Crawfish Boils Land Rookies in Hot Water
By Rachel Wolfe
The Wall Street Journal
BRANCH, La.—As a rule, crawfish from the Frugé family farm never went far in life.
This season, though, more of them are landing everywhere from San Francisco to New York City, including households with no clue how to handle the crustacean—which arrive still kicking—much less how to cook and eat them.
Courtney Frugé fields some of the calls. One Montana family dumped their 10-pound bag of mudbugs into a plastic kiddie pool without realizing their escape artistry.
“Crawfish are like walking Legos,” Ms. Frugé said. “They link together, and they’ll flip themselves up and out of anywhere. The family was running around chasing them.”
They are shipped overnight in cold packs and delivered alive. One rookie mistake is leaving them out on the doorstep. The unschooled don’t realize how perishable they are, said Justin Smith, owner of Louisiana Crawfish Company Inc. Once dead, they can go rancid in hours.
Novice customers call and say, “ ‘Hey, I got this crawfish on Wednesday and it’s Saturday and I want to cook them but it doesn’t look like any of them are alive,’ ” Mr. Smith said. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”
Preparing them is no picnic. Crawfish are notoriously tedious to peel, and 100 pounds of live shellfish yield only about 14 pounds of meat. The most inexperienced eaters try to take a bite with the shell still on.
Justin "Stalecracker" Chiasson, social-media manager for Fruge Family Farms.
PHOTO:RACHEL WOLFE/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Frugé family has been harvesting crawfish since the 1980s in ponds on the same land they have been farming since the 1800s. Crawfish sales at Frugé Aquafarms jumped after a TikTok of a crawfish boil was posted in February for the two million followers of the company’s social- media manager, Justin “Stalecracker” Chiasson.
“Within five seconds, we had 30,000 clicks on the website,” Mr. Chiasson said. While pleased with his online influence, he frets a little about crawfish in the hands of strangers. despite arriving with instructions.
“I’ve seen people boil them so much the meat looks like snot running out of the shell,” he said, pulling a crawfish trap out of waist-deep water at the Frugé farm. “They’re like, ‘What’d we do wrong?’ ”
One customer, Megan Hain, invited 50 of her friends and neighbors in Indianapolis last month to her first crawfish boil. “When the first box showed up I was, like, ‘What have we done?’ ” said Ms. Hain, 37.
The crawfish boil at Megan Hain’s house last month; her husband, Philippe Hain, tending the pot.
PHOTO:MEGAN HAIN
Her parents, both from New Orleans, hosted boils during her childhood in Tampa. Faced with cooking 70 pounds of live crawfish on her own, she felt like the one landing in hot water.
“They were in a big Styrofoam cooler that said, ‘Live crawfish,’ ” she said. “I was, like, ‘Well, this is my responsibility now.’ ”
The main entree drew the neighborhood kids, Ms. Hain said. Her 5-year-old son Roan and a friend staged a wedding for two crawfish. “They stood them up on a cooler and pronounced that they were husband and wife crawfish and put their claws together,” she said.
New York City chef Julian Medina was among the early visitors to the Frugé farm website after seeing Mr. Chiasson’s TikTok, which included a tutorial, with his 13-year-old daughter. It inspired him to host a crawfish boil for his 46th birthday in April.
“They were not my favorite,” his daughter Olivia Medina said afterward. Too spicy. Plus, she said, she felt weird eating the critters after watching them crawl around hours earlier.
Other crawfish distributors also have seen a surge in demand. Louisiana Crawfish Company has had 30% growth from a year earlier, fueled primarily by sales to far-flung customers stuck close to home in the pandemic, said Mr. Smith, the owner.
Schaefer Seafood in Metairie, La., has shipped more crawfish to more distant locales this year than ever. Many buyers first ate them in visits to New Orleans and wanted to try cooking them at home, owner Merlin Schaefer said.
A truck showing the Frugé Aquafarms website.
PHOTO:RACHEL WOLFE/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Crawfish has long been a popular dish in Louisiana and eastern Texas but not easy to find elsewhere. When Michael Maenza started his “Mr. Mudbug” crawfish catering and shipping company in 1986, he estimated that less than 10% of Americans were familiar with his product.
These days, the company arranges crawfish boils where “more than half of people know how to eat them,” Mr. Maenza said, crediting the internet.
His advice for beginners is to secure a big enough pot. “We get calls from people who are, like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ So we try to walk them through it and say, ‘First of all, you’re only as good as your equipment.’”
The day before a customer delivery date, farmers scoop the crawfish out of the swamps where they are raised. (Wild crawfish, of course, live in bayous and streams.) They are then cleaned, weighed, packed and shipped.
“Most people did not believe that you could order crawfish, and they’ll still be alive when they get to Connecticut or New York,” Mr. Chiasson said.
In Lyme, Conn., Nora Lynn Leech, 42, woke up the day after her family’s first crawfish boil and was surprised by an escapee crawling the kitchen floor.
“It was before her morning coffee,” said her husband, Jac Lahav, 44. “She saved it in a little bowl of water.”
The family’s boil premiere was a success overall, Mr. Lahav said, but guests with “tame tastes” weren’t interested.
Phoenix food blogger Michelle Bock, 46, saw a similar reaction hosting her first boil last spring. Some guests, she said, “thought they kind of looked like roaches.”
A group of first-timers, including Mr. Lahav, are turning into experienced hands. “We’ve done it three or four times since then,” he said, “and every time it keeps getting better.”
Megan Hain said her 5-year-old son and a friend staged a crawfish “wedding.”
PHOTO:MEGAN HAIN