Gumbo: Cook-Off 3

[fifi]

Yeah, Smithy, that is my question. I bought my 9 quart Le Creuset specifically to double my basic recipe and all of its variations. I had been using my 8 1/2 quart Calphalon saucier and it would get really close to not being big enough for the long simmer stage. A few times, a bit too much shrimp led to frantic "bailing" to another pot.

But then, my preferred technique is to do this all in one pot and that means that that pot has to be heavy for the roux making. So, lets say that if you vary the technique and make the roux in a heavy pot of some sort that will also hold the trinity then you could transfer it to a larger lighter pot of some sort for the rest of the process. I am not willing to give up searing the trinity in the hot roux so the heavy pot has to hold all of that. (I am really convinced that that is one of the techniques that separates a truly great gumbo from the merely good. The comments here about the heavenly aroma of the trinity hitting the roux only reinforces my belief.)

So, we are back to the limiting factor being the size of the heavy pot for the roux and trinity. Now my question is . . . At what point does the amount of oil and flour become too much to stir correctly to achieve even browning? My dad's saying in the face of every difficulty was "Get a bigger wrench." I get visions of the witches and their cauldron with a wooden spatula the size of a boat paddle.

The kitchen I am dealing with is a smallish commercially equipped affair. It has large pots and bowls, commercial range and ovens, large coolers and such. It serves for weekly "home cooked meal" sales to the community as a fund raiser and they prepare maybe 100 or so. It is also used for special events like to prepare the sides for a big BBQ. It doesn't have the big steam kettles or anything else like you would find in a really big operation. I remember seeing some of Malawry's kitchen in her blog, I think. It is something like that but maybe not quite as well equipped.

Having never worked in a commercial kitchen, how do they do it? I can tell an "industrial scale" gumbo a mile off. It may be good soup but it ain't great gumbo. So . . . How do the great ones do it? What is the limit on their batch size?

[Smithy]

I can't answer any of your questions, of course, and I hope someone else can because I'll be interested in the answer. Based on my experience to date I'd take your tack: MUST do the searing in that hot roux to get the heavenly smell and all the associated interesting flavor compounds. However, this caught my eye and brain:

. . . At what point does the amount of oil and flour become too much to stir correctly to achieve even browning? My dad's saying in the face of every difficulty was "Get a bigger wrench." I get visions of the witches and their cauldron with a wooden spatula the size of a boat paddle.

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If you could swing it, don't you think that stirring a giant pot with a boat paddle would connect wonderfully with rescue from the flood?

[Malawry]

Fifi, I have a very large heavy pot that I've filled with gumbo before. The key is to be sure you can reach the bottom and sides easily with a stirring implement so nothing scorches. (I slightly scorched the big batch I made for my 30th birthday party on the bottom, mostly because I was using a wafer-thin pot.) You can also do the roux and trinity in a smaller pot so they're easier to control, and then transfer them to a large heavy pot for making the rest of the gumbo if you're gunshy. I've done it both ways. I've made 4 gallons of gumbo at a clip and, to my taste, they're as good as a regular batch would be.

But then, I admit I'm not a gumbo connoisseur like some of ya'll are. So YMMV and all that.

Snowangel, I've considered it, but I already have a lot of batch recipes in the freezer 'cause I wanted a single serving! I'll get around to gumbo when it gets colder I'm sure--I'd rather not have an entire chest freezer full of food languishing until the baby appears in early spring 2006.

[fifi]

Thanks Malawry. That gives me a benchmark. My double batch makes about 8 to 9 quarts, let's call it 2 gallons. That means if I use the large heavy pot for roux and trinity to quadruple it, that will pretty much approximate what you did successfully. I don't have a problem with tranferring it to a lighter pot for the simmering. The bigger pots in this kitchen are pretty heavy aluminum, not really thin cheap stuff. At that point, it doesn't make a lot of difference as long as you simmer low enough and stir occasionally to keep it from scorching on the bottom.

