Before I get to the crawfish boil details, here's a picture of a catfish I caught recently. I caught 5 of them on Saturday, but only kept this one. It was YUMMY!
So, my little group at work got together in Bay City, TX to have a crawfish boil and I RSVP'ed that I'd be there. Karen and I have never been to one, so this was a great opportunity to see what all of the hoo-ha is about. The guy who hosted it is from New Orleans so this was going to be a pretty authentic example of what true crawfish boils are like. He ordered 300 lbs. of crawfish--which, now I understand why (we'll get to that in a minute). Here are SOME of the 300 lbs of crawfish:
Once they have the crawfish, they need to clean them out--something I DON'T think they do at the prawn and shrimp shack that Jon sent me to in Hawaii. How do they clean them out? They put them in a vat of concentrated salt water which apparently makes them throw up and poo a lot. That way, there's less of that type of junk in them when you cook/eat them. That doesn't mean it ALL gets out, but most of it does. Here's the vat of salt water/crawfish.
ONce they've been "cleaned out," they go into these two holding pots. During each transfer (frm the bags to the salt water vat, from the vat to these holding containers, from these holding containers to the boiler/pot, they find the dead crawfish and throw them away). They only want to have live, fresh crawfish cooked and eaten. So with so many crawfish to go through, how do they know they found all of the dead ones? They don't. It's up to the people eating them to find the last ones that slipped through. Apparently, if they have a curled tail, it means they died in the pot. If the tails are straight, it means they must have died before hand and are not good to be eaten. Anyway--here are the holding pots:
Here are the dead ones they found and are throwing away:
So, my little group at work got together in Bay City, TX to have a crawfish boil and I RSVP'ed that I'd be there. Karen and I have never been to one, so this was a great opportunity to see what all of the hoo-ha is about. The guy who hosted it is from New Orleans so this was going to be a pretty authentic example of what true crawfish boils are like. He ordered 300 lbs. of crawfish--which, now I understand why (we'll get to that in a minute). Here are SOME of the 300 lbs of crawfish:
Once they have the crawfish, they need to clean them out--something I DON'T think they do at the prawn and shrimp shack that Jon sent me to in Hawaii. How do they clean them out? They put them in a vat of concentrated salt water which apparently makes them throw up and poo a lot. That way, there's less of that type of junk in them when you cook/eat them. That doesn't mean it ALL gets out, but most of it does. Here's the vat of salt water/crawfish.
ONce they've been "cleaned out," they go into these two holding pots. During each transfer (frm the bags to the salt water vat, from the vat to these holding containers, from these holding containers to the boiler/pot, they find the dead crawfish and throw them away). They only want to have live, fresh crawfish cooked and eaten. So with so many crawfish to go through, how do they know they found all of the dead ones? They don't. It's up to the people eating them to find the last ones that slipped through. Apparently, if they have a curled tail, it means they died in the pot. If the tails are straight, it means they must have died before hand and are not good to be eaten. Anyway--here are the holding pots:
Here are the dead ones they found and are throwing away:
