A FEAT of PATIENCE
Chefs in New Orleans start early before they excel at making dark and savoury gumbo
In Alexis Ruiz's family, developing gumbo expertise starts young.
Her eight-year-old daughter, Juliette, pays close attention when her father, chef Richard Ruiz, makes his version of that quintessential New Orleans dish at an eatery called the Munch Factory.
“She understands the roux, that there's this odd, burnt-popcorn smell. That's the moment when you know it's ready,” says Alexis Ruiz, the Munch Factory's co-owner.
If Juliette masters making her father's gumbo, a culinary triumph will live on. Among one of many gumbos we sampled during our recent New Orleans vacation, the Munch Factory's gumbo was unsurpassed. It was dark and nutty and teeming with not only slices of sausage and chunks of ham, but also plump shrimp and a seam of seafood flavour in its broth.
My fellow travellers and I ate various gumbos at every opportunity. They ranged from enjoyable to delicious whether they featured chicken or duck or sausage or ham or exclusively seafood, whether they were topped with rice or a devilled egg, whether they were thickened with the addition of okra or of file (ground sassafras) powder, or whether, in two outlying cases, alligator or quail starred in the bowl.
Gumbo, Ruiz says, is “the one dish that can have every type of interpretation.” However, she and other New Orleanians frown on putting tomatoes in gumbo, which strikes them as flagrantly inauthentic.
Food scholars say today's gumbos can be traced back to early 18th-century Louisiana. By the mid-1700s, Africans in New Orleans were mixing okra, known as ki ngumbo in their mother tongue, with rice.
But, because New Orleans is a melting-pot city that saw waves of French and Spanish settlement, not to mention the influence of nearby Cajuns (displaced Acadians from the Canadian Maritimes), gumbo developed into a multicultural mishmash, improved by all its influences.
Gumbo “is like our country, our world. All these different people are coming together and we're meshing in that velvety roux and we're making one heck of a dish and that's fascinating,” says chef Edward (Dook) Chase IV, who served us fantastic gumbo at his restaurant Chapter IV.
Gumbo is in Chase's blood. His grandmother, Leah Chase, was a queen of Creole cuisine in New Orleans. Decades ago, she served gumbo to civil rights leaders and freedom riders, both Black and white, when they met at her Dooky Chase Restaurant, even though integrated dining was illegal.
“We were open for all the community,” Chase says. “My grandmother had a saying: She helped change the course of America over a bowl of gumbo.”
The question every gumbo-maker must confront is how dark to take their roux, a combination of vegetable oil and flour that darkens as the flour cooks. Yes, a darker roux grows intoxicatingly more nutty in smell and flavour. But the risk always looms of burnt roux, which must be trashed before starting the gumbo again.
Alexis Ruiz says her husband's roux brinksmanship makes her nervous. “I'm like, `You're burning it,' and he's like, `Get out of here, nobody's burning it, I know what I'm doing,'” she says with a laugh.
Nate Prendergast, a guide with Doctor Gumbo Tours who leads culinary tours in New Orleans, says the gumbo he makes each Christmas Eve takes 52 minutes of stirring to get its roux right.
“I go low, I go slow, I go super-dark. I call it a three-beer gumbo,” Prendergast says. The roux is ready, he says, when he can smell roasted almonds and the roux is the colour of a “heavily tarnished copper penny.”
Chase says his gumbo at Chapter IV is not as dark as the gumbo that Louisiana's Cajuns make, because the distinct flavours of his chosen proteins — chaurice and andouille sausages, crab, shrimp, chicken — shine better if the roux is a shade lighter. “It all depends on your preference,” he says. “They're all great gumbos.”
During our final afternoon in New Orleans, Cam Holmes, a chef-instructor at the Mardi Gras School of Cooking, taught us to make a tasty gumbo, even if we took a shortcut with store-made broth.
We got the hang of making the roux and took home the pro tip that bits of roux stuck to the bottom of the pot can come unstuck before they burn if you take the pot off the heat and scrape, or lower the heat and scrape.
We made smaller portions of gumbo, even if that contravened the gumbo code.
“I tell people there's no possible way to cook a small pot of gumbo,” chef Chase says. “You have to be bringing people together to eat at the table, for celebrations, for friendships, for whatever.”