How to boil crawfish: step-by-step Louisiana Cajun crawfish boil tutorial

[Music] oh hey I didn't see you there well so as you can probably tell by my shirt Alex from fresh hands again by the way as you can probably tell by my shirt today we're cooking crawfish we're just gonna do a simple crawfish boil nothing too too complex or anything but we're gonna basically walk you guys through how we prep the veggies and everything that goes into the boil how we clean the crawfish up and then how we go through the actual boiling process and then we're gonna eat them in front of you and make you feel really bad about that so anyways no just kidding we will eat in front of you but hopefully not make you feel that hopefully make you want to go out and do it yourself but it's a really simple process it doesn't take any effort and we're gonna do it super simple we're not adding a bunch of crazy ingredients and we're doing it very basic so let's just walk you guys through what we're gonna put in the boil today so I've got some years of corn I'm gonna cut these in half and put them in my boil one of my favorite things to put in the boil is mushrooms we're just gonna leave these whole these things soaked up so much of that juice just absolutely amazing it's one of the best things that I like it sometimes more than the crawfish or the actual seafood that you're throwing in there next thing you gotta have onions we're gonna slice these are gonna slice these up and down so that they kind of stay intact we're gonna actually put those in when we boil the seafood and then we're gonna put more in when we do the additional vegetable oil you got to have garlic garlic every time that's like more the number one things for seafood we got our lemons so we're gonna have these lemons up squeeze them into the water and then we're gonna and then we're just gonna leave those in the entire time then I didn't couldn't find the little red potatoes but what I want to do is just finding these little small ones I think they're gonna be really good never had these little tiny ones before so I think it's gonna be a fun experiment it looks like you can just pop those in your mouth so it could be pretty dangerous and then kind of the last thing that we're gonna put in in addition on the crawfish and everything is we've got two types of sausage here one this is the venison pork-sausage that my family and I make every single year so we're actually gonna probably throw this on the smoker first it's already smoked a little bit but it's not cooked so we're gonna throw that on the smoker probably to give it a little extra flavor and then we're gonna throw it in the boil with the rest of with the rest of the vegetables and sausage and then we picked up some some little cheese filled sausages from Fisher's meats and a little Germantown in Texas so we're going to throw those in as well and then as far as seasoning goes we're just gonna use plain old regulars a dorrance nothing super crazy here we're probably gonna use about this whole thing we're doing a full sack so we got 36 pounds of crawfish and we're gonna use basically this whole thing will use the vast majority of it for our initial boil of the crawfish and then when we add our veggies in we'll put a little bit more in since the crawfish will have soaked up a bunch of that seasoning so let's get to cutting some of these things up I'm not gonna cut everything up I'm only gonna cut the stuff up that I want that that I need to so for instance these ears of corn they're a little bit too big so I'm just gonna start cut them in half typically you'll see folks they'll do you know they'll do the little frozen corns for this I saw the fresh corn so I decided to go in and and and just get the fresh corn so I'll cut these up and and we'll kind of fast-forward through that for you guys [Music] okay guys so now I've got my core and cut up and and just to also prove you guys that I am somewhat legitimate here I'm from South Louisiana I'm from New Orleans I grew up cooking seafood my entire life you know and it's just boiling seafood has become really big up here in North Texas I miss it dearly so when I saw that some of our friends when our friends Dustin and heads and tails crawfish had some sacks of crawfish I said dude we're getting these and we're gonna make a video about to show some folks how we do it so hopefully that makes me seem somewhat legitimate here the next thing we're gonna cut up is like have a few of these onions I'm not gonna cut up a ton of them but we're gonna take you know let's take three about three of these onions or so and like I said I'm just gonna come a long ways because what that's gonna do is it's gonna retain gonna retain that root piece and it's gonna hold them together while I'm in the boil and this these are delicious so you can actually just go in and and eat them eat them whole so I love it so fast-forward through this for you guys okay guys now we got the lemon now I cut the onions cut up so we're gonna go in and we're gonna grab some lemons and do kind of the same thing I'm probably gonna cut all these lemons up so we won't show you guys all that but we'll kind of fast-forward through it as well okay guys now that we got the lemons all cut up we're just gonna cut these these garlic cloves in half and it's a pretty simple process I once again just like you would with with the with the onion just cut them straight down the middle and what that's gonna do is what its gonna hold it together but you're also gonna get all that seasoning into each little piece of garlic and when you're done with it a lot of people will actually overcook the garlic and those squeeze it out onto their crawfish but you can seriously just sit here and just eat it when it's all done so I'm gonna get these cut up and then we'll be back with you in a second all right we've got all of our vegetables ready to go into our boil now so let's just walk through what we've got here we've got our lemon garlic and onion right here we're gonna throw that in with the initial boil so once when I'm getting my water warmed up I'm gonna put all this in there cuz that's gonna flavor the water really well so I'll have a basket going with that in it then we've got our corn and potatoes we went with little bit of smaller potatoes these are gonna be awesome though we're gonna poke some holes in them probably so that we get some seasoning in there and then we got our wood then then we'll throw that in after we do our crawfish then we've got our mushrooms mushrooms are kind of my favorite part because the underside of those mushrooms just absorbs all that all that awesome seasoning and then we've got our sausage so we're gonna throw that sausage on the smoker for a little while let it kind of firm up a little bit and then we'll slice it and we'll throw it out into our boil so stick with me we're gonna go outside I'm gonna fill the pot and we're gonna go and start getting this thing going all right guys it's time to clean our crawfish now so what we have to do is we got to take our cooler here what I've done is I've taken the plug out of the cooler because we're gonna basically be looking at that outlet on our cooler and we're just looking for when that water starts coming out clear when that water starts coming out clear that's when you know your crawfish are clean now a lot of folks will say oh yeah well you gotta purge your crawfish in salt water and you can go look up any article on crawfish and it's going to tell you that that's gonna kill them because they're not salt order creatures and there's a whole myriad of reasons for that and with today's crawfish you really have to clean them that much because most of them are raised in ponds they're not going and catching as many of these out in the swamp as they'd like you to think so anyways but that's what you do and oh how could I forget you know when we walk through all the things you need for the boil there most forgotten you need a nice cool adult beverage so cheers to you so not further ado let's uh let's go over to our crawfish here so you can see I've got these crawfish laying out in the shade you want to leave them in a cool place and then I've got this beach towel and it's wet this beach towel and I was consistently kind of going through it all day because chances are you're gonna get these crawfish way before you're gonna want to cook them so I've had them resting in the shade all day staying nice and cool chillax and over here and so you can see they're still pretty lively and they're ready to pinch you so you got to be a little bit careful I'm not gonna kill you though so I've got a thirty-six pound sack here we're gonna take him and we're gonna put them over in our ice chests so you want to do is get this thing all right got one straggler there the big guy - okay now you don't want to leave it closed for too long but I'm gonna close it down and uh and what we'll do next is I'll just kind of show you guys I'm gonna run water through the top of this and then I'm gonna be looking at this spigot over here and I'm just gonna be waiting for it to come out clear so let me go grit get the water start and I'll bring you guys back when we're running clear out of here okay guys I've been just running this water over the ice chest from side to side for a while now trying to get these guys washed off and you can look down there we've got a clear stream of water running through that it just looks like straight-up water coming out so we know these crawfish are clean and so they're ready we're gonna set these guys aside and then we're gonna get our water warmed up and we'll dump these guys in there all right y'all we are ready to get our water heated up and we're ready to put these we're gonna put these seasoning veggies into our into our boil so I'm just gonna basically drop these into this sack and and then we're gonna put them in the water and then we'll add our seasoning here and we'll be ready to go so let's try to get this should be good there you see taking the sock up and you're ready to go so a lot of folks wait and heat up their water before they bring it up to a boil I just like our wait to wait to put their seasoning in until the water gets up to a boil water with salt in it boils a little bit faster so I like you to stick it all in there and you're ready to go okay guys I know it's really loud but you can see we've got we've got that boil rolling over there on that pot a basket and then we'll put our basket over into the boil that's why it's nice to have some glow [Applause] for all of our guys now when you do is we're going to take that bag that we put in originally and out of the pot and then we're gonna put these fellas in so it's bring it over here [Music] Oh [Music] [Music] a perfect seat so now we're gonna do you're going to bring that back up to a boil we're going to boil for about five minutes and then what we're gonna do is we're going to cut that that Becky put ice on it okay guys we just put the woman we just put the crawfish in the boil and now what we're gonna do is we're gonna basically let that come back up to a boil hold it there for between two and five minutes it depends on who you talk to I like to go you know closer to five minutes on crawfish so we'll let those boil for five minutes and then what we'll do is we'll cut it off because we want to bring that water temperature down and then we're going to throw it back ice on top to get to help the holes through that process a little bit so we'll check back with you once we're back up to a boil okay y'all I can see we got steam coming out it I can see we got steam coming out of that pot right now it's boiling and it's been boiling for about five minutes now so we're gonna go cut the fire to it and then we're gonna lay a bag of ice in there so let's go follow me let's take a look - see right there so now we've cut it we're still going here I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna get this sack out of here right here let's go to our ice chest I'll clean the ice chest down it's gonna make them sink cause you're gonna sink we're gonna leave this soak for about thirty minutes I usually with crabs and things of that nature I'll usually soak them for 30 with these will probably soak them for 20 so yeah well uh you see that ice already all melted but we'll let these soak for a while and then we'll come back to you guys when we're ready to take these out and dump them in the ice chest give them a try and start on our vegetables hey y'all this cooks starting to draw to a close here we've had these crawfish soaked in for a little over 20 minutes now as you can see they've mostly kind of sunk to the bottom I put back our bag put our bag back in we're gonna take that out first and let it drain a little bit set that aside and now we're ready to get these crawfish out of here and then we'll fire this thing back up and we'll put our we'll go ahead and put our veggies in but just kind of let that drain off as much as you can it's a real test of my strength right now hold this should be pretty good now what you just want to do is you wanna dump these into a nice dress and they're ready to eat and so as soon as they cool down a little bit you can let your guests go ahead one thing you want to note is if you're using a roto molded cooler you want to be really careful about leaving that lid shut because these things retain heat so well you'll wind up cooking those crawfish more and you don't want to do that you don't want to overcook these things so now we're gonna do is fire this thing back up and then we're gonna put or at least gonna put our potatoes in first and basically what we're gonna do is just do the same thing we did again I'm gonna add a little bit more seasoning and then we'll catch you back when we're ready to eat okay guys we got the crawfish out now it's time to go ahead and get our vegetables done so what I'm gonna do is this crawfish absorbed a bunch of the seasoning I'm gonna add the rest of this container in now so go ahead and put that in the water there real simple and then we'll go back over to our sack here and so what we want to do is mushrooms doesn't matter how long you cook them so go ahead and dump all of our mushrooms into the side here I got one more of those [Music] should've got rooms frankly the best part of this now we wanted to want to take these potatoes and put them in the sack as well the potatoes take the longest to close so as you can see I've set the corn aside because the corn if you cook it the whole time the winds up happening is it gets really soggy so I don't want to do that I definitely want to have the best possible now what I did do I told you guys I was gonna do is I smoked that sausage so I smoked it and then I cut it in half we can leave that in the whole time too [Music] I got just a big bag of goodness there so I'm gonna go ahead drop it in there let that sink down push that down a little bit stir it up all right just leave this string out and just close the top one so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna wait a little while to put the corn in I'll probably wait till I get back to a boil and it's now we're gonna do is we're gonna crank the seat up hey y'all our vegetables have now been soaking for about 20 minutes we went and added our corn late in the process and now we're ready to go ahead and take that out and put it in the ice chest so let's go ahead and look in here we've got our bag so we'll set that drain once again so we did before remember this has our sausage potatoes and our mushrooms in it and there we go remember we smoked our sausage and then we put it in the boil and we've got these mushrooms and these potatoes these little bite-size potatoes and you can already kind of feel them they're nice and al dente so simmer we added our corn later in the process cuz you don't want your corn to cook quite as long as everything else so we'll let that drain real quick [Music] all right and now that our vegetables are done we're ready to eat so let's go ahead and remember let's take a look at our craw fish so those of you that don't know how to peel a crawfish I take my gloves off really quickly so it's really simple all you do is you take the head pinch it a little bit pull the tail out and just like that have you cooked them well they'll come out super easily so anyways y'all I hope you go and try this at home let us know what you think about it in the comments below and have a great one keep on cooking

Channel: Fresh Hands

Views: 324,168

Keywords: How to boil crawfish, how to boil crayfish, cooking crawfish, louisiana crawfish, seafood, mudbugs, step-by-step Louisiana crawfish boil, crawfish boil, crawfish recipes, how to, tutorial, easy crawfish, crayfish, cajun crawfish boil, cajun, basic boil, easy, zatarain's crawfish, bison coolers, crawfish tutorial, sucking the head, peeling crawfish, jet burner, recipes, boiling vegetables, sausage, mushrooms, onion, garlic, potatoes, smoked sausage, cajun seafood, crawfish, crawdads

Id: BdcL0xg9vso

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 14 2018