Home › The World's Kitchen › Okras, Saute Creole
Okras, Saute Creole
Prepare and keep hot a Creole sauce. Trim both ends of twenty-four tender, fresh, sound okras. Heat a tablespoon fresh butter in a frying pan, add the okras, season with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper; gently brown for fifteen minutes, tossing quite frequently meanwhile. Pour in the Creole sauce, lightly toss while cooking for five minutes, pour into a vegetable dish and serve.
A two-part dish: the okra is browned hard in butter first, then finished briefly in a Creole sauce made separately. The browning is the whole point and should not be rushed.
- Creole sauceThe book assumes you have made its Creole sauce elsewhere — broadly a tomato base with onion and green pepper. Something in the range of 1 1/2 to 2 cups would suit this quantity of okra. It should be hot when it goes into the pan, or the okra stops browning and begins to steam.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of white pepper is a scant 3/4 teaspoon — assertive but not wrong for a Creole dish.
- How much okraTwenty-four tender pods is about 1 lb, which serves four as a side. Choose pods no longer than 3 to 4 inches; larger ones are woody and no amount of sautéing fixes that.
- Trimming"Trim both ends" means take off the stem cap and the very tip without slicing into the seed cavity. Every cut releases mucilage, so keep the pods whole and dry them thoroughly before they hit the fat.
- The hinge: dry heat firstFifteen minutes of steady browning over medium heat is what cooks the sliminess out. Do not cover the pan, do not add liquid, and do not crowd the okra; a crowded pan gives you a pot of glue rather than browned pods.
- More fat than one tablespoonA single tablespoon of butter will scorch long before fifteen minutes are up in a modern thin-bottomed pan. Use 2 to 3 tablespoons, or butter with a little oil, in a heavy skillet or cast iron, and lower the heat if the milk solids darken.
- The final five minutesOnce the sauce goes in, the okra only needs to heat through and take on the seasoning. Longer simmering softens the pods back toward mush and undoes the browning.
Okra came to the American South through the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa, where the pod and its thickening quality are basic to stews; the word itself is generally traced to Igbo ọ́kwụ̀rụ̀, while the Southern alternative "gumbo" is usually linked to Bantu terms such as ki ngombo. In New Orleans cooking okra travelled two ways — thrown into gumbo precisely for the body its mucilage gives, or browned hard in fat, as here, to drive that quality off entirely. The "Creole sauce" this recipe leans on is the tomato-pepper-onion base that ran through Louisiana kitchens.