I put in the stock and also the extra onions that I put by themselves as I sauteed them into the uh R I didn't need any more onion flavor so I just removed the onion from the menu so remember Cook everything to taste what you like is not necessarily what I like but these are just some basic the basics of making the gumbo with a little bit of a labor involved so when I uh get to the end product and I laid it over some rice I'll take a picture of it let you see what the final result look like but this is uh Papa top 912 and this is my version of a uh gumbo and there you have it

Channel: popatop912

Views: 226,615

Keywords: seafood, gumbo, sausage, file, chicken, Recipe, Kitchen, Cook, Cooking, Recipes, Dinner, Cuisine, Chicken Meat (Ingredient), Food, Cook (Profession), Comfort Food

Id: ddAhLTNTTYI

Length: 33min 11sec (1991 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2013