Crawfish: That other season

Time to come out of your shell: Mudbugs have arrived

Faded Rose general manager Zac David holds up one of several thousand cranky Louisiana crawfish destined to become a cooked crustacean star of the Little Rock restaurant’s annual Fat Tuesday crawfish boil.
Faded Rose general manager Zac David holds up one of several thousand cranky Louisiana crawfish destined to become a cooked crustacean star of the Little Rock restaurant’s annual Fat Tuesday crawfish boil.

Before the crawfish enter a final, boiling bath at Little Rock's Faded Rose, the crotchety crustaceans shed any remnants of their former lives with a last shower from a garden hose.

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About 422 pounds of crawfish were served at Faded Rose’s crawfish boil on Fat Tuesday. Before boiling…crawfish at Faded Rose restaurant on Rebsamen Park Road in Little Rock.

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After boiling… crawfish at Faded Rose restaurant on Rebsamen Park Road in Little Rock.

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Ed David, founder and patriarch of the family-owned Faded Rose, checks the pots of crawfi sh as they soak up spices and juices after boiling. The New Orleans native fi rst started cooking crawfish when he was about 5.

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With his father, Ed David (background), looking on, Zac David dumps a pot of boiled crawfish into a cooler, where they will be stored until customers arrive for the restaurant’s Fat Tuesday crawfish boil.


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Just 24 hours ago these crawfish were crawling around some pond or swamp bottom near Eunice, La. Now, the crawfish -- all 422 pounds of them -- are being transformed into the stars of the restaurant's annual Fat Tuesday crawfish boil.

After the cleansing, the conversion reaches its end stage as the crawfish are dipped into pots containing a bubbling, orange-hued grave of hot water.

Boiled and soaked full of the pots' spicy juices, the crawfish then are stored in green, 152-quart Igloo coolers the size of bedroom trunks as an eager audience of crawfish cravers awaits.

The restaurant's Fat Tuesday boil -- with its sound of simmering pots and a heavy aroma of cayenne pervaded air -- kicks off crawfish season at the Riverdale restaurant.

"It's a lot of fun,"Ed David, the founder and patriarch of the family-owned restaurant, says about the event. "I enjoy it. It's a treat to my customers. We didn't just get into it for the money."

The restaurant has held regular crawfish boils since the 1980s.

David, 73, grew up in New Orleans' Ninth Ward and first started cooking crawfish when he was 5 or 6. He knows crawfish are ornery creatures. They look perpetually perturbed and probably for a good reason. They are ugly, beady-eyed buggers from the bottoms.

But crawfish are delicious, he says. Well, once the crawfish's gobbet of tail meat is expertly removed and consumed. The smart crawfish eaters also know the crawfish head should be sucked clean of its jumbled flavors and spices.

"That's where the seasoning is," David says. "The sweetness of the fat and the spiciness of the seasoning."

On this Fat Tuesday, David's son -- and Faded Rose general manager -- Zac David is working alongside him. Zac David also started cooking crawfish when he was little. Like father like son.

With a steady stream of Louisiana-flavored music -- including Better Than Ezra and Trombone Shorty -- playing from a Bluetooth speaker, the Davids boil each crawfish batch in one of four 80-quart pots. Each pot holds about 30 pounds of crawfish cooking in a swirling concoction of crawfish, crab and shrimp boil, cayenne, onions and other goodies.

Later that afternoon and evening, Faded Rose will be packed with customers enjoying their first crawfish of the 2016 crawfish season, which continues at the restaurant with a weekly Wednesday boil through May.

The Fat Tuesday event is one of several around the state that opens crawfish season in Arkansas, which usually stretches from Super Bowl weekend through Father's Day.

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This year's crawfish crop looks to be a bumper one for fans of the crustaceans, says Lisa Marshall, owner of Floyd's Meat & Seafood in Sherwood.

Live crawfish have been sold since 1984 at the venerable family-owned and operate market, which has been around since 1978.

Marshall says the store has sold more than 617,000 pounds of live crawfish in the last 12 years. That's not counting cooked crawfish, which it sells as well.

Still, most of Floyd's crawfish sales are live crustaceans, which it acquires from south Louisiana. In 2015, Floyd's sold 74,000 pounds of live crawfish -- a record -- and this season has started off with a "big kaboom," says Marshall.

"I will break my record again this year," she says. "I absolutely will.

"I will not just break it. I'll shatter it to the point where I need a Shop-Vac, broom and a dustpan. We're well on our way to breaking it."

