If not, maybe you just don't like perhaps the most incredible thing to come out of Louisiana besides Huey Long. In that case, move along. If you're still with, let me share a couple nuggets of culinary wisdom I learned from chef John Besh, celebrated chef/owner of August in New Orleans.
"We're really talking about the master recipes of Louisiana cooking, and jambalaya's one of them," he said during a recent telephone interview. "Although you'll have variations on that recipe, depending on what town you're from, how your mother cooked it, and so on, it's the Jesse Tree of Louisiana: We can trace all these influences in it. Jambon, "ham," from the French; laya, the Swahili word for "rice," the andouille sausage we know to be French actually brought by Germans in the mid- to late-1800s. Then the Italians came and added their influences. I love exploring the historical aspects of a dish to get to the guts of it."
Everything to know about Cajun and Creole cooking plus recipes for iconic dishes
Besh, who himself favors the Creole style of jambalaya over the Cajun, uses tomatoes and relatively more spices and peppers in his home-cooked jambalaya. It's the result of a three-hour process that he explains thusly:
"We use a cast-iron pot we've been making jambalaya in for years, heat it over propane or coals or charcoal, add the lard to the well-seasoned cast-iron pot, and then start rendering your meats in it. You brown all your meats ... it could be adding bacon or ground pork; I love using chicken wings and legs, things that will add flavor to the rice. Then I add the onions and caramelize them till they're mahogany in color. Then I throw in remainder of the holy trinity of Louisiana cooking, bell peppers and celery. (Since they have more water, they won't brown as much.) I add garlic ... add the rice. Don't add water just yet, stir the rice and coat it with fat and until you smell that nutty aroma. Then the stock. So you throw in bay leaves and little bit of salt, cover, let it cook without disturbing on a low, low simmer for 30 to 40 minutes. In the meantime, that's when you figure out if you add shrimp, which you should add 10 minutes before it's finished to let the shrimp steam with the rice. If you're using crawfish tails, they go in about five minutes before the rice is ready. You just add in the right sequence, and everything is perfectly cooked."
"The big question: Do we add tomatoes or don't we? That really depends on which side of the state you grew up in. I grew up in the shadows of New Orleans, so we add a little bit of tomato. I don't like it red, but I do like the tradition of adding some chopped tomatoes to it, adding some richness. Cajun style, they prefer it more mahogany brown."
So, most at-home cooks obviously don't want to spend three hours slaving over a cast-iron pot. Besh is a big fan of the local favorite shortcut, Zatarain's mix, which he says he's secretly used to surprising acclaim.
"During Hurricane Gustav, so we cooked it for about 300 civil servants around New Orleans, and because we were out of power, I grabbed the good 100 pounds of jambalaya mix Zatarain's given me over the years," he said. "I doctored it up, and the people who know how to make jambalaya were tickled to death. They said, 'This is like my mother's.'" I never told them it came from a mix."
Not surprisingly, he's promoting the Zatarain's Jambalaya Throwdown, which ends July 31. Use the mix as a base in a recipe for jambalaya, and enter your recipe into the contest. If you win, you win $2,500.
Don't worry, you won't be going up against John Besh.
"I and everyone in my family aren't allowed to compete," he said.
Want more jambalaya? Get recipes for the classic Louisiana dish at Epicurious.com
by Michael Y. Park
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