If there was ever a place where as many as 35 “boiling teams” existed, it would have to be New Orleans. Where else would an entire day devoted to expert boiling, and eating, of crawfish take place? In fact, it is kind of surprising that this weekend’s Crawfish Mambo Cook-Off is only the second annual edition.

All-you-can-eat Crawfish Mambo Saturday, May 11

Saturday’s schedule is already chock full of activities from the cooking competitions and samplings to live music and local art vendors. Teams will compete for the best spice combinations with first, second and third place winners awarded by a panel of UNO alumni judges. There will also be an award for the “Best Decorated Booth.”

This year’s music line-up includes a full hour of New Orleans funk each from Big Sam’s Funky Nation, Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. & the Zydeco Twisters, Glen David Andrews, the New Orleans Nightcrawlers, Gal Holiday & The Honky Tonk Revue and the UNO Jazz All-Stars. Everything kicks off at 11:00am with the first batch of boiled crawfish and the first set of live music from the UNO Jazz All-Stars, but perhaps the best part is that your ticket gets you all-you-can-eat crawfish all day til the festivities end at 7:00 p.m. – so get those peelin’ fingers ready!

Tickets are $15 advance or $20 at the gate, and include unlimited crawfish eats.

Event is all-ages, children under 7 are free.RAIN or SHINE, it’s on!

2nd Annual Crawfish Mambo

Saturday, May 11

11am – 7pm

@ The Cove (Founders Rd. at the Sandbar)

University of New Orleans – Lakefront Campus

2000 Lakeshore Drive  (map)

More Info: www.crawfishmambo.com

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Even before taking the music into account, we will note that the annual Crawfest at Tulane University last year had an audience of 12,000, and offered 19,000 pounds of free boiled crawfish. Those are pretty good odds in our book. And now, the music: the legendary Funky Meters (Art Neville, Brian Stoltz, George Porter Jr. and Russell Batiste) will headline, and there will also be a “superjam” with Porter, “Papa” John Gros, and two members of Soulive. Also appearing will be the Main Squeeze, Honey Island Swamp Band, the Stooges Brass Band, Kristin Diable, Mia Borders, the Wild Magnolias, Mississippi Rail Company, Mission South, and Gold & the Rush. And in case some really big guy gets all the crawfish before you, there will be plenty of food vendors including Hubig’s Pies, Dat Dog Express, and NOLA Smokehouse.

The event runs from 12:00 pm – 10:00 pm on Tulane University’s Uptown Campus located at 31 McAlister Drive (between Willow and Freret). And it’s free.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

As YouTube has moved towards curating more original content, the community video site has partnered with various producers to create original “channels”. One of these partners is Bonnaroo, who launched the Bonnaroo 365 channel just after Jazz Fest. Like the Bonnaroo Festival, it’s a mix of music, comedy, and other “good stuff”—the channel’s overriding theme.

Also like the festival, the channel gets inspiration from New Orleans. Today, Bonnaroo 365 debuted a series of five films called “Adventures in Mardi Gras”, filmed during carnival this year. The series includes five short mini-documentary videos: an interview with Big Chief Monk Boudreaux (above), a Shaggy crawfish boil at NOLA Brewing, snapshots of revelers on Bourbon Street, a group of friends hanging out by the Mississippi River at 7 a.m. on Mardi Gras morning, and a car trip through the Lower Ninth Ward. All five films were directed by Casey Neistat, whose “Make It Count” commercial for Nike went viral in April and has since logged almost six million YouTube views.

Check out the full “Adventures in Mardi Gras” series below.

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Mia Borders at Jazz Fest 2012. Photo by Kim Welsh.

If you thought you were getting a break from festival food and music post-Jazz Fest, think again. This Saturday, the University of New Orleans is inviting the public to Crawfish Mambo, a crawfish boil on the lake. From 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., 35 teams will be competing to prepare all-you-can-eat crawfish and win the title “Crawfish Mambo Champion.”

