Crawfish, Crayfish, baby lobster, crawdaddies: Whatever you call it, it is a strange food that seems to exist in vast quantities. This food item has a lot of names but for the most part I consider it to be a very inexpensive food that tastes just fine but at the end of the day the process of getting to the meat on these things is more work than I think the payoff is.
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It's kind of a staple of the part of North Carolina that I live in though and often, at parties, there will be a bunch of this served and normally they don't even charge anything for it. This is because this creature is apparently so abundant that when you go to buy some people aren't really all that fussy about the quality because the quality is pretty standard. In some of the roadside vendors that I see when driving near the ocean they person just sells it by the trash bag. There's not even a great level of accuracy that goes into weighing it. It's so cheap that you don't really think about it.
For some, this might seem like a fantastic deal but there is a really big problem IMO about eating this: It's rather complicated to get the tail meat out of it and even if you have been doing it a while it just doesn't seem worth it to me.
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Maybe it's just the level of protection, so to speak, that I grew up with but dismantling these little guys is kind of a gross process to begin with and you can only really eat the tail meat, and there isn't much of that there anyway. Skilled people can rip these buggers apart in no time but just like with shrimp, it's a skill that I never really learned. For me, it takes a while to get all the carapace off the tail and often, I just end up eating the shell as well out of frustration.
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You are going to get messy because there is normally copious amounts of Old Bay sprinkled all over it. One of the worst things that can happen is that a piece of the shell gets stuck in your gums and that bad boy is just going to stay there until you get home. It's kind of annoying.
There are a couple of things that you can count on in a summertime BBQ yard party in North Carolina and this is if your friend isn't wealthy that is hosting it, they are going to have crawfish. If they are wealthy they are going to have a "pig-pickin" which is just an entire pig cooked all day in a smoker. For many people (including me) this process is kind of gross as well because I grew up in a rather protected environment like a lot of Americans are. We aren't really accustomed to our food looking like it did when it was alive.
I don't have a great deal of international experience so I don't know what the situation is like overseas. For me, I am kind of turned off when I eat a whole fish even though I do regularly go fishing. When I fish I don't normally fish for food and am the kind of guy that puts all the fish back after catching them.
Something that is kind of funny about the widespread and inexpensive nature of crawfish is the fact that while this is available almost everywhere year round here, I have never actually seen one in nature and I spend a great deal of time around bodies of water and live very near a large body of water that connects to the Atlantic ocean.
What about you? Do you like crawfish? To me it just seems like too much work for a teaspoon sized piece of meat