Vegan Gumbo for the Win

So I get a produce share this week with probably 2/3 lb of fresh okra. That leaves me with 2 serious choices. Fried okra or gumbo. I mean I know I KNOW there are other things I can do with okra, but let's be honest those two routes are so damned good that who cares if you CAN do other things. I've been meaning to try vegan gumbo for a while after an ok-ish recipe my husband found that I really wanted to fix up. (My husband is vegetarian and there are just certain things I want to be able to make and include him on. Gumbo is one of them) So here is what I came up with.

As a warning I meant to add a bell pepper to the gumbo and honestly just forgot (this is what happens when you improv). I will probably add that next time I make this, but as this batch turned out so damned well I wanted to try to just reconstruct it as is. If you try this I'd recommend adding a finely chopped bell pepper to one of the vegetable stages. Which one really depends on what effect you want the pepper to have on the finished product. They both have pros and cons. I'm also going to group ingredients by phase and process because I personally think it will make the recipe more readable. If you'd prefer the all ingredients at the top traditional presentation let me know, but I don't make any promises. Also keep in mind this whole thing was improved last night with no real thought to developing a recipe, but my husband asked me to try to recreate it. This should be pretty close to what I made, but feedback will definitely help me refine the instructions. I also want to personally thank Paul Fehribach of Big Jones where I used to work for much of the inspiration and cooking bravery necessary to undertake this experiment. And with all that Awwwaaaaaayyy We Go!

Ingredients:

Prep a bowl with 1st phase vegetables in it. They can all go in together.
4 medium carrots diced small
3 large ribs of celery diced small
1 medium/large onion diced small
4 cloves of garlic minced (I actually used jarred garlic for this)

Prep a bowl with the 2nd phase vegetables in it. They can all go in together.
10-14 oz okra cut into small pieces (this can be fresh or frozen)
2 medium zucchini diced

Prep a small bowl or ramekin with all the spices for the Gumbo. I know this might seem silly, but when you add them it needs to happen quickly so this step will make your life a lot easier.
2 bay leaves
1 tsp Thyme
2 tsp oregano
Several healthy twists of black pepper
1/2 tsp smoked salt
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1 Tbsp chili powder
cayenne to taste (this really varies based on your audience)
1 tsp paprika
a pinch of onion powder and granulated garlic (the dry and fresh provide very different flavors)

Put the following roux ingredients in your soup pot and saute on high heat mixing regularly until it just starts to turn slightly reddish brown. As soon as this starts turn the heat down to medium low and continue to cook, stirring constantly until it turns a dark brick red. If you are just doing this for the first time and are unsure of pushing the roux until it burns then you can err on the side of a slightly lighter red brick color. Darker rouxs will come with experience and comfort.
4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons cooking oil (avoid unrefined oils such as EVOO as they can become carcinogenic when they are heated too much and this process keeps the oil at a very high temperature for an extended period of time)

When your roux has reached the right color throw your 1st phase vegetables and the spices into the roux and toss the vegetables until they have started to give off some liquid and the roux seizes and darkens slightly. At this point you can turn the temperature up to medium high as you saute the vegetables and add the spices so that they can toast in the roux.

Saute until the vegetables start to soften and the roux dries up a bit again. You should also smell the flavor of toasted spices. Next add the first phase of moisture and legumes.
1 cans of diced tomatoes (I use fire roasted for the extra flavor, but any variety will work)
1 cup of french lentils rinsed and sorted to remove any pebbles

Cook the slurry that results down on low heat until it's smooth and begins to dry up a bit again. This will take between 15 and 20 minutes. You will need to stir occasionally to keep the mixture from sticking to the bottom of your pot. When it has developed a strong tomato aroma and has started to thicken back up add the broth and second phase vegetables.

2 quarts of vegetable broth

Simmer the gumbo on medium low heat until the zucchini and okra are done to your liking. Taste the broth and adjust the salt to taste. I always start cooking with enough salt to facilitate the chemical cooking processes I'm performing, but no more so I can adjust at the end to taste. I probably put in roughly another tsp of salt at the end of this process, but I was using mostly home made broth that I hadn't added any salt to yet. So if you're using store bought broth you might not need to make any adjustments, or just add a little additional salt.

Second To Last Meat Meal

My partners have been wanting to go vegetarian for some time.  There are many reasons for the change to our diet, most of them health related.  I highly recommend that anyone who has not seen it go out and watch the documentary Forks over Knives.  It explains a lot of why we are making this change to our diet.

In the mean time I have the final bits of an all organic meat share that we had to go through and the other night I made one of our last meat meals.  It was another smoked piece, and I'm taking these final meat preparation opportunities to try some cooking techniques I haven't tackled before.

I wanted to do a writeup on the second to last meat meal I prepared because it goes with my recent smoking interests, and produced some really excellent results.

I made smoked dark meat chicken.  It was a mixture of drumsticks and thighs.  I put together an impromptu rub of poblano chili powder, paprika, black pepper, salt, cumin, turmeric, paprika, garlic powder, and a little bit of brown sugar.  After smothering the chicken in the rub, and leaving it in the fridge to dry a bit and form a nice pellicle on the surface of the meat, I loaded all the meat up in my roasting pan.  It's important that you have it resting on a roasting rack, so the meat is elevated above the bottom of the roasting pan.  If you don't have a good roasting rack for this purpose I recommend loading up the roasting pan with vegetables that roast and smoke well, and laying your chicken on top of the vegetables.  If you roasting pan is large enough to hold a cooling rack you can also use an all metal cooling rack for this purpose.

