etouffee, Brutus?

We have a new Trader Joe's in Greenville, and in an attempt at browsing around (mucho crowded), I came across a bag of good looking, frozen langostinos, which, my research says, are sort of like a cross between a shrimp and a lobster, both in flavor and in texture.  Which reminded me of another little morsel, known in the bayou country as mudbugs, mudpuppies, yabbies, crawdads, and crawfish.  If you are a damn yankee, you can call them crayfish.

At any rate, I had a bag of pretty little pink and white crustacean tails, and little idea what to do with them.  Which made me think of an old favorite.  Crawfish etouffee.  Spicy seafood stew loaded with vegetables and served with rice.  Yum.  So I went to my go-to cajun cookbook, Paul Prudhomme's Lousiana Kitchen, and took a look at his etouffee recipe.

much loved and long used tome on NOLA cooking,

but there is a reason he is so fat

It's good -- dark brick red roux, the holy trinity (onions, green peppers, celery), seafood stock, and mudbug tails with chopped green onions.  Oh, and enough oil and butter to cause a heart attack right in the middle of dinner.

Hmmm.  What to do?  So I started a little google search, and came upon...... abomination.  Muddy, thick concoctions loaded with canned soups, improperly cooked roux, and bizarre additions of tomatoes, Old Bay seasoning, and cream.  Huh?  Well, the root word is apparently "étouffer", which is French for "to smother" and there seems to be no shortage of cooks hell bent on asphyxiating this wonderful dish.

At its best, etouffee most resembles a less complicated gumbo -- rich deep brown gravy, vegetables, and delectable little morsels of seafood.  It is, most emphatically, not a back of the soup can recipe.  So, I find myself forced to turn inward and try to lighten Paul's version of the dish without murdering its spicy, warm, and simple flavors.

I much prefer red peppers to green peppers for their sweeter, more complex flavor, but in this case, in deference to the fabulous cuisine of  southern Louisiana, I am sticking with the originals.  Now, how to get all that butter down to a reasonable level, so my obituary doesn't read, "woman killed by crawfish stew".

I started with the roux.   Prudhomme cooks his on lava level heats, in just a few minutes.  Tradition calls for low and slow, taking sometimes up to an hour to get to a dark, brick red hue.  I decided to go right down the middle, cooking the roux over a medium high heat, stirring for about 20 minutes, and cutting the heat off under the roux right after it reached a rich brown color, to minimize the chances of burning.  I started with three tablespoons of vegetable oil and three tablespoons of flour over medium high heat.  Pictured below, there is a blond roux just beginning to foam, a brown roux, about peanut butter colored, and a dark brown roux.  The next step is brick red, but I couldn't photograph it.  The second  it hits that color, the veggies needed to go in to stop the roux from cooking any further.

The Cajun holy trinity is green pepper, onions, and celery.

mise en place, clockwise, the holy trinity,

spice mix, chopped green onion, seafood stock concentrate,

and sliced garlic

I had a reduced seafood stock on hand, available at Whole Foods, and on Amazon as well.

this is a convenient product, but there are 

fish stocks available in most supermarkets as well

The spice mixture is salt, cayenne pepper, and thyme.  Prudhomme uses two sticks of butter for six servings of etouffee.  Out of the question.  So I needed a way to reduce the fat and retain the flavor.  After adding the trinity, I added half of the seafood stock base, the spice mixture, the garlic, a bit of dry sherry, and a couple of cups of water, and simmered the whole together for about an hour.  Once I had the rice on to cook, I added the langastinos, still frozen, the chopped scallions, and a bit of chopped parsley.  Success!  The stew was rich tasting, the langastinos tender and sweet, and the broth spicy and smooth.  My plan had been to stir in a couple of tablespoons of butter at the end, but I just plain forgot, and it didn't matter.  It was just fine without the extra fat.

NOLA on a plate