Crawfish Mambo will also feature live music from the UNO Jazz Allstars, Mia Borders, Paul Sanchez and the Rolling Road Show, Rockin’ Dopsie, Jr. & the Zydeco Twisters, and Bonerama to accompany the feasting. Judging for the competition begins at 1 p.m. and first, second and third place teams will receive a trophy for their crawfish offerings. For more information, ticket purchasing and team registration, visit crawfishmambo.com.

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Soft-Shell Crab Po-Boy. Photo by Nunu Zomot.

Seven days, 12 stages and tents, hundreds of musical acts, countless applications of sunscreen, and one can only guess how many lukewarm beers. To borrow a cliché, Jazz Fest is a marathon not a sprint, and just as those runners must refuel along their 26.2-mile journey, so too must you nourish your body over the many hours of sun-soaked, sweaty and serendipitous pleasure spent at the Fair Grounds.

The key to feasting your way through Jazz Fest is planning, pace, and patience. Enter the infield without some form of culinary agenda, fall head over heels for one dish so that you decide to go back for seconds, or avoid the longer lines in favor of immediate gratification, and chances are that you will miss out on some of the best eats on the grounds. But with a quick survey of the map, a few mental notations of your perennial favorites, and a willingness to navigate unknown gustatory territory, the fest can be as pleasurable for your taste buds as it is for your ears.

Consider navigating your way through the Jazz Fest vendors as if you were dining in a multi-course affair. A proper first course is minimal yet builds anticipation, a nibble to whet the appetite without taking up precious real estate in the stomach. If entering through the Sauvage Street entrance, stop in Heritage Square for an order of spring rolls from Ba Mien. The crisp vegetables and cool vermicelli noodles wrapped inside taut rice paper are a refreshing way to begin your journey. For those in search of a salty snack on the go, head over to Food Area II for a paper bag full of cracklins from Fatty’s. These hot, crunchy puffs of pork skin make a perfect amuse bouche to share among friends. Like much of the food at Jazz Fest, they’ll also freak out your friends from more civilized parts of the country, and the pleasure in that can’t be overrated.

Gumbo may fall into the soup category by default, but locals will tell you that a proper serving of the potage is a meal unto itself. There are as many versions of gumbo as there are cooks in South Louisiana, and three distinct varieties can be found on the festival grounds. Fireman Mike Gowland parlayed his Jazz Fest notoriety into a Food TV appearance a few years ago, but his celebrity has not detracted from his commitment to the Fest, where he will be offering shrimp gumbo thickened with okra. Filé gumbo takes its name from the ground sassafras added to the pot for both flavor and texture, and the Bacquet family serves up their Creole family recipe from their Lil Dizzy’s booth in Heritage Square. But the apotheosis of gumbo comes from Prejean’s, whose brick-red pheasant, quail and andouille gumbo is rustic from its Acadiana roots yet refined enough to warrant praise from all who have had that rich, deep base pass across their lips.

Moving onto the main course, the first decision to be made is whether utensils will be necessary. Standing up while holding a beer and ferrying forkfuls of jambalaya to your mouth is an art form that professionals and determined amateurs will be rewarded for mastering as it will be required to enjoy combination trios like the jama-jama, fried plantains and poulet fricassee from Bennachin; and the crawfish sack, oyster patties and crawfish beignets from Patton’s Caterers. You could spend those skills eating Crawfish Monica and crawfish enchiladas, or you could try them out on the lamb tagine from Jamila’s (hint, hint).

The portability of sandwiches make them the quintessential festival food, but at the Fair Grounds, it’s the substance not the functionality that explains the long lines forming in front of the Galley Seafood and Love at First Bite booths.

After a wait that at times may seem like an eternity, patient fans giddily walk away from the front of the lines with po-boys filled with crunchy fried soft-shell crab or succulent cochon de lait.

While technically not classified as sandwiches, the freshly baked breads stuffed with a myriad of meats, cheeses and seafood from Panorama Foods and Creole’s Lunch House include both the handheld and gut-filling characteristics that make them almost as popular as the classic po-boys. And although their ethnic origins lie outside southern Louisiana, the gyro from Mona’s and Cuban sandwich from Canseco’s are reason enough to recognize that the cultures of the region draw influence from all over the globe.