If you did the searing of the trinity I am sure that your gumbo was divine. Thanks for giving me the courage to quadruple.

[tejon]

I made my first gumbo last night. There aren't words. I used Mayhaw Man's recipe, carefully getting the roux to a deep chocolate before adding the trinity and then the chicken and sausage. It was hard to keep from tasting as it simmered, emitting the most wondrous smell all throughout the house. I will definitely be making this many, many times again.

[fifi]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Another one caught in our web.

That looks mighty fine, Tejon.

[tejon]

Why, thank you! Not the nicest presentation, but oh my, was it ever good. Sorry for the blurry picture....all that drooling made the camera shake a wee bit.

[MarkinHouston]

I have been to several gumbo cookoffs, and canoe paddles stirring roux in what appears to be a 100-gallon Hobart pot were standard equitment. Welders' gloves protected the bare forearms when stirring the roux. I wouldn't be surprised to see a small posthole auger rigged up with a paddle attachment!

[Toliver]

fifi,

RecipeGullet has a scaling function. Have you tried it with your recipes? I haven't used the feature myself but it seems like it could do the trick.

[fifi]

MarkinHouston . . . Oddly enough, I have never been to a gumbo cook-off. I would love to go and see some of the contraptions.

Thanks for reminding me about the scaling feature, Toliver. I completely forgot about it.

My concern with the gumbo was more about being able to reproduce the technique on a larger scale but you bring up a good point. I will be scanning RecipeGullet when I get the next call . . . "We got 3 crates of eggplant donated. Now what?"

[Kim D]

I use the recipe from the June 1999 Cook's Illustrated as a guideline. When we first started making it, we would break the roux on occasion. But that hasn't happened for ages. Until last night.

I love gumbo but for some reason it had been several months since we had made it. We recently watched America's Test Kitchen make that recipe and decided that we were way overdue.

And we broke the roux. I have no idea why.

There were a number of things that were different in this batch...

Hotter shrimp stock than usual.

Veg was chopped much smaller (because ATK did).

Garlic smushed in the garlic press instead of chopped with a knife.

Red pepper from my garden instead of from the store.

King Arthur flour instead of Bob's Red Mill flour.

We decided to try again. I was a bit gun-shy at this point and didn't get my roux as dark as usual.

This time:

Ice was added to the shrimp stock to cool it down.

The veg and garlic were chopped our "normal" size.

Red pepper from the garden.

King Arthur flour.

I have to assume that the issue was with the heat of the shrimp stock.

However, this gumbo was way thicker than any other gumbo we have ever made. We usually add file but this time that would have been overkill. My goal has been to make a thick gumbo and now that I have, I don't know how it happened.

So, my two questions:

Why did my roux break?

Why did my gumbo turn out so much thicker?

- kim

[fifi]

When you say your roux "broke" I am assuming you mean that the liquid didn't incorporate and you had these nasty looking blobs. I have had that happen to me and the culprit was hot stock. It took some pretty heavy whisking to recover. I read that somewhere or heard it from someone making gumbo on TV, probably Justin Wilson. It is true. To cool stock quickly I freeze bottles of water and put them in the pot. If I haven't planned ahead to freeze water bottles, ice cubes in a zipper baggy works pretty well.

The thickness will depend upon two factors: How dark the roux is and the roux/liquid ratio. As the roux gets darker, the starch is broken down and does not have the thickening power of uncooked flour. The ratio is of course, obvious. For the "teaching" recipe, 1 cup flour and oil taken to Upperline dark and 6 cups liquid results in a rather thin gumbo. I am not sure that a roux that dark can ever get "thick" on its own. Therefore putting the file on the table. I have tried to alter that truth on one occasion for reasons that are too long a story for here. What I did was make some light roux in a separate pan and stirred some in when it was all over. If you had a really dark roux and it was thick, I have no idea how you got there.

