December 3, 2013 Crawfish Etoufée

December 3, 2013 Crawfish Etoufée

This is a recipe we make pretty often, because it is one of my favorite Cajun dishes.  We use Paul Prudhomme’s recipe from his Louisiana Kitchen Cookbook.

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.  Suzette made three cups of chicken stock with some PPI chicken and water 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 a variation of the recipe with more vegetables and fewer crawfish.”  I chopped up about  ¾ cup each of celery, green bell pepper and onion and four green onions I picked from our garden.

Tonight Suzette put about 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 the ¾ cup each of finely diced celery, green bell pepper, and onion with 1Tbsp of garlic greens.  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 added the ½ cup of minced green onion and then cooked the crawfish (Nantucket Shoals $14.99) in the butter for about five minutes.  We then transferred the roux and vegetable mixture to a sauce pan and added the seasonings (thyme, white pepper, black pepper, basil and salt) and three cups of stock and cooked the roux and about ¾ of the vegetable mixture and the seasonings until it was a smooth creamy consistency.  We then added three cups of roux mixture to the casserole, and cooked the mixture some more to blend the flavors of the ingredients.    After about another five minutes we had a full casserole of etoufée.   The consistency was very creamy and the vegetables had softened.

I heated 1½ - 2 cups of PPI rice in the microwave and fetched two bottles of Shiner Oktoberfest from the garage fridge and we were ready to eat.

 

Suzette put approximately ½ to ¾ cup of cooked rice into each of two pasta bowls and then we each ladled scoops of etoufée onto the rice.  It was delicious.  Delicious.  I find it to be an elegant dish, akin to Homard American and yet sort of Chinese in conceptualization because it is a cooked stew served over rice.

 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. 

Bon Appétit