I left a small area near the corner of the roasting pan empty to hold the wood chip container.  Then I set the oven to just about 200 degrees (which is kind of a guesstimate with my oven knob).  While the oven was preheating I covered the top of my roasting pan in aluminum foil and crimped it around the sides very securely.  I left the corner of the pan with space for the smoking chips uncrimped.  Then I started the chips going on the top of my stove.  I spoke about this process a bit in a previous blog post.  I use a small powdered sugar dispenser to hold my smoking chips.  Really all you need is a small stainless steel container that you can heat directly on your stove.  This works best with a gas stove.  Once the chips were smoking heartily I quickly stuck them inside the roasting pan with a pair of tongs and crimped the remaining corner of the aluminum foil shut.  Then I slid the roasting pan into the oven.  Then I set a timer for 15 minutes.  When the timer went off I pulled the roasting pan out of the oven, pulled the chip container out and re-lit it.  If you don't want to be getting up every 15 minutes for the duration of the smoking you can get away with refreshing the chips every 20 minutes.  I've found at 15 minutes the roasting pan is generally still fairly smokey, but the chips have gone out.  At 20 minutes the pan generally only has a few whisps of smoke when I pull back the foil to retrieve the chip container.

Now at this point I'd like to talk a little bit about the 200 degree mark that I set the oven for.  Most smoking recipes I've seen have targeted the smoker temperature at 250 degrees.  I aimed for 200 because this approach to smoking doesn't provide the constant high concentration smoke exposure that a commercial smoker provides, so I want it to be in the oven/smoker a little longer than if I were using a professional smoking rig to soak up as much delicious smoke as possible.

The other question I want to cover is "Why go to all this trouble?"  I'm not going to lie, this is a definite slow food approach to cooking.  It's not difficult, but it is a lot of hands on contact with the food.  For many people that will be a huge turnoff.  The big reason for me is that I love the flavor of slow smoked meats, and I live in an apartment in Uptown Chicago.  I don't live in a bad neighborhood, but I don't live in a great neighborhood and plenty of things have been stolen from the decks of our apartment building.  For people in similar urban situations a nice expensive smoker may just not be an option.   You can do this entire smoking technique in  your urban apartment/condo kitchen with no special equipment and get amazing results.

Then there is the ultimate advantage, that quite honestly would have me doing this even if I lived in the burbs and had an acre yard, the juices rendered from the meat.  When I completed the roughly 3 hours of smoking/roasting there was an amazing deep dark liquid that had rendered out of the chicken.  It was incredibly rich, and had enough gelatin to set at room temperature.  This stuff is pure culinary gold.  If you use a traditional smoker then this liquid is generally lost.  It depends on your setup admittedly, but the outdoor smoking setups I have seen do not save this rare and magnificent resource.  It is a full batch of incomparable chicken chili waiting to be made.  Or it can just be poured into the bbq sauce for the chicken and cooked down into near perfection.  I was blessed with a similar liquid in smaller quantity when I smoked ribs using the same technique.  Slow roasting meats at home, with or without smoke will generally render a liquid like this.  This is one of those cases where the food you make at home will ALWAYS render a superior result to what is accessible in a commercial kitchen.  Slow roasting meat this way is just not feasible in a commercial kitchen.  You can't oven roast enough meat to do to order cooking.  There may be a few Michelin starred restaurants that go to this length, but you don't want to know what a meal costs at these establishments.  The trick here is low temperature roasting, and a high walled roasting pan to protect the liquid from the direct IR heat being given off by the sides off the oven.  While using this type of "stock" requires an imaginative approach to cooking it's worth it.  You won't find any recipes that call for this ingredient, because it's so rare, valuable and can't just be purchased at a store.  It's highly concentrated and doesn't flavor quite like regular meat stock as a result, so roast or smoke up some meat and experiment.  Trust me it will make all the hard work seem more than worth the time.

Now that those mild asides are . . . well set aside we can get to the final step, the bbq sauce.  In my experience everyone has different tastes in bbq sauce.  I like mine tangy, terribly terribly overwhelmingly tangy.  In my opinion if any flavors really win out over vinegar in a bbq sauce then you're doing it wrong.  There should be just a touch of brown sugar to give some roundness, but not enough to make the sauce distinctly sweet at all.  I can't really tell you exactly what goes into my sauce, but I start with a base of tomato paste, some of the juice drippings I discussed at length in the last paragraph, a bunch of vinegar (generally unfiltered apple cider vinegar), chili powder, cumin, turmeric, salt, pepper, some oregano, a touch of brown sugar, a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce, and a few splashes of home made hot sauce.  Then I start cooking the sauce down, and I taste as I go.  The flavor will depend on the freshness of my herbs, my mood and the quality of the various ingredients.  I grab various bottles and futz with the sauce till it tastes right.  There really isn't much more of a recipe than that.  Common things that I add while touching up are molasses if it's sweet enough, but I want more of that deep roundness brought by the brown sugar, smoked salt if it could be smokier but I don't want to thin it down with more liquid, more vinegar, paprika, sometimes soy sauce, and very occasionally if I want a really round sauce I'll add some cocoa powder.  I don't generally add any normal salt until the rest of the flavor is just right, because some of the ingredients I might add have salt in them.  So the final adjustment I make is to the sodium.

Finally I take the chicken, smother it in sauce and consume it in the undignified way that is required of such food.  I try to redeem myself with copious napkins . . . but I have a beard.  It's pretty hopeless.