How and when did crawfish in Arkansas get so popular? It's a murky mystery.

For Zac David, who has witnessed Arkansans fondness for crawfish grow every season, there are a couple of reasons why crawfish have become so popular in Arkansas. One is hurricane evacuees who stayed in Arkansas.

After the wham-bam punch of Katrina and Rita in 2005, thousands of Louisianans fled to Arkansas and the people who stayed brought with them an appreciation for crawfish. It's a love these evacuees spread to friends and neighbors.

Also, Zac David says, diners have gotten more adventurous in the last decade or so.

"There's a lot more demand for [crawfish]," he says. "The food world has gotten smaller. You see it all over on menus all over town of things that 10, 15 years ago people wouldn't have on a menu."

There also are just more crawfish available, especially from farms in Louisiana.

Ray McClain's official title is aquaculture professor at the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center's rice research station near Crowley, an Acadiana town whose motto is "Where life is rice and easy."

Unofficially, he's a crawfish expert who researches aquaculture and biology in a state that takes its mudbugs seriously.

According to a crawfish production manual produced by LSU, commercial sales of crawfish harvested from natural waters in Louisiana began in the late 1800s. In 1880, the first record of a commercial crawfish harvest in Louisiana shows 23,400 pounds were harvested with a value of $2,140.

In 2011, there were an estimated 189,860 acres in Louisiana devoted to crawfish production, with 111.9 million pounds harvested with a value of $195.8 million, according to LSU. There were perhaps another 14.5 million pounds of crawfish wild harvested in the state that year, the last year complete, official numbers are available.

The official acreage for crawfish farming in 2014 was 225,000 acres in Louisiana, McClain says. There was an increase in the farming acreage in 2015, although the official numbers aren't out, and McClain expects a substantial increase in pond acreage this year.

It's simple, he says: More acres dedicated to crawfish farming translates to more crawfish, many that find their way north into Arkansas.

And several factors came together to create the conditions for a great 2016 crawfish season, McClain says. Adequate rains last summer and fall in Louisiana helped as crawfish emerged with their young from their burrows. Warmer than average temperatures in the fall and so far this winter have been good for crawfish growth, too.

"The conditions have probably been more favorable this year than we've seen in several years in terms of crawfish production," he says.

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At the Cajun Cafe in Paragould, there are long waits Thursdays through Saturdays for boiled crawfish, says Penny Pigue, calling this season "pretty awesome."

(Pigue -- along with her husband Ron -- sold the cafe and accompanying Delta Crawfish Market in 2015, but she works alongside new owner Devlin Duke.)

"During the season, it's crazy," she says. "I think everybody loves crawfish. We have people come in from all over the place to pick up cooked crawfish or live ones. Super Bowl weekend was crazy with live orders going out and cooked orders. Valentine's Day weekend was mostly people coming in and eating."

Delta Crawfish also distributes live Louisiana crawfish and cooked crawfish across Arkansas and in Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

One of its customers is Harrison's annual Crawdad Days Festival, which returns this year May 20-21

Started in 1990, about 10,000 people attended the 2015 two-day festival with all 4,500 pounds of crawfish selling out by 6:30 p.m. the second day of the festival, says events coordinator Angel Perryman with the Harrison Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Sometimes festival crowds are as large as 15,000 people, Perryman says. Sure, Harrison is about 150 miles and a few mountains away from the Arkansas Delta -- and about 500 miles away from south Louisiana -- but people in the region love crawfish. Well, the ones who can be convinced to eat them.

"We have a stage where we do crawfish-eating demonstrations," Perryman says. "We've done spots on local TV where we actually go on TV and show people how to eat crawfish. Of course, some people, they are just never going to be into it, but they're going to give it a shot."

Perryman says Johnny Robin is one local man who enjoys crawfish, winning the festival's crawfish-eating contest regularly. In 2012, he ate 341 crawfish in less than 12 minutes. This year he's going for an official world record.

Back at Faded Rose, Ed David is not necessarily in the business of eating crawfish fast. But he does test every batch. He devours them methodically. Enjoying the succulent, spicy meat. The pop of flavors into his mouth from squeezing the head.

"That's why I still do it at my age," he says. "There's not a batch we do where I don't taste four or five crawfish out of.

"They're not the biggest bugs, but they're not bad for early in the season."

Ed David knows the crawfish will get more plentiful. Also larger. The season of the crawdad in Arkansas has only just begun.

Style on 02/23/2016

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