[slkinsey]

So, my two questions:

Why did my roux break?

I'm not sure what you mean that your roux "broke." Could you explain what happened?

"Breaking" is a cooking term that is usually associated with an emulsion that has gone out of emulsification (usually due to an overabundance of the dispersed phase) or egg-based sauces in which the egg has coagulated (usually due to overcooking). I don't see how it would apply to a starch-and-fat mixture like a roux.

Why did my gumbo turn out so much thicker?

You actually answer this one yourself when you note that you didn't get your roux as dark as usual. Browning the roux reduces its thickening power. The darker the roux, the less thickening you will get. Conversely, the lighter the roux, the more thickening you will get.

[Kim D]

Wow. I thought I was using the right term. Shows how much I know. I'm always looking to learn something new. So, if "broken" isn't the right term, what is?

Cook's Illustrated has a picture showing "roux has broken, with globs of browned flour floating in oil".

I wish I had known that it is possible to recover from a "broken" roux. There's nothing I hate more than wasting food.

My roux was a bit darker than a copper penny when I added the veg. I'm going to have to make a note of that as I liked the thickness of the end product. And the flavor.

Thank you slkinsey and fifi!

- kim

[Chris Amirault]

Kim, I'm assuming that this happened when you added the stock, yes? Did you do it all at once or add it a 1/4 cup or so at a time? I've never had the roux do what you were describing, and that's the technique that I use. Fifi and I up thread talked about the matter of stock temperature, and I revealed that I had always had simmering stock in this method, so I'm not sure that's your problem.

[fifi]

Well, if you have hot stock (simmering) and add it a little bit at a time, you might get away with it. A lot of stirring/whisking will help with that. It is just easier to add cool stock in larger amounts and not waste as much energy stirring. But then, I am a lazy sort.

[Rachel Perlow]

When I want a dark roux flavor, but still want the thickening power of flour, I just sprinkle on an extra tablespoon or two of raw flour after adding the vegetables to the dark roux. It doesn't lump because you're stirring it in immediately with the chopped veg. I suppose this is cheating, but it works.

[FistFullaRoux]

Don't any of you watch Emeril? Always add either hot stock to cold roux, or cold stock to hot roux. Fixes it every time. You can do hot/hot, but as stated above, it takes forever, and requires far more energy than I am willing to expend.

[Kim D]

The roux "broke" when the stock was added...

My husband always, always adds the stock bit by bit. He uses a half cup measure and pours a couple tablespoonfuls at a time from it. It wasn't until he got a good two cups in that I made him put down the whisk. Because I just thought that that wasn't good for my Le Creuset pot. Even though that's what he always uses.

It was at that point, when he added more stock and used a wooden spoon that I noticed the roux was broken. He said that it hadn't looked right all along.

Then he reminded me that we usually sip wine while we make gumbo.

So, he opened a bottle of Turley that we had been saving.

He chopped more vegetables. I made the roux. We sipped some wine while the veg were cooking. Then he added the stock. And this time it worked.

I like the advice about adding a bit of flour. But even more, I like hearing that the stock can be added faster if it's cold.

- kim

[MarketStEl]

Many years back, on one of my infrequent visits home, my father told me about some aunts on his side of the family who lived in Louisiana, but about whom next to nothing was known. He then shared with me a recipe for gumbo that he had, but had never made while I was still living at home. It had a little bit of absolutely everything in it and took two days to make. I jotted all the details down on a slip of paper and, when I returned to Boston, transferred everything onto a couple of index cards. I even tried making it once--with a subset of the ingredients--and did okay, if the guests' reactions were any guide.

It's been some 20-plus years since the one and only time I tried Dad's gumbo recipe. Stumbling across this thread and having a roommate who loves okra got me to thinking, Maybe I should try that recipe again.

So last week, I stocked up on okra on 9th Street--one of the vendors was selling okra for 3 pounds for a dollar--and put some aside for the dish.

