Diving into gumbo

I’d already started eating the gumbo before one of the owners of the place explained to me how it was made, but hearing about it still made me hungry.

The key to the roux, she tells me, is that it needs to be stirred continuously for an hour. If any part of the pan burns, the whole thing gets tossed out. That’s cooked together with chicken stock and the holy trinity of Cajun cooking: onions, bell peppers, and celery. The stock’s made with the bones of roasted chicken, which is mixed into the stew along with andouille sausage, sourced from Louisiana.

She and her husband came here from Louisiana, and you can see where on a map painted on the wall this Miramar restaurant, LouZiana Food. They’ve also got a food truck of the same name. They offer a litany of po boy sandwiches made either cajun or creole style. The former is dressed with the house remoulade, the latter doused with a spicy creole sauce.

It’s a boon to fried seafood lovers; they cook catfish, shrimp, crawfish and crab cakes. But I had to go with the Cajun Classics menu, where I found that gumbo. A regular serving goes for $9.25, and for $17.55 you may upgrade to a Bubba Bowl of unspecified size. I got a cup, supplemented with a cup of red beans and rice for $11 total.

The red beans and rice features smoked sausage, and I didn’t mind a minute of eating it. But were I to do it again I’d likely swap it out to try the shop’s jambalaya. More likely, I would just gorge on a Bubba bowl of gumbo, and take home what I couldn’t finish. It was a little bit spicy, and a little bit salty, but more it possessed a flavor like you get when you age alcohol in an oak barrel.

And since you’re in Miramar, you’ll find plenty of that nearby as well.