Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. aka Melting a hole in your crawfish pot.

The scene:

Son takes the 80qt crawfish pot and jet burner down by the dock for the last Crawfish boil of the season. I'm in the house getting the potatoes, onions, and citrus ready to put into the pot. Crawfish have been cleaned and are hanging out in a baby pool by the dock enjoying a nice summer day before they get the Auschwitz treatment. I get a call on the phone from the wife. Her voice is trembling with anger.

Wife: "I melted a hole in the bottom of the %@#&ing pot".
Me: "What do you mean you melted a hole in the bottom of the pot?"
Wife: "What part of I melted a %$##ing hole in the bottom of the $!@$ing pot do you not @#$#ing understand"

The wife decided it would be easier to light the burner without a pot on it. And it would be easier to put an empty pot on the burner rather than lifting a pot filled with water. I don't know how takes to melt a hole in an unattended aluminum pot as I decided it was in my best interest not to ask but I'm here to say you can effectively liquefy aluminum with a jet burner.

This is not photoshopped. If you can take a picture of your dog through the bottom of your crawfish pot then you have a crawfish pot problem.


Luckily the molten aluminum did not land on the jet orifice and it still operates. So we just need a new pot. It's 4 going on 5pm and the nearest place that would have a 80+ quart pot is a good 70 minute round trip drive. So we are probably looking at an hour and a half to drive out and get a new pot and not getting the crawfish cooked until 7pm.

So we scoured the two sheds and the house for options. In one shed we find a 30qt pot. It doesn't have a strainer so we are probably looking at 3-4 batches no good way to scooop the cooked crawfish out. Best we could do is to pour the whole boiling mess into a cooler and restart a new batch of water. Again not ideal. In one of the bedrooms we find a mesh trash can just the right size to fit into the 30qt pot. More rummaging through the shed and we engineer up an handle for what we lovingly refer to now as the "Murder Trash Can".



By now we are way off script and just sort of wing the cooking process. We had to abandon the potatoes (my favorite part )We boil them for a few minutes with the ears of corn. We didn't bother to use a timer just stuck them in there and pulled them out when it felt right. Strained the crawfish and poured them in a cooler and sprinkled more crawfish boil on them as we started the next batch. Took 4 batches to cook all the crawfish. After the crawfish were cooked we cooled the boil down by spraying a hose on the outside of the pot then ladled the boil into the cooler until the crawfish were covered with boil and let them soak for a bit. I cooked the sausage on the grill and threw that on top after the fact.

The results?

Honestly not our best but that was because the tails either never really fully soaked in enough crawfish boil or our boil was too weak. They were well cooked and not over cooked just didn't have the spicy kick they normally do. I think part of that is with the small pot we probably didn't put enough seasoning into the pot and/or it got diluted the more we cooked. We had to add water after the first couple of boils because we haddn't figured out the best way to use the trash can strainer so we probably diluted the boil too much on the last couple of boil.

In the end we got 36lbs of crawfish successfully and they didn't go to waste. If anyone asks what you should do when you melt a hole in your crawfish pot? Now you know to respond with "I need a trash can, rope, key rings, and spring clips."