Easy One Pot Jambalaya Recipe

I think my favorite part of jambalaya is the warmth of it all, and it's filling, and the color of it all. It's a very joyful looking dish. Hi, I'm Jay, and on episode one of Rice 100 Ways, I will be walking you through my special recipe of jambalaya. So to get started, we're going to put our oil in the pan and cook our veggies. Fun fact, the veggies are looked at as the holy trinity of Creole cooking. The holy trinity is Louisiana's version of the French mirepoix. The mirepoix is made up of onions, celery, and carrots. The holy trinity subs out the carrots for green bell peppers. Apparently, green bell peppers were more accessible than carrots. And adding garlic is sometimes referred to as adding the pope. So while they use green bell peppers, I like to use red. They are a star in their own right. So I have it over medium high heat. Just want to rotate this pan a little bit. Then I'm going to go in and add my onions. I like them to actually be strings of onion. It's my own personal preference. Add the celery. Make sure everything is touching the oil. So I'm going to add my red bell peppers. Now see what I mean about this color? If I had green bell peppers in here, it would just blend in with the celery. I like everybody to have their own moment. So I took things from my grandmother being from Mississippi and how she cooks. I took things from my aunt living in Louisiana and the things that she picked up along the way. And I threw them into my own recipe. Growing up, my grandmother was really big on jambalaya, goulash. Then my mom went to college in southern Texas and she picked up on how to make gumbo. I have so many memories connected to food when it comes to my family. I come from a cooking family. Next, I'm going to add a little bit of garlic. I love to use fresh garlic. I know they have so many variations of it. Nothing is better than fresh garlic. It just, I don't know, it brings the skillet alive. I like to put the andouille sausage in the skillet with everything else so that everything absorbs each other's flavors. Now the thing you want to do is you want to let the sausage brown a bit. Let all those flavors really marry. Now I'm going to add shrimp. I would recommend getting raw shrimp. When they're precooked, it's easier to dry them out. And so this is a good way to keep everything cooking at the same speed. So while the shrimp are cooking, what we're going to do is start to add our seasoning. So if you are making jambalaya, you absolutely have to use Tony Chachere's. It's a Creole seasoning. I call it an all-in-one. So there's salt, cayenne, there's pepper. And a lot of times when you use this, you don't even have to worry about using salt or pepper because it's already here. I've never not had it in my household. My grandmother had it. My mom has it. I have it. It's amazing. So even though that's an all-in-one, like I still add things on top of it. Now the thing with smoked paprika, sometimes it's hard to find. And so when it's hard for me to find, I'll just get regular paprika and mix it with cumin. And what that does is works really well with the Tony Chachere's. It brings out the other flavors. So you just want to sprinkle a little bit of that. And you can immediately smell it. Oh, my God. My palate can't get enough. I add cayenne pepper. And then I come behind that with hot paprika. And sometimes in the store you can find smoked hot paprika. I love to put a fair amount of thyme. It's my way of getting my thyme back. I come behind that with some pepper to add an accent of that taste to it. When you see the shrimp start to, like, fold inward, they're done. Now I'm going to add tomatoes. And I've read that Creole jambalaya has tomatoes. Cajun jambalaya does not. I like the tomatoes, especially the fire-roasted tomatoes. The smoky flavor of the fire-roasted tomatoes works really well with the smoked paprika and the thyme. Now the most important part is the rice. Traditionally, you put the rice in the pot with all the other things and add chicken stock. However, sometimes I do it a little different just because rice is a really tricky thing. And you can ruin it within five seconds. But we're going to do it the traditional way today. My way, I do it ahead of time on the side just so that I know I won't run into any issues. Use chicken stock, which is also why you don't need a lot of sodium. Like, you see how many components of sodium there are in this? Like, you don't want to go adding more to that. So now that the rice is in here, we're going to let it come to a boil. I'm going to turn it down, and it'll cook for about 10 minutes. I notice a lot of people really don't like black-eyed peas, and I don't understand what the grief is. It just adds an extra layer of something. Instead of doing the black-eyed peas, a lot of people would insist on putting okra. But as I've been saying this entire cooking experience, do what makes you happy. So in order to prevent it from scorching, you might want to add more broth, protecting the actual meal from getting burnt. So I'm going to put the lid back on, and we're going to let this cook for another 10 to 15 minutes. Okay, so we are done. It's just beautiful. It's a beautiful presentation. I like to add a little bit of parsley. I know you're thinking, like, he said multiple times this is already hot, why is he adding hot sauce? So it's not for the spice, it's for the tang. So I think it's time to plate this. Texas Toast just sets it all off. The garlic, the cheese, it's just a family. Alright, let's get into a taste of this. Mm-hmm. That's great. Everything that I wanted, I'm getting it. Thank you everybody for joining and watching this today. I think that this is one of many rice dishes, obviously. I think we still have 99 to go. So let us know what we should be making.