This is our favorite fare for a summertime party and we usually do this dish on Bastille Day. Grab yourself a bucket of beer and order some live crawdads, if you don’t have a trap and live next to a bayou. Most grocers can special order them or there are various places online in Louisiana and Texas. I found one of the best places was to order from King Soopers through their meat department. We have a new store Crawfish Market in Denver, which I am going to use next time for crawfish jumbo 5 for $29 frozen in winter, live next February until July $5.50 per pound.
Make sure they are purged and triple washed, otherwise it is time-consuming to do this task on your own.
Ingredients
Stock:
- 3 gallons water
- 2/3 c. salt
- 1 T. black peppercorns
- 2 packages dry crab boil
- 1 c. liquid crab boil
- 1 T. hot sauce
- 1 T. Essence, recipe follows
- 2 bay leaves
- Crawfish, vegetables, and sausage:
- 12 pounds live crawfish
- 8 new potatoes
- 2 ears of corn, cut into thirds
- 2 artichokes
- 1 foot of andouille sausage, cut into 8 equal links
- 3 lemons, halved
- 2 medium size yellow onions, peeled and quartered
- 1/2 lb. raw peanuts (optional)
- 3 whole garlic cloves, split in half
- 1 c. melted butter
- Couple of bottles of Abita Beer or your favorite beer
Directions
For the stock: In a large stock pot with a basket insert on high heat, add the water, salt, and peppercorns. Add the rest of the seasonings, cover and bring up to a boil. When the stock is at a boil, add the potatoes, corn, and artichokes. Cover and bring back to a boil, about 5 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients, except for the crawfish. Cover the pot and bring back up to a boil, about 5 minutes. Taste the stock for seasoning and adjust if needed. Add the crawfish, cover and turn off the flame. Allow the mixture to steep for 5 to 30 minutes. To assemble, place brown paper bags on the counter, lift the basket out of the stock and drain. Dump the boil directly on the counter. Serve with plenty of melted butter, beer and paper towels.
Emeril’s ESSENCE Creole Seasoning (also referred to as Bayou Blast):
- 2 1/2 tablespoons paprika
- 2 tablespoons salt
- 2 tablespoons garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon black pepper
- 1 tablespoon onion powder
- 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
- 1 tablespoon dried oregano
- 1 tablespoon dried thyme
Combine all ingredients thoroughly.
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What to do with the leftovers? Try this from our favorite new cookbook, Northern Soul:
Crawfish Bisque
1 cup (225 g) unsalted butter
1 cup (125 g) all-purpose flour
2 Vidalia or other sweet onions,
coarsely chopped
2 red bell peppers, stems and seeds
removed, coarsely chopped
4 celery ribs, coarsely chopped
12 garlic cloves, smashed
8 plum tomatoes, cut in half
Chopped leaves from 16 sprigs
fresh thyme
2 cups (470 ml) dry sherry
or cooking sherry
3 quarts (2.8 L) seafood stock,
preferably, or vegetable stock
3 pounds (1.4 kg) crawfish tail meat
6 tablespoons (113 g) kosher salt
4 teaspoons (8 g) freshly
ground black pepper
2 teaspoons (4 g) cayenne pepper
2 cups (470 ml) heavy cream
6 tablespoons (90 ml) fresh lemon juice
% cup (60 ml) bottled habanero
hot sauce, such as Cry Baby
Craig’s Hot Sauce
Fresh chives, optional, for garnish
MAKES 4 QUARTS (3.8 L)
y favorite afternoon lunch on a warm, rainy day.
MI’ll put on a little Sidney Bechet, open the windows
and listen to the thunder rumble through the city. Saint
Paul is a river town, a city of industry on the mighty
Mississippi-a reminder, like this bisque-that New
Orleans is never too far away.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Melt the butter over medium heat in a large Dutch oven. When the
foaming subsides, whisk in the flour and cook until you have an
evenly mixed blonde roux. Add the onions, bell peppers, celery.
and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, over medium-low heat until
the onions are translucent, about 10 minutes.
2. Add the tomatoes and thyme and continue to cook, scraping the
bottom of the pot continuously, until the tomatoes have released
their liquid, about 8 minutes. Add the sherry and deglaze the pan,
scraping the browned bits off the bottom. Add the stock, crawfish
meat, salt, black pepper, and cayenne and bring to a boil over
high heat.
3. Remove the soup from the heat and, working carefully and in
batches, puree the soup in a blender, then pass it through a
fine-mesh chinois or strainer. Return the pureed soup to the pot,
add the cream, lemon juice, and hot sauce and bring to a boil
one more time.
4. Immediately remove the soup from the heat, taste for seasoning,
garnish with fresh chives if you like, then serve. Leftovers can be
stored in your refrigerator in an airtight container.
