|
Post by casimira on Mar 25, 2021 19:01:14 GMT
I really enjoyed the video (by tod2), but it makes me laugh to imagine how disgusted so many people would be to have this delicious meal. Even in France, I have a number of friends who don't want to touch mussels or shrimp and will only eat them if everything "unacceptable" has been removed. So sad! The same goes for crabs and lobster for a lot of people. It makes my husband crazy!!! I too, find it a tad too fussy for people to eschew some of the "disgusting" parts of these shellfish.
|
|
|
Post by casimira on Mar 25, 2021 19:24:33 GMT
This is a very popular song written and performed by a local band (they played at our wedding reception!!)
|
|
|
Post by mickthecactus on Mar 25, 2021 19:36:34 GMT
For Blue Crab boils on the Eastern shore we used Old Bay which, at that time, was local. Since McCormick bought the rights to the seasoning, one can find it pretty much everywhere. Would that be good for crawfish? Old Bay Spice is perfectly fine for such things, but I always up the ante with extra Thai chillies or Cayenne pepper or other such items. But Old Bay is quite spicy enough for most people. I used to use it a lot more but for some reason it has moved to the back of my spice cabinet -- I still have one and a half tins of it on hand. I must bring it out again before it become totally useless. Old Bay Spice sounds like a men’s deodorant.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Mar 25, 2021 20:32:52 GMT
I too, find it a tad too fussy for people to eschew some of the "disgusting" parts of these shellfish. I try to sit next to those people so I can snag all the heads they discard.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on Mar 26, 2021 8:34:56 GMT
I try to sit next to those people so I can snag all the heads they discard. Then you and I will be elbowing each other out of the way!! - I'm slowly getting my grandsons to appreciate the "gold" everyone does not appreciate. My family discard all those delicious little heads my way. Now, a story from the past on how I learned the best of a langoustine is the head meat: A hundred years or so ago, a young and very inexperienced girl was taken out to dinner in a group from the office. My partner at the dinner was a much older (35+) man who was in town on business. The restaurant was a small "Mom & Pops" establishment - they were either French, Portuguese or Italian but in those days it was all the same to me! A huge bowl brimming with langoustines hanging over the sides arrived on the table still warm from the pot. Another dish was placed nearby with homemade mayonnaise. It was thick and gloopy and not at all like Cross & Blackwell. Then the "twist the head off" lesson was shown to me, and although very very reluctant, I shlurrrped my first lango head. I don't think I was that bowled over as I had never eaten a crustacean before. I doesn't take long to acquire the desire to have just one more....very often. Now, years down the line, I wonder what that foreign man thought of a silly girl who he had the pleasure of showing the art of langoustine eating.
|
|
|
Post by casimira on Mar 26, 2021 13:29:43 GMT
Hopefully he took the plunge and gave it a try and is forever indebted to a very wise and savvy young girl.
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Mar 26, 2021 15:41:51 GMT
I sit on the fence regarding head sucking. Sometimes I want to do it and sometimes I don't, particularly if there is enough of the other stuff to sate me.
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on Mar 26, 2021 15:46:42 GMT
In that case it would be 1 tail, one suck, One tail, one suck, until you are quite sick of the process and now darn hungry!
|
|
|
Post by tod2 on Mar 26, 2021 15:53:52 GMT
Hopefully he took the plunge and gave it a try and is forever indebted to a very wise and savvy young girl. He must have thought of me as delightful company as he presented me with a bottle of " je reviens " by Worth the next time we met over dinner. In those days the reciprocation of sex for dinner was taboo, so the gentleman (mostly married) was only too happy to have a "Dolly-bird" on his arm while in a foreign country doing business.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jun 5, 2021 18:09:10 GMT
My son sent me this link via facebook. I find it hilarious, but also appalling: Crawfish Boils Land Rookies in Hot WaterIf you're on facebook, you can get to the article from this link: www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=8304333127&story_fbid=10161137293178128If you're not on fb, you can try this link, but might be paywalled, thus the Spoiler with full text (but no pictures) below: www.wsj.com/articles/crawfish-boils-land-rookies-in-hot-water-11622840790{Spoiler}Crawfish Boils Land Rookies in Hot Water
Boxes of live crawfish ship overnight from Louisiana, but many buyers in the U.S. who saw them on TikTok don’t know what to do when they arrive Crawfish at Frugé Aquafarms in Louisiana. RACHEL WOLFE/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL By Rachel Wolfe June 4, 2021 5:06 pm ET
BRANCH, La.—As a rule, crawfish from the Frugé family farm never went far in life.
This season, though, more of them are landing everywhere from San Francisco to New York City, including households with no clue how to handle the crustacean—which arrive still kicking—much less how to cook and eat them. One Montana family dumped their 10-pound bag of mudbugs into a plastic kiddie pool without realizing their escape artistry.
