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Crawfish Sausage - Worth Visiting New Orleans For

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 05:44
by el Ducko
Crawfish Sausage - Worth Visiting New Orleans For
Hopefully you have visited New Orleans at least once in your life. It seems to be considered a right of passage for college kids at Mardi Gras time. During football season... well, we probably shouldn`t go there, this year. For the rest of us, however, if you like history, vampire novels, theater, films, literature, music, art, fine dining... (the list goes on and on), New Orleans is for you. Go there, spend several days or a week, drop lots of money on food and tours and... Yikes!

...or you can do what I did. Ya know, somehow coffee and donuts are never the same after Café du Monde. After you have café au lait and a beignet there, you should drift further northward, avoiding the French Quarter`s plastic façade, upscale restaurants, and tee-shirt & trinket stores. Follow the trail of fresh tattoo ink on the hipsters. North of the French Quarter, new jazz venues are opening up. ...and with them is a joint called Dat Dog, which serves- - you guessed it- - hot dogs and sausages of surprisingly wide variety. They had, beside the usual, such sausages as Guinness, alligator, crawfish, Duck (yikes!), TurDuckEn (duck, turkey, and chicken), Slovenian, Polish...

Good place! Being of "Inquiring Mind," I just HAD to have the crawfish sausage. It was better than good. "...mo` betta," as the locals might say. ...tasted like crawfish plus pork, with a nice subtle spiciness. It was delicious, grilled. Now, I gotta have more!

So naturally I turned to the members` Recipe Index, and there at http://wedlinydomowe.pl/en/viewtopic.php?t=5741 I found a recipe contributed by Devo, which he found in a post at http://forum.bradleysmoker.com/index.php?topic=25612.0 . There is a spice blend, "Soileau's Seasoning," which is proprietary. I suspect any of the hundreds of Cajun spice blends will do fine, seeing as how only a half-teaspoon is specified for 5 pounds of pork.

As to the crawfish, in Texas we can buy `em raw or fresh at certain times of the year, and frozen most of the year. If you can`t, do what Devo did and use shrimp. The flavor won`t be quite the same, but it`ll be good. ...real good. Make the sausage, grill some, and serve it by itself to appreciate the flavor. ...or do like they offer at Dat Dog, and serve jambalaya sauce on it. How...? I assume you make jambalaya, only don`t add the sausage, the rice, or the various proteins that you might normally add. The sausage is tasty enough, though, that the sauce isn`t necessary.

And as to the money- - at $7.75, the crawfish sausage ain`t cheap. But, given the choice of a sausage or another of those tacky tourist "Who Dat?" souvenir tee shirts, what would YOU do?
:mrgreen:

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 17:07
by Butterbean
Crawfish sausage for sure. I can always wear some of the drippings on my shirt so who needs a tourist shirt?

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 02:46
by Dave Zac
The wife and I enjoyed the French quarters plastic facad last year. Walking, watching, drinking, walking, drinking, seeing, all the way to bourbon steet. Never tasted a sausage but boy howdy did we have fun

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 13:49
by el Ducko
Butterbean wrote:Crawfish sausage for sure. I can always wear some of the drippings on my shirt so who needs a tourist shirt?
My grandsons and I maintain that "If it's good enough to eat, it's good enough to wear."

The area along Frenchmen Street is becoming what the French Quarter used to be, fifty (or more!) years ago- - jazz clubs, bars with patio restaurants tucked in behind. Maybe some day there'll be a re-birth of jazz. ...but you're right, Dave- - it's still fun, even if you're just wandering around. There's still good food to be had at reasonable prices, if you look a bit.

A friend told us about a grocery item to bring back with us: Savoie's "Real Cajun" sliced pickled pork. ...anybody familiar with it? The label says it's pork cured with a solution of water, salt, sugar, sodium phosphates, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite. The company is located in Opelousas. Our friend swears by it for cooking boiled vegetables such as okra, green beans, and cabbage. Should be fun.

...and of course, I'm bringing home some tasso, too. I was going to bring some of the sausages, but they don't last long in our family of carnivores.
:mrgreen:

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 17:48
by Darwin
el Ducko wrote:...

A friend told us about a grocery item to bring back with us: Savoie's "Real Cajun" sliced pickled pork. ...anybody familiar with it? The label says it's pork cured with a solution of water, salt, sugar, sodium phosphates, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite. The company is located in Opelousas. Our friend swears by it for cooking boiled vegetables such as okra, green beans, and cabbage. Should be fun.

...and of course, I'm bringing home some tasso, too. I was going to bring some of the sausages, but they don't last long in our family of carnivores.
:mrgreen:
Pickled pork is generally used to season beans, greens and such, it adds great flavor to pot of red beans. I have not tried Savoie's version of pickled pork, but I would think it is fine and would at least give it a try. I have had their smoke sausages and Andouille and I am not impressed with any of them. The texture, spices and smoke levels are all wrong. They have been a business a long time so folks are purchasing their products. I have used their roux and it is fine for a convenience product. I would get a jar of the pickled pork and give it a try, if you like it there are several of recipes for it on the web.

Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 03:32
by el Ducko
Thanks. Looks like it's interchangeable with the salt pork or ham hocks that we've always used. It'll be fun to try, though.
:mrgreen: