I love my iron stuff. Never felt the need for anything else. Got a dutch oven, big pot and several skillets of different sizes. Works great for all kinds of things. It's not the cookware that makes my jambalaya not perfect. It's the cook.
I explained all of this a couple or 3 ears ago if you feel like searching for the thread. The brown color comes from the bits of pork that stick to the bottom of the pot. You have to cook the pork butt (it aint jambalaya w/0 pork butt) until it starts sticking to the bottom of the pot. If you add water before that, the only way to get it brown is w/ Kitchen Bouquet (or so I'm told...I've never used it).
Maybe that's it. I've never used pork butt. I used pork sausage and chicken. I think you had said you use some cookware other than iron but don't all the pros that win the Jambalaya Festival all use iron pots? I would brown the sausage before adding other ingredients but sausage doesn't produce much fat.
Yeah anytime growing up and we cooked a big jambalaya you gotta a run by one of the local supermarkets and they have the pork cut up and ready to go just go buy a pack of that and throw it in. That's where all the flavor comes from. I told some yankee that this weekend who was making one with just chicken i think.
That is a novel idea. Cutting those damn things up is a procedure. There is so much fat on them and you just have to keep cutting and flipping and holy shit it is work.
I used to have the butcher shop cut mine, but they always cut it too big. I have a friend who owns a restaurant who buys it for me when it is on special and I cut it up myself. This weekend I used 120# of pork butt that I cut up myself. There are several advantages to doing it yourself. First, you get to trim that layer of fat off of the butt. I render that to use in place of any oil...that's just another layer of flavor. Second, I get to control the size of the cube. Your meat goes a lot farther if the cubes are smaller. It is work, but I can knock it out pretty quickly. 120# took me about 2 hours. Throw your meat in the freezer for a bit before you cut it. It tightens it up and makes it much easier to cut. Finally, I get to pick when I buy it. Tony get's it for me really cheap. The meat I used this weekend was bought 3 months ago at $0.69/lb. Retail it goes for anywhere between 1.19 and 2.19/lb.
