How to win your crawfish boil

Live crawfish season runs from roughly March through June, putting the Memorial Day weekend at its epicenter. This makes the holiday an ideal time for a crawfish boil in which the mudbugs are cooked in a salty, peppery broth along with corn ears and potatoes and served up along with beer and music. We had access to some excellent fresh crawdads so tried our own boil this year, then went to the event at a local restaurant for comparison. Here are a few best practices we learned along the way that can help you win your crawfish boil.

1. Use either live, lively crawdads or stick with frozen. We were lucky to find a freezer chest of big wrigglers at our local Asian market for a bargain $5.99 a pound. We picked them out ourselves and ended up with 24 crawdads totaling a little over 2 pounds. We also found copious evidence that reheating frozen, cooked crawfish is a fine way to go. Boudreaux, the purveyor we met at the Seafood Expo, only ships frozen product. Packages of frozen bugs were locally on offer at a highly respected source, the fish department at Honest Weight Coop. By comparison, the southern mail order companies selling live crawdads are full of disclaimers and many of the reviewers brag about how few dead bugs they received which is faint praise indeed.


Go for crawdads that measure 4 inches from snout to tip of tail.

2. Choose only big crawfish, 4-inch or longer, and pay extra if you need to. Sucking out the meat isn’t worth the trouble for smaller specimens. Don’t be tempted by sellers who appear to soften the pain of high prices by offering a “field run” of large and small crayfish. The small crawdads contribute to the body count, but add nothing to nutrition and flavor.
3. Allow about 8 large crawfish per person, which will be well under a pound. You can find some hoo-hah from purveyors about how you need two pounds per person or even more, but the best advice come from the fishmonger at Honest Weight who pointed out eaters will get bored or their fingers will wear out before they have eaten their fill. Even with the big crawfish it’s a lot of effort to get the meat out and the flavor is pleasantly aquatic but mild.
4. If you have live crawfish, purge them in fresh water until it is clear. This step is essential, but you don’t need to add ice and salt as some experts insist. (Thanks to Cajun Crawfish for this advice.) Crawfish excrete waste through their gills (yuck!) and since they normally live in humid but not underwater environments dumping them into a bucket of water will shock them into purging themselves. Give it a few minutes then pour the water out and repeat the process. Keep doing this till the water is clear, then drain and prepare your boil.


Crawdad boil at our local restaurant. Charged as a pound, but I think that includes the potato and corn.

5. Use a boil with lots of salt, spicy peppers, granulated garlic and maybe onion and perhaps some Old Bay thrown in. That seems to be the formula for the unfortunately-named Slap Ya Mama (the manufacturer says this is a term of endearment that has nothing to do with actual slapping) which is a best seller on Amazon. We could have found a recipe to make our own blend from scratch, but wanted to control the variables for our experiment. Some online home boil experts will tell you to combine 2 or 3 packaged blends but that seems an expensive way to heat up spicy saltwater.
6. When your water comes to the boil, cook potatoes then add corn and crawdads at the same time. Allow about 4 oz of potatoes (maybe a bit more) and half an ear of corn per person. Cook the potatoes for 10-20 minutes depending on their size (we used unpeeled fingerlings and gave them 15 minutes until they were just beginning to be tender) then add corn and crawdads, bring back to the boil and cook for 7 minutes more. Serve immediately. Note: we also added some sliced onions but those got tangled in the crawfish legs. Better to use onion powder.

That’s it. If you follow the above steps, you win your crawfish boil. Congratulations and happy eating.