Okra: think “silky”

Okra (in French, gombos) is one of those vegetables like beets (betteraves) or Brussels sprouts (choux de Bruxelles) that really get people going. Writing about them is almost like accepting a dare. Admitting you like them is like admitting you are weird. Well, I love them all.

Sometimes I think my taste buds must not be very well developed, or very sensitive. At the same time, I really enjoy good food. Or at least what I consider to be good food. I especially like foods that are cooked slowly and carefully, so that they become moelleux, onctueux, confits. The cooking has to be done carefully, but thoroughly. That applies to vegetables, meats, and fruit.

Okra pods, blanched in salted water and then sliced

One thing you can say about okra is that it is onctueux. In the context of food, that means doux (tender), moelleux (rich but mellow), crémeux (creamy), and velouté (velvety).The problem is, most people get stuck on the idea of okra's sliminess. That means they aren't getting past a prejudice, and probably that they aren't preparing the food in a way that emphasizes its best qualities.

Also, okra smells and tastes good. Yesterday when I was cutting up frozen okra pods that I had blanched in salted water — I only wish I could find okra fresh here in Saint-Aignan, or grow it — I said to Walt that the aroma of it reminded me of fresh sweetcorn — a.k.a. Indian corn, maize, or maïs. I don't think he agreed, but still — there's something very herby about it, and slightly sweet.

The French name for okra is « gombo », which is derived from a Bantu word, from Angola in Africa. It of course also gave its name to the Louisiana Creole seafood and chicken stew called "gumbo," which is thickened by the thick, sticky liquid inside the okra that cooks in it. The term okra is also of African derivation, coming from languages spoken in Ivory Coast and Ghana.

This is the pan of okra and tomatoes I cooked yesterday. I added
an extra ingredient: some sliced and stir-fried chicken breast meat.

When I lived in Paris in 1975, a Greek friend cooked okra once. I was surprised to learn okra is appreciated in Greece and other eastern Mediterranean countries. My Greek friend called it bamies, which she pronounced as [BAH-myess] I believe. According to the article on gombo in French Wikipedia, okra enters into the preparation of numerous Creole, African, and Japanese dishes.

Tomatoes from the garden, cut into chunks
and cooked with onions in bacon grease

In the U.S., okra is a Southern specialty. It came to the South with African slaves and, according to one book I have, was "in use" in America by at least 1780. One Southern cookbook author says it's probably true that okra is an acquired taste, but, he says, "if so, I acquired mine at a very young age." Well, I think I did too.

The two ways to acquire a taste for okra is to have it either perfectly fried or stewed with onions and very flavorful tomatoes. Each method reduces the impression of sliminess that so many people find off-putting.

Adding blanched okra to the cooked onions and tomatoes

Frying okra involves rolling each piece in good cornmeal and dropping it in very hot oil to cook it until it is golden brown. Another Southern book I use says that when you fry okra that way, "something miraculous happens. Everything about the vegetable that is unattractive disappears," the author says, "and a crisp, crunchy, dainty, and delicious morsel takes its place." The same author cites the following anecdote that appeared in the Arkansas Gazette in 1979:

Northern people are funny about food. There is a documented case in a Little Rock household of a transplanted New Yorker who declined a serving of fried okra on the ground that he was a vegetarian. The man seemed to be under the impression that each segment was a tiny crustacean scraped from the bottom of an Arkansas River towboat. It should be noted, in fairness, however, that the chances of the man's partaking of this Southern delicacy could not have been helped by the sight of his host spitting into the grease to make sure it was hot enough.

I don't spit into my okra and tomatoes when I cook them together. It's a very simple recipe. Fry some bacon in a pan. Take the bacon out when it's crispy, and set it aside to cool. Save the bacon grease and cook a couple of sliced or chopped onions in it until they are soft and slightly browned. Chop up four fresh tomatoes and add them to the pan, with any juice they release in the chopping.

Bacon, chicken breast, okra, onions, and tomato
stewed briefly in tomato and okra "juices"

When the tomatoes have started cooking down, add about two cups of fresh okra, sliced into small pieces (see my pictures). Or use about a pound of frozen, sliced okra, which you can precook in salted boiling water if you want. Don't throw out the water the okra is cooked in — add it to the tomatoes. The okra water (a "silky" liquid, wink wink) will combine with the slightly acid and slightly sweet tomato liquid to make a nice velvety sauce.

