Chef Paul Prudhomme's Cajun and Creole classics, Jambalaya & Gumbo

Welcome, I'm glad you decided to spend some time with me in my pots and pans. I'd like to talk to you about Louisiana cuisine. Louisiana food is two things to me: Cajun Creole and completely distinctive things that develop side by side. Over the years, Cajun food is country food and Creole food, sour food. Creole food is a food of the city of New Orleans and the city had seven flags flown, meaning that seven countries owned it whenever they left someone behind, as those people were usually influential. people that's why they stayed to have big houses with many servants the most important person in that house because entertainment is always part of the tradition of the south it's part of the business it's just a part of everything that the south is was the cook and the The cook would work for a Spanish family that cooking for their tastes did work for a French family that also has to cook for that taste, so the idea was that over the years these dishes would be part of something in which the cook worked and that turned into wonderful dishes of food like Creole shrimp and so many other things take the plane and stuff Mellet, but you can see the tendencies of the Spanish and you can see the French influence and the Italian influence in all these dishes that they were taught to their sons and daughters to become cooks.

And that's how Creole evolved. Cajun food is different. Cajun food was developed by people who came from Nova Scotia to Louisiana and isolated themselves right here in the swamps and swamps and lived off the land and made do with what they had. here in Acadiana Village to give you a feel of old Louisiana, food and music were the most important things Cajuns had to experience every day. I mean, this was our entertainment, but this was our life, the best cook in the neighborhood was the most important person in a bird and the musicians were the ones who made it work, so this is where both kitchens meet.

Where both types of cuisine come from. If you came to Louisiana today and looked for it, it would be very difficult to find it. because everyone is in homes and not in restaurants, so what we have today and what we are going to talk about you and I is Louisiana cuisine, which is a combination of Cajun and Creole, one of my favorite dishes in everyone. It's

jambalaya

jambalaya

is one of those things and just when you talk about it it makes the juices run down my mouth. It was exciting to eat and it's so simple it just says jambalaya was used when I was a mom.

We didn't have electricity so we didn't have a refrigerator, we had an ice box so you put a piece of ice in and about the second or third day you had leftovers in the box that started to get a little weird, a little contaminated. It was still good to eat and you had to eat everything because there wasn't much food, but the mother would take all this out of the refrigerator and put it all in the pot, it could be anything you can imagine. she would put a jambalaya, there was one thing that was in each of them and it was some type of smoked meat, she would put sausage or some type of ham, but what made the jambalaya distinctive is that it was a rice dish and it was incredibly hot.

I love to eat hot, I mean, until she itches your scalp and makes you sweat, you know, and you get really excited to eat, but we would accept that she would drink. the leftovers that we had put in a pot, take them out, make a nice strong juice with them and then put rice in and cook it and the rice would make it soft, it had a wonderful flavor and the rice had a lot of flavor and that's me, when I think of jambalaya What should you put? The stuff may be seafood, it may be pork, it may be new chicken, but what we have for you today and what we would like to show you how to cook is a chicken jambalaya. it has Enic sausage, which we call our dough in Louisiana, which to me means smoked pork sausage, and Tasso, which is intensely seasoned Cajun ham pork strips, that is, just rolled in herbs and I'm sorry you have olam with spices and sugar . and salt, then you age it and smoke it until it reeks of flavor and it's overwhelming with the sweetness of the smoke and this is Tasso, you combine it with rice and a wonderful broth and you have this amazing dish we call jambalaya, which you just happen to have here with me.

I love doing this type of television because you can eat all the time. I mean, it's just wonderful, you know, the word jambalaya comes from three or four different words, jumbo, which in French is called hands. a denim boat, that's where the Jumbo comes from, the yia yia comes from the African word for rice and I lost it. You know, we Cajuns always say Allah, so it's jambalaya. Oh, you know, cooking is a wonderful thing and you have to be creative. you have to be yourself when you cook and I will tell you right now that I will never follow a recipe more than half a time or never follow a recipe at all so don't expect me to follow my own recipes when I do.

