Dine & Cook | Alternative food journalism

Spring is a wonderful time of year in South Louisiana.  It usually kicks off around Mardi Gras with the festivities and pageantry that legends are made of.  The weather provides a refreshing break between the winter (when we are occasionally burdened by wearing jackets and having cold toes due to refusing to put away our flip flops) and the summer (when it is often too unbearably hot and humid to place anything on our feet other than flip flops).

Along with a change in the weather, spring also delivers one of Louisiana’s most unique and cultural culinary products.  Whether they are farm-raised or come from the swampy river basins, there is no doubt that spring in South Louisiana is synonymous with Crawfish Season.

Every year, a faction of friends that originated as a tailgating group for LSU Football, gathers for the “Third Row Crawfish Boil.”  The event serves as an off-season reunion and, really, just an excuse to throw a good party and eat hundreds of pounds of Louisiana mudbugs.

During the peak of the tailgating, the “Third Row Crawfish Boil” saw the consumption of nearly half a ton -- 1000 pounds -- of crawfish in an afternoon.  Now operating at a slightly smaller scale due to not being a bunch of college kids with nothing else to do anymore, the “Third Row Crawfish Boil” this past spring still managed to cook and serve nearly 400 pounds of seasoned crustaceans!

People not from Louisiana may wonder what makes a Louisiana crawfish boil so different than lobsters in Maine or king crabs in Alaska.  The answer is fairly simple: everything is in the seasoning.  A Louisiana seafood boil begins with salt and spice and then builds on that with any number of other various recipes that differ from cook to cook.

At “Third Row,” we use “Slap Ya Mama’s Cajun Seafood Boil” as the base for our pots of seasoned water.  Chefs Eusebio Gorgora and Travis Ducote scoop the blend of red pepper, salt, garlic, paprika, black pepper, and other miscellaneous spices into the large pots of boiling water that have been heating over propane burners.  Then added to the pot to supply even more flavor are lemons, onions, garlic, celery and more cayenne pepper.

Cajun sausage is also typically thrown in the pot for two reasons.  First, it adds a little fat to the otherwise lean boil-- this helps the crawfish peel a little easier (other people use butter or oil for the same reason).  Second, sausage boiled in the crawfish seasoning and spices is amazing!  Seriously, if you put it between some French bread, it could be possibly the best sausage poboy you’ve ever eaten.  (If you aren’t familiar with a poboy, you might just have to keep reading my column and I’ll get to them eventually.)

The other most popular additions to crawfish boils are corn and potatoes.  Rather than being used to season the water, these staples are added to soak up the flavor from everything else.  The corn on the cob plumps with spicy juice while the red potatoes soften to the point where they’ll melt in your mouth.  In the same fashion, we get a little crazy and throw in more produce to soak up the flavors such as button mushrooms and green olives.

Once the water is seasoned to taste and comes to a rolling boil, you are ready to cook the crawfish.  Before doing so, however, some people prefer to wash and purge the crawdaddies.  For the “Third Row” event, we never worry about purging because it takes too much time, and in my opinion isn’t really worth it.

Purging is done by soaking the live crawfish in salt water for a while which forces them to “cleanse themselves.”  Seriously, if you are going to be sucking the heads to get the entire flavor anyway, purging isn’t necessary.  Cleaning isn’t always necessary either when cooking one or two batches.  However, when boiling 400 to 1000 pounds in the same pots, it is important to clean the crawfish or your water will get fairly muddy by the end.

Crawfish are indeed muddy creatures, living in the murky bottoms of ponds and swamps, the critters can be rather filthy after being farmed.  Washing the crawfish means nothing more than rinsing them with a hose to remove some of the mud, and it can’t hurt to search through them for random debris and bait from the traps.

After the rinsing, a large aluminum basket is filled with crawfish almost all the way to the top.  Additional onion, lemon, garlic, corn and potatoes can be thrown on top of the basket to be cooked along with the crawfish.  The basket of live crawfish and goodies is then lowered into the boiling hot water and left there for a short moment in time.  In seven to ten minutes the crawfish are finished cooking, but they aren’t as flavorful as we’d like.  Many people will turn the heat off and let the crawfish soak for up to 30 minutes in the liquid while everything cools.  For us, that takes too much time.  Travis and Eusebio developed a two pot system where one pot is used for boiling and remains hot the entire time while the other pot is used for soaking.  This method optimizes efficiency while still allowing the crawfish to soak long enough for supreme taste.

The vividly bright red crawfish are then spread out over a newspaper-covered table for the rapid consumption and enjoyment of all the eaters.  Peeling crawfish has been turned into an art form amongst many Cajuns that “feed” off of the competitive spirit of a crawfish boil.  If supply is short then the faster you peel, the more you eat!  Also scattered across the table are all the delicious ingredients that are brought to spicy heaven in the seasoning.  Corn, potatoes, garlic, celery, onion, mushrooms, and sausage are all available for consumption, and all are damn fine eating!

A Cajun Crawfish Boil is an amazing display of culinary creativity and true farm-(or wild)-to-table eating.  The live crawfish are rapidly turned into delicious cuisine with the extra kick that Louisiana cooking is known for.  I love forward to spring every year, mostly because I know that with spring comes Crawfish Season!  The process is pretty simple: peel the crawfish, pinch the tail, suck the head, sip your beer, repeat.  As they say in Cajun French Louisiana, “Laissez bon temps rouler!”  Let the good times roll!

Jay D. Ducote is the author of the blog Bite and Booze, which chronicles his culinary and indulgent cultural adventures around Baton Rouge, South Louisiana, and the world.  It can be found at www.biteandbooze.com.  You can also reach him by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and follow him on Twitter @biteandbooze.  Thanks to Eric Ducote of BRBeerScene.com for taking all the pictures for this article.