New Orleans Cuisine

My Creole & Cajun Recipe Page

This is my blog dedicated to New Orleans & Louisiana cooking! I'll give links to great Creole & Cajun recipes and sites, as well as some of my own recipes. I love talkin' New Orleans, food and otherwise! Incidentally, I'm from Detroit. Go Figure. Lets just say I figured out "what it means, to miss New Orleans" and this site helps ease the pain.

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"Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins."
-Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces
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Saturday, March 26, 2005

Yesterday's Smoking Experience

Yesterday's smoking experience was a good one. The Andouille looks great, I'm going to let it hang in the basement for 1 or 2 days, I'll see how it looks tonight. I started out with 24 charcoal briquettes that I heated in a chimney starter for 15 minutes. I put them in the smoker in a pile to one side. I used a mixture of apple and hickory chips that were soaked overnight in hot sauce, then soaked in water for 2 hours before smoking. I looked for Pecan wood, I found every type of wood but: Alder, Apple, Cherry, Maple, Mesquite. Everything but Pecan. I've read Pecan wood is a little more subtle than Hickory as well as a little sweeter. So I decided to use a mixture of the delicate and sweet Apple and the deeper flavored Hickory. I changed chips about every 20 minutes or so. When they turn black they start to give off a bitter smoke. White smoke is good, black smoke is bad. Anyway, the temperature outside was about 50 degrees F and the highest my smoker reached was about 120 degrees F, that's pretty good. I smoked the links for 4 hours at an average temperature of about 100 degrees. I was shooting for 80 degrees F, but 100 degrees is great. I used a water bowl on the middle shelf filled with ice to cool the smoke down before it reached the meat; it worked well. I will post a pic of the finished product when it is ready. Of course, the true test will be the first dish that I cook with it.

2 Comments:

Blogger Anne said...

No Danno - the true test will be when you send ME some :) I am *so* envious - these sound incredible! Good job!!

3:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh god! I'm so envious that you can do this. I'm a displaced southerner living in Canada. Not only can you not buy any andouille sausage here but, you cannot buy a smoker either! I did see one industrial sized smoker that was over 7000.00 dollars.

I love cooking recipes from home and you absolutely cannot use the bland sausage they have here. We have one "cajun" restaurant in our town and they didn't even know what tasso, or andouille sausage was when I went in to ask where they buy theirs!

My goodness you'd think it wouldn't be so hard to come by given the wide array of other types of ingredients that are available.

Thanks for posting this, and I'm with the previous poster! Any day you feel like shipping these I'm second in line!

9:32 AM  

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