This now we're starting with a nice hot fire and this would be a normal fire at home and butter and onion and we want to take the onions and brown them as you see, it's happening here now, the reason we brown the onions is to give them dimensions, flavor and texture, now these onions actually turn sweet as they brown, you take sugar off the onion and bring it to the surface and make it golden and I mean, this is not like that. add sugar to the sweet, but this is a type of sweetness that will make a big difference in the flavor now that we add to it to throw it and the Tasso is a Cajun ham we literally take this ham and take strips of pork and roll it in sugar , salt and peppers, we age it and we smoke it, and I just want to say that this is a very seasoned and flavorful ham, but we still increase the flavor with our cooking method now that we are browning the ham with onion, now anyone who Have you ever had a piece of fresh cut ham and eaten cold or brown you know the difference in taste, when you brown it you just accentuate the flavor of the pork, I mean you just make it taste wonderful. and this is what's happening here now we're adding onions again and we're adding bell pepper and celery which we in Cajun country call the Holy Trinity of Cajun and Creole cooking the onions with bell pepper and celery and we're going to add some sauce of tomato now in this step what we have done is take onions, we put them in and we remove the sweetness from them and now they are getting very soft so that we have a flavor and texture. the first time we put in the onions we added the Tasso to start developing the flavor, start dehydrating the pork and browning the pork and collecting the juices at the bottom of the pot, now we are adding a herbal mixture. and spices and the second onion, bell pepper, celery and tomatoes, and we're going to let this cook together.

The reasoning behind this is really simple. I'm trying to develop the best flavor and I'm trying to develop it. the bottom of the pan will form a crust and the crust will be a combination of all these juices and the third thing that is absolutely necessary for the food to taste its best is to have these flavor changes and the texture changes. I'm going to add the sausage, adding the sausage at this point again is adding another element and we're going to add everything back in another time, let's look for a second at that beautiful now the juices are coming together, I mean you.

I can see it coming together, they're getting thick and things are browning and it's really working. This is raw cut chicken that we are adding because there is a chicken jambalaya. Now we don't just want to put the chicken in, we think. I think you have to season everything at every step and you saw that we seasoned the meat, we did the seasoning, but when we put vegetables that were not seasoned, we added seasonings, we put unseasoned chicken and now we are. adding seasonings, now it's time to add the bay leaves, it's time to add the garlic and we are approaching the final steps.

Are we getting closer to the conclusion of the dish? And what I mean by that is the conclusion of the flavor, not the conclusion. of cooking because we don't want to overcook the chicken, that's why we put it in so late, we want to let everything else get maximum flavor, maximum flavor capacity and then add the chicken because you want the chicken. so it's nice and moist and you don't want to cook it for too long, the juice and the chicken, the sausage, the Tasso and all the vegetables will now start to pool on the bottom when you see smoke coming out of the pan.

Evaporation happens when this evaporation happens, it leaves sort of, you can see it there, it leaves things that stick to the bottom, they're like little pieces of almost you call them scum, but little pieces of goodness and stuff when they brown. Not only are they sweet and delicious and a thunderous combination of flavors, but they are all so thick. I mean, they have gelatin, there's no flour in this, there's nothing to make it thick except the juices at the bottom. from the pot that evaporates and there is this brown crust and when you leave this brown crust and you put water or broth in it when it rises it thickens now for the last and last time we are adding onion and bell pepper and celery, now we have three times onions, we have two times bell pepper and celery and we have two different types of tomatoes, where tomato sauce now we are adding fresh tomatoes, so you see, we have taken this very economical. simple dish we call jambalaya and we have organized the ingredients, we have put them one at a time and we have gotten the best flavor from each of these ingredients, now we will join them with starch and We are adding rice to it now, the rice is very very soft , so we season it a little bit, but what will really make the rice work and make this a valuable dish are all the juices that we have concentrated and that We add broth to these juices and raise them, I learned that it is quite good, I can savor it, we bring them up and all of this will be incorporated into the rice and then the starch from the rice will be incorporated into the dish itself and those combinations. of blandness and seasoning is going to make this dish spectacular to eat here it sticks to the bottom and rises from the bottom last time to get the best flavor you have to scrape the bottom, that's where the good thing is it sticks to the bottom bottom, finish adding broth.

