Making Gumbo File

A little over a month ago, I posted This Post about Making Sassafras Tea in which I detailed how we identified the sassafras tree, got the roots cleaned up and boiled, and made some sassafras tea.  While doing that I asked Benjamin to take his machete and chop a few branches from the top of the tree we felled.  For the past month we've been drying the leaves.

To be honest, I had forgotten about them.  Somehow the sassafras branches with the leaves had made their way into the umbrella stand.  A couple days ago we had a 5 inch rain and when I removed the umbrella on my way out the door, I saw the leaves in the bottom of the stand and it reminded me of the unfinished project.  The leaves were dry and 'crinkly' and ready.

Dried Sassafras leaves

If you remember from the April blog post, sassafras trees have single-lobed, bi-lobed and tri-lobed leaves. Here is a dried tri-lobed leaf from the sassafras tree.  I always think it looks like a ghost.

Our project today involves making gumbo file (pronounced FEE-lay) with the dried sassafras leaves. Gumbo file is an herb that is used to thicken gumbo.  The native Indians in Louisiana taught the Acadian settlers about how to make it and use it to thicken gumbo.  Along with thickening, it provides a nice, earthy flavor. Normally, okra is used to thicken gumbo, but we sometimes use file along with okra for seasoning/thickening.

I carefully removed the dried leaves from the branches, trying my best to remove the stem of the leaf.  Then I put them in the food processor with the chopping blade on.

Spin Cycle

After putting the top on, I pulsed it around for a while.  The aroma coming out of the processor was nice and can only be described as 'woodsy,' 'earthy,' and fragrant.  I made the mistake of removing the top before the 'dust' had settled and inhaled a big nose of it and started sneezing.

Finely Chopped

I learned a couple of things from this experiment:

#1 The next time I do this (and I will do this again!), I'm going to dry a whole lot more leaves to make file, as the amount I made will be consumed after we make the first one or two gumbos.
#2 While the food processor certainly makes things easier, it doesn't pulverize it to the fine, powdery consistency that I'm looking for.  I'm going to use a mortar and pestle (or molcajete) to further grind the dried leaves after I get them to this point.

It didn't make much!

I poured the ground up leaves into a sieve with a small screen as I want to only allow the chopped leaf portion to get through to the bowl.  I don't want any of the little sticks from the veins in the leaf in my file.

Filtering the file

I use a spoon to run back and forth against the sieve to force the finest portion of the ground leaves into the bowl.  You can see the finer particles sifting through the wire mesh.

Partly cloudy with a chance of File Showers

And here is our file.  Again, I'd like it to be processed to a little finer consistency, but we can work to improve that portion of the process.  The main ingredient is there and if the fragrance is any indication, it is a better product that one you purchase at the store.

All we need is a gumbo now!

I save little spice containers and re-use them to repackage homemade ground criolla sella pepper that we make, to store seeds that I save, and now to store homemade gumbo file.

Packaged in a spice container

After thinking about it, I dumped the file into the molcajete (mortar & pestle) and ground it up real fine - into a nice powder.  It pulverized it a lot finer than the food processor could get it.

Pulverizing the file in the molcajete

For comparative purposes I scooped some store bought gumbo file out of a jar in the spice cabinet.  That's it on the left.  Then I scooped out a spoon of the file that we just made.  Ours is in the spoon on the right.  Just look at the difference!  They both smell great and I'm sure they'll both do the job in a gumbo, but I like ours and give it two thumbs up in the 'eyeball test.'

Store bought on the left.  Homemade on the right

Now all we need is a nice Chicken & Sausage Gumbo to put it to the taste test!

Making Sassafras Tea

After church on Resurrection Sunday,we journeyed 30 miles north to Kinder to eat a fine meal at Mom & Dad's house and spend a leisurely afternoon visiting.  My sister and brother-in-law and her passel of kids were there as well.  Benjamin always looks forward to visiting with them and they create their own adventures every time they get together.  Imagine boys running around in the woods with machetes, frogs, crawfish, eels, and mud.  They have so much fun.

