Cajun Crawfish Bread Sandwich

This week's sandwich is inspired by my recent visit to New Orleans.  While there, my Mardi Gras Sherpa (Whitney) helped me to sample a smattering of all the best in local cuisine-- beignets at Cafe du Monde, Po' Boys at a restaurant owned by the owners of Commander's Palace, one of Emeril's restaurants and, of course, a crawfish boil!

  

I had never seen crawfish before (let alone tasted them), but I was excited to try them!  They look like baby lobsters and are cooked in basically the same way.  

You start with a large pot of boiling water that has been seasoned with whatever your preferred seasoning is (in our case it was some back woods combination of insanely hot spices) and lower in a basket of live crawfish.  Obviously once they hit the water they die and proceed to simmer and cook until they're ready (I don't know how long).  That's when the fun begins.

Once the crawfish are done you dump them out on a table that has been covered with newspaper or trash bags and proceed to peel the crawfish.  Peeling basically means you pull their head/torso off (and suck the juice out of the head if you so choose) and then brake the exoskeleton off to reveal the tail meat (which actually ends up looking like a shrimp).  Yum yum!

Clearly New Orleans cuisine left a strong impression on me, so it was only a matter of time before I would develop a New Orleans grilled cheese.  After consulting with my Mardi Gras Sherpa, she pointed me in the direction of "crawfish bread," a delicacy she buys every year at Jazzfest.  It sounded like crawfish bread could easily be made into a sandwich, so she found me the perfect recipe to use as a jumping off point.

One other food I became obsessed with while in New Orleans are Zapp's Voodoo Gumbo chips.  Apparently they're limited edition and are only available during festival time (and are hard to find outside of New Orleans), so I had Whit ship me some so that I could somehow include them in this recipe!  This alone got me very excited :-)

The only ingredient that I couldn't find during a routine trip to the grocery store were fresh crawfish.   I did some Googling and came across a place called "Seaside Crab Shack" over in Seven Corners that purported to have fresh Louisiana crawfish.  This was actually a Vietnamese restaurant, so I was a little skeptical about what I'd get, but it was the best option I could find, so I went with it. 

It was definitely a random spot, but it had a neon crawfish in the window, so I felt good about it.  The recipe called for 2 cups of peeled crawfish tails, but I had no idea what this would equate to in terms of whole crawfish (considering you throw away like 60%  of the crawfish), so I ordered 2.5 pounds.

Now I was ready to go.  Step one was dicing up the veggies-- the recipe called for 1/4 cup diced red bell pepper, 1/2 cup diced onion and 1/2 cup diced celery.  I actually changed that up a bit and did the least amount of celery and more onion and pepper.  I used about 1/2 of a large Vidalia onion and a whole red bell pepper while only using a few smaller sticks of celery.  I'm not sure what the total final measurements on these were, but it looked like a good combination of veggies, so I think it was fine.

I recruited my sous chef to help me with the dicing while I started peeling the crawfish.  The shells were pretty hard, so peeling them was more work than I remember, but slowly and steadily I worked my way through the bag.  I took it as a good sign that the little cuts around my cuticles were burning-- this meant the crawfish were nice and spicy!

Finally I finished peeling them all and realized that I only had about 1 and 1/4 cup.  Oh well!  Two and a half pounds cost like $25, so I don't think I could have afforded to get any more.

Next I melted 1/4 cup butter in my non-stick skillet and tossed in the crawfish. 

Then I added the veggies and a minced clove of garlic and started sauteing the mixture for 15 minutes.

While this was cooking I went ahead and cut a loaf of French bread like I was making one big sandwich and proceeded to scoop out the middle to make room for filling it with the crawfish mixture.

The cheeses to be utilized for this sandwich were cheddar and mozzarella, so I also went ahead and grated some of each of these.

Once the crawfish mixture had sauteed for about 15 minutes I added 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard and 2/3 cup of mayonnaise.  The recipe only called for 1/2 cup, but my 1/2 cup measuring cup had gone missing.  Oh well!  I went ahead and stirred all that in and it looked kind of gross, but oh well again!