I'm going to add just a few more tomatoes to Elsa. The onions and bell pepper we added last time still have color. Now let's add some tomatoes for color. be there so we're going to cover it up let it simmer for a few moments and you'll have hot jambalaya on the heels of black and red fish you know you see God this is good maybe we'll work with something else and one day I had a rib eye and there was been cooked and then it was leftovers from the day before and a cut of steak from that and I did the black method and I felt sorry for the rest of the world while I was saying they're I just put this out I mean it was wonderful and it created a whole new method of cooking for us and we call it black rib and tenderloin and what we do is we take the layer of fat from a rib and we lift it up and We take a knife and we make holes in the surface on the top of the rib, they would literally cover it with seasonings , then we put the fat cap back on and prepare an oven as hot as possible, seven eight hundred degrees. whatever you get and put this rib in there and it literally burns the fat and in that method of burning the fat it drives the seasoning and the fat is what you really have to know so that it turns into those holes that you made, but it doesn't cook the rib, you leave it raw and after you burn off the fat, you remove it, scrape off the seasoning and cut it into the steaks and then you take the steak and you do it.

For the blackening method, you get a cast iron skillet, you heat it up when it's really hot, you put the steak and the butter on both sides and you sprinkle seasoning on it and then you drop it in that skillet and when you do it, it's going to be amazing. , I mean, the smoke will fly, you know, the fire will light and it's just wonderful to watch, but what happens is when you do that, you'll start to evaporate the meat juices off the surface. and the meat has sugar and the sugar is going to start to caramelize and the seasoning is going to start to caramelize the butter is going to start to caramelize and you're going to develop this crust and it's going to be a crispy crust and this crust is It's going to be a little sweet, it's going to be a slightly smoky, slightly bitter and in the center, for me, you can leave it cooked, medium-rare, whatever you want.

I mean, this is the first cooking method that really makes a piece of meat taste different. I usually have a better steak or not as good as it gets, that's it, I mean, that's where the meat comes in, but with this cooking method you start by grilling it and then you end up blackening it and it tastes amazing when it just drives me crazy and It just drives me crazy, so I have one right here. I mean, yeah, and I'm going to stop being crazy because I'm going to take a bite of this, look how black it is and it has a nice crust.

Oh to some whole wheat garlic butter in Kappa mmm, you're bad for you, oh, it's like it's him. I thought I'd be here strictly for you mmm, probably the hardest thing to really have an effect on is beef and especially a roast, so what we're going to do here is do a roasting process that actually has an effect of flavor in the meatYeah. I mean, it's not a dramatic effect, I mean, it won't change the whole premium roast. It is, but it will have that little bit of flavor that will give it a change and give it this wonderful breadth of things.

Now what we're doing here is we're drilling holes in the top of the rib and then we're going to add seasoning now by doing that something won't get much into the holes but we're going to put the fat cap back on and when we put it back on we're going to put it in the oven now it's probably going to take between half an hour and 45 minutes in the oven and we want the oven to be as hot as possible. The goal of what we are trying to achieve is to burn fat without cooking. the meat and hopefully those holes will get all this wonderful juice that comes from the fat now here look at this brown thing on top this has been in the oven for about 45 minutes we've taken it out and we're getting all the seasoning out of the top top cutting off the excess fat because we want to cut it into steaks and here we're cutting it into a steak and you'll see that the inside, although it looks like a cooked rib, the inside is still absolutely raw I mean it's absolutely raw but it's starting to take on a flavor toasted and it is beginning to acquire the first tensions in the flavor now we are ready to cook it we are going to put it in butter we turn it over we are I'm going to add the season code now, here you need a little more seasoning than with the fish or else You make it with a thinner piece of meat because this is a thick piece of rib with a very strong flavor.