Crumble the bacon or break it into pieces and add it to the pan. Cook the tomatoes and okra together on medium to medium-low heat until the sauce has reduced and thickened to your taste. Don't forget salt and pepper, and pinches of hot red pepper flakes, dried thyme, and ground cumin can add nice flavors too. Serve the stewed tomatoes and okra with cooked rice, millet, wheat berries, or pasta.

Here's one final quote. I took it from a web site on Texas cooking:

People try to be kind to okra by describing its texture as "silky," a euphemism, to be sure. There's no getting around it: okra, especially stewed okra is slimey. There should be another word that does it justice, but I'm afraid the English language is lacking. But I refuse to defend okra. It's delicious — so much so that I enjoy that slimey texture. There's an old one-liner about okra that goes like this: When I was a kid, I ate so much okra I couldn't keep my socks up.

I found okra

Earlier this week, after dropping Walt off at the gare for his quick trip to Paris, I went shopping at the Paris Store market in Blois. Paris Store is a chain of grocery stores that carry a wide rangle of products imported from Asia.

I bought a load of rice noodles, mung-bean noodles, bottles of Thai fish sauce and black rice vinegar, bags of corn meal, dried shitake mushrooms, and pinto beans, and two kilos of frozen shrimp, among other delicacies. When I thought I had finished shopping, I pushed my cart to the single check-out stand in the store. I was just going to just stand and wait as the customer ahead of me paid for and packed up her groceries.

Gombos, or okra

But there was nobody in line behind me, so I thought I might as well take a quick look at the vegetables and spring rolls of all kinds in the freezer cases right behind me. That was when I discovered the okra. In French, okra are called gombos. These okra, imported from Thailand, are actually labeled « Gambo », but that's okay. They are okra. I picked up 2 kilos.

A slight labeling issue

When I was packing up my groceries, I told the clerk how happy I was to have found gombos. He looked at me and said, well, you asked me if I could get some, so I did. I thanked him.

Walt and I had made a Paris Store run back in January. That day, I asked the Paris Store employee whether he ever had okra available. He didn't seem to understand the word okra, so I said, you know, des gombos. He understood that. "I ordered some once, fresh okra, but it didn't sell," he told me. "I ended up having to throw it out. If you want some, I can get it for you, but you have to buy 10 kilos of it."

Ten kilos is 22 pounds. Now I wanted okra, but what would I do with 22 pounds of it? "You could blanch it and freeze it," the Paris Store guy said. I asked him whether he might be able to get frozen okra. He said he didn't know.

Shrimp and okra cooked in olive oil
with hot red pepper flakes and garlic

Well, he remembered and he did find frozen okra. I took 2 kilos of it off his hands. I think maybe you have to be a Southerner to appreciate what a find this was. Okra and tomatoes. Fried okra. And Louisiana gumbo!

Yesterday I made shrimp and okra with grits. It was something I had made when I was in North Carolina a couple of years ago, and I had been thinking about it ever since. Okay, I can hear some people already: Slime! Yuck! Actually, that is the essence of okra. I say: "Embrace the sliminess!" — but try not to get it all over your clothes.

Grits, shrimp, and gombos

This okra I bought was imported from Thailand, so it's not exactly ecologically correct in terms of its carbon footprint. In 2006, I found some fresh okra at the Tang Frères supermarket in Paris and made a great Okra Pilâu from one of my Southern cookbooks (here's a link to my blog topic about that).

The recipe for shrimp and okra with grits is pretty simple. Cook some okra in boiling water for 10 minutes. Cook some grits or polenta in a separate pot of water. Peel, devein, and sauté some shrimp in vegetable oil with sliced garlic and hot red pepper flakes. Add the okra to the pan with some butter or olive oil for flavor, and turn down the heat. After a few minutes, serve the shrimp and okra over the grits.

