It’s spring and that means it’s crawfish season. Time to get a bunch of folks over and boil the little bastards alive.
When you pick a mudbug up - he'll spread his claws out and try to look as big and as mean as he can. He still looks delicious - no matter how hard he tries.
The equipment used in a crawfish boil. A good crawfish cooker makes a sound like a jet engine on idle.
There are plenty of things that go good with crawfish. A plate of good, briny, small oysters on the half shell is one of the best.
There are always a few that try to make an escape from the impending immolation.
You pour the cooked crawfish out onto a table covered in newsprint or brown paper (if you feel like bein' fancypants).
There's lots you can cook up with the crawfish. Corn, crabs - or here, sausage, garlic heads, and taters. It all takes the spice and the flavor of the crawfish.
And then it is time to chow down.
Bill Chance 
Informative. That’s some pretty neat write.
Man, that looks good – probably enough sodium in the spice to kill me, though…
Ohhhh, but you ie happy! I gare-on-tee! 🙂
We used the powdered Zatarain’s spice, which must have a lot of salt in it – but a lot of folks swear by the liquid, which I think is a lot lower in sodium. You sure could boil them with hot pepper powder and no salt.
Great post! Takes me back to when I was a kid growing’ up in da Miss’ippi delta. We’d made a long handled dredge to fish ’em outta da creeks an’ bayous. Get a bucket or two and do ’em up jus’ like you show. As Jerry Clower used to say, Eeee-dawgies!
Thanks, I used to catch crawfish for bait, but it would be too much work to catch ’em to eat. In the Midwest you catch them in creeks by using a bit of bacon on the end of a string.
In Oklahoma, we’d roll up our pant legs and go after them by hand. Not wasting bacon!
Yum!!
No kidding!
Your pictures look like home. Ironically, suggesting crabs threw me off. I don’t think I’ve ever had crab at a crawfish boil, but can’t think of a good reason as to why not.
A few years ago there was a shortage of crawfish (cold snap in Louisiana, I think) and a lot of folks here supplemented the mud bugs with crabs. Way too much work as far as I’m concerned.
At one of those where we were short of crawfish I ate four garlic heads to make up the difference. The next day my family made me sit out in the yard all day.
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There is nothing better than a crawfish boil. My other favorite southern culinary experience – roasting a hundred and forty pound pig. It took something like seventeen hours. I was assigned the 2am to 6am watch.