For a couple of bucks you can park at the Galvez Parking lot on Main Street downtown and it will put you right in the middle of a lot of interesting eateries. Just tried the Jambalaya Shoppe for the first time and I will definitely go back to try the gumbo and crawfish pie at some point along with some of the lunch specials. Amazing how a place can work into your rotation on the first trip. Jambalaya like barbecue is hard to take to retail since prep time is so long that you really have to have a good grip on what you might sell on any given shift to make it profitable. These guys do a really good job. The flavor base of garlic, onions, chicken and sausage and salt is strong. They do go easy on the red white and black pepper so the base product is richly flavored but mild, but everyone knows you can turn the music up at the table with hot sauce and added seasoning but you can’t turn it down. No one in the restaurant business wants to spice out their customers. Think about the over-spiced crawfish you’ve had–all heat and no real flavor. Mostly that happens in someone’s backyard. They used to get that all wrong in California when I was out there. They thought blackened seasoning was all about the cayenne when really it’s about balancing salt and herbs with peppers for the fullest flavor profile you can manage. Jambalaya is the most obvious example of Spanish influence on our cuisine. Jambalaya is much closer to paella than pilaf. Way back when at The Gumbo Place is where I first learned to make a jambalaya and that one was very heavy on herbs like basil, sage, and thyme. It definitely gave it it’s own twist. We also turned that one off at the slurry stage when the meat was browned and cooked down with the garlic, onions, bell pepper, and celery into a kind of wet paste. This is where you would add stock if you were going to cook the rice in the pot, but at the Gumbo place we stopped there and reheated the slurry for the line a half gallon at a time and mixed in cooked white rice and held it on the steam table. When I would cook jambalaya for parties at another restaurant I would start the day before and move past the slurry stage to add the stock and bring it back to a boil to the point where you would add the rice and turn it down tightly covered to finish it. Instead I would turn it off and put it in the cooler to reheat to the same point the next day while I was getting everything else ready then add the rice 45 minutes out from the start of the party so it would be hot and right on time. I hated cooking jambalaya on site because their was always at least one asshole that would come up and tell you how you were doing it all wrong, and jambalaya takes at least three hours do right which means it took at least that long to shut all the “experts” up by serving the jambalaya. Since jambalaya is such a deep flavor dish the best way to improve your recipe is to gather the very best ingredients you can. One of the reasons our on site jambalaya took so long was that we started with hen meat which has a deep flavor but really has to be stewed to break it down. It was also a three meat jambalaya with Boston butt, boneless skinless hen meat, and smoked sausage. Once you had that one boiling with the stock in it you had to let it roll for an hour before you added the rice just to get the hen to its shredding point. This is also where Prudhomme’s layered seasoning concept is very important for building depth of flavor. You season a little bit throughout the process instead of all at once. The other benefit of that method is that it allows you to adjust, adjust, adjust until you zero in on exactly what you want. You really need to use the best possible stock and rice you can get your hands on as well. Or you can head over to the Jambalaya Shoppe for a very good plate of jambalaya with a roll and two sides like white beans and potato salad for under ten bucks. Very good deal when it’s cold and nasty outside and you want something to warm you up quick.
(The next day ended up being just as wet and nasty as the day before so I headed back to the Jambalaya Shoppe to try the chicken and sausage gumbo and the mini crawfish pies. And I am very glad I did.)
