Seafood Gumbo Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 cup of oil
• 1 cup of flour
• 2 cloves garlic
• 4 whole dry bay leaves
• Old bay seasoning
• 1 lb Hillshire Farms green label chicken sausage smoked on a rope (if you don’t eat pork) or andouille sausage
• 2 lbs party wings (depends on who’s coming to the party)
• 1 lb crawfish tail meat
• 2 green bell peppers
• 1 stalk of celery
• 1 onion (The peppers, celery and onions together is known as the Trinity!)
• 3 lbs snow crab
• 3 lbs king crabs
• Season salt
• Onion powder
• Cajun seasoning (we use Louisiana brand)
• 3 tablespoons pepper sauce
• 4 lbs large shrimp - raw peeled and deveined
• Chicken breast OR boneless skinless thigh meat (2.5 lbs if one, or 1.25 lbs of each if you’re combining)
• Gumbo filé seasoning
• 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
• 1 cup flour
• 3 quarts of chicken broth
• 2 cups of water
• Soup kitchen pot (This shit should be the biggest pot that can hold all the shit you want to put in there. Ain’t no telling how many people you feeding!)

1. Large dice your trinity. Put that to the side.
2. Dice your sausage, cube your chicken breasts or boneless skinless thigh meat. We like a mixture of half chicken breast and half skinless thigh meat. Clean your shrimp. The crawfish tail meat already comes cleaned and cooked.
3. Take your cast iron pan, your cup of oil and your cup of flour and heat the pan up. Add the oil, heat that up. Gradually add the flour to make a roux. You have to sit there and stir for about 1.5 to 2 hours until you get a dark-colored roux without burning it. You gotta stay on it! You can’t leave the roux. You can’t let the roux burn, so you gotta constantly be stirring until it’s brown. Make sure it’s not sticking to the bottom of the pot. This is the key to your gumbo! I repeat, the key to your gumbo is your roux! Do not scorch or burn that! You have to cook it. If you have to take the pan on and off the fire just to control the temperature, then that’s what I suggest you do. This is serious.
4. Take your trinity, your diced chicken and diced sausage in a pot, sauté it in some oil until it starts to turn clear and turns soft. Add the pepper sauce in to taste along with the other seasonings. Keep tasting throughout and adding seasoning throughout. Then you add the chicken broth and bring it to a boil. Once it boils, you take the roux that you’d set to the side fully cooked, and you add it to the pot. Keep stirring until it thickens. It’s gonna get thick. Let that boil up for an hour. Then you take your shrimp, crab legs and party wings and add them in and cook them for another hour. You can fry your party wings beforehand, but we prefer to cook them raw.
5. Add the gumbo filé at the end to taste. The max cook time for a good gumbo with a nice, dark, rich roux is like 2.5 to 3 hours, but you can leave it on as long as you want. We don't put okra in ours!