Crazy for crawfish? Mudbug season is here
CAN’T WAIT FOR MUDBUG SEASON? IT’S HERE, BUT FANS CAN USE FROZEN TAIL MEAT YEAR-ROUND
Ah, crawfish season. The stained and sticky fingers, greasy lips and butter-splatted shirts.
If you’re like me, a crawfish boil — aside from the camaraderie and beer — holds little allure. I don’t have the patience to extract the tiny nuggets of tail meat, zero interest in sucking the gooey fat, delectable as it is, from the briny head. And then there’s the mess.
By no means am I a mudbug fuddy-duddy. I love the flavor and texture of the pink curlicues of tail meat. And all the creative things chefs and home cooks can do with them: étouffée, bisque, dip, enchiladas, beignets and fried rice, just to name a few. My appreciation for swampy critters peaks during my yearly sojourn to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (this year starting April 26), where we often head straight to the Crawfish Monica booth to savor a dish of spiral pasta judiciously coated in a creamy sauce studded with plump crawfish. Anyone who has tasted Crawfish Monica knows what a glorious thing it is.
Cooking with crawfish is easy thanks to the frozen packets of pre-cooked tail meat you can find in the frozen-seafood section of your supermarket, available all year round. Sold by the pound — I found them at H-E-B
and Kroger for about $12 — these bags of crawfish in their fat are freshwater-crustacean gold. All you have to do is defrost and add to recipes. Some recipes suggest draining the crawfish of the liquid, which contains the sometimes yellowish or orange-hued fat from the heads. It actually isn’t pure fat but an organ in the head of the crawfish that functions like a liver.
The recipes I’m sharing here were all made with thawed, frozen crawfish tail meat harvested and packed in Louisiana. I did not drain the liquid/fat because it adds flavor. The recipe called Crawfish and Cream Over Pasta is a pretty good facsimile of the famous Crawfish Monica, which is a registered trademark of New Orleans-based Kajun Kettle Foods, creators of one of the best-known foods at the Jazz Fest. Call it what you want, it’s delicious.