New Orleans · Soup
Gumbo Z'herbes
- Advanced
- 3 h
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, aromatics blooming from the first bite, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- An ODD number of greens, 7 or 9 for luck: collards, mustard, turnip, spinach, watercress, cabbage, beet tops, carrot tops, parsley: the more, the more friends
- 1 smoked ham hock + 300g smoked sausage + 200g brisket or ham (Lenten version: omit and go maroon-style meatless)
- Dark roux: 100ml oil + 100g flour; the trinity; garlic generously
- Filé powder, thyme, bay, cayenne; the strained pot likker from the greens, every drop
- Rice; and Holy Thursday on the calendar, traditionally
The skills inside
Making a rouxStraining & passing through a sieveKeeping the cooking liquid
The words inside
Mirepoix, Trinity, Sofrito & FriendsPrime Cost: The Number That Runs the BuildingWatercressHam & Hock
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Boil all the greens together in ample water 30 min; RESERVE the likker; chop or grind the greens fine. 30 min
- Make a milk-chocolate roux; trinity; garlic; then the meats, browned.
- Greens back in with their likker; simmer low 1.5–2 h: the gumbo should turn deep green-brown and thick as a sermon. 120 min
- Filé off the heat; serve over rice. Count your greens; each one is a friend you'll make this year, says the tradition.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
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- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.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.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Zinfandel (old-vine)
- Also Right
- Shiraz or Malbec
- From the Taps
- Smoked porter
- Zero-Proof
- Cherry cola, honestly
Barbecue’s sweet-smoke wants jammy fruit that shakes hands with the sauce; dry austere reds argue with sugar and lose.
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