An unexpected okra treat

“Okra is an annual flowering hibiscus (Abelmoschus esculentus) native to Africa. Its flowers, whose bright yellow petals deepen to rich burgundy red at their base, are some of the loveliest of all the hibiscuses. Of course, okra isn't grown for its ornamental qualities, but for the mucilaginous seedpods that develop after the brilliant flower has faded.”

Okra, the seedpod of an annual hibiscus plant

That's how Damon Lee Fowler introduces the Southern U.S. specialty vegetable okra in his book Classical Southern Cooking. Okra (a collective noun) is actually a fruit (like the tomato) and is known by the plural count noun « gombos » in French, but is not much known in France at all. It's something we don't find here in Saint-Aignan — at least I never have.

Here's a close-up of the okra pods...

However, a friend of ours went to Blois the other day and went shopping in a grocery store called Grand Frais. It's a new shop and I haven't been there yet. What our friend found was a bin full of gombos — fresh okra. She was kind enough to buy about a pound of nice fresh okra pods for us and leave them by our front door later that afternoon.

She told me on the phone that evening that okra isn't something she and her husband eat, but she knew I did because she remembered reading about okra on this blog.

...and here's what the okra looks like when you slice them.

“We tend to think of this vegetable as peculiarly Southern and African-American,” Damon Fowler writes, “but it can be found in Central and South America wherever Africans were settled and is also known to the cooking of the Middle East.” Well known is the Louisiana seafood stew called “gumbo,” in which okra serves as a flavoring and natural thickening ingredient.

Sliced okra cooking with wedges of yellow tomatoes and
red tomato sauce, along with onions and garlic

I've blogged about okra before (2010 and 2009, for example), and pointed out that a woman I knew and went to university with in Paris back in the 1970s surprised me one day when she cooked what she called bamia or bamies — it was okra. And the woman who cooked them lived in the city of Thessaloniki in Greece when she wasn't studying French in Paris.

I may soon have to stop stating so categorically that okra is hard to come by in France. I haven't yet found it, fresh or frozen, in our Saint-Aignan SuperU or Noyers-sur-Cher Intermarché, however, or in the farmers' markets. It seems to be sold only in specialty stores, in the cities.

This is the stewed okra and tomatoes you end up with.

Okra is good pickled in vinegar; dredged in cornmeal and deep-fried; stewed and served with rice; or, my favorite way, cooked with tomato sauce and chunks of tomato and onions.

I made okra and tomatoes yesterday, using sliced onions, sliced garlic, a pinch of dried thyme, and a pinch of hot red pepper flakes. It needs lots of salt and pepper, of course, as well as the one ingredient that makes the dish very Southern (the U.S. South, I mean) and also typically French: fried smoked bacon or lardons fumés, along with some of their cooking fat.

And here's a close-up. The okra seeds are tender, not hard.

We'll eat the okra and tomatoes not with rice but pasta — linguine, specifically — and an escalope de dinde à la milanaise. That's a thin slice of turkey breast that is breaded — in my case, just dredged in cornmeal — and panned in butter. Turkey scallopini, I guess, is the term used in American English — we call so many foods by more or less Italian names.

The okra and tomatoes will make a good sauce for the pasta and for the turkey. “The pairing of these two vegetables has all the makings of a great love story...,” Damon Fowler writes. “What they do for each other must be tasted to be understood; tomatoes lend their sunny tartness while the okra, in turn, enrobes with its silken texture, blunting the [tomatoes’] acid bite...”

Here's the recipe from Fowler's Classical Southern Cooking book:


Notice that I didn't use the S-word even once in this post. Happy eating!

Okra Pilâu

Here's one more recipe before I move on to other subjects. Last week we were in Paris and we went shopping, as we often do, at the big Asian supermarket in the 13th arrondissement called Tang Frères. We can get all the French food we want in and around Saint-Aignan, but when we want exotic food products, we head to Tang Frères.

Fresh okra from Tang Frères in Paris
Besides a couple of very ripe mangos, some packages of dried bean curd sheets (haricot caillé séché en feuilles), and some sushi rice and sheets of roasted seaweed (algues séchées grillées) for making sushi rolls, I noticed a package of fresh okra (gombos). Being a reformed Southerner, I couldn't resist okra. What I had in mind was a nice pot of okra and tomatoes, using tomatoes from the garden. We ate okra and tomatoes when I was growing up in North Carolina.

