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Notes -
It is now Saturday morning here, but inspired by @clo , @AsTheDominoesFall , and @hydroacetylene I decided to go for it and try making gumbo again last night, Friday evening.
Usually I am what is in Japan called a "kitchen drinker" and imbibe a nice glass of red or a beer or whatever I can get my grubby hands on while chopping my celery, but this time I settled for this. I only recommend it for the hard-core who do not care what they are pouring down their gullet as long as it seems remotely related to beer (I was in that category as I made the gumbo).
I started, as one does, with a roux of flour and oil. It started like this.. I may have had the heat up too high (it was on the small burner as low as it would go) but I got distracted and the roux burned and I had to scrap it. Undaunted I began again. The new roux looked like this when I considered putting in the trinity which in my case also contained garlic, but I avoided the temptation, mainly because my gumbo is never dark enough. I kept stirring. It eventually looked like this..
You may notice the portion is small. That is for two reasons. 1) I was not sure of success. 2) I am enculturated thoroughly to Japan and thus I think small when it comes to portion sizes. I held off until the roux was darker, ultimately like this though it was darker in reality than this photo shows.
Too much going on for me to take photos of other phases, but I added sausage (unfortunately this means the small, ubiquitous and not that tasty Japanese ソーセージ, shrimp, laurel leaf, and all this..
What I did not add is Tabasco, as although I like Tabasco it makes everything taste like itself. I ate a smallish portion over rice with the actual dinner. It wasn't bad though I expect both the users mentioned above and probably I can do better in the future.
Advice welcome.
Pour a dark beer into the roux when it's done and before you add the trinity. Stir it all together and add stock(I'm sure Japan has at least good fish stock) into a gravy before adding water. That's the stage where I would drop in bay leaves, dried cayenne peppers, salt and pepper, chicken and sausage(shrimp goes later), etc.
Just looking at the gumbo I'd guess it didn't simmer quite long enough, but it certainly looks like you got something reasonably authentic.
Wouldn't doing it in this order get in the way of getting any caramelization/Maillard reaction in the vegetables, which you'd generally want to offset the bitter flavours?
I have made gumbo fairly successfully several times by following this guy's recipe. Getting the right kind of coarse and dense sausage is probably difficult in Japan, but there should be good chicken stock?
My grandparents never caramelized the vegetables in their gumbo, the long cooking times broke them down. And usually they used roux from a can and mixed it with some stock/water/beer before adding the veggies anyways, although I make my own roux and do roux-beer-enough stock to keep from burning-vegetables-rest of the stock-protein and seasonings.
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