My kids had a day off school yesterday (teacher training), so I shoved them in the car and headed off to jjimm’s neck of the woods - Oxford (too spur-of-the-moment to try to arrange a meet-up this time though). Our objective was to catch some of the crayfish that I’ve heard are infesting the river there.
We didn’t really have much of a clue where to go, but jjimm had previously suggested Port Meadow to me, so we went there and after eating our picnic, we dropped a couple of crab lines - baited with bacon - into the water… I was quite pleasantly surprised by the success we enjoyed… I’ve posted more pics and details on my website - here
Do you need a fishing licence to line catch crayfish? (I’m pretty sure you need one to trap them)
I wouldn’t mind having a go at it myself, but I’m no angler.
You certainly need to get one to use a ‘fixed engine’ - that is, any kind of trap or net that you leave unattended. Whether or not you need one to catch them with a line appears to be a bit of a grey area. Given that a hook isn’t even necessary - you can just tie the bacon onto a piece of string and haul them out, I’m not sure if it even qualifies as ‘fishing’.
What’s mildly amusing is that you’re not allowed to release these crayfish in the UK - so once you’ve caught them, you’re pretty much obliged to eat them.
I don’t think your lack of fishing experience constitutes a serious disadvantage - you just drop the bait in the water, wait a while, then pull it up - you need to get a shrimping net under them pretty quickly as they tend to let go and disappear once they break the surface - and there’s a modicum of skill in getting the speed of pulling in right - too fast and they don’t let go of the river bottom - too slow and they let go halfway up - but apart from that, it’s a doddle.
BTW, if you’re going to catch them, take adequate precautions to avoid injury - I’m pretty sure the pincers on the larger specimens would take your finger right off - also, watch out for the spines when you’re shelling them - it’s not immediately apparent, but there are little frills of them all over the place - particularly around the joints of the claw legs. The fan-shaped tail is also pretty sharp. I have a mildly painful set of minor cuts and punctures on my fingers today.
There’s good meat inside the claws (use pliers to crack them, but be careful not to crush them completely) and the two joints below them (use a cocktail stick to tease it out).
I’ve heard people say they taste muddy or dirty and that they need purging for 24 hours before cooking - this might be the case if you’re going to dump them whole into a dish, but if you boil them briefly and throw away the water, they’re no dirtier or more difficult to clean than tiger prawns. It was all a bit of a rush this time, but next time, I intend to set aside the cleaned heads, shells and legs (discarding all the gut etc), then smash them up a bit and make some decent stock from them.
We have a festival here you’d enjoy. We call it the crawfish festival, sometimes crawdads in this area. If you’re ever on this side drop by - I’ll take you to the VIP tent for all you can eat crawdads. But don’t make the mistake I did a couple years ago. I wore white!!
These are our American crayfish, I assume? I spent hours catching the things as a kid. Most of them were pretty tiny, but occasionally you’d find one a good four or five inches long. But they seemed to live in the foulest water, which, even if I’d been inclined to eat seafood, would have put me off.
Yes, they’re American Signal Crayfish - we didn’t catch anything smaller than about 5 inches long and the biggest one was around nine or ten inches from tail to claws - they don’t belong here - escaped from farms and now overrunning some of our waterways - but they seem to be thriving.
The Thames, although it still seems to make people react “dirty river” is apparently now one of the cleanest rivers in Europe - the spot where I caught these was a little bit turbid, but not really dirty in any sort of terrible way - just natural murk.
I love them too but I am from Louisiana which is the headquarters for these types of things. I am going to have to politely ask once and only once that people refer to them as their proper name: “crawfish” as mentioned above. Crawdad is a cute downhome name but it won’t fly either. I don’t care what the dictionary says, crayfish makes someone sound like an uneducated foreign person from another country or at least a far away state. The place that they best known for gets to name them especially when they are exports.
You are correct. I am not God although I am a close consultant to her. During the last interoceanic crustaecean translant, the project plan called for them to be called “crawfish” like it was decreed back in God’s vacationland of L-O-U-I-S-I-A-N-A. The other terms were were planted to catch Canadians but also very foreign people from faraway places from trying to pass as Southern locals. It tends to work very well.
Shag is correct - I was there for the vote - crawfish won and can be found written by the hand of God on a stone tablet here, propped next to the live catfish tanks. Louisiana is considered the Crawfish Capital of the world.
My family of four buys 25lbs (already highly seasoned and boiled - we’re too lazy to do it ourselves) almost every weekend during crawfish season (“spring” to everyone else), along with new potatoes and corn on cob (boiled in with the crawfish). If there are any leftovers, you make crawfish etouffee and serve it over steaming hot rice with crusty french bread and lemon ice box pie for dessert. (Truly, that’s the meal God cooked for herself after she finished creating those pesky mosquitoes).
BTW - although daunting to peel at first, they are really very easy once you get the hang of it. Down south most kids can peel enough to feed themselves earlier than they potty train Keep practicing!
Thirded. We just cooked 90lbs for a party a few weeks ago. (Crawfish are really only worth eating if you start with live ones.) The etouffee we made with the leftovers was dynamite.
Are you entirely certain we should trust an establishment where “Cajun Balls” is part of the menu highlights? And what do they do with the remainder of the Cajuns?
As for the purging, Mangetout, take your slotted basket (full of mudbugs) and let sit in a pot of cold clear salted water about 5 mins before boiling them. Hubby has a whole recipie here somewhere about all that.
My Hubby ran into one of those deals-of-a-lifetime Sunday; a buddy had hundreds of pounds of live crawfish which needed cooking. Free! You can’t turn away free.
We cooked 60 pounds Sunday nite.
What was left over, I peeled and froze the tail meat. It took me 3 hours to peel 'em.
We’ll be fixed up for sure, for gumbo this winter.
If I ever visit somewhere they’re called crawfish, I’ll be sure to use that term while I’m there and also retrospectively after my return home - in reference to any crustacean-related antics that happened there. Here though, they already had a name before there was a place named Louisiana, so we’re not about to change it.
Louisiana is considered the 
Keep practicing!
Hubby has a whole recipie here somewhere about all that.
