For Mardi Gras, sharing my recipe for chicken and sausage gumbo. A couple tweaks unique tweaks to my recipe that I believe are what have helped it get to restaurant quality:

1. I use the InstantPot’s pressure cooker mode to compress down the hours of cooking time, helps the flavor deepen in a much shorter period.
2. Traditionally gumbo recipes call for you to start with the roux, and the darker a roux is, the better the gumbo. In my experience, it just results in a lot of the great flavor of your gumbo being burnt to the bottom of the pot (regardless of if it’s an Instant Pot or not), and a very unpleasant burnt tang permeating the whole dish. The solution I came to comes from Japan; Japanese Curry is more of a stew, that calls for adding the roux to the stew as one of the last steps, completely the opposite of what traditional Gumbo recipes call for.
3. No tomato paste, use a 5.5 fl oz can of V8; lesson from my Dad, you want to enhance the umami of any dish, substitute some of the canned tomato with V8.

Ingredients

• 1 pack bacon
• 1 ham steak, diced
• 1 lb chopped chicken breast
• 1 small pack andouille sausage, chopped
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 2 cups chopped onion
• 2 cups chopped bell pepper
• 1 Tbs. chopped garlic
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 1 Tbs. Worcestershire Sauce
• 1 Tbs. Tabasco
• 1 Tbs thyme
• 3 bay leaves (add more if the leaves are small)
• 1 Tbs Parsley
• 1 tsp White Pepper
• 1 qt chicken broth
• 1 small can V8 (5.5 fl oz)
• 2 Tbs Cajun seasoning
• Gumbo File, to taste (I recommend 1 Tbs)
• 4 Tbs. Flour
• 1 pack frozen chopped okra (10-12 oz)
• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 2 Tbs butter

Instructions

1. In a InstantPot on saute, sauté bacon until crispy. Remove bacon, add ham and cook until done.  While ham is cooking, mince the bacon. Remove ham and add sausage and chicken; once cooked remove from pan. Make sure you leave the grease in the pan.
2. Add all veggies (except for okra) to the pan, saute until tender.
3. Add all meat back to the InstantPot. Add lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, tabasco, thyme, bay leaves, parsley, white pepper, chicken broth, V8, and Cajun seasoning.
4. Seal instant pot, pressure cook for 30 minutes on high. While that is going on, add the olive oil and butter to a skillet over medium low heat. Whisk the flour into the pan, stirring constantly until smooth. Set aside off heat.
5. When InstantPot is done, strain all the veggies and meat out of the broth, then set the InstantPot on low saute for 30 minutes. Add in the roux and gumbo file, and whisk together until smooth. Add back in all the veggies and meat. Also add the okra. Once the 30 minutes are up, serve over white rice.

Yield: about 1.5 gallons of succulent stew (enough for dinner for 8)

Closing Shoutout: To Debbie and Philipe of The Kitchen Witch Cookbook Emporium in New Orleans, thank you for running such a wonderful little shop, if not for you, I would not be nearly as good at cooking Cajun food as I am now. While they don’t sell cookbooks anymore, they do still sell their homemade Cajun seasoning blend online!