Crawfish Etouffee

I’ve seen my share of recipes for crawfish etouffee. Lemme tell ya. Some of them (even from highly-rated chefs) make me think “Jesus, take the wheel.” Like gumbo, everybody does their etouffee differently. I get it. You have your “thing” with etouffee. I have my “thing.”  What gets my panties in a knot is when your “thing” is tomatoes. Or Rotel. Or anything remotely related to tomatoes. It’s the kind of pet peeve that makes me want to go on an epic crusade against all who combine crawfish and tomatoes in any dish. I mean fist-swingin’ swashbucklin’ St.-Nicholas-punching-a-heretic-in-the-face kind of crusade. Stop that nonsense. Too late for Jesus to take the wheel, cher. You done wrecked yourself by putting those two things together. Crawfish has very delicate flesh and even more delicate fat.  When I was young, the peel shacks in Catahoula (and everywhere else too–I use Catahoula because I grew up there. Calm your tits.) used to save the fat in separate packets that would be included in every package of peeled crawfish. That’s what my grandmothers and great-grandmother used to start the base of their etouffees. Not a roux. Not a mix. Pure, unadulterated crawfish fat. Nowadays, due to the infinite wisdom (sarcasm) of the FDA/food-gods-that-be, the fat is just included in the package bathing the crawfish tails in that luscious golden nectar of the gods. Our problem is getting that fat to cook in our sauce longer so that the flavors can mix. You can’t cook crawfish that long, else you’ll end up with small grey shriveled little specks resembling a tail….still unappetizing nonetheless.

Introducing water as a transport. I buy my crawfish tails direct from Dale Barras’ peel shack which used to be Carl’s Seafood on the Catahoula Highway. Theirs is by far the cleanest and fattiest I have seen. Still, I like to generally check each tail to make sure an errant spinnerette leg didn’t accidentally make it into the package. What I do is dump the crawfish in a bowl and rinse the bag with warm water—and dump that into the bowl also. Add more warm water to the crawfish–enough to cover it. Run your fingers through the tails and kind of shake them up in the warm water. The fat will either float on the water or partially emulsify into the water. Either way, it is removed from the tails and in a medium that you can easily reduce to a nice, rich etouffee sauce.  Put the crawfish tails after they’ve been checked into a different bowl and stick it in the fridge. Reserve every drop of liquid you used on the tails. For the sake of simplicity and the fact that not everybody has 40 people at a time coming to eat at their house, I’ll give you the recipe for two pounds of crawfish–enough to feed four Yankees or two of us.

2 lbs. crawfish tails

4 large yellow onions, diced/minced (but don’t get the squat fat ones–those are Vidalias and are entirely too sweet)

2 tsp. minced garlic

1/4 lb. (one stick) butter (See my previous posts about butter–I mean BUTTER)

salt–don’t even start with me about how much.  Everybody likes different levels of salinity in their dishes

Tony Chachere’s (or Slap Ya Mama Seasoning or whatever)–see previous note about how much. It’s to taste. YOUR taste. Just shake the seasoning over the pot until the spirits of our Cajun ancestors tell you to stop.

Melt butter over medium heat. Add onions and garlic and saute until the onions are “clear”–we really mean translucent. This will release a lot of water from the onions, and that’s okay. Better to have too much water than not enough. Add the water reserved from checking the crawfish. At this point you can add the seasoning but taste as you go! If you’re absolutely not sure how much seasoning to put, use 1/2 to 1 teaspoon at a time, stirring and then tasting after every addition until it gets to the level of seasoning you like. Yes, you might have to taste it a whole lot. Yes, cooking like this will probably make you fat, but I’ve always said to never trust a skinny cook. Reduce this liquid/onion/garlic/butter concoction down to roughly 1/2 to 1/3 of its original volume. Add crawfish tails and cook 15 to 20 minutes but DO NOT OVERCOOK THEM. If the sauce seems a little thin or you didn’t reduce it enough, simply mix a couple of tablespoons of corn starch into about 1/2 cup of warm water and add this slurry to the pot. It’ll thicken up almost immediately. Repeat the starch slurry if necessary.

A side note about color: if the color is a little too orange-y for your tastes (and that sometimes happens due to the variety of crawfish and the crawfish’s varied diet of different baits–the color of the fat changes a little), simply add good ol’ Kitchen Bouquet, a splash at a time, stirring between each splash until the color doesn’t make your sphincter tighten every time you look at it. Kitchen Bouquet is a great color adjuster in a lot of dishes. You have no control over your raw ingredients, but you do have control over how much Kitchen Bouquet you can add to your dish. It adjusts the color without changing the taste one iota. You can get the small bottles at Walmart, but I usually buy the institutional-sized one at Joyce’s.

Another note about the supplier of your crawfish. If you live in the city and can’t make it out to the peel shacks in BFE, that’s okay. Albertson’s and even Walmart sell crawfish, but caveat emptor: READ THE PACKAGE CAREFULLY. Make sure it’s not imported from China and just repackaged here with somebody’s Cajun surname on it. If you even try to cook with that shit, you deserve whatever just deserts the universe hands your sorry ass. If you can’t support our communities and buy local because you want to be cheap and save two bucks a pound……then God help you. Maybe you should live on Taco Bell. Peace out, Girl Scout.