Pass Lake crayfish

Stonedfish said:
I have a private lake I fish that just screams crawdads. I’ve always wanted to try it there.
Do they need to be put in water to purge and clean them prior to cooking? If so, for how long and is tap water ok?
SF
Click to expand...
We never got so fancy. Just drop a whole mess of em into a big pot of boiling water, watch for em to turn red, then dump and rise with cold water to stop the cooking, then snap off and shuck the tails into a big bowl and pour some melted butter on, squeeze o lemon, and dig in! I never bothered with anything but the tails.
 
Zak, as always, you are spot on. That being said, the video that refers to "processing" these critters to the maximum "wow factor" has some merit IMHO. Of course it would take forever to do this with ten pounds of crawdads, but meticulously processing these Lobsterettes, and presenting the small piece of meat, in each one, as a "delicacy" might just add something "gourmet" to a seafood BBQ. Of course "Pinch the tails, suck the heads" is never to be questioned.
 
  • Love
Reactions: Zak
Jim in Anacortes said:
Zak, as always, you are spot on. That being said, the video that refers to "processing" these critters to the maximum "wow factor" has some merit IMHO. Of course it would take forever to do this with ten pounds of crawdads, but meticulously processing these Lobsterettes, and presenting the small piece of meat, in each one, as a "delicacy" might just add something "gourmet" to a seafood BBQ. Of course "Pinch the tails, suck the heads" is never to be questioned.
Click to expand...
"As always"!🥲 well, shucks (and thanks)! I might fancy it up with a shot glass full of toothpicks...
 
Back in the good ol days….Mineral lake was famous for their crowdeds. One time when I was a carpenter, my buddy and were working on a Safeway deli, and the gal gave us a bunch of post dated chicken drumsticks. We took some string lines from the job, got a case of Rainier and headed to Mineral lake. There were professional pots on the lake…ours were three empty beer cans, long string with a drumstick tied on. We’d go fly fish a bit, make the rounds back to our hi-tech crawdad traps. Then slowly hand wind the string upwards, then before the drumstick broke the surface we’d slip the net under it. The crawdads hung on munching on the drumsticks and we’d scoop them up! We filled a five gallon bucket! Great fun until cleaning and boiling all of them…but super tasty! The demise of that crawdadding was a logging company dredged all the old growth logs which eliminated the crawdad condos. Haven’t tried it since, might have to try this year to see if there’s any recovery.
 
I envision a couple dozen big crawdad tails, perfectly processed, each with there own toothpick, cooked on the grill... for appetizers. Perhaps after a short time in a marinade.
Crawdads or Lobsterettes... Let's go eat em.... that's what I say.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Zak
I want to thank everybody for all the great feedback. I’m excited to give this process a whirl. Stay tuned, when the season opens, I’ll see how it goes.
 
Matt B said:
Pinch the tails, suck the heads.
Click to expand...
Just make sure that you use nice fresh bait before you do that. Maybe add a little seasoning. Or did you not realize that most of what you get out of the heads is stomach and gut contents…. 😜
 
Chucker said:
Just make sure that you use nice fresh bait before you do that. Maybe add a little seasoning. Or did you not realize that most of what you get out of the heads is stomach and gut contents…. 😜
Click to expand...
Yeah, I will not be sucking the heads of any mudbugs.
 
There are some good sized ones in Pass. I lost a rod to a fish there 40 years ago and brought a friend with scuba gear up to find it the next week. He did find it and also brought up some huge craws.
 
Wow! 40 years ago. A diver retrieving your rod and grabbing some crawdads. Now that is cool! And shows that Crawdads have a long history on this lake. IMHO these little critters are an under utilized source of truly gourmet seafood.
 
downriver79 said:
If you can find one of their holes, drop a piece of raw bacon on a string in there and wait for it to get tight, pull it up slowly. When I was a kid, we'd spend a couple of weeks at Lake DeGray in Arkansas every summer. There was a seam in the boat ramp with about a 2 inch gap between concrete pieces. When the water was up above that seam they would literally stack on top of each other in the gap. Bacon on a string would fill a bucket in no time. From there they went onto the trot line as live bait.
Click to expand...
Wasting bacon 🥓!?! This feels like a dreadful misuse of a precious resource.

