April 30, 2013 Dinner- Crawfish Etoufée

April 30, 2013 Dinner- Crawfish Etoufée

I must be in a down home retro frame of mind with Texas steak dinner last night and one of my favorite Cajun dishes tonight.  Actually, I try to balance my surf and turf and we were heavy on the turf last night. So I went pretty heavy on the surf tonight.  

First let me show you Paul Prudhomme’s recipe for Crawfish etoufée and then I will describe how we made it.

We use one large skillet and one large enameled casserole (Le Creuset 6 3/4 to 7 quart).  Suzette made three cups of seafood stock with some PPI chicken parts and dehydrated instant dashi cooked in water for about thirty minutes and I diced 1 cup each of celery, onion, and red bell pepper, plus 1 Tbsp. of fresh garlic.  Then Suzette said, “We are making one half of the recipe, so we need ½ cup of green onion.”  So I chopped up the two large green onions we had picked from our garden.

Tonight we put ¾ cup of oil instead of the 7 Tbsp. of oil into the skillet and started sprinkling in flour slowly stirring all the time to eliminate any lumps, until the mixture thickened and took on color.  When we had a thick light brown paste we added to the skillet 1 cup each of finely diced celery, red bell pepper, and onion with 1Tbsp of garlic and most of the seasoning (thyme, white pepper, black pepper, basil and salt).  The heat under the roux mixture was reduced and cooked for a bit.  Then Suzette put 4 ounces of butter into the casserole and I added 1 lb. of crawfish tails and heated the casserole until the butter melted and then cooked the crawfish (Nantucket Shoals $14.99) in the butter for about five minutes.  We then transferred the roux mixture to the casserole and added three cups of stock and ¼ cup of chopped green onion and cooked the roux and crawfish mixture adjusting the seasonings by adding salt until it tasted good and bit of water to smooth the dish to a creamy consistency.  We then added three cups of greens, mostly de-stemmed kale, cut to bite sized pieces from our garden to the casserole and cooked the mixture some more.   Suzette said the flavors were not right.  I tasted and got a sharp spicy flavor.  So Suzette added an additional 4 ounces of butter to smooth out the flavors in the dish and we cooked that in until the butter melted.  After about another five minutes we had a full casserole of etoufée.   The consistency was very creamy, yet the bell pepper was still crisp although the celery and onion had softened and the greens had collapsed.

I heated 1½ - 2 cups of PPI basmati rice in the microwave and fetched two bottles of Negra Modelo from the basement and we were ready to eat.

I put approximately ¾ to 1 cup of cooked rice into each of two pasta bowls and then we each ladled scoops of etoufée onto the rice.  It was delicious.  Still one of my favorite Cajun dishes.  Like Jody said when he came into the kitchen while we were cooking the dish to discuss Suzette’s car repair, “We used to catch those little critters in the ditches in Corrales.”  Didn’t all of us, who lived near creeks, catch crawdads when we were young?  Perhaps there is that element of childhood fascination in this dish also.   I find it to be an elegant dish, akin to Homard Á L'Américaine (Lobster w/ Wine, Tomatoes, Garlic & Herbs).

This recipe makes enough to serve 8 to 10 people so it is a great party dish.  For parties, Suzette likes to make dirty rice with chopped chicken livers and gizzards cooked into the rice. 

Here is what was left after Suzette and I took all we could eat, still about five to six cups of etoufee.  Note that the dark color of the dish is due to the darkened color of the roux, which is important because cooking the roux cooks and flavors the flour.  Roux is essentially a thickened cream sauce base made with oil and flour instead of butter and flour.  The resemblance of the etoufee sauce to the sauce in Homard A L' Americaine is striking, because both make a seafood stock from the leftover parts of the seafood cooked in water.  Both dishes include fresh vegetables and spices and herbs in the sauce and the body of the dish in both is a seafood cream sauce. 
 

 

Bon Appétit