What kinds of meat or proteins are usually used in Louisiana gumbo?

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I can’t speak authoritatively on Louisiana gumbo, but Cajun gumbo, Cajun being a specific ethnicity in Louisiana, whose culture from which the dish originated, almost always come in one of two varieties. Chicken and sausage, and seafood.

The chicken is typically parboiled to brown it and added in the middle or towards the end depending on how tender you want it, as leaving it in for the entire duration of the cooking time will cause it to fall apart.

Cajuns have three types of sausage, fresh, smoked, and andouille. Andouille sausage is typically not used in gumbo as it’s too dense. What you think of as andouille is not how the Cajuns make it, Cajuns make it like they did back in France.

Instead Cajuns have developed their own kind of American-style fine-grained sausage made with Cajun spices that they’ll either smoke or leave fresh. In a chicken and sausage gumbo, usually you’ll see both fresh and smoked sausage.

A seafood gumbo is made with all shellfish, no bony fish. Usually oysters, crawfish, shrimp, and mini-crab legs.

I personally prefer chicken and sausage gumbo. There’s not much point in adding anything other than Cajun style-sausage to it in my opinion. In order to get it you need to find a Cajun meat market. These used to be extremely rare birds, but I found one outside Atlanta not long ago. I prefer fresh sausage to smoked but they’re both good.

I really don’t advise you to try to make Cajun style gumbo without Cajun style sausage. The flavors will be all wrong. If I didn’t have access to it, I’d just make a chicken gumbo instead. I suppose you could use mass-market “andouille” but then why not just make a Creole gumbo instead with Creole ingredients?