Seafood Gumbo!

For the last week I have been in the mood for some serious seafood gumbo. It's been hot and humid here for the most part but given the length of a typical Chicago winter, I don't mind sweating a little during the summer. Or a lot... I thought a spicy seafood stew would go nicely with the weather.

Here's what I did.

I started out with a trip to my fish guy. Came home with some head-on shrimp, soft-shell crabs, VERY fresh scallops, craw fish tail meat and frog's legs. While I was out I also picked up some chicken Andoulli sausage (they were out of pork), bacon, okra, trinity and thyme.

I took a slightly different approach to making this gumbo than most traditional cooks do. I used 3 separate cooking vessels during the beginning stages in order to achieve various levels of cooking /caramelization with my ingredients. I used a cast iron pot for my dark roux, a big All-Clad pot for rendering fat from bacon and sauteeing my trinity and a copper fry pan for pre-cooking my Okra before bringing all of these ingredients together in the stew.

For the roux, I started with canola oil rather than butter. I did this because I wanted to be sure that the brown color of this roux was coming from the toasting of flower, rather than the browning or burning of butter. The picture above was taken a little more than mid-way through the process of slowly cooking this roux. Overall I would say it took me about 25 minutes to get the roux to the color I wanted it. I then scooped it out of the pot and set it aside.

Next I rendered some bacon lardons in the All-clad pot and when they were crispy I removed them and sauteed the trinity of celery, bell pepper and onion until it was lightly caramelized. Some cooks would just add these ingredients directly to the roux and cook them there but I wanted to be sure my roux did not cook any further than I wanted it to while I was trying to get these veggies where I wanted them. Next I added my roux to the pot with the trinity and gave it a moment to take on the bacon fat that was still in the pan. Then I added 2 cans of San Marzano tomatoes, some shrimp stock and some light chicken stock. I threw in a couple of bay leaves and let this mixture simmer while I went outside to do some work on the Green Egg.

As some of you may know, I'm a big fan of using the grill to bring flavor to my braises and stews. In this case, I grilled the frog legs and the Andouille sausage over a nice smoky grill before throwing them into my gumbo. I just like the added depth of flavor that a little smoky char adds to some of the ingredients. After these legs and the sausage came off the grill, i sliced the sausage and threw it into the simmering gumbo pot with the legs and my seafood.

A lot of people complain that okra is slimy... It can be. So giving it a saute before putting it into the gumbo will prevent this.

I let the seafood cook in the simmering pot for about 25 minutes. Oh.. a note on these shrimp: To prep these guys, I basically left the head and tail on, but peeled and devained just the body. This way they were easy to eat out of the gumbo and just set the heads aside. The heads add a huge amount of flavor to the dish and work well to enhance the presentation of the whole thing.
The crabs were soft-shells so they just got cut in half and eaten as is.

Just before serving, I adjusted seasoning with some salt, Old-bay, fresh thyme and hot sauce. We ate this with some crusty bread and cold beer.

Sweet ass!