I love fresh caught crawdads but the don’t seem to hold taste well once killed. Every now and then I go to a local slew and catch a mess.
I use something like these:
to put shells/tails/legs in. They also work great for bouquet garni!
NB: they are not meant for extended direct contact with a hot pan, so you can’t saute with them. But they’re great for soups, stocks, sauces, etc!
Thanks for the ideas. I’m not easily socially embarrassed, so if I’m served shell- or tail-on shrimp, I eat them with my fingers. I like the idea of making a stock/broth–it sounds like a yummy base.
It seriously is, to the point that buying shrimp at the local Kroger, I buy shell on by preference!
Nothing like simmering some of the “peel” bag in hot water, and then using the strained results to make my seafood or “spicy” flavored Neoguri or Shin. Or just peeling your IQF frozen, shell on shrimp, peeling them, and using the raw shells as above, and then simmering your shrimp in the final ramen just long enough to cook them. Wins on flavor from the base on up!
Tomalley on asparagus? I’ll have to try that. i love the tomally. Often I’d stir some if not all into the melted butter.
ETA: Yes, I know tomalley can have toxins in it depending on any contamination in the water the lobster came from. I have it so rarely I’m not worried.
As a kid, I learned how much I liked shrimp creole. It used to be more of a popular menu item than it is today. I eventually learned how to make it, and as a result, how to make shrimp stock. I’ve never thrown another shell away since.
I absolutely adore shrimp. But I’ve yet to acquire a taste for sweet shrimp. For the uninitiated, if you order sweet shrimp at a sushi bar, the bodies are served raw, while the heads are deep fried. I didn’t like the texture at all of the raw shrimp, and I tend to steer clear of any food with eyes still attached, so I never tried the heads, which are supposedly delicious. I was somewhat disappointed in myself for not trying them, but I’ve never quite got over the mental “head” hangup that I seem to have.
Even better, at a really good sushi bar, you can also get drunken shrimp, where live shrimp are beheaded, then stirred up in a bowl with a little vodka to make them frisky. In other words, they are still moving when you eat them. I’ve never come close to trying them, despite their lack of a head.
The strange thing though is that I don’t seem to have the same hangup when it comes to soft-shell crab for whatever reason. I know I’m eating the whole damn thing and I don’t care. They are sooo delicious.
I’ve had sweet shrimp. I didn’t like the texture of the raw shrimp. The flavor was delicious, but it wasn’t worth it.
Oddly enough, as an extremely finicky kid who wouldn’t touch it, I love shrimp now. Bummer that I didn’t give them a try until adulthood. We had a family friend would bring us industrial sized boxes of fresh shrimp and other goodies (he was a meat cutter for Vons for many years). I really missed out.
I think this is comparable to my feelings about chicken wings; what’s the point of them?
Someone, maybe Jerry Seinfeld, made the joke that restaurants just use the same leftover bones and cover them in sauce. Sounds right to me.
If you want to get grossed out by eating head-on shrimp, do not miss Dennis Quaid in THE SUBSTANCE (first few minutes too) where he masticates and dismembers numerous shrimp in tight close-up for at least two minutes straight. You’ll never touch a shrimp again.
I have a few packages of frozen, head on shrimp, one of which I’m planning to use to make the following this weekend.
Imagine how luscious my stock will be using all the heads and shells. Though I’m not using the Goya seasoning, I have better variants of all the seasonings in the sachet in my pantry including MSG. 
I just want to echo those giving love for crawdads. A local chain does crawdad chowder and it is so rich and tasty. Crawdads have a subtly sweet flavor on top of the savory seafood taste you expect. So good.
Not a big fan of peel and eat shrimp, though maybe next time I’m in NC I will look for a place that serves them. (My oldest daughter and ex-wife live there so I do visit on occasion.)
This thread got me craving shrimp, so I thawed some jumbo shrimp and made a nice quick and easy shrimp scampi meal for dinner tonight 
In my late teens to mid 20s, a friend’s dad had a cabin in northern Michigan that we’d go spend some weekends in the summer. Just down a dirt road there was a little spring-fed lake with a swimming area off a little beach that dropped off from shallow to 15-20’ deep like a cliff. I was into snorkeling at the time, so I’d dive down as deep as I could, and found there were hundreds of crayfish, as we Northerners called them, at that 15-20’ level. They were ghost-white with a hint of blue, and scattered outward in all directions at my approach. One weekend my friend’s family were all up there, and I borrowed his nephew’s butterfly net and caught a couple dozen. Boiled them up and they were delicious. My dad was not one to take me fishing, so it was the first wild thing I ever caught and ate.
Over the years when we’d go up there I’d dive down, not catching them anymore-- I think it was only the one time that I caught and and ate them; really just to get a look at them. I noticed that every year there were fewer and fewer of them. I’d have to hunt around and look under debris and submerged branches just to find one or two. And then my friend told me one time when he was up there when I didn’t go with him, he was hanging at the beach and he saw a guy in scuba gear emerge with a huge sack of crawdads. So, someone’s always got to overdo it and ruin it for everyone else 
That’s the story of human history.
I made my favorite Chinese dish from scratch for dinner tonight: shrimp and lobster sauce. Remarkably easy.
Ain’t that the truth 
How’d it turn out?
When I was a kid, and I loved shellfish back then as much as I do now, I thought that the sauce was actually made from simmering lobster shells in broth or something, and I thought it sounded so extra good, with shrimp and lobster. But, though the dish is delicious, I eventually found out there is no actual lobster in it.
Someday I think I might actually try this recipe making a sauce out of lobster tail broth, just to try to recreate what my young self imagined it to be.
I think it’s meant to be a sauce for lobster, not a sauce that includes lobster. I grew up eating lobster with lobster sauce, and miss it.
I assume it was made from the water in which lobsters were boiled. Plus corn starch, shrimp water and so on. “Never throw anything out that can be used for anything.”
My father made lobster with lobster sauce for me once, for my birthday. The lobster pieces are cooked in the wok, shell-on. No boiling.
I got this from our local Chinese takeout, ‘shrimp in lobster sauce’. I was deathly ill with food poisoning, but I don’t think it was the lobster sauce’s fault. The shrimp were sus, but of course I plunged on and ate them.