I normally wouldn’t save pan drippings from the BBQ, but I think subconsciously I had a notion of making gumbo since Saturday afternoon when I was bored flipping channels and found an episode of a PBS show called ‘Kitchen Queens: New Orleans’.
An aunt / nephew chef combo were making this gumbo that looked fantastic. On one burner they were making a stock by simmering a ham hock and various veggies and herbs and spices. On another burner they were cooking chunks of sausage in a cast iron pan. They didn’t say what type of sausage other than to say it was spicy. I don’t think it was Andouille, because that’s smoked and pre-cooked I believe, and this sausage started out raw and a lot of fat was rendered out after cooking it.
The nephew removed the cooked sausage from the cast iron pan with a slotted spoon and added it to the stock. So the oily fat in the pan remained, tinted red from paprika and other spices in the sausage, and then he added a surprising amount of flour, looked like a cup and a half, to the sausage fat to make the roux! That kind of blew my mind. Not exactly heart-healthy, but must make for a crazy good gumbo. But then, how heart-healthy is a roux made from butter and flour, like I usually do it? Pretty sure I’ve heard of making roux from bacon fat as well, which has to be similarly delicious.
They finished it up by shredding the ham hock and adding back in, adding chicken and shrimp and other good stuff, and carefully adding the roux (Cajun napalm I heard another NO chef call it) to the stock little by little.