Deviled Crawfish Roll
4 unsliced 6-inch (15 cm)
Italian hoagie rolls
1 recipe Deviled Crawfish Salad
(see opposite)
14 cup (25 g) thinly sliced scallions
16 rings Pickled Watermelon Rinds
(page 56)
MAKES 4 SANDWICHES
s much as my time in a French fine-dining kitchen
Ataught me to love the approach to cuisine, the crawfish
roll is a situation where a grocery store baguette simply
will not do. Get yourself a blonde, crispy-on-the-outside,
spongy-on-the-inside, Italian-style hoagie roll. More than
one. Get several. Get a pile going and stack these puppies
like cordwood next to the beer tub and the BBQ chopped
salad with buttermilk vinaigrette.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Using a serrated knife, slice a V-shaped wedge into the top of
each roll, making a deep trough for the salad filling.
2. Spoon the crawfish salad into the troughs, dividing the
salad evenly.
3. Garnish each sandwich with the scallions and watermelon rinds.
ANOTHER REASON I GO LIGHT ON THE MAYO
Consider the weather when you choose a menu to prepare. If
you’re going to make a pile of sandwiches and allow them to
fuel your fun in the sun, avoid the whipped white stuff in a jar
and substitute a light vinaigrette or a simple splash of olive
oil and vinegar. Mayonnaise, even when you take into account
how heavily processed it is, doesn’t react well to warm
temperatures, particularly outdoors in the sun, for hours at a
time. Don’t let your po’ boys be the reason you and your fellow
yacht rockers spend two days fighting over who gets to use
the loo and how often.
DEVILED CRAWFISH SALAD
Unless you live and play south of Baton Rouge, crawfish tails
can be hard to come by. We’re fortunate in Minnesota to have an
embarrassment of riches when it comes to seafood purveyors and
Southeast Asian grocery stores, where one-pound bags of frozen
crawfish tails are easily procured. If that’s not the case where
you live, ask your local co-op or butcher shop if they can order
some for you or jump online and find a site that will pack them
in a case of dry ice and get them to your front door.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Drain and briefly rinse the crawfish tails under cold running water
and allow to drain, gently squeezing excess liquid out of the meat.
2. Combine the mayonnaise, onion, carrot, celery, hard-cooked eggs,
chiles, chives, lemon juice, garlic powder, mustard, hot sauce, Old
Bay, Worcestershire sauce, salt, Zatarain’s Crab Boil Seasoning,
cayenne, and black pepper in a mixing bowl and fold in the tail
meat. Taste for seasoning, then use in a sandwich. Leftovers can
be stored in an airtight container in your refrigerator.
1 pound (455 g) cooked
crawfish tail meat
1 cup (225 g) heavy mayonnaise.
preferably Duke’s Real Mayonnaise
i medium yellow onion, finely diced
f medium carrot, finely diced
1 celery rib, finely diced
3 hard-cooked eggs, diced
15 cup (72 g) stemmed, seeded, and
4-inch (6 mm) diced Fresno chiles
1 tablespoon (3 g) minced fresh chives
L tablespoon (15 ml) fresh lemon juice
% teaspoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon (11 g) whole-grain
Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon (15 ml) habanero
hot sauce, preferably Cry Baby
Craig’s Hot Sauce
I tablespoon (7.5 g) Old Bay Seasoning
1% teaspoons (23 ml)
Worcestershire sauce
1% teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon Zatarain’s
Crab Boil Seasoning
% teaspoon cayenne pepper
N teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
MAKES ENOUGH FOR 3 TO 4
DEVILED CRAWFISH ROLLS,
DEPENDING ON THE SIZE
OF ROLLS YOU HAVE
Pickled Watermelon Rinds
4 cups (600 g) 36-inch (6 mm)
watermelon rind slices
(see Note below)
2 cups (470 ml) apple cider vinegar
1 cup (235 ml) water
2 cups (400 g) sugar
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons
(31 g) kosher salt
6 sprigs fresh fennel fronds
M cup (25 g) chopped fresh ginger
1 tablespoon (5 g) whole black
peppercoms
2 sprigs fresh thyme
MAKES
1 QUART (946 ML)
The oldest pickled watermelon recipe that I’ve been
able to find in the English language was written in the
mid-nineteenth century, but the tradition dates back much
further than that. Although pickled watermelon doesn’t
appear on many American dinner tables outside of the Sour
it has a strong legacy in Scandinavia and northern Europe.
It became a big part of soul food all over the United Statet
during the Great Depression, in large part because of Patsy
Randolph in Harlem. As the story goes, Ms. Randolph would
collect all the watermelon rinds from the street market
fruit vendors, pickle them in her home kitchen, and sell
them to neighborhood diners and restaurants. Thank you,
Patsy Randolph.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Combine the rind slices, vinegar, water, sugar, salt, fennel, ginger
peppercorns, and thyme in a nonreactive saucepan and bring
to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the rindis
tender, about 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and allow to cod
to room temperature.
2. Transfer the watermelon rinds and their brine into a large glass ja
Store in your refrigerator. These can be served and eaten as soon
as they are chilled.
Note: Prepare the watermelon rind by using a vegetable peeler
to remove the dark green rind from the outside and scraping a
of the red flesh of the fruit from the inside. What’s left should
be a very pale almost-white green rind that is quite tough and
crunchy. Slice this remaining rind about 14-inch (6 mm) thick.
(Note: a food processor with a slicer attachment will make slora
the rind much easier.)