This exists as a written account of how We Made Gumbo. This is the third time we’ve made it, but the first where I’ll actually write this all down.

Ingredients:

Roux:
1 cup flour
1 cup fat ( we used butter – 4 small sticks = 1 cup)

Veggies/Aromatics
1 medium onion
1 green pepper
6 cloves of garlic
3 stalks of celery

Protein
2 lbs uncooked shrimp
2 packages of imitation crab meat
1 rotisserie chicken, meat pulled off the bone
3 packages of Hot Doug’s Andouille Sausage (12 links total)
3 packages of Paulina Market ANdouile Sausage (12 links total)

Broth
4 cups of shrimp stock (made with shells from shrimp)
1 1/2 containers of low sodium chicken stock

So, after chopping everything, we did these few things:
Put the sausage in the oven to broil off some of the grease. This results in a lot less grease in the finished product.

So, with everything ready to go, we started.
Dumped the butter in our gumbo pot, meted it. The key is, when you dump the flour in, it sizzles. Got it hot enough for this, then added a bit of flour in as we went, not dumping in the whole thing at once. This gets VERY HOT. Stirring the whole time is imperative. Check my mans here with some good roux-making.

Stir until you get the roux as dark as you want; we didn’t go for dark chocolate milk, but milk chocolate bar, let’s say. Then, dump in onions. Stir until they sweat; ie, you see the water coming out of them. Because of the steam, this gets HOT AS HELL. Then add the pepper and celery. The roux will cool down, and you’re supposed to stir until they get integrated a bit. We didn’t do it a full two minutes, I don’t think.Then the garlic, which doesn’t get a chance to burn, but when you smell it good, we went ahead to the broth. Medium heat.

THen, add the broth. We put in the shrimp stock first, then the chicken. Because we had a ton of protein, we left a few inches from the top. Stir and stir some more.

We put the sausage in, and got it up to a boil. The idea was to get the sausage flavor in there while the cooking was happening. Stir! Once it boiled, turned down to simmer, and let it sit for 40-hour.

Because everything else was already cooked, we added the chicken next and let it sit in a while, then the crab and finally the shrimp, which was in for maybe 20 minutes. Then off the heat, make some rice and some French bread, and go to town.