I'm in one of the cooking groups for my women's club, and a couple of months back we learned some dishes from New Orleans. The gumbo recipe we used was based on this recipe from Emeril Lagasse, with a few tweaks.
Since then, I've been craving gumbo and I decided to make it this weekend before the weather warms up too much. I tweaked it further because the dish would've been pretty expensive to make otherwise. I omitted a whole bunch of the seafood, lessened the amount of shrimp, and swapped the chorizo for andouille. And my understanding is that it's sacrilegious to use both okra and filé powder, but I did anyway because the amount of okra I used wasn't enough to thicken the gumbo to the consistency I like, and the filé imparts a nice earthy aroma.
But one of the things I want to mention here is that it is hard to use whole wheat (WW) flour to make a roux! Usually, when you make a roux with bleached all-purpose (AP) flour, you can use color to gauge its "doneness." But with WW, it's brown almost immediately and you have to go by time and smell, which can be difficult. I felt like I was screwing up the roux because I had no clue when it was done. Besides the fact that I think I added too much oil and it looked too liquidy to me. In the end, I added more flour, soaked up most of the oil with multiple paper towels, and used less than half of the remaining chocolate-colored roux. I tasted it a bit (and it is not tasty!) to make sure it wasn't too burnt, and then proceeded with the recipe. Next time, I'm sticking to AP.
In the end, though, the dish tasted great and I'm so glad we have leftovers!
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