Gumbo and Malty Beers

My brewing partner recently had a milestone birthday and we wanted to have him over to dinner to celebrate. He used to cook for a living and although he likes my food, he always seems to enjoy the simpler things that I do. I asked him what he wanted and he said he had no idea so I gave him some choices and he chose Cajun. I do a pretty good job with gumbo and it’s something that he’s enjoyed in the past so I decided to give that a shot.

Cajun and Creole food was one of the first types of food that I really got into in college and right after. It was during the late 1980’s when Cajun food was getting national attention and Paul Prudhomme became a national celebrity. I’ve never been to Louisiana and my cooking knowledge of Cajun and Creole food is essentially from the cookbooks that Paul Prudhomme did.

My general rule with gumbo is that you can’t have too much variety in the pot. Some purists may prefer a simpler version, but I stick to the “if it can’t run away fast enough, throw it in the gumbo pot” rule. For this batch I used home cured and smoked ham, andouille sausage, chicken thighs, shrimp and a few oysters.

The soupy base of gumbo is the most essential part of the dish. Without a properly made brown roux and good stock, the dish will be a failure. I made stock from the shrimp shells and also had some home made chicken stock from last week’s roast chicken. The roux is made from equal parts of oil and flour. It’s cooked over high heat and it’s essential to stir it almost constantly to ensure that it won’t burn or separate. I try to take it all the way to a rich chocolate brown in color. Once it’s arrived at that color, I throw in a mixture of onions, celery, cayenne peppers, and green bell pepper. This stops the roux from cooking and drops the temperature, but I leave the vegetables in for several minutes over medium high heat to ensure that they essentially get sautéed in the roux.

Once the vegetables have softened, I start adding stock and bring the whole thing to a boil and let it reduce. I’ll add more stock once it reduces and let the whole process go again because I like to concentrate the flavors. Once it’s the right consistency and richness, I turn it down to a slow simmer and season it with salt, pepper, Tabasco, and thyme.

I normally brown the ham, sausage and chicken in a pan before adding them to the gumbo pot itself. I like the extra flavor that browning them gives the dish and I normally deglaze the sauté pan with more stock and then add that to the gumbo. The whole process is essentially an exercise in building and concentrating the various flavors. The chicken, sausage and ham, normally take about 45-60 minutes at a temperature just below boiling. The seafood essentially gets thrown in at the end. Once the seafood is done, serve the gumbo with white rice and plenty of hot sauce at the table.

Beer is the natural choice with such a spicy dish, and past experience has shown me that malty beers work best with hot, spicy foods. Hops don’t cut the heat and just seem to accentuate the burn, but malt sweetness seems to mellow it out. I got a variety of beers to have with the gumbo and we split bottles and tried four different beers with the gumbo. First was Schwemler Bernstein Vienna lager, which is a lighter beer but with good malt notes. It was very refreshing and the malt did make it a nice match, but it was a little light for the complex flavors of the gumbo. Next up was a Monchshof Schwarzbier from Germany, which is a dark lager with good rich, smooth malt, and just a hint of cocoa and roastiness. It too was good and was low enough alcohol that you could drink a few throughout the meal. It was nice but not perfect. Next up was the Doppelbock from Bayern Brewing in Montana, which is their winter seasonal offering. It has an incredible malt intensity and was far sweeter than the previous two beers and really stood up to the complexity of the gumbo while simultaneously mellowing the effects of the chiles. It was a great match and my favorite of the beers we tried. Last on the list was Skullsplitter Scottish ale from the Orkney Islands. It’s an intense sweet, rich, malty strong Scottish ale that has notes of dried fruit from the intense malt character of the beer. It was sweet enough and malty enough to match but somehow the Doppelbock worked a little better and was the universal favorite. Strangely enough when I had another bottle of the Bayern Doppelbock the next day, it wasn’t the show stopper that it had been with the food. It’s tremendous how the food can change the character of the beer so much.

Birthdays normally require cakes but my brewing partner isn’t a cake person, but does have a penchant for good cheese and is particularly fond of stilton. I got a piece of stilton and several Concorde pears for dessert and we decided to try the last bottle of a Russian Imperial stout we had made more 5 years earlier (it was brewed in January 2002). Anyone who knows me knows that this isn’t my favorite style of beer because often they are unbalanced and overly alcoholic and lack the balance that a high alcohol style requires. The beer we had made had been virtually undrinkable in it’s youth and had never been a particular favorite of either of us. It had started out with an original gravity of 1.130 and finished out at about 1.030 which means it clocked in at a heady 13.5% alcohol. It poured very viscous and left a thick glaze on the glass when you swirled it. We decanted the bottled into a pitcher and tasted it. To our surprise, it actually had finally come around and was quite astounding. The abrasive hop character it had when it was young had mellowed, the alcohol seemed more in balance and it was full of coffee, cocoa, chocolate and some dark fruit notes. It was fantastic with the rich creaminess of the cheese and a good counterpoint to the ripe sweetness of the pears. It was a pleasant surprise to all of us and my brewing partner and I admitted that we were secretly dreading that it would still be the undrinkable, unbalanced beer it had been for so many years. Sometimes, those big beers do come around.