This past weekend, 6th Man had our very first crawfish boil, and boy, was it a party! We had a few seasoned boilers on deck, but for those of us that hadn’t hosted a boil before, it was a big experiment. All in all, we had a successful run. We’ll share our ups and downs with you, and what we learned that will hopefully make for a pro-boil next time around.
We were expecting around 35 people, so we planned for about two pounds of crawfish per person and called Louisiana Seafood Company earlier that week to place our order.
We picked up our mud bugs around 2pm Saturday and rented the boiler from them as well. The boiler was very large, much bigger than we expected. In retrospect, we should have started boiling the water as soon as we returned with the equipment. Pro Tip: 100+ gallons of water takes a very long time to boil. At this point, had bitten off a little more than we could chew and did not realize the difference this industrial size boiler would make compared to the turkey fryers you usually see at a DIY boil. Check this thing out…
Still, we moved forward, iced down a delicious keg from Tennessee Brew Works, and began prep work for the additional items we would boil with the bugs.
We ended up getting two fat sacks of crawfish. Crawfish typically come in 30ish pound sacks, and when you pick them up live, you need one cooler per sack to store them in. Before you boil them, you have to go through a culling process. This is where you pick the dead crawfish out. On average, you’ll lose about 10% of your bugs during this process, but you definitely do not want to eat those that are dead upon arrival.
Transport and rinse:
Dump, cull, and place back in the cooler until it’s time to cook:
For a 60lbs crawfish boil, we used the following:
7 large onions (quartered)
12 Lemons (halfed)
6 heads of garlic
2 bunches of celery (cut into thirds)
5 lbs of sausage
16 lbs of red potatoes (halfed)
3 larges boxes of mushrooms
60ish pieces of mini frozen corn cobs
4.5 lbs bag of crab, shrimp, crawfish boil seasoning
8 – 3oz bags of Zatarain’s crab, shrimp, crawfish boil
5 – 4oz bottles of liquid crab boil
1 lbs Morton’s salt
1.75oz cayenne pepper
3 – .12oz container of bay leaves
Add the seasonings, potatoes, lemons, and onion first. As far as what goes next, we just went for it and dumped it all in. That’s probably not the best way to go about it, but we had been waiting for the water to boil for so long, we just went for it. It turned out great!
Once the crawfish were ready, we dumped them on a large folding table covered with newspaper. It was time to feast. Normally, we would advise waiting a few minutes for everything to cool. But if you’re hungry, just go for it. We did…
And it was delicious.
