Crawfish Etouffee | Emeril Lagasse

I'm about to teach you everything you know about etouffee today the French word etouffee literally translates to smother a lot of New Orleans dishes you'll find different things that are smothered in this case we're gonna do crawfish etouffee you can find shrimp étouffée and you can also smother chicken rabbits many different kinds of meat but today we're gonna do crawfish etouffee the beginning of an etouffee is always a room so we'll start with melting some butter alright so I'm gonna move this pot to this burner right over here they continue melting that butter to start off the roof the roux is gonna be our thickening agent for the etouffee at this point I'll simply add the flour you want to do equal parts of butter and flour and what I mean by equal parts is I have a quarter pound of butter and a quarter pound of flour in here so once the flour and butter have come together initially right here this stage of the roux is called a blond roux you use this ruin different applications where you don't really want to add a lot of color to your sauces or your dishes a blond Roux will go into like a bechamel sauce or any you know very light or clear stalks as well when you're making a roux you want to constantly kind of scrape the sides that start building up so that way all of the flour gets cooked pretty evenly at this point I like to use a whisk and sort of just constantly stir that as well the reason why you want to constantly stir your Roux is so it doesn't start to have little burnt pieces on the bottom of the pot while the flour and butter are cooking to make their roof in New Orleans especially a crawfish etouffee is a lot of times made the day after a crawfish boil at the end of a crawfish boil the people who are still hanging around they're still gathered they'll start peeling the rest of the crawfish tails that are left over that nobody has eaten and those crawfish tails will be saved to make the etouffee the next day as you can see the roux is started to slightly Brown and we're gonna bring this roof to a peanut butter color you want to go back then use your spoon and once again scrape all those sides that have built up on the pot now another component of the etouffee is a Trinity the Trinity in New Orleans is the basis of a lot of dishes that are prepared here in the city our Trinity involves onion celery and bell pepper treaty's may vary from region like in France their Trinity is called a mirepoix and instead of bell peppers they use carrots you can also find a Trinity in Spanish cooking which is used in so Fritos so free-throws are a lot of the basis of Spanish dishes like a Paia and stuff like that as you can see the color of the root has definitely darkened a little bit and you're very close to the stage we want to be at for the next step in the a to fake now the next step to building this etouffee is to add the Trinity there's a couple things they're going to start happening once you add the Trinity to it it's going to start cooling down the room which will stop the Browning process of making that Roux as well at this point I'll add four onions you want to have a heavy bottom top when you're making a roof so your dish doesn't burn when you're making it I'll also add celery and green bell peppers if you add red bell peppers and green bell peppers that'll work too but at this point is when you know something good is happening in the pot because it starts to smell really really nicely all these onions all these bell peppers all that celery as well so at this point we have the Trinity in the pot which is cool down the room and it the Trinity itself just cooked down a little bit so it's a little bit soft and we're going to want to add a little bit of green onion bottoms a little bit of garlic as well and some diced tomatoes you find these in a can at the store or you can use freshly diced tomatoes as well now there's a liquid component to this dish and what I have here is shrimp stock you can't find shrimp stock or if you don't have any shrimp stock you can go to the grocery store and get chicken stock which will work in this dish as well I'm going to stir this until it all comes together very lightly and then bring it up a little bit we're gonna add some Cayenne a little bit of tomato paste some of some essence Emeril's essence and a little bit of salt as well well bring this up to a boil and then once it comes up to a boil we'll cover it and cook it for about 30 to 45 minutes until the roux is cooked out and the rubian cooked out means when you go to taste the liquid it doesn't have like a little flour in this like a very lightly grittiness at that point you can tell that the room has been cooked out this may take three to five minutes to come up to a boil it really depends on your stove and how many BTUs it puts out just keep an eye on it because it can to scorch on you and you don't want that to happen so at this point the etouffee has come up to a boil we're gonna let this simmer for about 45 minutes now which I'll drop the heat to about medium-low I'm gonna cover it and what's gonna happen is the roux is gonna start thickening that stock that we added to it 45 minutes from now then you should have a fairly thick etouffee so after about 45 minutes of the etouffee cooking down I'm gonna add our Louisiana crawfish tails that we have I would not recommend using any other crawfish tail meat other than Louisiana crawfish tails due to the flavor is just completely different the stuff that we have down here is it's amazing it's a great product and a lot of a lot of places ship them out if you're not in town if you're trying to make another style of etouffee like a shrimp étouffée you could also add the shrimp towards the end of the cooking process these crawfish tails are already cooked so really what you're gonna do is just heat them up at the end of the 45 minutes but when you have shrimp you're most likely gonna have them raw so you kind of want to cook them maybe like 10 minutes before serving so I have a pot here that's been cooking for about 45 minutes now and it's at the stage where I'm ready to add the crawfish tails and the green onions to the dish now I'm also going to add some green onions and when you survey etouffee normally you want to serve it with some steamed rice I think it's probably the best accompaniment for this dish so what we have here is just a plain steamed rice I like to pour the etouffee alongside of the rice just to kind of give my guests an opportunity to mix it themselves and then we'll just simply garnish everything with a little bit of fresh chopped parsley as well so there you go that's how you make it across the Chez to fake but you can substitute crawfish for shrimp or chicken or even just make like a sausage etouffée as well

Channel: Emeril Lagasse

Views: 598,562

Rating: 4.8103175 out of 5

Keywords: Emeril, Emeril Lagasse, Crawfish Etouffee, Crawfish, Etouffee, Emeril's Delmonico, shellfish, smothering, cajun cooking

Id: RlP-ru8DbTc

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2015