Crawfish Bisque; A Tutorial (Pic Heavy)

Good morning to the folks of South Louisiana and beyond. Today I will be presenting to you a tutorial on how to make a Crawfish Bisque. Not the cream based soup recipe that is so common in New Orleans and other parts of the world. What we are cooking takes us the River parish Region of Louisiana, specifically St. James Parish. I will be presenting the stew based bisque variety.

We are going to start to start with a recipe.
Now you may notice that is says Crawfish Loaf, this is the recipe we will follow for the stuffing. It can also be used to make patties for sandwiches or for the loaf. If you would like to substitute shrimp that is an option and although I’ve never tried I have heard of it being used to for Catfish patties.




We are going to set up our grinding machine, in this case a Kitchen Aide stand mixer with the meat grinder attachment. You may use a food processor but be warned that too much grinding will turn it to mush so be careful if you go that route.



So here we have some of our ingredients, doubled from the recipe.





What it looks likes as it coming out of the grinder.





Here’s some of the help cracking the eggs.





The mixture with rest of the ingredients added.





Now, get in there with your hands and mix it up…..







Make up a couple of small patties and fry them in a little cooking.




Drain them on a paper towel and have a taste to check the seasoning, adjust accordingly to your taste before you stuff all the heads.





Our seasoning was good; we added a little salt and some Tony Cacheries.


Next step is the stuffing of the heads. There is really no easy way to do this, just wash your hands and get to it. My mom’s method is to separate the shell with 2 fingers and put the stuffing in with the other. Here she is showing my daughter….



Here’s all the heads stuffed.




Once the heads are stuffed we get started on roux to make our crawfish stew which the heads will go in. 1 ½ cups oil and 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour.




Getting a turn stirring the roux…… start them out young. You don’t want your kids to be dependent on anyone else to cook for them.






Roux was cooked so we added 3 small chopped onions and cooked them till they were clear. Then we added our crawfish tails (about 1 ½ pounds) and cooked it for a few minutes.





All the heads added into the pot with some green onions added.




Let that simmer for 45 minutes – hour.


Here it is Bon Appetit!






ETA: If you stumbled upon this thread and the pics arent showing it's because Photbucket quit hosting without having to pay, I reloaded to Imgur but they still aren't showing up, not sure whats going on with that. Here is a link to the Imgur Album.