I mean, you should put a little seasoning on it. to have leverage, so we're going to coat it a little bit on this side, flip it over, put a little bit on the other side and then we'll start the blackening method. Now the blackening method for this is simply unique in this heat. pan see the smoke when you can't do it in the house you have to do it outside I mean this this produces a credible amount of smoke what we want to do is just understand that oh let's see it I love seeing that it's almost moving what's happening is that you're taking the best parts of the meat juices and the seasoning and the butter and browning them on the surface and forming a crust to give it incredible dimensions and flavor, you see the black. starting to form there now, if you take it too far it will burn, but what you want to do is get it black and not burn it so it tastes amazing, it's almost like holding two steaks on top of the bottom of that cut. frying pan, that's Adam, you'd think there's nothing you want to add to this, but let me tell you something.

Whole wheat garlic butter sauce is something that will almost enhance the flavor of anything you put it with and it's very It's a simple thing to make and it's very quick and you do it at the last minute, you take a pan and you heat it up and preferably you make it hard with nothing in it, you just empty it and then you add a few pieces of whole butter and then you just sit there and just stir it, which still takes a few seconds until you start to develop a brown spot in the center. You see that brown spot in the center and it's starting to turn brown on the sides as well.

Now we're going to add garlic and then we're going to add a little bit of parsley and then we're going to add something wonderful that brings our two wonderful things together actually and there goes the reduction of the glaze, this is a meat glaze and another little piece of butter and the parents of the little one Ian and shaking this we turn it into a sauce that will give a steak or a piece of fish or anything you put on it with a third and fourth technological dimension that you can hardly get anywhere else and what you want to do is let this brown It comes together and you want to let it foam and rise and you can see the foam coming out now and it's getting close to being ready.

I see a wonderful color. Brown it and you can just pour it on top of a steak or put it on a plate and serve it with dinner. It works for roasting. It works for anything. It was just a Gumbo, the most elusive. I think it has more meaning. I think that anything else I cooked maybe jambalaya has almost as much, but

gumbo

really has it when we had problems with lack of food, my mother made

gumbo

when we had too many mouths to feed with company and gumbo always made it work because gumbo It's a sauce and it's rich and it tastes good and it takes away your hunger.

I can remember the times when I was a child my brothers and sisters would go to the dance and they would stop by the house and on Saturday night they would leave their children outside. Mom and I would take care of the children. One of the things we always did was fix the pot. of gumbo because when they came home at 2 or 3 in the morning that was something for them to eat, we had a wood stove and I just simply shoved the gumbo into the back of the stove after making it and it was just spectacular what you have with a gumbo when you talk about cooking, you have a spectacular multiple flavor that is really unusual, especially if you don't know anything. about Louisiana food, you take flour and oil and you cook it at such an incredibly high temperature, we're talking five hundred and six hundred degrees until the flour starts to brown, then you season that flour and oil by putting in onions and peppers and celery and you mix it together. herbs and spices, once that happens you have the start and we always say Louisiana, first you make a roux and that's the key to getting the gumbo the right color, the next thing you do is give it the right flavor.

You have to have a very old chicken or that old duck that screams there, you have to have any of those and it has to be old because if it is old it is difficult and when it is difficult for you. you have to cook it in a long time, it makes a wonderful juice if you don't have that and if you live in the city you certainly don't have that if you have to have a wonderful broth that takes bones as you see What we are doing here is taking bones and browning them very hard until make them nicely browned and put them in water, bring them to a boil and then let them simmer for hours and hours until you have a wonderful juice to cook with.

