This Recipe Totally Changed My Mind About Gumbo

I used to be one of those people that didn't really understand why people care so much about gumbo. But then, I figured out how to make it, and now I care a lot. Mmm, dude, that's so special. In this video, I'm going to show you guys my well-tested recipe for Cajun-style chicken sausage gumbo. The roux is super dark, the flavors are inky and mysterious, and making it isn't as hard as you've been led to believe. To get started, I've got two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs here. And I'm just going to give them a quick season on both sides. Then I'll also hit the backside with a nice pinch of salt. From here, I'm going to let this chicken sit for about 10 to 15 minutes to give it a real quick dry brine. This not only seasons it more thoroughly throughout, which makes it taste better in the final dish, it also helps it hold onto its moisture so it's juicier in the final dish. So I'm just going to set that aside real quick, and then grab a big ol' rope of spicy andouille sausage and cut that down. To do that, I'm just going to cut one inch coins, more or less, and then I'll cut those coins into quarters. So I've got roughly one inch thick cubes of andouille. By the way, this is not artisanal sausage by any means. This is just standard issue Johnsonville andouille. For this dish, I don't think you need anything special because there's just so many different layers of flavors between the trinity, all the spice that gets added, the roux, which is also the main event in this entire dish, and you just don't need a sausage that's going to shine. Okay, once I've got one inch cubes of sausage here, I'm going to add a little oil into a 12 inch nonstick pan over medium high heat, and I'm going to slide these in, and I'm going to brown them off for five minutes or so to get a little bit of extra color on the outside. A lot of people like to add their andouille right to the gumbo later on and boil it, and so you might wonder, is this step totally worth it? It seems like you're making an extra pan dirty, you're adding more time. I think it is worth it. It adds a pretty big boost of depth to the gumbo, and it kind of renders out some of the andouille fat in a way that makes it more a part of the dish. The fat kind of sits on top of this gumbo and just makes everything taste a little bit smokier, a little bit more roasty, and a little bit more delicious. I take it just until I have some nice dark color on about 60 to 75% of the sausage, and it's starting to smell nice and roasty. So from here, I'm just going to flip this over into a little bowl to hang out. There we go. Then I'm going to take my salted chicken thighs and drop those in and brown those off for about 15 minutes or so. I basically want to get these chicken thighs cooked most of the way through because it's going to make them much easier to braise, and obviously searing them is going to make them much more flavorful. At the 10 minute mark, I'll come back and flip one over. You can see it's got some nice golden brown color, and I'll keep cooking these on the backside for maybe another 5 minutes or so. We don't have to cook these all the way through, we're just looking for about 80% or so. If you're a bit more comfortable with the recipe and you've made it a few times, or if you've made dark roux in the past, which we're going to do in a second, I would say you can definitely brown your meats off while making the roux and save yourself a bunch of time. That being said, if you're a beginner and you've never done this recipe before, I would say take your time, do it step by step, because making dark roux is pretty involved, it requires a lot of attention, and you can mess it up, I wouldn't say easily, but you can definitely mess it up if your attention is divided. I'm giving you guys individual building blocks of steps and trying to explain where you can save yourself some time, but if I were to show you all at once, it'd be a little bit confusing, I'd have to use two burners, and I think some people might get lost. All right, so this has been searing now for about 15 minutes in total. When I give it a poke, it feels like it's most of the way cooked through. So I'm going to pull it off heat onto a little plate to rest up until it's go time later on. There's also a ton of really good brown chicken fondue stuff in this pan, so I'm going to add in a splash of water to deglaze that. Nothing crazy, just a quick scrape scrape to get it up and dissolved into the water. Then I'm going to pour this off into my stock, which we'll get back to later on. This is 15 grams of store-bought stock. Once I've got my meat browned off, I'm going to set that aside for a minute, and then before I move on to cooking the roux, I want to briefly talk about the knife work. It's really, really good to get it done ahead of time, because again, cooking the roux takes a lot of attention, and if you haven't made it before, there is a chance that you could mess it up. So you want to make sure that you're fully locked in when it's roux time. As far as knife work goes, I've got 400 grams of medium to large diced onion, and then 250 grams each of celery and poblano peppers. I'm using poblanos instead of the more traditional green bell as the third component in my trinity, just because I kind of hate green bell peppers. They're a little bit bitter, they're pretty watery, and I don't think they taste very good. So I've opted for poblanos, which I think taste way, way better. They actually have a perceivable, pleasurable green chili flavor, and they bring a little bit of spice, which is nice. And then I've got 200 grams of chunky okra here. If you guys don't like okra, you can leave it out, but your gumbo is probably going to be a little bit thin. And honestly, give it a chance. Once it's been cooked thoroughly and it's nice and tender, I think it's really, really great. Okay, I'm going to move these off to the side now, along with my meats. Then I'm going to grab a nice, heavy bottom pot. For me, that means a 6.75 quart Dutch oven that has a bit of a wide stance. Pots that are a little bit more narrow and tall just kind of force you to be like this. And if you're going to be stirring something for 45 minutes, that's just not very pleasant. Okay, once this is up to medium-ish heat, I'm going to add in 225 grams of neutral oil. In this case, I'm using peanut oil. Then I'm going to add in 225 grams of all-purpose flour and whisk that in to get it fully dissolved into the oil. At this point, you guys are probably thinking, hey bro, that seems like way too much roux for that pot size. Under normal circumstances, you would be totally right, but for gumbo, you need really, really dark roux. And when it comes to cooking roux, the darker you make it, the less thickening power it has. So from here, I'm just going to stir this and cook it for anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. I will say this, you can kind of speed run this and make it at about 15 over medium-high heat, but you really got to know what you're doing and you got to be stirring 100% of the time. If you do it that way, you can save yourself theoretically 20 minutes, but you're not going to be able to prep any vegetables or do any of the searing stuff that we did earlier. You're going to have to be laser focused in the entire time in keeping this moving because as the flour settles to the bottom, it will instantly start to brown because the oil temperature is pretty high and the pan is going to be pretty high over medium-high heat. Now, I think going over medium is a little bit better, safer way to go about it because it does give you the opportunity to put the whisk down, go wash a couple of dishes by the sink, and you can be away from the pot for probably up to two minutes, maybe three minutes maximum at that temperature. The lower you go, the more passive cooking you can do, but it's going to take a lot more time. At this point, I've been standing and stirring over medium to medium-high heat for about 10 minutes or so, and now we've transitioned into the phase where we're actually starting to brown off this roux. It's kind of like a light beige at this point. It takes about 10 minutes for the oil to come up to temperature to start doing anything in the first place, which in my opinion, the oil should be at about 275 to 300 if you want to get your roux made in around that 30-minute mark. From here, though, I'm just going to actually lower the heat a little bit because this is progressing a little bit faster than I'm comfortable with. I'll probably get this down to, let's say, a 4 out of 10 heat or maybe a 3 out of 10, and I'll just keep stirring, and I'm going to cook this for maybe 10 to 15 minutes more. At about the 20-minute mark, you can see we've crossed over into peanut butter. Things are looking good. We're rapidly progressing towards British khaki. It's smelling really good. Nothing burnt in here. There's no flecks. That being said, though, if you walk away from your pot for a little bit longer than you planned and you start to get some darker flecks, that's okay up to a point. You can stir those in and they'll kind of get redistributed because the grain of the flour is so small, but if it's dark, dark, like burnt and acrid, unfortunately, dude, you're going to have to start over because that flavor is going to pervade the entire dish, and you're going to be bummed that you spent two hours making it. It's just not going to taste very good. At about 25 to 28 minutes, we've moved into more of a mahogany brown. You got to resist the urge here to call it quits. Every second that goes by, you're like, is it ready yet? Is it ready yet? But there's just a little bit more flavor if we go a little bit further. You're feathering it up to the edge of what's possible. If you go too far, you're going to get burnt, literally, but if you fall short, you're leaving a lot of pleasure on the table, guys. We've transitioned now into the lighter side of melted dark chocolate, I would say. It's looking really, really good. It's smelling insanely roasty and toasty, and as you can see, I mean, it looks like mud. It's extremely inky. Okay, at this point, I'm going to do what's called arresting the roux, which is just a Cajun cooking phrase for adding in the aromatic vegetables to stop the browning of the roux. But first, I want to thank Wild Grain for sponsoring this vid. Wild Grain is the first bake-from-frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries, and frozen pasta. I've been using Wild Grain for over two years because it's not just standard-issue frozen grocery store products that you're getting. Instead, everything that Wild Grain sells is slow-fermented and baked by small bakeries from across the country. 