Andouille defeats Truman

I’ve never set foot in Louisiana — the closest I’ve gotten is Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, which is pretty close. But I love Cajun food and seasonings, and I’d love to go to Louisiana. Someday, I’ll join the group from my church that spends a volunteer week at UMCOR Sager Brown Depot each winter.

A very easy comfort meal for me is to prepare a box of Zatarain’s jambalaya mix. You can use various meats; when I first started buying Zatarain’s, I used plain old smoked sausage. I longed for andouille, which is a Cajun-seasoned smoked sausage. It looks a little different from regular smoked sausage; if you cut into a link and look at the cross-section, the grain, as I’ll call it, is larger than regular smoked sausage, meaning you can see larger pieces of meat and fat. I don’t mean that andouille is necessarily fattier than smoked sausage; I suspect the ratio of lean to fat is similar in both products. But you can see the little specks of fat in andouille, because they’re slightly bigger than the specks of fat in regular smoked sausage.

I write as if I had a lot of first-hand knowledge of andouille. Believe me, I really don’t. Please, please, take everything your read here with a grain of salt — or, even better, a grain of Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning. Those of you who really do know andouille please feel free to comment.

For a long while, I couldn’t find anything but regular smoked sausage in Shelbyville. Then, Hillshire Farms introduced an “andouille-style” or “cajun-style” smoked sausage. If you cut it open, it…