So I made jambalaya last night. I basically made a riff off of one of Emeril’s recipes on food network. His chicken and sausage jambalaya. Based on the reviews, I added a few ingredients.
Everything came out great, but the andouille sausage was way too hot. It masked all the other awesome flavors in the sausage (and dish). The chicken and rice components were good, but I couldn’t really enjoy the full effect of the meal.
Do they make a mild andouille sausage? Is the intense heat what makes it andouille? Any brand recommendations? Thanks in advance!
Were you using cured or fresh andouille? I usually find the cured to be much hotter. You might try Italian sausage, or chorizo that you get from a butcher counter.
What is ‘too hot’? Generally, I like my spicy food hot enough to make me sweat. I get andouille sausages from a sausage maker. His are about the same heat as your typical ‘hot link’ you get as a sandwich or in a packet at the supermarket. Maybe a little hotter. I’ll glisten a little if I eat one on a roll, so they’re not all that hot.
So I guess the first question would be: How hot is too hot for you? I like this recipe. I use a little more shrimp, maybe a little more chicken, and not quite double the andouille. I find it relatively mild. The SO, who doesn’t like things as hot as I do, does not find it too hot. Jambalaya has to have some heat, but you can attenuate it by using less andouille. Only, I’m not seeing how the heat can mask the flavour of the other ingredients unless you’re eating an actual piece of sausage. Maybe you’re using too much cayenne pepper in the seasoning you add to the pot?
I’m not sure about substituting chorizo. (Sorry, Chefguy!) I think it’s too greasy for jambalaya, and the flavour profile is different. I think Italian sausage might work. (Sorry, Jeff Lichtman!) It might have too much fennel in it, but you can use a kind with less.
Kielbasa? Hm… Not working for me in my imagination.
As I said, the spice in the sausages shouldn’t make the rest of the dish too hot. I’d suggest using less cayenne in the spice mixture (or leave it out and just get the residual heat from the andouille), and/or reduce the amount of andouille. Perhaps use a mixture of andouille and another, mild, sausage. Fresh bratwurst might work.
Andouille actually has more flavors going on than either of those sausages (thyme, bay leaf, sage, etc.). Chorizo is just peppers, garlic, a bit of oregano and a small amount of cumin. Italian sausage has a bit of fennel and paprika, but nothing overpowering. Either one would work fine, especially the commercial brands, which are usually fairly tasteless.
This reminds me that it’s been way too long since I made Jambalaya. I’ve made it with andouille, I’ve made it with italian (Mild and hot), and I’ve made it with chorizo. I and others liked it every time. Don’t be afraid to try a little variation.
Kielbasa is a perfectly fine substitute. Just use that if andouille is too spicy for your tastes or difficult to find. Personally, while I don’t find andouille spicy, it’s not easy to find really good andouille around here unless you make it yourself or make a trip to a special shop. However, good homemade smoked Polish sausage is, so I use that instead.
I just checked my excellent Real Cajun cookbook by Donald Link, and he just mentions “smoked sausage” for his Cajun (brown, no tomatoes) jambalaya recipe. He doesn’t even specifically call for andouille. The recipe in The New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook (1976) for Dunbar’s jambalaya doesn’t even call for sausage of any kind, just ham for the smoky element.
My absolute favorite online resource for this is gumbopages.com
That recipe recommends a “(hot) smoked sausage, andouille, or chaurice.”
That website has been updated and a lot of links appear to be broken. I’ve found the links on archive.org to older versions of the page that work:
Anyhow, the moral of the story is, you don’t even necessarily need sausage, but, if you do, go for a smokey one, and kielbasa/smoked Polish sausage is the perfect substitute. Or smoked Hungarian sausage if you’ve got that around, especially the spicier types.
Thanks guys. I think I’ll try the kielbasa suggestion. I got the andouille from the deli counter at Wegman’s. So I could probably find a milder version. The weird thing is, I like hot. For wings, the hotter the better. So maybe it was some combo of the flavoring of the andouille that didn’t agree with me.
