Food // Chuck Blount

Crawfish and seafood boils make for an instant party

Crawfish. Crawdads. Mud bugs. Swamp lobsters.

Call them what you will, but get the water boiling and plan a party because the Louisiana staple is about to enter into peak season. Live sacks of the critters are starting to show up at Groomer’s Seafood and area grocery stores, and they will remain through the early summer months.

And while crawfish may be king this time of year, these large pots are also made to tackle everything from shrimp, fish chunks, crabs, vegetables, turkey necks and anything else that takes to the rolling boils. You can find regional takes on boils all over the United States.

If you aren’t already equipped to handle a boil setup, they are inexpensive and easy to use. You can purchase Boil kits with a propane burner, 100-quart aluminum pot with a strainer basket and lid run about $150. All you have to do is attach a traditional gas grill propane tank and add water.

Just don’t use them as a turkey fryer; that requires an entirely different setup.

Pieter Sypesteyn, a Louisiana native who is the chef and owner of San Antonio’s Bud’s Southern Rotisserie, Cookhouse Restaurant and NOLA Brunch and Beignets, said the key to a good crawfish boil isn’t so much about the recipe as the technique and the ability to start with live crawfish fresh out of the mud.

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“There is a definite Coke vs. Pepsi argument that comes with the type of spice mix that you use, but other than that, it’s a straightforward process,” said Sypesteyn, a firm advocate of the Louisiana Fish Fry products. “The real allure is the social aspect.”

According to Sypesteyn, crawfish boils are all-day affair in Louisiana, with about 500 pounds cooked on site. They also hold well and stay hot in a cooler.

“Every guest can put down 8 to 10 pounds through a long afternoon,” Sypesteyn said. “We toss them all on a big long table and just go at it with plenty of cold beer.”

He gives the live crawfish a simple freshwater rinse and 20-minute soak before putting them in the pot. This helps purge the swamp muck.

He adds lots of salt to the water mixture and adds potatoes, corn, garlic heads, hot sauce, mushrooms and whole artichokes into the pot in stages before the crawfish are put in.

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“Instead of that big rolling boil, I find it best to keep it all at a slow simmer,” Sypesteyn said. “That will get more of that seasoning flavor into the crawfish and anything else in the pot.”

The crawfish start to float to the top when they are fully cooked, and Sypesteyn allows them to sit for an additional 20 minutes with the heat turned off. The boil process from beginning to end usually lasts less than an hour.

The low-country boil, which is well known in southern states like South Carolina and Georgia, is a close cousin to the crawfish boil. It tends to be a bit more mild in seasoning, with multiple ingredients tossed into the pot that aren’t as labor intensive to eat as those pesky, messy mud bugs.

The recipes can take many forms, but most trace back to a dish made on the fly from coastal fishermen who cooked an assortment of whatever was harvested in their nets. They called them “catch pots.”

However, in the 1960s, an enterprising seafood provider named Richard Gay developed a specific recipe that he dubbed Frogmore Stew, named after a region in South Carolina. (No frogs are harmed in the making of the stew.)

A proper Frogmore has pounds of large, shell-on shrimp, a few crab clusters, ears of shucked sweet corn, red potatoes, lemon juice, chunks of sausage and most importantly, Old Bay seasoning.

“Old Bay is the key to everything on the East Coast,” said Braunda Moody Smith, owner of Lucy Cooper’s Ice House in San Antonio. “Use it, and use it some more. Citrus is another secret that adds to the flavor profile.”

Smith, who comes from a family with Louisiana roots and who grew up in Georgia, features a classic low-country boil on her daily menu. Her boil pot is loaded with about eight heaping cups of Old Bay, giving it a look of bubbling tomato sauce.

“The key to the low-country boil is the options,” Smith said. “Whoever tells you there is a right way and a wrong way is full of it. The key is to experiment and have fun.”

Boils aren’t limited to bayou and coastal ingredients.

In Northern states like Wisconsin and Michigan, lake communities with a large Scandinavian influence chop fish like lake trout or whitefish into chunks and toss them into the boil pot with potatoes, quartered onions and mountains of salt (upwards of 4 pounds in a 20-gallon boil pot).

It’s not the most complicated of dishes, but the Door County (Wisconsin) Fish Boil is an institution that dates back into the 1800s when the region was home to thousands of hungry lumberjacks. They are currently marketed as a major tourist attraction for the area, which straddles Lake Michigan.

Whatever kind of boil you try, it should be fun and it should feed a crowd.

Recipe: Louisiana Crawfish Boil

Recipe: Low-Country Boil

Recipe: Wisconsin Fish Boil