  

Next I was to add the cheese-- the recipe called for 1/3 cup of mozzarella and 1/3 cup of cheddar, but since I had done more veggies and more mayo than the recipe called for I figured I should keep up my over-adding and use 2/3 cup of each instead.

I stirred this in until the cheese was melted (which happened very quickly) and now the mixture was looking even more like vomit.  Hmm... maybe the extra mayo and cheese weren't such good ideas after all.  Too late now!

I grabbed the bottom half of my hollowed out loaf and scooped the crawfish mix in.  I used a spoon in hopes of getting some of the grease/fat that had separated out to stay in the pan.  This worked well, but some definitely still made its way into the bread.

Next it was time to integrate the Voodoo Gumbo!  I decided I'd crush them up to be sort of like bread crumbs and sprinkle them on half of the sandwich (so I would be able to compare the two versions).

I mashed them up using the bottom of the mayonnaise jar and added them to the top section of the sandwich.  I sprinkled a little extra cheese on top of the bottom half of the sandwich for good measure and then put the top part of the sandwich in place.

The amount of grease left in the pan grossed me out, but at least that meant it was grease that hadn't made it into the sandwich! 

The recipe called for buttering the outside of the bread, wrapping it in foil and baking it at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes.  I couldn't fathom adding more fat to the sandwich, so I skipped the butter and just wrapped it and popped it in. 

25 minutes later it came out thoroughly baked and looking like this:

I sliced it into quarters and added some more Voodoo Gumbo chips on the side and was ready to chow down!

Taste Review:
Let me preface this review with the statement that Colin doesn't like seafood, so he was little help in providing an unbiased review.  I told him that crawfish were similar to shrimp, but in reality they differ in that crawfish actually have a taste whereas shrimp seem to take on the flavor of whatever they are cooked with/in.

You definitely noticed the seafood aroma of the sandwich, but in a make you hungry kind of way.  The veggies and cheese combined to make the sandwich look particularly colorful, which is always a good thing.  I got a crawfish in my first bite and immediately tasted the strong fresh seafood flavor.  Yumm.  The way the cheese, mayonnaise and seafood combined reminded me of a warm seafood dip (like a crab dip).

I was glad the bread had been hollowed out, because the sandwich filling was very dense, and putting it on a solid piece of bread would have led to a big mess!  Colin agreed with me on the density and said he actually thought the French bread ended up being too crunchy and hard and that he would have liked to see the filling spread on regular white bread and grilled instead of as a filling that has been baked.  I can see the merits of both-- using less filling to create a normal sized sandwich would have been interesting to try, but I also liked the way the French bread made more of a capsule to hold the filling.

As for the Voodoo Gumbo chips-- I could only taste them a little bit on the sandwich, so if I wanted to use the chips on the sandwich I should have added more.  I liked eating the chips separately from the sandwich, though, since they added some seasoning and crunch that was separate from the sandwich itself.

Colin didn't even try it with ketchup (crazy, I know) because he said it definitely doesn't need it.  The sandwich is very cheesy with a strong seafood taste and aroma that he found overpowering and smelly, but that I found delicious.

FINAL RESULTS:

Sandwich:	Cajun Crawfish Bread Sandwich
Gooey-ness:	3.5
Aroma:	4
Appearance:	Very colorful and appetizing/inviting!
Taste:	B

Gooey Scale	Aroma Scale
1 = still cold/hard	1 = can’t smell a thing
2 = slightly melted but still firm	2 = tender waft
3 = melted evenly	3 = makes your stomach growl
4 = melted and slightly runny (starting to get those cheese strings between your sandwich and your mouth when you take a bite)	4 = strong scent
5 = runny	5 = overpoweringly pungent
6 = sloppy mess!

 In summary, if you like shellfish, you'll like this sandwich!  I may have overfilled it and used too much of the fatty ingredients, so I'd be interested to try it again with a little less filling and perhaps on regular sandwich bread that's been grilled.  I think if I had followed the recipe in terms of amounts of cheese and mayonnaise included that this would have been an A.  Also, this is a labor intensive sandwich, so I'd only make it when I'm sure I have plenty of time to spend cooking.

Next Week: Still TBD.