Tulsa Food

Now if you’re even a casual reader of Tulsa Food, you’re bound to have read a lot about Chicory & Chives, that country and Cajun luncheonette over on the West Side. So I’ll just weigh in on one thing and one thing only: their roux.

From what I know about Cajun food, it involves this. First, you make a roux. The joke is that a Cajun begins to make a chocolate cake by making a roux. That’s not true but I think it is used for just about everything else. It’s not your classic Julia Child French roux. In fact, it’s so hard to do that ol’ Julia would have a hissy fit if she tried. Basically, you stir flour and some oily thing (preferably the fat from whatever meat you’re cooking) around for half an hour or more over a flame and if you stop stirring for even a second, you get burnt stuff in the roux and you have to throw it out and start again. (Down in backwoods La., people with phones just unplug them and I’ve heard of people parking their cars far from their house so no one rings the doorbell and messes up the roux and then they’d have to kill him.) Then you sauté celery, onions and green bell pepper (they call it the Holy Trinity, it’s a lot like a Spanish sofrito) and stir that into the roux. Then you slowly stir in some sort of stock (if it’s a gumbo you might add either okra or sassafras powder to thicken it) and then you put in the meat or seafood, let it simmer and that’s it. What you don’t do is make like Emeril Lagasse on TV and say BAM and thrown in hot chili powder and all sorts of crap, you just let it cook and it just brings out the natural flavor of the ingredients and make them sing. Now a chain restaurant just can’t do this properly, I can’t see them assigning a chef to stir your roux for an hour. They’d use a mix, and that’s like using spaghetti sauce from a can or getting your love life from TV.

So I walked in to Chicory & Chives, met Jim Loggin the owner, tried to impress him with my street creds, told him that when we make roux Cathe stirs it for a half hour. Not enough, he said, I stir mine for an hour. I asked him about various shortcuts I’d heard about (Paul Prudhomme has a way of frying the roux that takes 15 minutes) and he said that it’s just not as good as the old-fashioned way. When I heard that, I knew I’d come to the right place. So I ordered the Crawfish Étouffée and a cup of gumbo. And I asked to have my rice in a separate bowl, otherwise that thirsty rice would just soak up all the sauce and steal the flavor. The étouffée was a blond roux, which, since it’s a lighter blend, is stirred much less than an hour, but boy was it good! It brought out the flavor of the crawfish and gave it depth and shine. So rich it was almost creamy, like a classic French sauce or even better — but without cream. Yeah, those Cajuns could teach the French a thing or two. The gumbo, which did have that hour-long roux, was dark, smoky, sultry like breeze on the bayou. (Okay, I’ve never seen a bayou but this just sounds right.)

There was a lot more to the meal, a ton of rice, Texas toast, and my friends ordered the buffet. Then cobbler. But you’ve heard about that before. I just wanted to talk about that roux cause it’s something you just can’t find around here too often.

Chicory & Chives

New Address

5800 S. Lewis Ave, Tulsa, OK  74105 (London Square)

918-585-3500.
Full Service Bar. (The Cranky Cajun Bar)

Mon – Fri 6:30am til 9pm
Sat 7:00am til 9pm

Brian Schwartz:

Born in NYC, age 0, on my birthday. College in Oxford at age 16. Law School in New Haven, Conn. 6 years travel in Africa and Asia. Haven’t done much lately. Still, I’m the only Tulsa member of the little-known Omega Society.  www.theomegasociety.com

I speak enough Chinese to order food not on any English menu. Spanish French Italian too (not fluently but food-ently) My favorite restaurant is Jean-Georges in New York. But those NYC chefs would sell their soul to get the produce available from the farms around Inola.

“A writer writes alone. His words tumble forth from a magical inner void that is mysterious even to himself, and that no one else can enter.” And yet, the most important thing to me the writer is YOU. Without you to hear them, my words are worth less than silence.

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