Craw Me Daddie

Crayfish, crawfish, crawdads, crawdaddies, mudbugs, or, as I like to call them, inland lobsters are fascinating little critters. Virtually all of us have wondered at some point in our life, “They’re obviously super cool, but what do they taste like?” Well, wonder no more. I’ve done all the heavy lifting in answering this question, if you follow these three simple steps, you’ll be able to satisfy this hunger as well.

Step One: Find a Spot

Crawdaddies earn their reputation as mudbugs. Their favorite environment is to seek shelter in the cracks of rocks buried in mud. They will wait there for a little fish to swim by or just eat the scraps left over from the real big fish. So the best place to find them is where there is at least 2 feet of water with lots of rocks. That’s where the ‘Nanny creek comes into play:

While yes it is a very picturesque spot, you should mainly concentrate on the rocky shore line on the left side. Typically what you see right next to the water is also what you’ll see underneath the water, so I figured this would be a good spot with lots of rocks and (potentially) crawdads. Turns out, I was right – but more on that later. Point being, rocky, muddy bottoms are what you want in terms of location.

Step Two: Make a Trap

This is easily the most technical part and can be a little intimidating at first. All you really need are some big jugs of like fruit punch that have the cones at the top but no handle. After that the key is to basically cut off the coned top and invert it. You can then secure it with zip ties, cut another “door” at the top to put in rocks for sinking and your bait, and poke some more holes so it sinks easily and the crayfish can get some fresh water. It should look like this:

You can tie a rope to it and then you really just want to make sure it is sitting on the creek bed correctly when you drop it in. As for bait, this is what gave me the hardest time. I tried hot dogs but, similar to catfish, the crawfish were not interested. I was recently able to catch a few small bluegill and after “processing” them I put them in the trap. If the fish are small, you’ll want to secure it somehow to the trap because they will flush out of the entrance when the water rushes in.

It honestly depends, but the easiest thing to do is just leave the trap overnight and check it in the morning. Crayfish are nocturnal but it is totally possible you catch a bunch in just a few hours. I think this would probably hold more true in a bigger body of water or in warmer climates where there’s more of them.

Step Three: Catch and Cook!

I’ve written this blog up till now rather confidently. In truth, I had no idea if any of this would actually work. Typically I don’t catch things I’m after until several months of failure. But luckily, it worked! I caught an absolute HAUL of two crayfish. Yes that’s right, two absolute lunkers. I present you the biggest one:

They really are just like lobsters but with disproportionately larger claws. I transported the crawdaddies back to my apartment in a cooler with ice. You have to keep them cold or they die easily, which is not good. Dead crayfish grow a particular bacteria very quickly which makes them completely inedible. Thus, they have to be alive and healthy in your kitchen (just put them in the fridge with a damp paper towel over them):

The real question is how to cook these bad boys. You’ll need a big pot, oranges/lemons, lots of salt and basically whatever spices you want. I heavily featured old bay but also threw in plenty of paprika and even some mustard. You boil the fruit and spices for about 15 minutes:

While you do this, another critical step is to put the crawdaddies into a bowl of water for about 30 minutes, occasionally stirring. These mudbugs literally have mud in them. For whatever reason, putting them in water for a bit allows them to “purge” it from their bodies. This is important if you don’t want to eat mud:

After the boil, now you get to put in some sweet corn and potatoes (little ones). I ran out to the local farmstand – only the best for my crawdaddie boil. Let the veggies boil with the spices for another 15 minutes and then drop the crawdaddies in. 10 minutes later, you got yourself a delicious meal!

Some nice surf and turf! Yes, sure, you could point out the steak is 90% of the meal but then you’d be a jerk. I believe it’s recommended for one person they should have, at minimum, two pounds of crayfish. I didn’t quite meet that goal, so I decided to supplement it. But the veggies came out great and everything was obviously slathered with butter. Now for the question you’ve always wanted to answer – how do they taste?

Below is a two minute video of me struggling to eat a crawdaddie. It is probably highly instructive as to how your own experience will go, but not essential to the rest of this blog. I also use the word sh*t once, for which I apologize. We keep things PG on this fishing blog. I mostly blame the celebratory libations prior to filming.

If you had zero interest in that above video, I will quickly recap. There’s lots of nice fat/juices in the head and it is recommended you suck out. So just snap the head off and, uh, get to sucking! After that, virtually all of the meat is in the tail, so you’ll need to peel it. I still am not totally sure what the best way is to do this. Surprisingly, there really is no meat in the claws despite how big they are. Dip the meat in butter and down the hatch. It really tastes just like lobster.

So that’s that. Nothing better than figuring out how to do something and actually executing the job. I’ve given you all of my accrued knowledge so you too can share in this glory. All you’ve got to do is…

Trap and pray,

Jon (see below for a picture of my cooking assistant)