Tuesday, January 28, 2020

I can put it off no longer

I've got all the ingredients I need to make keto gumbo (almond flour instead of regular flour*), but I've been stalling for at least two days. Today is the final day of our company's little five-day break, so I'll do my four-hour walk, then get right to gumbo-making. I also teased my coworkers with the prospect of making boeuf bourguignon because our company once again gifted us with two bottles of wine. Last time around, it was cheap, shitty wine in a red-and-white pair. This time around, it's two bottles of red: a 2017 Merlot and a 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon from Chevalier de Glanan, which sounds vaguely naughty to my francophone ear: un gland can refer innocently to an acorn, or naughtily to the somewhat acorn-shaped glans penis. The French expression for "a gland" is une glande—feminine. In French, une tête de gland is a dickhead, used in the same way we use "dickhead" in English.

Arrête de faire ça, tête de gland!
Stop doing that, dickhead!

The gumbo will take hours and hours to prep because there's so damn much to chop and dice, including a bagful of whole okra (the store didn't have the pre-chopped kind). The beef Burgundy, by contrast, has few ingredients and is basically a slow simmer for a few hours.



*Practically speaking, even though almond flour doesn't have the thickening power of regular wheat flour, this won't matter because you're making a dark roux, which already has little to no thickening power, anyway. (Thickening will come from the mucilage in the okra, and from the filé powder.) What you're really going for, in such a roux, is the smoky flavor that comes from blackening the particles of flour inside the boiling oil. Using almond flour means no gluten (not an issue for people who aren't sensitive to gluten) and almost no carbs.



2 comments:

Daniel said...

Sounds delish! Photos to come, I presume?

Kevin Kim said...

Sure thing! The gumbo will be keto, but the boeuf bourguignon won't be, as I'm making it for my coworkers.