Cold weather means warm cooking. So yesterday, with the wind blowing another batch of dry, cold snow around, seemed like a great day to make some gumbo. Besides, I wanted to try the Alton Brown method of baking the roux. This is a great idea on so many levels. It gives you an excuse to turn on the oven and heat up the kitchen. It takes the worry out of stirring the roux. It gives you time to go out and shovel some more snow and enjoy the heat when you come back in.
While the roux baked, I cut up some bacon, one andouille, and a couple of chicken legs to gave the meat a good sauté.
Meanwhile, the roux smelled remarkably like a turkey roasting in the oven. When I took it out and added the trinity of an onion, a green pepper, and a couple stalks of celery, the roux got even browner. Once the onions were translucent, I added a few cloves of crushed garlic and browned them another minutes.
The meat which has been browning all this time, goes into the pot. A cup of broth gets heated in the skillet to clean it, and goes into the pot. Enough water to cover the goods goes into the pot. A teaspoon of thyme, not quite a teaspoon of salt, and some unmeasured grindings of black pepper go into the pot. Then the pot simmers half an hour while I fix a batch of long grain rice. At the end, toss in some shrimp and turn off the fire.
By then, the house is warm and the gumbo smells great, and we dish out a couple bowls. All the pieces taste great, but the taste that’s supposed to bind them together, the taste that’s supposed to define a gumbo–the roux–tastes like, well, um…oil. And toasted flour. Which is gritty.
What am I missing here?
Writing Every Day 
Well, my first thought is that you either the oil in the roux was either off or the wrong sort (i.e. EVOO), or you toasted it too long. (Disclaimer: I don’t recall that particular episode of Good Eats. Guess I need to retrieve it from the PVR.) I’m a little skeptical of the oven method, as I’ve always found a roux to be a pretty quick preparation that bears close attention to avoid burning.
I might have to give this a try soon. It’s supposed to rain this weekend, which will be a nice break from the heat.
A gumbo roux is supposed to be very dark, chocolate brown, which I still didn’t quite get to. I used peanut oil, and it tasted relatively unaffected by all the heat. I did a little more poking around, and now I think the missing ingredient is time. And skimming off the grease.
So tell me about this “heat.” I don’t think I’ve experienced it lately.
Heat? The day I wrote that, my car thought it got up to 85F at one point. Things have changed, as it’s currently 60F and has been showering gloriously all day.
Then we’re converging. It’s going to be a real scorcher this weekend–all the way up into the 50s. Lots of melting going to be going on.