Then I went hunting through my old recipe file box for that recipe. I must have gotten sloppy over the intervening years, for the only thing I could find was this one card:

"So wing it on the rest," I said to myself.

And wing it I did. I didn't have lobster, crab legs or Polish kielbasa, so shrimp and chicken would have to suffice by themselves. And, as all of you can see, some key ingredients were not listed, as I would discover at the end.

But off I went. I chopped up two pounds of okra, one large Spanish onion, and the 4-pound chicken I'd simmered in a Crock-Pot the day before--reserving the water for use in the gumbo--then peeled a pound of shrimp and crushed three large cloves of garlic. I pulled out a couple of cans of diced tomatoes (one 28-ounce, one 14.5-ounce) I had on hand as well; as the labels said they contained jalapeno and green chile peppers, I figured they'd do.

I then crumbled three bay leaves and got down to business.

But oops! I didn't make a roux. Instead, I combined flour and butter as if I were making a white sauce. Then I added the okra and cooked it for about 5 minutes. Next came the onion, then the garlic, then the chicken, then the shrimp, and finally the tomatoes. I didn't have the time to cook the okra down as another cook-off participant did. The result looked like this:

Then, in went the two quarts of water I had reserved from cooking the chicken.

An hour and 20 minutes later, after the stew had simmered over low heat (adding 3 tablespoons of file powder during the last 15 minutes), I served it over cooked rice. The result looked like this:

and tasted much blander than I remembered it to be.

Looking back through this cook-off thread, I now know why. No celery! No bell peppers! No cayenne or crushed red pepper! And no roux! I think it would have benefited from the kielbasa as well.

Oh, well. Chalk this up as a re-learning experience. At least the consistency was more or less right. There's always next time. I think Dad could understand that.

Edited October 7, 2005 by MarketStEl (log)

[Jason Perlow]

It is actually possible to make a decent gumbo without using roux, but it is a totally different animal.

This is the signature gumbo from Bozo's Seafood Restaurant in Metairie, Louisiana. I'm not sure if the place survived Katrina and the resulting flooding of the New Orleans metro area, but it had the distinction of being the one of the few gumbos in the city (perhaps the only?) that was rouxless.

By the way, it was an awesome gumbo. It had a thin, but very flavorful broth, which I think was a strong chicken stock, and thickened with a lot of okra.

Edited October 7, 2005 by Jason Perlow (log)

[johnjohn]

Does Gumbo freeze well?

[Eden]

Does Gumbo freeze well?

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Mine did. It reheated beautifully and filled the kitchen with that inimitable gumbo smell

[Jason Perlow]

Gumbo freezes exceedingly well. I might add though that if you add the rice to the gumbo to freeze when portioning, when you reheat the gumbo, the rice breaks down a bit and you get a very think soup. Not undesireable, and it tastes great just the same, but something to consider.

[My Confusing Horoscope]

It is actually possible to make a decent gumbo without using roux, but it is a totally different animal.

This is the signature gumbo from Bozo's Seafood Restaurant in Metairie, Louisiana. I'm not sure if the place survived Katrina and the resulting flooding of the New Orleans metro area, but it had the distinction of being the one of the few gumbos in the city (perhaps the only?) that was rouxless.

By the way, it was an awesome gumbo. It had a thin, but very flavorful broth, which I think was a strong chicken stock, and thickened with a lot of okra.

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I am sure it's good but this looks like chicken soup with some okra thrown in. Not an okra gumbo a la southwest Louisiana. For the strongest okra flavor, see http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=37077&st=210 at post 240

Okra gumbo without roux is not just decent, it's great. If the okra is cooked down enough, it thickens like a roux, so adding roux to an okra gumbo is like adding roux to roux, i.e. too thick, plus overpowering the wonderful flavor of the okra.

Edited October 10, 2005 by My Confusing Horoscope (log)