Crawfish Boilin'

Anyone who has been fortunate enough to go to one of Andrew's BBQs knows that this is not a man who fools around when it comes to outdoor cooking. For the short time that Andrew lived in Boston, he would smoke some kind of meat or fish almost every weekend. I have been on the receiving end of more than one brisket that has resided on the smoker for 72+ hours, and required him to wake up multiple times over two nights to ensure that the temperature was just perfect. Unfortunately, Andrew moved back to his hometown of Austin last year, and aside from the occasional Redbones visit, my BBQ consumption has dropped dramatically. On the plus side, my cholesterol is no longer at crisis levels, and I've gone down a waist size. 

So when Andrew told me that we would be having a crawfish boil during my Austin visit, I knew that this would not be a half-hearted endeavor. (By the way, we're a bit out of order here. I'm probably the only one concerned about this, but for the sake of documentation, this was day 2 of the Austin portion of the trip- after the week in Dallas, but before the trip from FL to NY). 

Anyway, the successful journey of one of these little crustaceans from a Louisiana swamp to our table is a multi-step, all day affair.

Step 1: Locate Crawfish. 

Understandably, Andrew's wife Mary was not very enthusiastic about the idea of buying the crawfish a day early and having them smell up the garage for 24 hours. So Andrew and I set off on Sunday morning for several unsuccessful attempts at locating a bag of these things. Obviously, crawfish aren't the kind of thing you find crawling around any stream- They're local to swamps and rivers in Louisiana and Southeast Texas. And since they need to be cooked alive, they're shipped in small quantities weekly. And as we quickly learned, when they're gone, they're gone. After finding no success at a few supermarkets, a visibly stressed Andrew called one last place who told us they had 2 sacks left if we could get there in a hurry. We raced across town (remember this is Texas, so across town = 30 miles) to a dimly lit cajun shop and picked up 33 pounds of Texas crawfish. Victory! 

Step 2: Dump them out and pick out the dead ones

Unfortunately, not all of the little guys survive the trip, and the dead ones don't taste very good, so they all get picked out. Luckily, Lauren didn't seem too traumatized at having these things crawling around her baby pool...

Step 3: Purge

Purging involves dumping an entire container of salt on the crawfish, and then washing it off. Put simply, this step gets rid of the poop. Apparently there is some debate as to whether or not this is effective, but it certainly seemed worth the small effort to me. I'll spare everyone the picture of the water post-purging (safe to say, I think it worked). 

Step 4: Boil them up 

We used a turkey-frying pot (aka, the most terrifyingly unsafe thing I have ever seen- the fact that people fill these up with boiling oil blows my mind) to boil up the fish. The recipe for the water is pretty simple- 2 full containers of salt, a package of cajun seasoning, lemons, and a few sticks of butter. In the basket with the fish, we added potatoes, corn, onions, and sausage. 

Going in, and coming out, 15 min later. 

Step 5- Dump them out and eat. Repeat. 

There's not too much to it- just rip off the tail, peel off the shell, and eat the tailmeat. And drink lots of beer- this is some spicy stuff. About half of the people with us sucked everything out of the heads too, but I wasn't quite gutsy enough for that this time around. 

There's not a ton of meat in the tail, so you end up eating what feels like hundreds of these.  We did 3 batches before we got through all 33 pounds, and by the end were drunk and stuffed with sliced up fingers. The person next to me at the table literally didn't move for 2 hours- just slowly and methodically made his way through everything in front of him.  

Start to finish it was basically a full day of prep and cooking- I think it took a full 2 hours to just get through the eating portion of things. But it's a damn good way to spend an 80 degree day in March...

The aftermath: