I have recently studied the topic of gumbo extensively.
You know how all the snooty cookbooks go on and on about how making your own stock really is the only way to go? They finally wore me down and I decided to try it. It actually does make a huge difference.
It
so does, for etouffe, too.
I ended up with about 3 gallons of stock that was the color of brown lake water and smelled like fish, but not in a good way. It did not appear promising.
Yeah, that's what it's supposed to look and smell like: pond.
You can do stock with the shells of just a couple of pounds of shrimp, too, or crabshells or crawfish shells or fish parts or any combination thereof. You don't need to save stuff for that long! I like to have a low country boil with shrimp or crawfish or both, make everyone save their shells, and then put them in the crockpot that night with all the rest of the ingredients. When you wake up, you have fish stock.
Heat about 1/2 cup vegetable oil in a frying pan. Gradually add in about 1-1.5 cups flour, a tablespoon at a time. Stir constantly.
The roux is done when it is about the consistency of peanut butter. Traditionally, it should also be about the color of peanut butter, but mine always ends up about the color of Hershey's chocolate. Possibly I'm doing something wrong, but the end result (the gumbo) is good.
For a peanut-butter colored roux, you need less flour or more oil. I think the proper ratio is 1 cup flour for every 3/4 cup of oil.
Dark brown roux is fine for gumbo, but if you ever want to make etouffe, you ought to change the ratio a bit.
This takes about 20 minutes and is extremely boring as the stirring must be more or less constant. If a well-meaning s.o. or housemate pops in and asks "is there anything I can do to help?" enlist them to stir the roux even if they were just being polite.
ROFL, I totally do this!
I'll defer to Fraulein on this, but I believe cajun roux is traditionally made with vegetable oil. Or possibly I'm being a philistine again.
It can be made with vegetable oil, (REAL) butter, or bacon grease.
I'm not generally crazy about okra, but I do like it in this. Not sure where the tomato idea came from, but I like them in most anything.
Generally, gumbo that has okra has tomatoes, and gumbo that has tomatoes has okra. And generally, tomato-okra gumbo (also called Creole gumbo) has seafood, and Cajun gumbo can have seafood but usually has sausage, chicken, and tasso. (I grew up across the river from Louisiana, in Mississippi, and I only had Creole gumbo, ever, until I went to family functions of actual French-speaking Cajuns in college. I kept thinking, where the hell is the okra?)
The difference between Cajun and Creole is that Cajun is the culture of the French descendants in that area, and Creole is a hybrid of Cajun and African--thus the okra, which is an African vegetable, in the gumbo. Creole food is more dominant around the (Mississippi) river, due to obvious ethnographic reasons, and Cajun food is more dominant the further you go west.
Sorry to sound like a know-it-all; I had to get to the bottom of this last year because I couldn't find any satisfactory gumbo recipes. I vastly prefer Creole gumbo, though I like the Cajun stuff, too. And I prefer etouffe to either kind of gumbo.
As to the thread question, the best dish that I cook is bananas foster chimichangas. It is probably also the least healthy food I have ever consumed--brown sugar, rum, butter, and bananas all wrapped in a tortilla, fried, and sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar.