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Okay, once my roux is nice and chocolatey looking like this, I'm gonna add in 400 grams of onion, 250 grams of celery, and 250 grams of poblanos. Then a nice strong pinch of salt, maybe about three fingers worth. And then I'll jump in with a wooden spoon and scrape up to make sure that any roux that might be stuck in the corners of the pan is getting tossed up with the veggies. The salt that we just added into the vegetables is gonna draw out some moisture, which is going to help keep the roux from sticking to the pan, and like I said a second ago, it's going to arrest or stop the browning, which is really important. We've got all of that flavor developed, and now we need to maintain it and protect it. Once the vegetables are stirred in, I'm gonna let this sweat or saute for about five minutes or so to soften them a little bit, to draw out their moisture, and to get everything a little bit more unified. And after about five to seven minutes, you can see that the trinity has softened a little bit, and the roux has definitely stopped the browning, which is what we're looking for. So one last step before we add the wet stuff, I'm gonna add in 25 grams of minced garlic and sweat that for about two minutes, just to open up its flavor. Okay, after two minutes, we've got dark roux, softened trinity, and the garlic is smelling really, really fragrant. So next, I'm gonna add in my wet stuff. For that, I've got 1,500 grams of what I'll call fortified stock. To make this, I just combined 1,500 grams of store-bought box chicken stock with three packets of powdered gelatin, and about 35 grams of Better Than Bouillon chicken base, and just whisked that up until it was dissolved. So I'm just gonna add in this fortified stock a little bit at a time here, and stir that in to hydrate the roux and avoid any clumpiness. And if you're wondering what I mean by fortified stock, basically, adding in the gelatin and the Better Than Bouillon, it's a move you guys have seen me done a lot of times in the past, and it's just a way to approximate the quality of homemade stock when you go out to buy your own bones and simmer it for a long period of time. That kind of stock is gonna have a lot more gelatin from the bones, and it's gonna have a lot more chicken flavor. Once everything's in the pot here, I'm just gonna slowly bring it up to a simmer and cook it until it's just starting to thicken up, which is gonna take about three minutes or so. In the meantime, I need to take that chicken thigh that we seared off earlier and cut that down into bite-sized chunks that are gonna fit on a spoon. Again, I like to do the pre-searing on the chicken mainly for form factor. Yes, the browning brings a lot of flavor, but when you cook a piece of chicken thigh in its natural form, it ends up being this nice, flat rectangle that you can then come back and cut into these perfect little squares that are gonna braise down into these spoon-sized pieces that are gonna be really pleasurable to eat. In contrast, cutting chicken thighs from raw into little cubes like this is kind of a pain in the butt because it's such a squishy, fatty little piece of meat, and you end up with very uneven pieces. And again, like I said earlier, I just don't like putting raw meat into wet heat like this. I think you lose a lot of flavor and you actually have to cook it for quite a while, and that's just gonna make the okra and the trinity and everything a little bit too mushy. Okay, I've got my what started as two pounds of chicken thighs cut into roughly one-inch cubes like this. So from here, I'm gonna add in all the chicken drippings from the seared chicken. That's a non-insignificant amount of chicken flavor that we're gonna be adding in. Then I'll slide in my diced chicken thighs. Then I'm gonna add in all of the seared off and dewy sausage. And then finally, 200 grams of chunky okra. Also at this point, if you're wondering about using frozen okra instead of fresh, I would say it can do, but only in like a severe pinch where you cannot get fresh. And look, I'll be the first to admit that okra as a vegetable sucks ass. Like I really, really don't like it. But when it's in gumbo, it's actually really special and really, really delicious. Now, I know a lot of people are gonna blow me up in the comments being like, bro, okra is so good. Guys, it's not. It's just not. It's super snotty. Texturally, it's fine. But yeah, it doesn't even have that much flavor. But in a gumbo, it's good. Trust me. And it is worth going out of your way to get