Chicken & Andouille Gumbo

Making a roux 32 recipes

• Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
• It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
• The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
• No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
• Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.

Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.

Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes

• It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
• The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
• Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
• The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
• Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.

Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.