Mama’s Crawfish Étouffée

Name: Mama’s Crawfish Étouffée
Yield: serves 4 to 6
Ingredients: 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature; 1/4 cup all-purpose flour; 1 onion, preferably Vidalia, chopped; 2 stalks celery, chopped; 1/2 green bell pepper, cored, seeded and chopped; 1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley; 5 green onions, green part only, chopped; 2 cloves garlic, very finely chopped; 2 cups fish or shrimp stock (see page 132) or water; 2 pounds crawfish tails, cooked; Hot sauce, for seasoning; Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper; $20,000 Rice Pilaf (page 158), for accompaniment

December 9, 2011

A Cajun specialty, étouffée is a succulent, tangy, tomato sauce usually made with crawfish or shrimp. The word étouffée comes from the French étouffer (to smother), and that’s it exactly: rich and tender crawfish tails smothered in a spicy blanket of flavorful sauce. “First, you make a roux” is the start of many Creole and Cajun recipes (it’s also the title of a popular cookbook from Louisiana published by the Lafayette Museum in the early 1960s). Roux is a cooked mixture of fat (butter) and starch (flour) used to thicken many sauces in classic French cooking. A Creole roux is not the classic French butter-flour mixture, but sometimes combines flour with an oil like peanut oil that can hold a high temperature. Unlike a French roux, which can be white to pale golden, Creole and Cajun roux are typically, at the very least, the color of peanut butter and progress to deep, dark brown. This process can take 45 minutes or so of constant stirring. It is dangerous stuff. If any splatters on you, it will be perfectly clear why this fiery, sticky combination of oil and flour is often referred to as “Cajun napalm”!

Recipe notes