We love cooking with our friends. Some meals are elaborate undertakings. Gourmet club for example is about challenging yourself to make something complex and delicious and out of your wheelhouse. Other times the meal is not complicated, but gathering all the ingredients is the challenge. The Crawfish Boil falls into this category. A Crawfish Boil is easy to prepare and easy to clean up and perfect for family gatherings! We are blessed to have a friend who loves shopping for food, and loves to invite us over to help cook. He will order live crawfish from Louisiana, source some good Andouille sausage and we bring salad, beer, our boiling skills and joie de vivre!
My son and I fell in love with crawfish when my husband was working in New Orleans. They are served all kinds of ways in etoufeé and gumbo, but our favorite is hands done the boil. Nothing is better than going to a food festival in New Orleans and getting a plate of crawfish and eating the tailmeat and sucking the juices out of the head! The season begins in February and runs through the end of June.
When it comes to cooking crawfish, you can read all kinds of variations on the theme until you’re overwhelmed, but the long and the short of it is, buy as big a batch as you can afford, and boil them along with garlic, onions, new potatoes, sweet corn and Andouille sausage in a pot of water flavored with crab boil seasonings. Drain and serve on a table covered with newspaper. Don’t forget the hot sauce and the paper towels.
You can buy fresh crawfish online http://www.lacrawfish.com
Crawfish Boil
Makes 6-8 servings
Ingredients
20 pounds live crawfish
8 quarts water
1 package (16 ounces) Zatarain’s Crawfish, Shrimp and Crab Boil, Complete
1 large onion, peeled
1 head garlic, halved crosswise
1-1/2 pounds small red potatoes
6 ears fresh corn, shucked, halved
3 lbs andouille sausage
Instructions
Discard any dead crawfish and debris. Pour live crawfish into a washtub or ice chest; cover with water. Drain. Repeat 3 to 4 times until crawfish are clean. Drain. If you buy purged crawfish, you can skip the step above.
Mix 8 quarts water, Crab Boil, onion and garlic in large (20-quart) stockpot. Bring to boil on high heat; boil 5 minutes. Add potatoes and sausage; boil 5 minutes. Add crawfish and corn; return to boil. Cover and cook 2 minutes.
Turn off heat and let stand 20 minutes.
Drain and pile potatoes, sausage crawfish and corn onto newspaper.
Notes
You need a very large colander or skimmer.
