Almost Mo's Crawfish Étouffée

Spicy rich crawfish étouffée, almost exactly as my Cajun grandmother used to make it. The perfect dish for Sunday Supper or a Mardi Gras party!

Hear that spinning noise? Wait, what? You don’t hear it. It’s so loud on my end and I know what it is. It’s my grandmother, in her grave, spinning. If you’ve read my About Me, you know I am originally from Southern Louisiana, home of crawfish and gumbo and Tabasco pepper sauce. In fact, many family members worked for Tabasco on Avery Island when I was growing up. We never used store-bought sauce because, if you washed and saved and brought your bottles back to my grandmother, she got them filled up with the best of the best, what we called bottom of the barrel. Scooped from the bottom of the barrels used to age the Tabasco, that sauce was the nectar of the gods.

As the relatives who worked on Avery Island grew older and retired, my grandfather, who always had a huge kitchen garden, started growing his own peppers from seeds he had been given by those same relatives. And my grandmother started making and bottling her own sauce from the Tabasco peppers. To this day, you will not find a bottle of store-bought Tabasco sauce in our houses. It’s too full of vinegar with too little body. I prefer to make my own as well, although I can’t get the Tabasco peppers anymore and have to use habaneros. But I digress.

Back to my grandmother and her spinning. Along with the disdain for store-bought Tabasco, I was brought up with a healthy dose of repugnance for any crawfish not caught wild in the Atchafalaya Basin. Those were the years of a short crawfish season just in the Springtime and when it was over, it was over, till the following year. Nowadays, with crawfish farming and crawfish imports from *gasp* China (here the spinning noise increases in volume) we can eat crawfish étouffée year round.

With apologies to my grandmother, we love crawfish étouffée and, in as much as I am causing her post-death exercise by using frozen Chinese crawfish, I try to make up for it by making it just as she would have. Or as close as I can get with the foreign interlopers which don’t have as much of the lovely orange fat as our locally caught specimens.

Ingredients

1/2 cup or 65g flour
1/2 cup or 120ml canola oil
2 medium onions
1 bunch of green onions
1 large green bell pepper or capsicum
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/2 cup or 115g butter
4 packs frozen crawfish (Each pack is 12 oz. I buy Boudreaux’s, which, despite its name, is indeed from China.)

(If you can't get crawfish, this can also be made with shrimp or prawns. It won't be the same but it will still be delicious.)



Method
Make a roux by mixing the flour and canola oil in a heavy pan. Cook over a medium heat, stirring frequently, until it turns a lovely caramel color. For full step by step instructions, check out this link: How to make roux. 

Meanwhile chop your onions, green onions and bell pepper.

When the roux is browned enough, tip in the vegetables and cook, covered, until the vegetables are very soft – about 10-12 minutes.

Add the tablespoon of tomato paste for color and the butter to replace the missing fat content and cook for a bit longer, perhaps another 10 minutes. (In the old days, the tomato paste and butter were not necessary as the crawfish came with a lot of the natural orange fat which, I have been told, is not allowed in packing any more. This fat gave the étouffée the lovely color without anything else added.)

Add in the crawfish and cook for another 10 minutes, covered. Season to taste with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper and cayenne.

Serve over white rice in the Tabasco gumbo bowls that your grandmother left you. If you are so blessed.

One of my most precious possessions - a set of Tabasco gumbo bowls.

Enjoy!

Chicken and Sausage Gumbo

Chicken and sausage gumbo made easy, with authentic Cajun taste. Make a pot for your next party and serve it in cups! 

Dark roux and gumbo is the smell of my grandmother’s house in New Iberia after a long drive from Houston in the winter and the warmth of family greetings and big hugs.  My grandmother is gone now, but gumbo simmering on the stove brings me back to her big round kitchen table where she always sat, chopping and dicing and preparing vegetables or stuffing a roast for the next meal.

My maternal grandmother, Wanda Fleming Gautreaux, sitting in her usual chair in her yellow kitchen.
Being in that yellow kitchen with her made me happy!

And some of my fondest college memories are of visits from my College Station/Houston/Beaumont friends who would come to Austin for the weekend.  Sometimes we went out to enjoy the nightlife of Sixth Street but more often than not, we would stay in, have a number of drinks and make chicken and sausage gumbo.  Truly, I am never happier than when I am in the kitchen, surrounded by friends and family, perhaps sipping some red wine, and stirring a roux.

In most gumbo recipes, you are supposed to cut the chicken in pieces and brown it first.  Unfortunately, I usually find myself starting with the bird still frozen, (Who can remember to take anything out of the freezer in the morning!) so I have developed this method.   Yesterday, I didn’t have a frozen bird, but I stuck to my usual program anyway.

Ingredients

3 1/2 pound or 1 1/2 kilo chicken (If you can find a hen, use her instead. More flavor.) 

Additional chicken breasts (optional)

1 lb or about 500g smoked sausage, sliced in rounds, about ½ inch thick

2 medium onions

1 green bell pepper (capsicum)

4 celery sticks, de-stringed

1 1/2 cups or 190g plain flour

1 cup or 240ml oil (I prefer canola.)

Sea salt

Black pepper

Cayenne

Chicken bouillon or stock cubes

For serving: Light sprinkling of gumbo filé. 

Method

Put whole (frozen or not) chicken to boil in pot with about a gallon of water, about 2 teaspoons of salt and good couple of grinds of fresh black pepper. (If it is frozen and you can’t get the bag of giblets out, don’t worry.  Keep checking back and get it out when the chicken thaws enough.)

Chop onions, bell pepper and celery and put aside in one bowl for later.

My bell pepper looks a little frozen because it was.  I chopped it over the weekend when I thought I was going to make gumbo but, then, couldn't find celery.  As long you are not using it for salad, bell pepper keeps great in the freezer.  So do onions and celery, for that matter. 

In separate pot, preferably a black iron skillet or some other heavy gauge vessel, mix flour and oil.  This is called the roux.  Cook over medium to medium high heat, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon, until roux begins to turn brown. 

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 Depending on temperature and the thickness of your pot, you may have to stir constantly because roux has a tendency to burn.  A medium heat is safer; it just takes longer.  Continue cooking until the roux turns a very dark, chocolate brown.  Should the roux burn (Everyone does it at least once, so don’t feel too bad.) toss it out and start again, otherwise the entire gumbo will have that burnt taste.

27 minutes - it looks delicious but do NOT try to taste it.  It's hotter than the hinges of hell
and will burn your mouth off.  Also it doesn't actually taste good. 

The roux will be VERY hot so be careful when handling it and try to stir without splashing on yourself or nearby “helpers.” 

In fact, it's best if you make the helpers go sit on their beds. 

Add the chopped vegetables and stir. This cools your roux down without too much spitting.

By this time your chicken (or hen) should be falling off its bones.  (If not, turn the roux off, giving it a couple of more stirs, and let the chicken boil for a little longer.)  A good sized hen may take up to two hours to fall off her bones. 

Take the chicken out of the pot, leaving behind the stock, and allow it to cool until you can handle it.  Discard bones and skin, leaving meat in fairly large chunks.

Add stock from the chicken pot gradually to the roux.  Never add roux to stock, always stock to roux.  It may bubble up considerably, depending on how hot your roux is, so when I say gradually, I do mean ladle by ladle.  Stir between ladles.

When the roux has thinned considerably, then you can add the whole mixture back into the stockpot.

Add the sliced sausage.  And the additional chicken breasts if desired.

I cut these into fairly large chunks so they don't disintegrate into shredded chicken. 

Let simmer until the sausage and breasts, if using, are cooked and you are ready to eat.  Depending upon how fatty your sausage is, you might need to use a serving spoon to skim the oil off of the top of the gumbo before serving.

Add the deboned chicken meat and make sure it is warmed through.  Add chicken cubes, as necessary, instead of salt, for more flavor.  Add freshly ground black pepper and cayenne to taste.

Serve in bowls over a large spoonful of cooked white rice with a couple of drops of hot sauce and a sprinkle of gumbo filé (ground sassafras leaves), if you have it.   We also often serve with fresh baguette slices to dip. 

Enjoy!