- Outdoor columnist Ben Smith says if you’ve never eaten crawfish, you are missing out.
Suck de head an’ pinch de tail. Repeat until your belly is full. I went through almost five years of articles and couldn’t believe that I’ve never written about this. Five years of writing about the outdoors, many of those columns about food, and not a single one about my favorite thing to eat…crawfish. And if you’ve never eaten crawfish, you are missing out.
As it often does, my mind began to wander the other day while partaking in this tasty treat from the comfort of the right field deck at Milton Wheeler Field, “Who first thought it would be a good idea to eat these things?” After all, at a glance they don’t really look like something you’d say, “I wonder what that tastes like.” Small in size, pretty ugly, and usually burrowing in the ground, these delicious little boogers are often referred to as “mud bugs.” And essentially that’s what they are.
I remember my buddy from Illinois that I coached with at William Carey telling me about the first time he’d ever eaten crawfish. He came down here in college to play baseball at Mississippi State and couldn’t believe it when they took him to his first ever crawfish boil. He said that back home they used them for fishing bait, and it blew his mind that people down here ate them. If memory serves me correctly, he’s now a believer! Crawfish are the tastiest fish bait you can eat!
Thinking of Eric’s story, I started looking up the origins of eating crawfish. Now, there are several countries across the globe that eat crawfish, but I don’t have enough space to cover all of that, so we’ll just stick to the United States. The origins of eating crawfish in America dates all the way back to at least the 1700’s with the Native Americans. According to my research, the natives would hand deer meat from canes and stick them in the water. When they’d lift them up, there would be crawfish clinging to the bait. Another method used by natives to catch crawfish was gigging them.
Next come the Acadians, or as we refer to them, the “Cajuns”. Arriving in the mid-1700’s, Cajuns farmed ponds for the specific use of procuring crawfish. However, commercial sale of crawfish didn’t happen until the late-1880’s. The first commercial sales came from fishing the Atchafalaya Basin. The practice continued to grow throughout Louisiana and fishermen began to use nets and traps in flooded rice fields. These crawfish would go to larger cities like New Orleans and Baton Rouge to restaurants and seafood markets. Soon, the practice of farming for crawfish exploded in Louisiana and by the 1970’s there was over 40,000 acres of land being used almost exclusively for crawfish farming. By the end of the 1980’s, Louisiana produced around ninety percent of the crawfish consumed worldwide.
Today, Louisiana accounts for seventy to ninety percent of the crawfish consumed in the United States. There’s over 115,000 acres of land used for crawfish farming that is responsible for an over 300-million-dollar industry. Over 150 million pounds of crawfish are farmed annually.
So, how does one prepare a crawfish dinner after catching them? It’s a simple, yet rigorous process to ensure you cook them like the good Lord intended.
The first step is cleaning them. The best way to do this is use an old cooler and run clean water over them with a hose. Let them sit for a while in the fresh water, then repeat the step several more times. This will clean them and also purge them, which to me makes them taste better. While you wait on your crawfish to be purged, bring your water to a rolling boil. Once your water is boiling, add your seasoning and any other things you want in your boil. Personally, I like to add potatoes and lemons in with my seasoning. Finally, add your crawfish to the boil. Using a paddle, stir the crawfish in the boiling pot for about two minutes. After boiling for two minutes, kill the cooker and add some frozen corn to the boil. Let everything in the pot soak for about twenty minutes before removing.
Of course, this is my own method for boiling crawfish and I’m no expert, but I’ve got some friends that are, and I try to mimic what they do. And the great thing about boiling crawfish is you can add whatever you like to the boil. In the past, I’ve used broccoli and onions in my boil and know some people that will even add jalapeños. The main thing to make sure of is that you have plenty of crawfish to eat for everyone. I’d say 4-5 pounds per person is about right if you’re planning on crawfish being the main course. Now there are several other ways to eat crawfish, but it’s almost sacrilegious to even mention them.
If you have leftover crawfish from your boil, which you shouldn’t, you can peel and freeze the tails to add to an etouffee, gumbo, or jambalaya later on.
Ben Smith