When I got home I looked in some of my Southern U.S. cookbooks to see what recipes for okra and tomatoes they might give. There were surprisingly few. In a book published by Southern Living magazine called Cooking Across the South (1980) there was something called Deep South Okra and Tomatoes, which included bacon, onion, cumin, and garlic along with the main ingredients.

Okra Pilâu with red peppers and tomatoes

But another recipe caught my eye. On the same page was a recipe for something called Okra Pilâu. Maybe it was the circumflex accent on that A that attracted me. Or the exotic name (how would you pronounce "pilâu" anyway?). The fact that the ingredients included green peppers as well as tomato and okra was also a plus. We have a lot of green and red bell peppers in the garden.

Recipe from Cooking Across the South
(© 1980, Oxmoor House Inc., Birmingham AL, USA)

Red bell and long peppers
I had red peppers from the garden. We decided early on not to pick the bell peppers while they were still green, but to wait until they turned red. And some had. They're better red, especially roasted, peeled, and marinated in olive oil.

Diced sweet red peppers
I also had tomatoes from the garden, and wanted to use them. Instead of putting them in to cook down into the sauce, I decided to add them at the last minute so they would be identifiable and fresh-tasting in the finished dish.

Roma tomatoes
I also had a package of French supermarket lardons fumés — smoked bacon cut into matchstick shapes — so that was perfect. I sauteed the lardons in a little butter and oil until they started to brown.

Sliced okra

Meanwhile, I cut the tops off the okra pods and cut the pods into slices.

Okra and bacon (lardons fumés)
Then I added the okra to the lardons and let all that cook together for a few minutes. It started to stick, so I added a few tablespoons of water and let it continue to cook on low heat.

Then it was time to add the chopped onions and red peppers. All that cooked slowly for a while. I wanted the onions and peppers to be tender but not overcooked, and I wanted to make sure the okra got good and soft, because the pods contained a lot of seeds and can be a little fibrous. Then I poured in some good chicken stock I had made the day before, using the back and trimmings from the chicken that I had cooked as a tajine with prunes. The stock was flavored with fresh ginger, garlic, onion, bay leaves, parsley stems, a clove, and some black peppercorns.

Okra, bacon, onions, peppers, and tomatoes
Finally, I added the diced tomatoes and let them heat through. The okra and bacon were well cooked, the peppers and onions were tender but not disintegrating, and the tomatoes were just warm.

At the last minute, I remembered that I had seen a ziploc bag of tiny bay shrimp in the freezer the day before. I rummaged through the freezer, found the shrimp, and added them at the very last minute. They just had time to cook through.

While all this was going on, I had cooked 1½ cups of basmati rice in 3 cups of the ginger- and garlic-flavored chicken stock. I had decided not to cook the okra-peppers-tomato mix with the rice because the vegetables would end up overdone. I told Walt we would treat it as a vegetable stir-fry and serve it over the rice. I supposed that meant it wasn't really a pilâu, but it was good nonetheless.

My version of the Okra Pilâu

Okra and tomatoes + corn

On the way back home from my eye appointment on Monday, I stopped at the Grand Frais produce market just south of Blois and bought fresh okra and fresh tomatoes. I already had a quantity of blanched okra pods in the freezer, but I couldn't resist buyingsome more. So I started nosing around on the 'net for okra and tomatoes recipes. There were also eight or nine small cans of corn kernels in the pantry, so I searched for "okra tomatoes corn recipe" on Google.

What I found was a Betty Crocker recipe from a collection called Betty's Soul Food. Here's a link. The recipe calls for canned corn, which I had, but also for canned tomatoes and frozen okra. As I've said, I had fresh okra and fresh tomatoes so I used those. I figured that was an improvement that would give a tastier result.

    
I also used shallots that I bought at Grand Frais, and three cloves of garlic instead of garlic powder. And I decided to substitute French saucisse de Toulouse, a plain pork sausage, for bacon. I cooked the sausage first and then cut it into rounds, discarding most of the fat it released. Then I cooked the aromatics and corn together, adding a sliced celery stalk.

