How to clean crayfish for food

Fragrant and mouth-watering boiled crayfish will not leave anyone indifferent. But to get to the delicious meat, you need to know how to clean the crayfish from the chitinous shell. In addition to the tail (crayfish neck), these arthropods have many more edible and tasty parts. But, before carving crayfish for food, they must first be cooked.

We clean fresh crayfish before cooking

Crayfish live in rivers and lakes, where they dig deep burrows for themselves in steep underwater cliffs or banks that plummet underwater. They can swim, but more often roam the muddy bottom in search of prey or sit in holes. It is clear that on the shells the earth settles, pieces of silt, mud. Therefore, before cooking the caught crayfish, they must be thoroughly washed and cleaned.

Crayfish caught or bought in the market should be placed in clean water for a couple of hours. During this time, their intestines will be cleansed. Then you need to clean the shell of dirt. For this:

• Dirty water in which there were crayfish, completely drain and pour clean. Leave for 5-10 minutes, occasionally stirring vigorously.
• Change water and repeat operation.
• Change water and rinse one last time.
• If dead crayfish surface during flushing, they must be removed and discarded (only live crayfish can be cooked).

After that, you can start cooking. Sometimes, before boiling the crayfish, they are soaked in milk for 1-2 hours. It is believed that this improves the taste of their meat.

You can clean these arthropods with salt water. They say that in this way they are better and faster cleared of dirt. The cleaning procedure is approximately the same as in pure water. Only the first two washes use a cold salt solution. But the crayfish do not need to be kept in the brine for a certain time. Immediately after stirring, salt water must be drained and fresh water added for final washing. After cleaning with salt water, crayfish cannot be stored, as they will quickly die, they must be boiled immediately.

Cooking time is 20-30 minutes (depending on size). Salt and seasonings are laid to taste. Crayfish are thrown into boiling water only alive.

How to eat crayfish

Professionals eat crayfish almost completely, leaving only a shell and a few giblets. Amateurs eat only the tail-abdomen, throwing out half of the most delicious delicacy. As is - everyone chooses for himself. But in any case, to get to the meat, you must first remove the shell. Cleaning crayfish is easy.

This is done in a certain order, at the same time we will describe all the edible parts:

1. First you need to inspect the tail, if there is caviar under it - it is edible and tasty.
2. Thin walking legs should then be torn off. In no case should they be thrown out, as they have meat, and if the cancer is large, then quite a lot. It is not difficult to get this meat - break the legs on the joints and squeeze the contents into the mouth with your teeth.
3. Now you can separate the claws. In them, the delicacy is not much less than in the cancer neck. The edge of the carapace near the joint must be opened, cutting with scissors, or gnawing with teeth and, through the hole formed, remove the meat.
4. Keeping the cancer with his left hand turned upside down, slightly tilt it with his head down and carefully, with a breaking movement, separate the abdomen from the cephalothorax. If this is done carefully, then in the front of the carapace there will remain a delicious broth, which should be drunk as if from a cup.
5. Pull in different directions by the edges of the shell. It will burst at the junction with the head. Holding the tip of the head to separate it to the end.
6. From the inside of the head should eat all the flesh with an orange mass.
7. Scrubbing the white mass from the inside of the shell is fat. It is edible and quite tasty.
8. Using a breaking motion, separate the gills (they are gray) from the abdomen (cancerous neck) and suck the broth out of them.
9. The fleshiest piece remained - the abdomen (tail or cancerous neck). First, you need to tear off the feathers at the tail, located on its tip, then suck the broth out of the shell. Then remove the triangular plates on both sides of the abdomen. You can break them off with your hands, but it's quite difficult, you can get hurt. It is better to use scissors or bite off with your teeth. After that, the upper and lower parts of the carapace can be easily separated. Remove a thin strip of meat from the top of the cervical neck - it can be easily separated. Under it opens a dark strip - the rectum. It must be removed. After that, eat both pieces of delicious and tender meat.

If everything is done correctly, then at the end of the meal from the crayfish there will only be shells, squeezed gills and a few entrails.

Some tips

• If live crayfish brought home are not prepared immediately, but left “for later”, they should not be released into a container of water. It is better to leave in the air, occasionally spraying with water.
• If arthropods are to be stored for a long time, they should be rinsed with water from the shower, placed in a container with pieces of ice and put in the refrigerator. So you can keep them alive for several days, periodically draining melt water.
• Before cooking, remove ice from the container and allow the crayfish to warm to room temperature.

We advise you to read the article on how to clean fresh shrimp