Crawfish Étouffée Recipe (2024)

The most important ingredient is missing. Roux. In my opinion Etouffee is not an Etouffee without roux.

All crawfish tails are precooked, just like crab and lobster are precooked. As gross as it sounds, the shellfish is alive when it is cooked. In fact, if you are eating boiled crawfish, you want to avoid the tails that are not curled up because it indicates that the crawfish was dead prior to cooking.

I order from Cajun Grocer online. I'm sure there are other online sellers but I've used this one for years and it's always good.

Where's the step where you add flour to all that butter and make a roux? In the NOLA citified version there has always been a medium dark roux. We also use a fish or shrimp stock in place of the water, bay leaf, the lemon isn't optional, bell pepper is essential, and there's somethimes a dash of Worcestershire. This is the old school method; I'm Medicare age and learned to cook from my elders.

Roux would make it a Crawfish Creole, or a Crawfish Stew.

I cut this recipe in half and it worked very well. I used vegetable stock rather than water in both the rice and sauce-- made for a richer base. I also threw in some shrimp with the crayfish. And included a yellow sweet pepper with the poblano.

The advantage of the precooked tails is that you need them to be peeled, which is hard when they are raw. Note that the only liquid in the recipe is the melt from the frozen tails. So for fresh crawfish, boil them in a liter of water, and remove them when just cooked. Break off the tails and set aside to cool. Return the crawfish bodies to the pot, reduce liquid by half, and strain. Use this instead of “melt” in recipe Peel the tails, and add them only at the last minute. Taste and season!

Fantastic! I did make some alterations to my family’s tastes. I substituted uncooked Shrimp for the precooked Crawfish, used a whole head of garlic, added a diced bell pepper, and only used 10 oz of butter.

There's usually some crawfish left after a big gathering for a boil. Peeling and making an Étoufée with the leftover is THE BEST. Get the fat and flavor out of the heads too! When you make your light roux (Not like the one you make for duck and andouille gumbo), put the fat in it. The rest is easy; seasoning, slow cooking. The crawfish go in at the end (don't want them to turn to rubber). Serve it with lemon, fresh chopped green onion and more hot sauce for those immune.

I am not sure what this is, but it is not etoufee. There is no roux. It should be creamy. Check your recipe for shrimp etoufee. It starrts with a roux. I made this and added flour and cream toward the end to get the right texture. Then it was good.

Etouffee has a roux base. This recipe has no flour, so cannot be a roux and therefore not an etouffee. It’s basically veggies and crawfish cooked in butter.

No roux needed.

So RE: Roux. This Southeastern Texan followed recipe but just sprinkled a couple of tablespoons of flour over the cooked veggies and stirred til starting to color. Added some Cajun spice. Put CFish in a bowl with 1.5 cups water per lb. Stirred and “washed” deliciousness off crawfish. Then strained that beautiful fat filled water into the veggies for a wonderful “creole” but light gravy. Let come together than add crawfish to just warm….

Perfection! The liquid answer is obvious once you zero in on step #2 which says, or implies, that you should strain out the defrosted packets of crawfish tails INTO the pan. (Also, DO squeeze the crawfish meat for extra juices after a general straining - lots of juices still in there). So the juice plus the (inordinate amount of) butter makes plenty of liquid for sautéing for the next 30 minutes. p.s., we reduced the recommended butter from 2 sticks to 1.5 sticks. Much nicer-less overly rich.

I’ve made this delicious recipe x2 before. Chinese pre-cooked was all I could find & tasted just fine. Making it again 5 years later & am looking over the recipe before diving into the cooking later today… Previous comments have wondered where’s the water in this recipe. How/why do you simmer a small amt of butter/veg/spices for 30 minutes w/out liquid input? Good question. I don’t recall this being a problem last time. Still, I’m cooking for 11 tonight and am concerned… will post again later…

Just a really poor recipe. Needs a roux or at least something to thicken.

I don’t understand step 2. How does the squeezed crawfish meat produce enough liquid to simmer for 30 minutes? I am using shrimp instead of crawfish. How much liquid do I need to add?

This was stellar with some modifications. After sautéing the veggies in EVOO, I pulled out and melted butter (half of what’s called for) and made a dark roux with about 1/4 cup flour. Added veggies back in with homemade shrimp broth and spices and let that simmer for about 20 minutes while I made the rice. Once down to a gravy thickness, I turned off the heat and dropped in peeled shrimp and langostine tails, along with green and red bell peppers and put the lid on for 5 mins until just done.

Use only a very, very blonde roux. Crawfish "fat" is the key to the dish. Rinse the bags with warm stock to get all of it out. Frozen crawfish lose flavor, so go fresh if you can. Regionally and in season (Dec to May) you can find them refrigerated so fresh the packages crawl backwards. Also, there is a taste difference between "pond" crawfish (farmed) and "basin" crawfish (wild). I like the latter, which don't come until the middle of spring. Avoid "imported" tails at all costs.

Where in this recipe does it say add water or fish stock? Help.

Nothing special. Seemed lacking in any depth of flavor. Don’t really understand the need for all of that butter either—just gets absorbed by the rice. I would rather cook the rice in stock to add moisture. Cut crawfish by half and added andouille sausage.

I too started w a roux. But a light one, i.e., I added just a touch of flour to the butter at the start, and I browned that for 45 minutes or so on very low heat. Used bell peppers instead of chili pepper. And no thyme. Used twice the garlic and added a little tomato,paste at the end. Served over good, brown rice. It was a hit. I tripled the recipe, which worked out well.

Paul Prudhomme's recipe for Shrimp Etouffee from his book Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen is the best ever. I have made it 50 times. Yes, it requires you to make a shrimp stock, which is why I always have baggies of frozen shrimp shells in my freezer. But it's absolutely worth all of the effort.