Finally, in went the tomatoes (diced) and okra (sliced) with about half a cup of water. As soon as the okra was tender, it was ready. Inspired by the recipe below, which I had in my recipe database, I seasoned the dish with hot red pepper flakes (to taste) and added some sliced red bell pepper. We enjoyed it for lunch, seasoned with "Louisiana's Pure Crystal Hot Sauce" at the table (Tabasco or Portuguese Piri Piri are good substitutes). Here's the recipe for that spicy version of okra and tomatoes.

Creole Okra & Tomatoes

3 Tbsp. unsalted butter, lard or bacon drippings
¼ cup lardons (bacon), finely chopped
1 cup Spanish onion, chopped
2 Tbsp. garlic, minced
4 Tbsp. hot peppers, minced
3 cups fresh okra, washed, trimmed, and sliced
2 cups ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 tsp. fresh thyme, chopped
2 tsp. fresh basil, chopped
2 tsp. green onions, thinly sliced
Salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper
Crystal Hot Sauce to taste at the table

Melt the butter and saute the lardons (bacon) in a stainless steel pot until lightly browned. Add the onions, garlic and peppers, and season with a little salt. Sweat until the onions are translucent.

Add the okra, season again with a little salt, and cook until the okra ceases to rope, which means that you don’t see threads when you stir the pot.

Add the tomatoes and thyme, plus a little more salt to make the tomatoes break down.

When the tomatoes break down and reduce slightly add the basil, green onions, and salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste. Serve as a side dish or over rice.

Okra is a vegetable that some people either love to death while others find it completely disgusting. All I can say is that I love it, and my okra, tomatoes, and corn recipe was not slimy. By the way, it occurs to me that this recipe would be really good made with wide, flat romano green beans (cocos plats in French) instead of okra. Serve it with pasta, polenta, or steamed rice.

Spicy pan-roasted okra with onions and garlic

You might remember that I bought a couple of kilograms of okra at the Grand Frais market in Vineuil, outside Blois, a few weeks ago. I blanched them and froze them on trays so that I can easily take out and cook as many as I want, when I want. Yesterday, I wanted.

In my web surfing and reading, I found several recipes for okra and onions cooked with spices including cumin, turmeric, and coriander, along with hot red pepper and lemon juice. I adapted that by adding garlic to the mix and using Chardonnay wine vinegar instead of citrus. The Maille vinegar has an expecially bright taste that I really like. Another white wine or a cider vinegar would also be good in this. Or lime juice, for example.

After the onions and garlic are sautéed in oil and starting to brown, the frozen okra pods go into the pan. Don't thaw them first; let the heat of the pan do it.

Then add the spices and let the okra cook with them for about 10 minutes. At that point add the vinegar (or lime or lemon juice) and either a teaspoon or so of sugar or some sweet wine like hon mirin (a rice wine) or even a sweet French wine like Monbazillac, Muscat, or Vouvray. I always favor sweet wine over sugar in my cooking. Let the okra simmer and steam partially covered for another four or five minutes, or until tender.

Then it's ready. You might notice that I added some little potatoes to the mix, mainly because I had them already cooked and in the fridge. They're nice little yellow-fleshed boiling potatoes grown in the Saint-Malo area of Brittany — French Yukon Golds, you might call them. I got a bag of them at the supermarket.

To go with the okra, Walt grilled a duck breast that I had rubbed with a mixture of spices like the spice blend I used in the okra, but with some smoked paprika and ground cloves added. You score the duck skin with a sharp knife before marinating and then grilling it, letting the spices penetrate into the meat and preventing the breast filet from curling as it cooks.

Here's a recipe for the okra and onions. You can use either fresh or frozen okra for this one, and I think cooking broad flat Roma green beans this way would be really good too.