This was my first time cooking jambalaya, and I really fell in love with the method: brown veggies, brown meat, add spices, add rice, add liquid, cook. It leaves room for a lot of experimentation.
The best jambalaya I’ve ever had was at Coop’sin New Orleans. They put rabbit in it and cook it so it gets a little burned/crusty on the edges. I’m drooling thinking about it.
We had the sampler plate, with jambalaya, gumbo, fried chicken, red beans and rice, and I think something else. All very good. But I like jambalaya the way I make it better.
I wonder if we’re talking about two different things. Kielbasa is pretty close to plain smoked sausage and closet to andouille than plain smoked sausage is (whatever that is exactly, as all smoked sausage I’ve had was spiced in some way.(
And so on and so forth. Personally, I think a smoked Hungarian sausage is even closer, but that’s not available in most places. All this stuff about (smoked) kielbasa not being a good substitute seems bizarre to me. They are similar sausages.
Chorizo, no. Italian sausage, no. Those are quite different. Those are not smoked and have quite a different flavor profile, but Polish sausage is basically andouille minus the cayenne pepper. Here’s a basic andouille recipe.Here’s a pretty standard kielbasa/Polish sausage recipe. They are not at all that much different, with the andouille having cayenne pepper and sometimes other spices, and the Polish sometimes has marjoram or allspice.
Look, I’ve actually made and smoked these sausages myself, as well as eaten them in my trips down to New Orleans–they are not all the dissimilar, with a good Polish sausage (especially if you can find something like this at a Euro-style deli) just being a milder, less spiced smoked sausage. You can always add some cayenne and thyme or whatnot to bring up the spicing and get it closer, if you’d like.
I think Hillshire Farms makes a product called simply “smoked sausage” (ah, here it is). I tried it once in a pot of beans when I couldn’t find any smoked ham hocks. No, it wasn’t a suitable substitution. I don’t know why it was so hard to find ham hocks in Anchorage. The base commissary used to have them on occasion, but they were frozen and there was very little meat on them. The local store down the street always has these large, meaty, tasty hocks. But I digress.
Yeah, I’ve seen that before. There’s still spicing in those. The Hillshire Farms sausages, in general, I find to be way too watery and soft, whether their plain smoked sausage or their kielbasa. I really can’t tell what the difference is between their kielbasa and smoked sausage. Maybe the meat? Polish sausage is usually either all pork or a mix of pork & beef. But otherwise, they’re not all that different. Typically, I try to look for Polish sausage that’s sold in delis for this kind of thing. It’s usually just hanging up on the walls on hooks and you buy it by the link or pair of links. But I happen to live in a community with a lot of Eastern European delis so it’s easy for me to find. Of the commercial brands, I would look at those that are either all pork or pork-and-beef (no turkey or other meats), no fillers, no “smoked flavoring,” no autolyzed yeast extract, no gelatin, etc. Basically, I’m just looking for meat, salt, spices, and maybe some nitrites or celery juice.
Next time, just try plain ol’ ham (like a hamsteak or from a spiral ham). That’s what I do. Or even smoked turkey wings (my grocery has a pile of various smoked meats, turkey wings being particularly suitable for this application.) Around here, you can also get smoked pork loin, smoked shoulder, smoked ribs, etc., and those work just as well as smoked ham hocks, in my opinion, but it all depends on what you have locally available.
I’ve used ham and I’ve used smoked pork chops with success when I couldn’t find hocks. I prefer the hocks we get here to most anything else, as they’re fairly lean and loaded with flavor.
Oh, and I agree about Hillshire Farms; they seem sort of mushy or rubbery: rubbishy, I guess. It’s not a pleasant texture.
Speaking of dishes being too hot, I made my latest try at Indian food today with a dish called Goan-style Spicy Sausage. Holy shit. It’s similar to feijoada, but without the beans to give you a break from the heat. It recommended chorizo as a suitable substitute for Goan sausage and also had some cayenne powder and diced serrano peppers in the mix. I should have seeded the peppers, as the final product was almost too spicy to eat. Even served over rice and topped with a desperation dollop of yogurt, it still caused my scalp to sweat and my eyebrows to melt. :eek: