Passionfruit Butter

That would be a plate of scrumptious, spicy, juicy boiled crawfish. Creepy feelers, spindly legs, bugged-out eyes, tucked tails… it’s all so good. Everywhere else, baby animals and melting snow are indicators of imminent springtime. It’s different here, though. I know when winter (if you could call our dreary 50-degree season that) is over when I come home to a giant brown paper bag from Big Fisherman, filled to the brim with these suckers.

So, to convey to you what this means to me, I’m embarking on a kind of photographic food porn. Brace yourself for all kinds of shellfish smut. Locals, you can nod in agreement (or shake your head in protest). Out-of-towners, take this as affirmation that, yes, we do actually eat these things, believe it or not.

Without further ado… Crawfish Anatomy 101.

Meet and greet. Gaze into those beady black eyes, down that strange concave snout of sorts, and get rid of the antennae if they creep you out toooo much. Whatever you need to do, just to get familiar etc.

Claws. BIG RED CLAWS. Typically, the word “crawfish” refers synecdochically to the tail meat, but I subscribe to the line of thought that says any waste of perfectly delicious food (no matter how nominal it is in amount) is a sin.

On the particular day when I ate these crawfish and took these pictures, it was pretty easy to extract a perfect, intact clawful of meat. I think this is due in part to the fact that crawfish are officially in season, but also simply because they were cooked to perfection. I ate crawfish just a week or two after this, and they were overcooked, so the claw meat shredded and stayed mostly inside the hard shell, and even the tail meat fell apart before I could extract it. Anyhow, to do it right, grab the movable (innermost) claw and gently wiggle it with little bitty motions. Sometimes, if I’m having trouble with that, I break off the non-movable claw so I can kind of pry the meat out of the opened shell that way. Resort to this kind of violence only if you must, as sometimes you can incur minor injuries from the sharpness of the shell.
Back to what I was saying. What you see is crawfish claw meat. It’s much saltier and flakier than, say, lobster meat, and for that reason, it’s neither as renowned nor as delectable. It’s still worth nibbling, though, particularly if your crawfish are well-cooked enough to facilitate your claw meat hunting. It falls apart in your mouth, and it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) taste fishy. Eat it exactly as you would a crab claw, and try not to be put off by the SUPER long claw itself (the proportions are very strange).

Yes, I suck the head (no that’s what she said’s, please). Most people are afraid to do this only because they’re afraid they’ll get the crawfish’s guts or brains or innards, but I’ve never known that to be the case. Instead, what you’ll get is a shot of crawfishy juice. Appetizing? Maybe not at first, but just consider the possibility: it’s brothy (just the water from the boiling) and has the concentrated flavor of all the spices you put into crawfish. Is it now instantly more appealing?
On a side note, if you look close enough, you can see the crawfish’s gory battle wounds of amputated claws. He kind of looks degraded here… sad.

And at last, we have… ze crawfish tail. I always think there’s something kind of bittersweet and noble about the tail. It’s folded under, as though it humbly submitted to death. Maybe I’m crazy to wax poetic about this kind of thing… but it just looks kind of valiant to me.
Anyway. If you didn’t opt to suck the head and your crawfish is still in one piece (with the exception of the severed claws), you just give the tail a gentle twist to separate it from the head. Then, you tear off each of the little ribs of the shell, front to back (I’m sorry I didn’t have the foresight to take a better picture of that part of the tail). Then, put a little pressure on the underside of the tail, pushing from the back (where it fans out) forward, so the meat kind of falls into your hand. Use your own judgment to determine how many ribs to peel off. I can usually get by with two or three, and my record peeling time is four seconds (!). Once I have it, I peel away the bit where the spine would be if crawfish were vertebrates — that bit usually has a lot of yellowy-gray fat that’s harmless to eat (some people like it), though I prefer to bypass it. Do what you want here. It’s all at your discretion.

Warning: that may not be the most beautiful or appetizing image unless you’ve already experienced the joy there is to taste. This is a particularly substantial piece of tail meat. Some find just-plain-boiled crawfish like this to be a bit too “muddy,” but I have grown up with this and it just tastes like springtime to me. (Plus, as I said, a cursory cleaning always solves the problem for me.) It’s true; the flavor of crawfish tail meat isn’t exquisite, delicate, or pristine by any means. That is why they are most often consumed in backyards on newspaper tablecloths. This is more than fine by me, as I love little more than piling a Dixie paper plate high with a pyramid of crawfish carcasses. What you’ll taste is at once briney and sweet, spicy, but almost velvety, if it’s cooked perfectly. The tail you see above was dense, chewy, and substantial, the ideal bite. Whereas shrimp are inherently a bit tougher, crawfish meat gives when you bite into it. It’s not something you really could chew slowly as you pondered the flavors, nor is it something you’d want to chew slowly in a million years. To that extent, crawfish are a bit like popcorn: simple salty snacking that you just can’t stop eating. Sure, you can dress it up (soon, I’ll be blogging on an excellent crawfish mezzaluna that I ate at La Petite Grocery around two and a half lifetimes ago), but sometimes, there’s nothing quite like the humble original.