Add in cooking experience and bell peppers, onions and celery and what comes out is this rich, rich, wonderfully flavored broth. It's a soup, but it's not a soup. It doesn't taste like any soup I've ever had. It's a gumbo and a gumbo. has a special flavor all the Louisiana food we talk about has a flavor framework and that flavor framework involves in the cooking method the brown roux which involves the red pepper seasoning white pepper black pepper garlic onion bell pepper celery and the use of that stuff and then what we're doing is we're making a gumbo that tastes like you wouldn't believe now I've got some here but I'm taking it I'm going to get ready for this one I mean I'm just going to get right into that yeah yeah you know , I like to present dishes this way because it really makes my job harder, oh, when it's just amazing to taste what's going on, the first thing you taste is that dark roux and then as you start swallowing and you get a different flavor: the bell pepper, the onions that have been cooked for a long time and it's a little sweet and then you taste the chicken and the chicken comes out very strong and when you swallow it you have this wonderful shine. your mouth I mean it's like it's like almost paid but it's not and it's always fun I mean it's a pleasure I mean it really is and what's up with that you won't take another bite and I mean then the chicken comes out again the sausage it comes out through the smoking of the sausage um I'm going to stop talking about just eating I think to accentuate any type of cooking you need a broth now we do it I'm going to prepare a chicken broth for you we We take the chicken bones, chicken tenderloins and we brown them until they turn golden brown, then from this point you can add water now and cover it or you can get more flavor out of it by adding carrots and you can see that we used the peels. of the carrots here we can put celery and just use the top part, so you used to use the bottom part, the celery root that you would normally throw away, you wouldn't use, put onion on it, the skin of the onion gives it a nice tone. color plus the onion flavor you put garlic in it and use whole garlic cloves or you can use garlic leaves or whatever and it's good to fill the pot, don't put it on top like I just did, but cover this with water and bring it to a boil and let it simmer now if you want, you can reduce it without adding water and letting it simmer and you'll make your gelatin, they'll make a glaze for it or you can just keep it. add water and cook it for 24 hours and get this wonderful flavor that will make everything you cook so much better, just bring it to a ball over low heat, a gumbo is a very emotional thing for me because there are many times that I remember eating gumbo, Those are memorable moments in my life.

I'll try to tell you some of them as we go, but let's start cooking. The first thing we have to do is season and brown the chicken. Now it's important. season every step of the way, I mean everything you do, if you want what you are cooking to have multiple flavors so that it constantly changes as you eat it and with each bite, and if you want the last bite to be just as good. or better than the first you have to season every step of the way and this is what you see us doing first we season the control now we're going to put a little bit in the flour that's going to go and check it now my The philosophy is that you don't want to take something that be soft like flour and put it on the surface of the chicken because you will just take away the flavor, now it won't make a big difference but the fact is that if you add seasoning to the flour and you have already seasoned the chicken it will make a difference for the better ;

In other words, they will enhance it even a little and help the flavors change. heat the oil until it's about 375 degrees because you want it very hot what we're doing here is browning the chicken, you don't want to cook it and you don't need to cook it, you want to take it and get it. a nice golden brown color, you know, I remember some times in my life when, when I was what I was, I was in high school and my friends and I used to go to my uncle's gas station, an all-night diner in Opelousas Louisiana, and I I mean one of the things we had was gumbo, what's one of the things we could afford?

Because at that time you could get gumbo for $75 or $50 for a whole bowl and it was 2 or 3 in the morning. You had been out all night with your girl and you know you ran out of mud and you could go there and get a big bowl of gumbo for a dollar and a half. Here we are browning the chicken and we turn it over for you. look what you want is you just add flavor to the chicken by browning it, you've given it, first you put the skin in the pan, you remove the fat from the skin and you put it in the oil, but you brown it, but also add dimension to the flavor by making the nutty flavor of the flower brown which gives it a nutty flavor and so what we're doing is while we're making this gumbo, you're going to see us doing things to add to the flavor now that the Probably the most important thing in my head about the flavor of gumbo is the root and a roux is flour and oil that is cooked at high temperature until it retains the color, let's see what we have done here, we brown the chicken and leave the remains of the bottom of the brown and from the chicken all the little bits of flour and all the fat from the chicken that went into the oil we try to leave that at the bottom of the pan because we are accentuating the flavor now we are adding flour and we are taking the flour that we used to dip the chicken in seasoned flour and Editors, you can see the little seasonings in them and you can see them, the red pepper and the black pepper, etc., now you see that the flavor is steadily building up on the top. of flavor at different points to make those flavors constantly change and to me that's what a great gumbo is now.