“Crawfish are like walking Legos,” Ms. Frugé said. “They link together, and they’ll flip themselves up and out of anywhere. The family was running around chasing them.”
They are shipped overnight in cold packs and delivered alive. One rookie mistake is leaving them out on the doorstep. The unschooled don’t realize how perishable they are, said Justin Smith, owner of Louisiana Crawfish Company Inc. Once dead, they can go rancid in hours.
Novice customers call and say, “ ‘Hey, I got this crawfish on Wednesday and it’s Saturday and I want to cook them but it doesn’t look like any of them are alive,’ ” Mr. Smith said. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”
Preparing them is no picnic. Crawfish are notoriously tedious to peel, and 100 pounds of live shellfish yield only about 14 pounds of meat. The most inexperienced eaters try to take a bite with the shell still on.
The Frugé family has been harvesting crawfish since the 1980s in ponds on the same land they have been farming since the 1800s. Crawfish sales at Frugé Aquafarms jumped after a TikTok of a crawfish boil was posted in February for the two million followers of the company’s social- media manager, Justin “Stalecracker” Chiasson.
“Within five seconds, we had 30,000 clicks on the website,” Mr. Chiasson said. While pleased with his online influence, he frets a little about crawfish in the hands of strangers. despite arriving with instructions.
“I’ve seen people boil them so much the meat looks like snot running out of the shell,” he said, pulling a crawfish trap out of waist-deep water at the Frugé farm. “They’re like, ‘What’d we do wrong?’ ”
One customer, Megan Hain, invited 50 of her friends and neighbors in Indianapolis last month to her first crawfish boil. “When the first box showed up I was, like, ‘What have we done?’ ” said Ms. Hain, 37.
Her parents, both from New Orleans, hosted boils during her childhood in Tampa. Faced with cooking 70 pounds of live crawfish on her own, she felt like the one landing in hot water.
“They were in a big Styrofoam cooler that said, ‘Live crawfish,’ ” she said. “I was, like, ‘Well, this is my responsibility now.’ ”
The main entree drew the neighborhood kids, Ms. Hain said. Her 5-year-old son Roan and a friend staged a wedding for two crawfish. “They stood them up on a cooler and pronounced that they were husband and wife crawfish and put their claws together,” she said.
New York City chef Julian Medina was among the early visitors to the Frugé farm website after seeing Mr. Chiasson’s TikTok, which included a tutorial, with his 13-year-old daughter. It inspired him to host a crawfish boil for his 46th birthday in April.
“They were not my favorite,” his daughter Olivia Medina said afterward. Too spicy. Plus, she said, she felt weird eating the critters after watching them crawl around hours earlier.
Other crawfish distributors also have seen a surge in demand. Louisiana Crawfish Company has had 30% growth from a year earlier, fueled primarily by sales to far-flung customers stuck close to home in the pandemic, said Mr. Smith, the owner.
Schaefer Seafood in Metairie, La., has shipped more crawfish to more distant locales this year than ever. Many buyers first ate them in visits to New Orleans and wanted to try cooking them at home, owner Merlin Schaefer said.
Crawfish has long been a popular dish in Louisiana and eastern Texas but not easy to find elsewhere. When Michael Maenza started his “Mr. Mudbug” crawfish catering and shipping company in 1986, he estimated that less than 10% of Americans were familiar with his product.
These days, the company arranges crawfish boils where “more than half of people know how to eat them,” Mr. Maenza said, crediting the internet.
His advice for beginners is to secure a big enough pot. “We get calls from people who are, like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ So we try to walk them through it and say, ‘First of all, you’re only as good as your equipment.’”
The day before a customer delivery date, farmers scoop the crawfish out of the swamps where they are raised. (Wild crawfish, of course, live in bayous and streams.) They are then cleaned, weighed, packed and shipped.
“Most people did not believe that you could order crawfish, and they’ll still be alive when they get to Connecticut or New York,” Mr. Chiasson said.
In Lyme, Conn., Nora Lynn Leech, 42, woke up the day after her family’s first crawfish boil and was surprised by an escapee crawling the kitchen floor.
“It was before her morning coffee,” said her husband, Jac Lahav, 44. “She saved it in a little bowl of water.”
The family’s boil premiere was a success overall, Mr. Lahav said, but guests with “tame tastes” weren’t interested.
Phoenix food blogger Michelle Bock, 46, saw a similar reaction hosting her first boil last spring. Some guests, she said, “thought they kind of looked like roaches.”
A group of first-timers, including Mr. Lahav, are turning into experienced hands. “We’ve done it three or four times since then,” he said, “and every time it keeps getting better.”
Write to Rachel Wolfe at rachel.wolfe@wsj.com
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 Appeared in the June 5, 2021, print edition as 'Louisiana Crawfish Boil Lands Rookies in Hot Water.'
|
|