Spicy pan-roasted okra with onions and garlic

2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 medium onion, sliced

3 cloves garlic, sliced
400 g frozen okra pods (just shy of a pound)
½ tsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. ground coriander
¾ tsp. salt

½ tsp. black pepper
½ tsp. ground turmeric
½ tsp. hot red pepper flakes (or more to taste)
1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar or lemon juice
1 or 2 tsp. sweet white wine

Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and sauté for three or four minutes. Add the frozen or fresh okra pods to the pan with the spices. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring to blend all the flavors. Finally, add the vinegar and wine. Loosely cover the pan to steam the okra for a minute or two, and then remove the cover and let the liquid reduce slightly.

Cooked this way, the okra didn't have any of the dreaded "silkiness" (aka "slimy texture") that people often associate with the vegetable. I think the vinegar and wine added at the end dissolve the okra juice. The potatoes turned out to be a good addition, but this okra would be really good served with rice — meatless if you prefer.

Okra and tomatoes

Okra are called gombos in French. It's an African word. That's where we get the term "gumbo" as in the Louisiana specialty dish. Okra is an ingredient — a green vegetable — that also acts as a thickener in the chicken, sausage, or seafood stew that is gumbo, as well as adding good taste.

In other places in the U.S. South, people like okra just cooked with tomatoes. The flavors of these two vegetables complement each other, and while the okra helps thicken the stewed tomatoes, the acidic nature of the tomato juice improves the texture of the okra. Add onions, garlic, herbs, and maybe some bacon, and you have a great vegetable dish. It's good served with grains like rice, couscous, polenta, or millet.

I can't find, or never have found, fresh or frozen okra in the supermarkets or open-air markets in Saint-Aignan. But there are two stores up in Blois, which has a significant population of fairly recent immigrants from places including Africa and India, that normally have some in their produce departments. Once I even found frozen okra, which is almost always available in supermarkets in the U.S. South. I was surprised the one time I found frozen okra in France, in an Asian supermarket.

When I can buy fresh okra, several times a year, I usually freeze a good supply of it for future meals. First you have to blanch it in boiling water, as you do with nearly all vegetables you want to store in the freezer. You can trim up the okra pods and then cut them into bite-size pieces before putting them in the freezer if you want to. The ones pictured on the left are some I blanched and froze this summer.

I prefer to leave the pods whole, though. I just cut off the top of the stem end of each pod, and then freeze them on trays so that they are separate and remain that way after freezing. The you can pack them in plastic bags and take out just the quantity you need or want when you decide to cook some, without having to thaw a large quantity.

That's what I did the other day. I took a dozen or so okra pods out of the freezer. I sauteed a few cut-up tomatoes from the garden and sauteed them with some onion in olive oil. Then I added some fresh tomato sauce and the frozen okra pods, which were basically cooked before freezing, and let all that simmer on the stove for a few minutes. Meanwhile, we cooked up a batch of millet (also available in the stores in Blois) and grilled a couple of pork chops for lunch. If I can do it, you can do it.

Rainy day activities

What do you do indoors when it rains more or less steadily for a week? Well, you have to entertain yourself, and try to be productive. Computers are good for entertainment, but a lot of them time you spend surfing or searching doesn't really pay off.

Fresh okra pods

Luckily, on one of the recent less rainy days, we drove up to Blois for lunch and to do some shopping. I bought a lot of vegetables: bell peppers of different colors, Italian flat green beans, sweet potatoes, and okra. Okra goes by the name gombo in French, and that's where we get the Louisiana dish called gumbo. It's a seafood stew that is thickened in part by cooked okra. Okra is also good cooked in a rice pilaf, or in Brunswick stew, and many other ways. See these old blog posts of mine.

Stem ends trimmed

Since I bought about three pounds of fresh okra, I had to figure out a way to process it for cooking over the next few weeks and months. You can make pickled okra, or you can freeze the okra pods. I decided on freezing, because our big chest freezer isn't at all full right now. If I could buy fresh or frozen okra in our local Saint-Aignan supermarkets, or at  the weekly outdoor markets around here, I probably wouldn't go to all this trouble. But I can't, so I do.

Blanching in boiling water

The key to freezing vegetables like okra, green beans, Brussels sprounts, and so many others is, of course, blanching them first in boiling water, and then freezing them on trays in the summer so that each pod or bean is frozen separately. That way, you can use as many as you want when you take them out of the freezer to cook them and not have to thaw out a big block of the vegetables that would be more than you need or want at that moment.

Taking a cold bath

Blanch the fresh okra pods for three to five minutes in boiling water, after trimming the stem end off each one. As soon as they're just slightly cooked, scoop them out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon (écumoire) and plunge them into a large quantity of cold water — ice water is good — to cool them down quickly. The photos here show the different stages in the process.

Arranged on trays for the freezer

Arrange the blanched okra pods (or beans or sprouts) on trays that will fit inside your freezer. Try not to let them be in contact with each other. Putting them on a silicon pad or a sheet of parchment paper (papier de cuisson) is a good idea. Set the tray or trays in the freezer and leave them for as long as 24 hours.

Frozen and separate

Once the vegetable pieces are hard-frozen, you can put them in plastic bags or containers, sealed up tight, and store them in the freezer long-term. And you can take out just the quantity you need when you want to cook and eat some. Do the same thing with sliced and blanched bell peppers, zucchini — any vegetable, really. When we have big crops of vegetables from our garden, we often use this method to preserve them.

Shrimp, gombos, and Louisiana gumbo

In French — mostly African French, but also in France when necessary — okra are called gombos. You can't find them everywhere, that's for sure. The best source we've found so far is a little Asian grocery store up in Blois, nearly an hour's drive from Saint-Aignan. We were up there last Thursday.

I bought a kilo of fresh okra. The woman at the cash register of the little shop was surprised that I was buying a product that, she said, is mostly bought by her African customers. I explained that okra was very popular in the southern U.S., among black and white people alike. And then I started thinking about what I would do with such a lot of fresh okra.

Louisiana gumbo with rice and grilled shrimp

Gumbo, I thought — I haven't made that in years. The extra okra I would blanch and freeze for later. Making gumbo meant we needed some celery and green peppers, so Walt went to the market Saturday morning. Onions, green pepper, and celery are the usual aromatic vegetables used in Louisiana dishes like gumbo and jambalaya.

Blanched (parboiled) okra pods

The first step in making a thick, rich, soupy gumbo is to make a roux. Not a French-style roux of butter and flour that you turn into a white sauce or béchamel, but a brown roux. What you do is heat up about half a cup of vegetable oil in a pan and the sprinkle in about half a cup of flour. You stir that well and let that cook on medium heat for 30 minutes, more or less, until the flour turns a nice medium brown color, without letting it scorch.

A brown roux with onions, celery, green pepper,
herbs, and lardons cooking in it

The brown roux is both a thickening and a flavor ingredient. While it's cooking, chop up a large onion, a green bell pepper, and two or three stalks of celery. Add them to the brown roux and let it all cook together for another 45 minutes to an hour. Season with salt and pepper, and add some dried herbs — thyme, rosemary, and a couple of bay leaves, for example. Optionally, toss in a cup of lardons or diced ham too.

Add the parboiled okra pods to the vegetable-roux mixture

The next step is to add okra. Whether frozen or fresh, the okra needs to be cooked briefly in a little water or sautéed in oil before it goes into the roux mixture. Okra, whether added whole or sliced, will thicken the sauce. Add a chopped fresh tomato too, for flavor and color.

The finished gumbo after long, slow cooking

Once all the vegetables and seasonings are in and cooking, add liquid. If you're making shrimp gumbo, use shrimp broth that you make by boiling the shrimp shells in water for a few minutes. Or use chicken or vegetable broth, or even just water. You need about a liter (a quart) of liquid to make this much gumbo.

Grilled spicy shrimp

Now it just simmers for an hour or two. It will slowly thicken as it reduces. Everything is already cooked. Toward the end of the cooking time, when you think the gumbo is about ready, add some shrimp or some cooked chicken or sausage to the pan. Raw shrimp will cook quickly, say in 4 or 5 minutes. Or you can cook the shrimp separately like we did — on skewers on the grill. Any other meat you add to the gumbo should already be cooked so it just needs to heat through.

Grilled shrimp, yellow rice, and Louisiana gumbo – with gombos

The only other step is to cook some rice or grits/polenta to eat with the thick, rich gumbo. Enjoy. And don't forget the Tabasco or other hot sauce at the table.