I’ve seen Zatarain do commercials about their Dirty Rice mixture on TV all the time, but I don’t think I’ve seen them plug their Jambalaya Mix. I’ve been picking up both the Zatarain’s Dirty Rice box and the Jambalaya mix box for awhile now. It is actually not too bad, I like them more than most of the other Rice-A-Roni products out there.

The most important thing for Cheap Eaters to note is that you need to add meat to all of the Zatarain’s products. For instance, this Jambalaya Mix calls for adding “your choice of 1 pound of smoked sausage, chicken (pre-cooked), ham, or shrimp cut into bite-size pieces.” For me, this is actually OK because I generally have one of those items (except the shrimp!) on hand. In particular there is usually either sausage or ham in the fridge, usually left over from making something like Pasta with Ham.

Although you can easily get away with just putting the meat in the dish, it’s common practice at Cheap Eats headquarters to spice up the dish with some veggies. The usual suspects work well in Zatarain’s Jambalaya - chopped brown onion, celery, red or green bell pepper. A garnish of chopped parsley on top sort of takes away some of the slightly gummy feeling that the rice will leave in your mouth. There actually ARE vegetables in the mix in the form of “specks” of dehydrated onion and bell pepper, but we all know how good this freeze-dried astronaut food tastes. Do yourself a favor and throw some of the real stuff in.

You can also make this without meat if you’d like. The rice is pretty salty and has quite a bit of heat in the spice so it can easily stand alone without adding anything but the seasoning packet. The rice itself is OK… but suffers a little bit in substance and fluffiness since as with all these instant rice products, they’ve parboiled the rice in advance to make sure it cooks more evenly in only 25 minutes. But as far as convenience goes, it sure is simple. It’s just like cooking rice, but you add a seasoning packet.

On that note, at a price of nearly two dollars per box, many Cheap Eaters are going to cry foul. Why not make the mix yourself? I’ve actually made Jambalaya from scratch before and it does take a bit more doing. I think the thing that most people will have problems with is making sure they have all the correct spices on hand and with making the roux.

What’s a Roux anyhow? (I used to pronounce this Rowks when I was a kid, haha). It’s basically flour cooked in oil until the flour darkens to a toasty brown. Roux is sort of like women’s hair color… there are light blonde, brunette, redhead, and jet black variations. You generally don’t want to get your roux to be black because that means its burnt. I think most of the Cajun recipes call for roux that is light to dark chocolate brown, like the color of an old penny.

You take an equal amount of flour and oil. You gotta do it in a deep pot and be careful because the oil reaches crazy hot temperaturees. Heat up the oil for awhile in the pot and then sprinkle in the flour gradually, stirring like a madman with a wooden spoon. I hope you don’t need that spoon anywhere else, because it’s going to turn a nice black burnt color.

As the flour cooks in the oil it will start to turn brown and develop that wonderful toasty aroma that is what makes jambalaya and gumbo so good. The toughest thing is you MUST MUST constantly stir and scrape the bottom or you will burn it. You have to do it at a fairly low heat, and if it starts to smoke it needs to be taken off the burner and cooled a bit. It takes like 20 friggin minutes of stirring! After you get it the right color, you can add other ingredients and proceed with the recipe. I’ll probably try and get a Cheap Eats gumbo or jambalaya recipe up sometime. But it’s hot summer right now, and standing over a boiling pot of roux is the equivalent of cooking with the oven at 400 degrees and the door wide open!

If you’d rather not risk life and limb making a roux, you might want to just try the mix which is nowhere near authentic New Orleans (I had some Jambalaya when I went to visit and it was pretty amazing) but as I said it tastes better to me than plain rice-a-roni.

One note: they are not kidding when they say this box will serve 6. I ate it for lunch, dinner, and then lunch again the next day…

Cheap Eats Score: 6/10