My pro tip: Cook the bacon, eat it, then go to the body of water where you want to catch crawdad. Use almost anything else - I don’t even care what - to catch them. The bacon will sustain you in your hunt. You’ll feel better even if you don’t catch any.

If you want to get creative, I suppose you could just lube up a weighted fly with some bacon grease - musk up that fly a touch - and rest it on the bottom for a bit then pull it up slowly. (Insert two AI generated images: one showing several crawdad clinging to a fly, and the other showing @JimTravers¤£a!!Travers and me clinging valiantly to a fly as it is being pulled up).

For those who don’t eat bacon…I respect your choice and suspect you wouldn’t want to “fish” with bacon any more than you would care to eat it.
 
This brings back great memories of my fishing buddy and I hiking down to Castle Lake many years ago. Against good advice we hiked straight down the hill carrying float tubes and all our gear and it remains one of the stupidest most dangerous things I've ever done. Anyway we camped overnight and seeing crawdads near the shore scooped a bunch up and boiled them over the fire in an empty can we found. Might as well have been Maine lobster, so good!
 
We used crawdad traps to catch them in Lk Washington and Sammamish back in the’70’s. We used punctured cans of cat food for bait and we’d let the traps soak overnight. It was pretty exciting to feel a heavy weight while pulling them up the next day , the traps usually completely filled up with “‘dads”!

We actually had a lot more fun catching them than eating them as I recall, as we found the flavor was disappointingly bland. We were young though, and we made a party of it supplemented with cold beers.

I wouldn’t classify them as gourmet personally. They were good for some fun memories though.

There used to be a local guy that made traps for them and you’d find them in the local sporting goods stores.
As someone said, a shrimp trap should work well.
 
Bugmeister said:
Wasting bacon 🥓!?! This feels like a dreadful misuse of a precious resource.

My pro tip: Cook the bacon, eat it, then go to the body of water where you want to catch crawdad. Use almost anything else - I don’t even care what - to catch them. The bacon will sustain you in your hunt. You’ll feel better even if you don’t catch any.

If you want to get creative, I suppose you could just lube up a weighted fly with some bacon grease - musk up that fly a touch - and rest it on the bottom for a bit then pull it up slowly. (Insert two AI generated images: one showing several crawdad clinging to a fly, and the other showing @JimTravers¤£a!!Travers and me clinging valiantly to a fly as it is being pulled up).

For those who don’t eat bacon…I respect your choice and suspect you wouldn’t want to “fish” with bacon any more than you would care to eat it.
Click to expand...
Good point. This was 40+ years ago before bacon was priced like steak. 😁
 
Matt B said:
Wusses, I tell ya.
Click to expand...
Chuck's Seafood Grotto in Snohomish,(now gone?) used to have a crawfish boil on Fridays. They were quite good. I must confess I did suck a few heads, and they were OK...tasty if you could get past the texture. Good times!
 
I’m intrigued
The work/meat benefit ratio seems similar to the salad shrimp we get in the south sound
You get excited about the harvest then have to process

Saw some fatties on the lower yak while fishing for smallies

Also heard some intel on them on the op at the takeouts due to fish cleaning

Happy hunting!
 
Jim in Anacortes said:
Stonedfish...I did a quick search about how to cook a freshly caught Signal Crayfish. "Purging" (like is done with clams) does not seem to be an issue. Wash them off and boil em in pre-made "boil" spices...seems to be how it is done. I urge you to view this Youtube..

How to Cook & Peel Signal Crayfish

Lobsterettes. How fun is that? Think of the appetizers you could make with this on a Triscuit cracker. The you tube shows how to process this animal into a very clean, tasty piece of a seafood delicacy.
Click to expand...
1773415731431.png
Etouffee - some darn good stuff!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top