Let's talk Jambalaya. I went to a restaurant and saw it was on special. Huge mistake. The restaurant doesn't normally make it, but I figured how bad can it be?
I order it. Five minutes goes by. No food. Okay. Ten minutes goes by. No food. That's not a good sign. Fifteen minutes, no food. Bad sign. They're making this shit to order. For those that don't know, jambalaya is really simple. It's a big pot of rice, meats, seafood, and spices. Restaurants love it because you just make a massive pot of it and serve it in a bowl real quick. If it's being made to order, that's a bad fucking sign.
Finally food comes 20 minutes later and my worst fears are confirmed. Made to order. Now the problem with made to order is first off you're not getting a chocolate rue. Fine. I can live with that, but it's also a sign people don't know what they're doing. It's also a sign they're probably not using a pot to cook it, but rather a pan or skillet. If you're using a pan to cook jambalaya, all different types of things can go wrong. So let's cover the most common mistake.
Chefs are lazy and won't switch pans when cooking a sausage based dish. What a fucking sack of shit. You cannot cook sausage and not clean the pan after. The whole dish will get soggy and you'll have a pool of sausage grease. Change your damn pans. Which this chef did not.
The next cooking sin is that in a pan, jambalaya is easy to over spice and season because you crowd the pan with all kinds of peppers and seasoning. That means it's incredibly easy to over spice. I had a giant inedible mess on my hands. It was way too damn spicy.
Next is because there's so much grease, your shrimp wind up getting soggy. You cannot mix shrimp and grease outside of frying them. The shrimp just absorb and become coated in it.
Finally, when you cook in a pan, it's easy to overcrowd the rice. So you wind up skimping on rice. Jambalaya is a fucking rice dish. You don't skimp on it.
So what we had was a dish with a pool of grease on the bottom, and was too spicy, with no rice to absorb it and shrimp coated in the sausage grisel. Completely inedible garbage from what's considered a 4.8/5 and fairly well known restaurant. I've never sent back food before, but I did this time. I just said fuck it. Let me back in the kitchen and I'll fucking cook it myself.