New Orleans Style Red Beans and Rice

Alright folks, we’re going to be making up some Creole Red Beans and Rice today. And as you look at all the ingredients here, I’m kind of surprised. I don’t ever really think about this but all this stuff is locally grown and locally made and I think that’s part of what goes into why our food is so delicious here and so rich. We have some Savoie’s Andouille sausage. They’ve been around for sure over a century so making smoked meat for us here at South Louisiana. We have some Savoie’s pickle meat or just sliced pickled pork. We’re going to be searing this off and that’s going to have a lot of flavors to our beans. We have Camellia Red Kidney Beans. There really is no other red bean here. They’ve been doing this since 1929. That’s the mother of local favorites, just some deep salt seasoning, Zatarain’s Creole seasoning. We’ll use a lot of this here. Morton’s is also a local salt. So when you look at everything here, we’re now ready to make our red beans and rice. It’s just amazing. It’s all a local fair. And that’s part of why I truly believe our food just comes out to be wonderful. We’re also going to be using a nice Vidalia onion. We have a jalapeño pepper here. We’re going to put in a little bit of a green pepper. We have some garlic and we have some green onions that we’re going to be garnishing with. Alright folks, we’ve got us our vegetables cut up here. Remember, we’ve got one whole onion, one whole bell pepper, one whole jalapeño, some onion buttons or green onion buttons, and about three cloves of garlic. We’ve got all of that chopped up, ready to go. We’ve got about half a pound of Savoie’s pickled pork or pickle meat. Red beans wouldn’t be the same without this stuff. You absolutely need it. And we have about a pound of Andouille smoked sausage. Now you can use a regular smoked sausage, it will taste just as good, just a slightly different flavor. And certainly you can build a good pot of beans without the pickle meat. It just makes a big difference. It helps bring that flavor together. We’ll fix and get these stuffs in the pot, folks. We’ve got some olive oil in the pan or I should say the pot. We’ll fix and add our pickle meat here, and once we get that go, we’ll add our seasonings to it. We are just cooking over medium high heat and we want to stir this off and got it just brown a little bit on the outside before we add our aromatics to it. That won’t take too long. Oh, my goodness, this stuff is delicious. Just browning that off a little bit. Just about ready, we start adding our chopped vegetables. We just want to get it browned up a little bit. All that browning would create a flavor that we’re going to need to bring this dish to life here. I don’t know if you all can see it folks but down in that pot, it’s starting to get all that bond build up from the pickle meat. When we throw those vegetables in and they started to sweat, liquid comes of it. That bond’s going to pick up and become part of our dish. That’s the stuff you don’t want to miss. Alright let’s go away with the veggies. Like I said, we’re not going to really brown these. We’re not looking to brown them. We are just looking to sweat these off so that they could reach. Alright, so we’ve got one onion, one bell pepper, we have a jalapeño pepper, some garlic and some onion, onion buttons from the green onion. Oh, my goodness, that’s looking good. Alright these vegetables have been in here for about three to five minutes, and they’re turning out nice and beautiful. We’re lifting all that bond off the bottom of that pot. It still sweat and everything’s starting to melt together. We’ve got all of the ingredients in the pot, simmering up nicely. I hope you all can see that. We have Andouille sausage, pickle meat, pickle pork, we have onions, bell pepper, jalapenos, some garlic, just simmering up nicely. What we want to do is we’re just going to let that brown just slightly and continue to reduce a little bit before we add our beans. We are creating a rich broth, a rich flavor that’s going to flavor our beans just the way we want it. I’ve got my four cups of water here along with my Camellia kidney beans. We’re just going to add this right to the pot. As you can see, it’s enough water to cover everything we have in there. We’re just going to stir this around a little bit, take up the heat to high. We want to get this to the point where it’s simmering or where it comes to a boil so we can reduce it to a simmer, I should say. Alright, that’s all we’re going to do for the moment. As soon as we get it to where we could simmer, we’ll show you what it looks like and we’ll go from there. As you can see folks, we’ve got this stuff simmering lightly. We’re going to go ahead and add two bay leaves to this. We’re also going to add a little bit of the Zatarain’s Creole seasoning. I mean not too much to get started. You have to remember. I keep going back to the flavor of that pickle meat, all the aromatics that we have in here, as well as the Andouille sausage, we do not want to overpower this. We’re actually going to save the salt for the very end. You know, when we do some tasting. Get a little bit of Louisiana hot sauce, that’s some pretty good stuff. We’re just going to stir this up. Let all this stuff get to simmering and all the flavors coming together. And put a lid on it and let it roll for quite a while. It’s going to take a good bit, but I will keep you all posted. We’ve been simmering down probably for about an hour and a half, something along those lines and as you can see most of our four cups of original water is cooked down. The beans are definitely getting thicker and tender. They’re starting to look delicious, well, look delicious from the moment we’ve started but that’s a different story. But what we want to do now is add about two cups of water, because again, that’s going to reduce some more and begin to thicken up as those beans break down, and we want to have enough gravy or juice with the beans. So we’ll just turn that up to about a medium heat, and get that ready to start simmering again. And we’ll keep tabs on it. We’ll check on it in a few minutes or so. These beans have been cooking probably now about two and a half hours. They are what I would consider done, rich and creamy. You can see it just kind of fallen apart, rich, rich thick gravy. These are about ready to put on top of some nice white rice. We’re going to serve it with a little bit of corn bread. Yes, nothing gets much better than this. These are done, ready to go. Well that’s it folks. We got us some little bit of red beans, poured over rice, a little bit of corn bread, topped with some shallots or green onion tops, a little bit of jalapeño pepper. I don’t know if it gets any better than this. This is Cajun Country Food at its finest definitely some delicious stuff.