So, what we're gonna make is a nice dish. Cajun red beans and rice. So, I'm making use of red
beans that I've soaked overnight.
We have onions, bell peppers, bacon,
and I'm going to use both the smoked ham hock and some andouille sausage, and I'm gonna finish it with rice and scallions.
We have some flavorings of cayenne, and bay leaf, and thyme, that go in it. So, the first step we need
to do is render the bacon. This will be the base flavor of our dish.
So, I'm gonna cook this down for about 10 minutes until I get some nice color, and what I'm doing is rendering the fat off.
The fat is gonna be the base fat that I use to sauté my onions, and my bell peppers, and my celery.
So, this just takes about 5 to 10 minutes to render down. We'll come back to the point where I'm
gonna remove the bacon, and in the meantime, I'm gonna cut my onions, and peppers, and celery,
and get that ready to sauté.
Okay, coming back, let's take a look at our bacon. We're at that point where we're getting some nice color, and we've rendered off a lot of the fat.
I'm gonna remove the bacon, and use it for later when I add it back to the beans. But in the meantime, I want
to make use of the Fond, the flavor on the bottom the pan, and the fat to sauté our our trilogy
of vegetables. Our green peppers, our onions, and our celery, the base of all Cajun cooking.
We'll reserve that for later use.
In the meantime, I want to cook these vegetables down in the bacon fat,
until they're soft and slightly translucent. This step will take about five minutes.
So I'm doing this on medium heat. So, I want to get much color, I just want to cook them down.
And once I've extracted a lot of the moisture, and cooked them down, I'll be ready to add my beans.
I have chicken stock, and my ham hock, and then we'll proceed to cook that for about an hour and a half to two hours.
So, let's take a look at our Cajun mirepoix trilogy here, cooking down.
It's slightly translucent, this is what we're looking for, we don't want too much color,
And as you see, I stir the pot, it's actually cooked up all the Fond that was a from the bacon.
So, now is when we had our soaked red beans....
Our two quarts of chicken stock....
And our smoked ham hock.
And we'll bring this up to a simmer.
And this has to cook slow and low for about an hour and a half to two hours. And I'll stir it frequently every five to 10 minutes.
And by the time we're done, this will....Most the water will have been evaporated, all the vegetables will cook down...
And then the next thing we're going to be doing is taking the ham hock out,
removing the skin and shredding the meat. That's gonna be another component to the dish.
Okay, let's finish our red beans and rice here.
I've taken the ham hock off, and removed the skin, and shredded our Ham Hock.
We have our bacon, that we've rendered in the beginning.
I have some cooked white rice here, and some scallions that I'm gonna cut thinly.
And right now, I'm grilling the andouille sausage. So, to bring this together,
it's a matter of adding our bacon....
adding a little our ham hock.... We'll use some of it for garnish.
We're going to go ahead and cut our scallion for garnish.
Back to our sausage. Let's give this a slice for our garnish. We have our rice, our scallions, and our sausage.
Our....
Red Beans.....
A couple slices of andouille sausage,
sprinkling of scallions....
And here we have Cajun red beans and rice.