Today on Backyard Bayou we're taking you full
circle! We're going from bait to plate and it all
starts south of the intercoastal waterway in Franklin, Louisiana at St. Mary's Seafood
& Marina. This truly was one of the most interesting
days of filming that we've ever had in the history of the series. Let's catch up with our grand tour guide for
the day. This is Daniel Edgar. Daniel, thank you for having us. So what is St. Mary's Seafood? St. Mary's Seafood is basically a distributor. A wholesale distributor. We have boats that go out in the morning. They buy bait, gas, all of their supplies,
fish all day. When they come in, we buy their catch, put
it on palettes, and wholesale it to distributors. My dad was a commercial fisherman, fur trapper,
you know we lived, born and raised in the swamp out on the bay in the Gulf and we fish
everything from catfish to crabs, crawfish, shrimp. Everything. That's our entire life. I also have a bait company in Abbeville. This company can't survive without bait, so
I have my own bait company. So is that where we're going? We're going to your bait company? Yes, we're going to go to my bait company,
yessir. Okay. And that's where it all starts. It starts with bait, then the trap, the to
harvest, then to transportation, then to restaurant, and then the table. So we're going to go full circle today. Full circle. Yessir. As we make our way to LA Seafood, Daniel tells
me about their almost 200 foot long fishing boat and I'm getting more and more excited
because he tells me that the boat just made a drop off of hundreds of tons of Gulf Herring
or what he calls Pogie. This is higher in protein, higher in oil,
higher in fat than any fish swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. And what do you use this fish for? Bait. This is a bait that we use for crawfish, crabs,
and catfish. The reason I started this company was there
were no more bait companies in Louisiana. Louisiana, 90 to 95 percent of our bait needs,
we were buying from Virginia and New Jersey from the East Coast. The last bait company we had in Louisiana
closed down in '07 and Louisiana we struggled for bait, fought over bait, little price wars,
trying to get bait. So you could imagine like right now if we
ran out of bait you'd walk into a restaurant and say I'd like three pound of crawfish and
they'll say we don't have any because we're out of bait. Every bank, every farm operation, every restaurant,
every part of this culture depends on the success of this company right here. You don't really think about the bait used
to catch your food. Whenever you're looking at the seafood on
the plate you're not really thinking about, okay, well what got this seafood in the net
or on the line in the first place. Crawfish didn't go in that trap just because they like it in there! So what you're saying is "No bait, no plate." That's right. This room is one of the most critical parts
of the operation here at LA Bait. Once the Pogie or the Gulf Herring comes off
of the bait boat, which is what they use to go out and catch these guys, they're brought
here. So one of these two tanks. This tank here holds 100 tons, 50 on each
side, of the fish. This is where they're individually quick frozen. What that means is that they're put in a brine
solution which is about 22 percent saltwater that is super chilled down to 10 or 12 degrees. What happens is because that brine solution
will not freeze, the fish will. And because the solution doesn't freeze they
don't turn in to big blocks of ice. They are actually frozen individually which
where IQF comes from, so if we grab one of these guys, and you can tell there is a lot
of them, this guy is frozen solid and is going to stay that way until he's pulled out. This guy right here could be catching crabs
tomorrow. I think I just got put to work! This is really, really cold. These hoses are pumping the same 10 to 12
degree saltwater brine and there's a reason why these guys are wearing gloves and long
sleeves and I'm not. I'm going to go warm my hands up because I
can't feel my fingers. So Daniel is waiting right now to fulfill
a request that I had. Right over here is a spout, I call it the
fish shooter, I've gotta play with the toy, so we're going to find out if we can do it. We're here at St. Mary's molting room and this
is where they take the Blue Crabs that come in and this is where your Soft-shell Crab
will come from. This is a Blue Crab right here. Right in the middle of molting. You can see that its exiting its shell right
here. So here is the old shell. Here's the crab coming out of that shell. You can see the difference in texture. This is really, really soft right here. As soon as this crab exits its shell, its
going to leave it behind. It looks just like a crab, but there's nobody
home. Lift this us. Nobody's here. This is one that just freshly molted probably
just a couple of minutes ago. And she's probably grown about 30 percent
in size and she's really really soft. This may look like a basket of crabs, but
this is actually all of the molts that have been pulled out of the water, so there are
no crabs in this, these are just the old empty shells. This is the end result, but once they molt,
we let them firm up a little bit where they can physically hold their shape pretty good,
we put them in these coolers, and every couple of days the truck comes sometimes he'll come
everyday. Sometimes if we're doing one hundred dozen
a day, then the truck comes pretty often. It just depends on how much, the type of season,
the time of the year. And these guys are still alive? Yeah, in the cooler, they'll stay alive a
couple of days and that's why they like them a little firmer. You see this one, its a little soft? Touch this one. They took that one out a little too soon,
but the restaurants like them just a little bit leathery. They live longer, they hold up better. And they can't pinch you? No, oh no, they can't bite you. They're too soft! They're soft shells. As we continue our journey from bait to plate,
now its time to pull some crawfish out of the water. Daniel is taking us to his crawfish farms
just outside of Abbeville, Louisiana and as we turn off of the asphalt and onto the dirt
road, we go down these winding trails where we do our very best not to drive into these
ponds, which is where we're going to get the crawfish. This is where we find Mitch and Mitch is going
to do his very best to teach me the finer art of crawfish harvesting. We got one down here! Now grab the other one. There we go. Mitch, how long have you been doing this? All my life. Since I was five years old. We put us over the weight limit, so we're
stuck. This is where I get snake bit. Now is when we need the camera. Oh, now its over the boot! Alligator! Alligator! What! Alligator? No, keep going Jake. Keep going. You alright. Ain't no alligator. Ain't no alligators, I'm just joking. Keep going back Jake. Alright. Now push the front end that way. This way? Yeah. There you go. Now, jump in. Walk us all the way back. And as I try to dry out my boots, I notice
that the guys are sorting the crawfish and not in the way that I expected. They're not sorting them by size. They're actually sorting them by color. That's a different species. They're basically a river crawfish. See theres a male and there is a female. See the male here? He's got four. Us guys here just got one, he's got four. And here's the female. And you can see the claws. You see how his claws are a lot longer than
hers? The males have a lot longer claws. Do they taste any different? Ah, they taste a little different, but if
there's Tony Chachere's Seasoning on it, you can't hardly tell. There's no such thing as a bad crawfish. You know, this is our passion. My son, my family, we love raising crawfish. We love fishing, love being in the swamp. My dad introduced me to the swamp when I was
a little bitty kid and we never wanted to leave. Sometimes when your hands are all busted up
and you have to tie a string to the bedpost to hold your hand up, so you could sleep because
if you put it down you'll hurt your hand. When you're really catching a lot of fish,
yeah, sometimes you get tired and you just wait for a day when its just pouring down
rain or bad bad weather and you have an excuse to skip a day, but every time you skip a day,
you can't make up for that money. It's gone. You don't know about the hurricanes in the
future. Lost days. Broken motors. Problems. It just bothers you to know that you've got
crabs or fish in those nets and you need to be taking them out to catch some more. If you can raise your family, keep them out
of trouble, and pay the bills, that's as good as the rich God can do. No one can do any better. So its the end of the day here at St. Mary's
Seafood & Marina. We started the day, we found our bait, we
spent the day pulling the crawfish from the traps. I say, we spent the day pulling the crawfish
from the traps, they spent the day pulling crawfish from the traps and I spent the day
getting in the way, so now, we're back here and its time to unload the crawfish. Today's haul from today's group brought in
about fifty or sixty sacks, so they'll get weighed and pre-graded. Now its time for us to take the crawfish back
to Shreveport and we're going to show you what we can do with them. Now my favorite part is finally here. Its time for our crawfish boil. We completed that journey from bait to plate
and even so, its really easy to take for granted the seafood that this state provides to us
and now I believe we have a really interesting perspective on where it all comes from. You may think that when you're buying seafood,
you may be contributing to a CEO buying his next boat, but even though this CEO is buying
his next boat, its going to be one of these. One of these fishing boats, right? No Bahama yachts? The people that buy Louisiana Seafood, they
support a lot of families. Lot of families, local people that give their
lives, bad weather, rough weather, cold weather to produce and to supply a real good quality
product. This episode is brought to you by the Louisiana
Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board and Louisiana - Feed Your Soul.
