re: Secrets to a Great Jambalaya

alot of good advice in here.

I might add, taste testing before you add the rice, you want it slightly over spiced, the rice will soak up plenty of the seasoning.

1. Keep it simple. You don't really need anything more than: long grain rice, yellow onions, pork, sausage, water, and seasoning

2. Buy sausage from louisiana and have it shipped to you. Do the same for LeBlanc's seasoning. It's already in the perfect balance for jambalaya, so much so that it was banned from use at the Jambalaya Festival.

3. Use the jambalaya calculator for your cook times and amounts of ingredients

4. The most important step is the onions. Brown them as much as possible without burning them. This is where 90% of your flavor comes from. They will essentially get to the point where they're essentially "clear".

5. Use pork temple meat if you can get it, cubed boston butt if you can't. Just sear the meat to start off and take it out before browning the onions.

6. Keep it simple and stick with the formula and you will have a fantastic dish that is truly resplendant in its simplicity. Jambalaya is a dish that takes only a day to learn, but can never truly be mastered as every batch is completely unique.

I'm not saying you have to do it that way. That's just a safe approach if you've never done it before or if you're really rusty. Once you get the basics down, then you can experiment. You've got to crawl before you can walk.

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About onions: Use 30-50% more onions than the calculator calls for

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Or you can change the ratio of cups of onions to pounds of rice and your formula can scale up or down with the amount of jambalaya needed.

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Why use water instead of stock or broth?

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Stock actually dilutes the flavor and oversalts it unless you know what you're doing. I'll sometimes use a stock when cooking a chicken jambalaya with lean breast meat, but pork temple meat and boston butt have plenty enough fat that stock isn't needed at all.

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Why leave out 2/3 of the trinity

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celery adds nothing but a mild bitter taste. Green Bell pepper has a completely different cooking time from onions. They will be burnt long before the onions hit the perfect mark. It just adds an extra level of complexity which would be something I would advise against when cooking your first batch. With that said, I generally include green bell peppers in my jambalaya, but I did not do so until I had a little more experience at cooking them.

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No garlic at all?

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There's a ton of garlic in the seasoning blend. Like I said, it's already balanced perfectly, giving you exactly the right proportions of garlic, salt, and heat.

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Why leave out green onions and parsley?

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Green onions I advise leaving out for the same reasons as bell peppers, except they burn even more quickly. Some people add them as a garnish at the end, but I find that unnecessary so I do not. As for parsley, it's also completely unnecessary and merely there for appearances sake.

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Hell, if you're going the safe route, especially to impress a chef, why not use parboiled rice? Most chefs use parboiled rice because it separates grain for grain (they think this looks better) and it holds at holding temperature better.

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Parboiled rice cooks differently, absorbs water differently, and has a completely different texture when you eat it that personally, I'm not a fan of. When I taste a jambalaya cooked with parboiled rice, it reminds me of the shitty jambalaya LSU would serve at recruiting functions. It tastes like some kind of boxed, pre-made mix. Like something that would be a side on a cruise ship. Parboiled rice should only be used when you have a major time constraint and need it cooked faster.

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Stock actually dilutes the flavor

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Explain how this is so.


And 90% of your flavor comes from onions? That doesn't sound right at all

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Green Bell pepper has a completely different cooking time from onions. They will be burnt long before the onions hit the perfect mark. It just adds an extra level of complexity which would be something I would advise against when cooking your first batch. With that said, I generally include green bell peppers in my jambalaya, but I did not do so until I had a little more experience at cooking them.

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You realize you don't have to cook everything at once, right? You can start browning your onions first and then add in the other members of the trinity when it reaches the appropriate point. There's nothing complex about that.

You sound like someone making up a bunch of shite.

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've got the plaques and trophies from the Jambalaya Fest to prove it.

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pics

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've got the plaques and trophies from the Jambalaya Fest to prove it.


pics

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They're at my parents' house. My dad keeps them in his home office. I'll take some pictures and post them at a later date. I competed a lot in the mini-pot circuit years ago, but I have been too busy to do too many cookoffs lately. I was really disappointed that I had a conflict during the one ya'll did at Big Heads.