it. Once that's stirred in, I'm just gonna bring it up to a lazy bubble, maybe about a three or four out of 10. And then I'm gonna simmer this for about 25 to 30 minutes or until the sausage is nice and tender. And more importantly, the chicken thigh is nice and tender. At around the 15 minute mark, two things will happen. One is the roux has been cooked enough to leak a little bit of its oil, and the okra has been cooked enough to let a little bit of scumminess out. And both of those things will aggregate around the side here. And they're not that desirable, just kind of a side effect of this particular type of dish. So I'm just taking a spoon and kind of skimming that off. You just want to get this to the point where there's no oil patches or any little bits of coagulated okra snot. Now one last thing that I want to call out here is that the thickness level of your gumbo is gonna vary a little bit because gumbo is more of an art than a science. And how thick it gets really is directly tied to how dark you make the roux earlier. Now I made my roux in the top, top three to five percent of darkness, so that means I lost out about five to ten percent of its actual thickening power. Now I've designed the recipe for the home cook who's not super comfortable with cooking roux to its ultimate darkness. And so the 225 each of oil and flour is gonna be exactly the amount you need to thicken this. But if you push it really, really far, you actually might need to up the total amount of roux in your recipe to let's say 250 oil, 250 flour. Or if you get to the end and you haven't had the extra roux from the beginning, you can add in a tiny bit of cornstarch or a little bit of filet power to give you that ten percent more thickening. The last step before I finish this dish is to just snatch out a piece of chicken and give it a little smush with my spoon. Now I don't want this to be cooked so much that the meat just totally falls apart with any pressure. That means that as I stir this, it's gonna fall apart and it's gonna be a total mess. But I don't want it to be undercooked to the point where the chicken protein just kind of bounces because it's just cooked through. Right here we've melted the collagen and the fat inside the chicken, so it's gonna be really tender in your mouth, but it's not cooked so much that it's gonna fall apart. Okay, okra's tender, chicken's perfectly tender, thickness is on point, so I'm gonna kill the heat. Then add in 10 grams of Louisiana hot sauce, 10 grams of paprika, 3 grams of cayenne pepper, and 3 grams of ground black pepper. And then I'll just jump in and give that a stir to combine. And if you're wondering why I'm not using an off-the-shelf Cajun spice blend for this, for, you know, authenticity, it's because most of those spice blends have a ton of salt in them, and that makes it really hard to add more spice flavor without excessive saltiness. Now, the final step here, and a really, really important step, aside from the roux, it's probably the second most important part of this entire dish, is to taste for salt level at the very, very end. Ooh, that's close. That's so good, though. But we can really turn this up from a 9 to a 10 just by adding one more pinch of salt. Depending on how much you added to the Trinity when you sweated everything down and how salty the sausage is, that can vary a little bit, but the pros are always gonna come back and taste things at the very, very end and just feather it up to that perfect level of seasoning. And then just one more final taste before I plate this up. Mmm! Dude, that's so special! I'm gonna plate this up, I'm gonna make sure that I get a good balance of chunkiness from the okra, the Trinity, the sausage and the chicken, and a good amount of gumbo broth, too, or gravy. Then I'll take a big scoop of American long grain rice and plop that right in the middle. And then I'll put in a few little pieces of scallion here and there to bring some green and a little bit of freshness. And that's it, dude. That looks so freakin' good. Ooh, ooh, man. Mmm! I got a piece of okra in that bite. Normally I hate it. In gumbo, it really works. Also, like I said before, this gravy hits so freakin' hard. There's just layer upon layer of toasty, roasty flavors and it evolves as you eat it. The later into the bite that you get, the more interesting it is, the more mysterious it is. I didn't really grow up eating gumbo, so I never had a frame of reference to hold it in this high regard like a lot of people do, but then I learned how to make it and now I love it. I really, really get it. Like, it tastes like it's been cooked all day. Like, it literally takes forever to make, but the results are there. The payoff is high. The flavor is so insanely good. So if you guys want to make it, I'll throw the recipe down in the description along with a link to my blog, brianlagerstrom.com, where there will be a slightly more advanced and detailed version of the recipe. So if you want to follow along, I would probably click through over to that. Thank you guys for being here. I hope you make the recipe. I'll see you in the next vid.