Writhing horde of black bug-like creatures emerge from the water, crawling toward you with their sharp claws flailing.
It's no nightmare. It's lunch.
Crawdads, also known as crawfish or crayfish, aren't often found on Utah menus. But these crustaceans, which look like midget lobsters, are a staple in Louisiana's Cajun cuisine, and a favorite in Sweden, where a "Kraftor" (crawfish) festival takes place annually. They're also used in French and Southeast Asian cooking. In western Australia, large crawfish are known as "marron."
Those who would rather not get acquainted with their seafood until it appears on a plate at Red Lobster can stop reading right here. But if you're in a hunter-forager mode and enjoy a little adventure, you can try a crawdad outing right here in Utah.
Last year, Doug Miller, the outdoors specialist for KSL-TV, aired a segment on catching, cleaning and cooking crawdads at Strawberry Reservoir. Using tips from the show, my family did a similar crawdad feast last year. We had such a good time that when we were invited to join Miller and some of his fishing buddies on this year's crawdad expedition (which will air on his Ch. 5 show Saturday, Aug. 4, at 11 p.m.), we jumped at it.
There were about 25 of us in all — from age 1 to 60-plus — and we descended on the Soldier Creek area of Strawberry Reservoir Thursday, with traps, nets, bait and a lot of enthusiasm. You can find crawdads all along the shoreline, but we boated out to a small island where the critters were even more plentiful.
Catching them was the fun part. We tied a long string onto a raw chicken leg, threw it out in the water and waited for the crawdads to begin attacking. Then, we scooped them up in a net and threw the chicken leg back out. After fine-tuning their reflexes, two of my sons were able to catch them with their hands. Some of the veteran fishermen brought wire cages, placing a chicken leg inside. It didn't take long for the cages to fill up with crawdads, too.
I took pity on a few small ones and threw them back in, although Lisa Pascadlo showed me that the little crawdads yield tails nearly as long as the larger ones. Everyone got caught up in the hunt, and, in a couple of hours, we had five or six huge buckets full.
Then we headed to the fish-cleaning stations and got busy "processing" (that's a nice word for tearing their tails off). Some people cook the crawdads whole, but for our purposes, we used mainly the tails. First, you need to hold the crawdad on its body behind its claws, so that, most of the time, they can't pinch you. However, several still managed a few painful pinches. One had such a tight grip on the finger of my sister, Christi Nash, that it drew blood before she could pull it free. Eleven-year-old Parker Collings, of Farmington, got pinched at least four times, but it didn't deter his enthusiasm.
Here's where some of the squeamish factor comes in. Miller showed us how to, first, devein the crawdads (similar to - shrimp). There are five fins on each tail. He took hold of the middle fin, snapped it a bit to the left, then to the right, pulled, and the vein came free. Then he snapped off the tail with a quick twist. If the crawdads had large claws, we saved them to cook, too. The tails are pretty small — it takes a lot of crawdads to make a meal for 25 people.
The meat spoils quickly, Miller said, so the tails should immediately be put on ice. Also, he cautioned, if the crawdads seem to be dead already, throw them away. You also need to rinse them several times to get off any dirt or other unmentionable stuff.
Now it was time for the crawfish boil, as they call it in Cajun cooking. For a crowd, a giant pot is needed, preferably one with a lift-out strainer basket. There's no exact recipe; it's more of "a work in progress," explained Patrick Milburn of the Anglers Inn fishing supply store. Mulburn doctored the simmering water with a little salt and a cup of vinegar, then threw in a few bags of Zatarin's Crab Boil, some purple pearl onions, a couple of quartered lemons, a few shakes of garlic powder, Old Bay seasoning and Cajun spice. "I like it when it just starts to make my eyes water," he said.
The Crab Boil is a packet containing a lot of spices and seasonings that not only flavor the water but permeate the air with a tantalizing aroma. The vinegar, explained Milburn, is supposed to make the crawdad meat a little firmer. He and Miller first put a couple dozen little red potatoes in the pot and let them cook 30 minutes. Then, freshly husked corn-on-the-cob went in and cooked another five minutes. Then it was time to throw a small cooler-full of crawdad tails and claws. We waited about five minutes for the water to come back to boiling temperature, and then another four or five minutes for the tails to cook. They're done when they're a bright orange and start coming to the surface. Like shrimp, the meat becomes rubbery if cooked too long.
As Miller and Milburn pulled out the strainer basket, everyone started gathering around. "The vultures are circling," noted Lisa. . . . Pretty soon, everyone was bent over the mound of crawdads on their plates, shelling and eating.
Forget Joe's Crab Shack; this was Doug's 'Dad Shack.
To get the meat out of the shell, we squeezed the sides of the shell and the peeled it back. Each shell renders a morsel of meat maybe an inch long and about as big around as a pencil. Most of us ate each morsel as soon as we got it out of the shell; Milburn preferred to peel and stockpile his into one big bowl. Then he doused them liberally with melted butter that contained a squeeze of lemon and a dash of garlic powder. He had to fend off onlookers trying to steal a few nibbles of his tasty treasure.
The tail meat has a delicate, mild flavor like that of shrimp or scallops. Like other crustaceans, it's high in protein and low in fat (unless dipped in melted butter, which makes them taste even better).
My brother, Travis Sagers, saved the leftover shells to feed the chickens on his farm. Some of the group joked that the calcium boost would yield rock-hard egg shells — and possibly baby chicks with claws instead of wings.
I'll admit this isn't the "Martha Stewart" type of picnic you'll see in glossy magazine spreads, where the smiling picnickers' clothes are color-coordinated to match the tablecloth and the centerpiece takes more time to make than the food. Here, the only centerpiece was the big pile of empty crawdad shells. But for some of us, it's as close as we'll come to a Martha Moment.
Many Utah lakes contain crawdads; some of the best places to go are Strawberry, Bear Lake, and Joe's Valley Reservoir, according to Miller. There's no limit on how many you can catch. But Division of Wildlife regulations don't allow transporting live crawdads out of the area where they were caught, in order to keep them from spreading to other Utah lakes and streams.
E-MAIL: vphillips@desnews.com