Making the roux is an intricate and really important part because if you burn this flour and oil, if it becomes too dark, it becomes too black. be bitter and once it's better you can forget about it, I mean, it's gone, but it's also the key to its flavor now, when it's a brown color like now, it's going to have a nutty flavor and it's going to have an influence. but not as well and it will thicken because of the color now when you get a darker brown it will thicken less and have a bigger influence on the flavor so what I'm telling you is that this part look closely and this part try to duplicate as much as I can and see if we can see the color that just changed now that we're getting darker, it's almost like a red brown, now I want to stop the color.

I want to stop the cooking process so I add onion, bell pepper and celery, turned off the heat and I'm also going to add now that I have seasoning. I have the season mix belt that was in the flour along with the onions, bell pepper and celery, now you can smell this. I mean, the smell is just amazing. Now what I did was use soft flour and oil that I already cooked down to chicken, it tastes like chicken and I have combined the flavor to give me an incredibly strong flavor to add to my gumbo and I have the juice from the bell pepper and the juice of the onions and Season this with the nutty flavor of the flour.

Now when I go to add this to the broth, you can see how that broth turned out really nice and rich with a little bit of brown color. Now I'm going to start adding. The root that this Roux has now is the only thing that will be everywhere, it is a good gumbo, so yes, I add it so thatstart to dissipate into little pieces that will spread everywhere as you beat it, it will become part of that. squeeze out a part of the broth and that part will be in each tablespoon, so what I took is onion, bell pepper and celery, I took a mixture of herbs and spices and I took flour and oil. and I made it the biggest influence on this gumbo, I mean, the biggest influence it has because it's not everywhere, as this boils, the flours dissipate and become part of the gumbo.

Now I want to develop the flavor of the chicken and so I'm adding the chicken that I've browned and the nutty flavor particles that are on the surface of the chicken and a little bit of seasoning right on the surface will also go into the gumbo and add to the flavor and I'll see what I do. What I'm doing is some building dimensions and stages of flavor and you just have to go ahead now, we're going to add the sausage or the sausage has a smoky flavor, I mean the smoky flavor that's going to come after that. you've taken a bite and you swallow it, you'll feel the smokiness and you'll feel the pepper now we're going to add onions, bell pepper and celery another time, look we have something that's already cooked in the flour and the oil in the root will now have a flavor and a texture of its own, we're going to add more, we're going to add more onions, bell pepper and fresh celery again to give it a crunch, so to give it that second, third and tenth dimension and flavor, we're going to add fresh garlic and we're going to add more spices because right here I reviewed it, tried it and felt like it needed more.

Seasoning now, what you have to do at this point is bring it to a boil and let it simmer. Now when that happens, oil will start to form on the surface. This is the oil with which the flour is released. when you made the root in other words the flour can only hold so much and it also loosens it so this is part of making a gumbo you have to stop and skim it and if you let it roll like you see it simmers and then the oil. it's going to build up on one side of the pan and then you just take it and take it out and say you have the space that's brown and you notice that at some point it started to turn black after you put the vegetables in now that's something artificial when you see it start to turn black because once you put it in with the broth you can see how it still has that really nice rich brown color.

Now I'm telling you this is oh, I'm it's going to taste this good this is good all you have to do now is simmer it's alive it's a wonderful gumbo you can see all the flavor in it I a bowl of potato salad put some rice on it and pour on the non-

cajun

gumbo the table is complete without its own set of condiments, everyone makes their own, their pickled pepper vinegars, they have pepper vinegars, they have

creole

mustard and mustard sauces, and it goes on and on. Next, all kinds of pepper sauces are wonderful to add to food.

In closing, I would like to say get your own pepper vinegars, get your own table seasonings when you make it to Cajun, we appreciate you joining us, we hope you had a good time and remember if anyone serves you something and it's not So. It doesn't taste good, it's not Cajun, and there's no good sign.