Once the meal was over, I led the boys into the woods to show them something that we always did when I was younger - make sassafras tea.  As a kid, me, my brother and our neighborhood crew would often go into the woods and dig up the roots of a sassafras tree to make sassafras tea.  The smell brings back great memories and reminds me of the summers of my childhood.  The first thing you have to do is identify the sassafras tree.  This is a very easy thing that I learned in a tree identification class from both Boy Scouts and 4-H club.  The sassafras tree can be identified because it has a regular looking leaf, a bilobed leaf (looks like a mitten), and a trilobed leaf (looks like Casper the ghost).  They grow like weeds in the piney woods of Southwest Louisiana.

Showing the guys how to identify sassafras

I liked the way the light filtered through the leaves of the sassafras tree, silhouetting the leaves that I just described.  There are numerous trees like this scattered on my parents' 5 acres.  Once we found one we were looking for, we went to work digging around the base of it with shovels.

The diameter of the tree was a little shy of 3 inches and it didn't really have a tap root, just a root that angled off to the side.  It didn't take long to bring the tree down.  The minute we broke into the root, the rich smell of sassafras permeated the air and all the boys started talking about how much it smelled like root beer.

Getting down to the root cause

Benjamin got his machete out and chopped away at the sassafras root until he had uncovered all of it and pulled it from the soil.

Pulling on the root to remove it from the soil

We took the root near the water hose and washed all the dirt off and then split the roots into pieces with Benjamin's machete.

Cleaning/Splitting the roots

Then I got a big magnalite pot, added the cut up roots along with enough water to cover them and started boiling the water.

Starting to apply heat to the roots & water

I would be remiss if I didn't show pictures of the Sassafras Posse armed with machetes and enough energy to power up the electrical grids of the better part of the State.

The Sassafras Tea Party

They had a blast finding something growing in the wild that they could identify, harvest, and actually drink and they all took turns smelling the great smelling sassafras roots again and again.

Boys being boys

Pretty soon we had a rolling boil going in the pot and the roots began to leach out a reddish-brown tint into the water.  We allowed it to boil for a while.  The entire kitchen smelled really nice.

Water turning to tea

Before long the tea was done and the fire could be turned off.  I assume that you can drink the tea hot or cold, but we always added sugar and drank it over ice - just like root beer.

It's done

Only one thing left to do and that is to strain the tea as little flecks of bark (and probably dirt), still floated in the tea.  We poured it through a sieve and into a pitcher so that we wouldn't be drinking any of the solids or sediment.

Pouring through a sieve

And finally...  It's Tea Time.  After we added sugar, stirred and poured over ice, it was time to let the tea party taste the fruits of their labors.  Here's T-boy taking the first sip...

A Spot of Tea, old chap?

The boys liked it - although I think they liked the idea of it more than the taste. Although it tastes good, there is a strong finish to it.  I had several glasses of it and it was like taking a sip of my childhood.

Sassafras Tea

Mom later reminded me that sassafras tea was discovered to be a carcinogen back in the 1960's. Specifically the oil of the sassafras tree, called safrole, caused liver cancer in mice and so it was banned by the FDA. Now root beer is flavored by artificial means or by the birch tree.  Wow, great job, Kyle!  Get the boys all together and give them carcinogens!  Actually, after researching it more I learned that in moderation, it is not bad and that a cup of sassafras is 1/14 as carcinogenic as a cup of beer. Hmmm...  So why'd they ban root beer but not beer?  I certainly didn't give all my little nephews beer and we drink sassafras tea so infrequently that I'm sure no one was hurt by it.

The roots, leaves and bark were first used for medicinal purposes by the American Indians and they taught the Europeans of its many useful properties. One other neat factoid about sassafras trees: Sassafras leaves are dried and ground to a fine powder called Gumbo file' that is used as a thickening agent and flavoring for gumbo. Benjamin saved some leaves from the tree we cut down and we'll make our own gumbo file.  I'll likely show you that process in a month or so.