Hello, my Chris Clime, I am Chef de Cuisine at Acadiana Restaurant, in the heart of the Penn Quarter. I am here today to make a little Louisiana Crawfish touffe. We are starting off with fresh Mudbugs, thats what they call. We are down at Abbeville, Louisiana. We got the pleasure of going down into the crawfish fields and going out and getting some of these. We have already done a regular crawfish boil with these. Spices, a lot of lemon and cayenne and lot of salt, different herbs and spices. Once weve cooked them, we chill them down and then we are going to go ahead and clean them to make our touffe. An touffe is French for smother, so that means smother. So what we are going to do is, we are going to take it out and make sure that we get the fat from the head, because thats very important that fat from the heads and a lot of traditionally the touffes are made with that fat. So its very good to use a whole crawfish. So we take our crawfish here and we separate it from the head as such, okay? Then you can go ahead and break it down, the top part, and we are going to pinch the tail here. When you pinch the tail; that means you are able to get that whole fillet out like as such. Remove that vein and then there is the meat there. Now when I am talking about the fat, its very important, youre going to take your finger in there, and when youre eating crawfish, you actually suck that the head, so, its pinch the tail and suck the head. So, now you want to get some of that fat out there, I got a big finger and it goes like that and that is the gold right there.

Thats the fats from the head and we are going to use that, and thats going to help us make the flavor for our beautiful touffe. So we are going to go one more time. We are going to remove it from the head; we are going to take this cross section off, just to the top. We are going to pinch the tail, perfectly cooked, pull right out, and if you are really good you can get that vein with the two, sometimes I got lucky there, and then we are going to go and get the fat out again. You dont have to use your finger, you can use a small spoon or so forth, but its better to get it like that and thats a hat Now in Louisiana, thats where the good stuff flavor is and thats how you clean crawfish.