If you have made it to the end of a full day of music and your progressive outdoor feast, the least that you can do to reward yourself is to indulge in dessert. Perhaps a snoball from one of the three vendors serving these frozen cloud-like treats from strategically placed locations around the grounds. For those in search of a more filling finale, look no further than the Creole cream cheese cake with strawberries from Minnie Pearl (find a friend to split it with) or the sweet potato treats from Marie Sugar Dumplings.

But always remember to finish with a mango freeze and plenty of rosemint iced tea and strawberry lemonade, as you will need to rehydrate. This is a marathon, after all.

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Throughout the year, Tulane University holds concerts from time to time that are open to the public. But its biggest public party of the year is Crawfest, which features over 16,000 pounds of boiled crawfish, potatoes and corn and a full day of musical performances. Saturday, April 21 was the sixth-annual Crawfest on Tulane’s Uptown campus, and the musical lineup included Galactic, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, Alo, The Soul Rebels, Eric Lindell, Flow Tribe, Sol Driven Train, Mississippi Rail Company, Los Po-Boy-Citos, Dana Abott, Higher Heights, and Erika Flowers. Below are photos from the festival and Eric Lindell’s performance.

All photos were taken by Willow Haley.

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The Gravy with Barbara Menendez. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“My son Weston, who is also in my band (the Help), he put it to me this way about cooking. He likes to cook because I’ve always cooked, and I said to Weston, ‘You know, one day, everything that you’ve ever learned about cooking just gels, and it’s like an epiphany.’ And he goes, ‘Like jazz!’ and I’m like, ‘Exactly! It’s like the day you understand jazz.’ I love how he said that. Basic cooking is like building a foundation for any structure in the construction business. You can build anything on top of it. You just need to know how to make a solid foundation.

The cooking I do, I guess it’s indicative of New Orleans. Low and slow. People ask me to make gumbo, debris, stews. I make jambalaya too, a white jambalaya with chicken—thighs have the most flavor—and you fry them, take them out, and then into the fat you throw tons of onion and some bell pepper, cover and cook that down for 20 minutes and then you add your dry rice into the juices that came out of the vegetables and cover and let that cook for a while; then you throw in the sausage. I like andouille sausage for everything. I heard, ‘You never put andouille in red beans,’ but get out! Andouille’s the best. Then you put your chicken back in, add water and then garlic at the end. If you sauté garlic, it pales too much and loses its punch.

[Meowing] That’s my cat in there, sequestered. She actually can’t come out because she’ll jump up here and put her face in the crawfish. She’ll put her face in your sandwich, and she’ll go, ‘Oh, hi, thanks.’ I love her to death, but my biggest fear is getting hair in the food.

I make my roux fast. You start when you’re 20 doing it low and slow because you’re terrified, but I’m 50 and I get how to do this and I’m not going to burn it and I’m not going to be here forever. The other thing I do is I use olive oil. The earthier the dish, the more I prefer olive oil. When you start your roux, just ignore it for a minute. If I start spazzing about it, it’s like watching water boil; it never happens. So just wait. But once it’s hot, you’ve got to pay attention because it turns quick.

I first made this recipe when I was pregnant with Weston, and he’s 27. I originally got it from Justin Wilson. I don’t believe recipes, usually. It’s art; it’s a spiritual thing. You’re adding your own love, your own stuff. People should just relax when they’re trying to cook, get their own channel going. Emeril, who I love dearly, his whole ‘kicking it up a notch’—I’m sorry. Everything doesn’t need to be kicked up. Creole cooking is a lot subtler than that.

The first thing I ever learned to cook was red beans and rice from Dolores Tillman. I call her my mom. I was born in 1960 and grew up in Lake Vista, which was sort of the Northshore of those days. Dolores came to work for my mother when I was 10 months old, and she worked for my mom for 23 years. I used to pull my chair up and watch her cook. She was from Honduras, had nine children of her own, helped my mom raise her seven. The way she makes red beans is how I make red beans. Basically, you chop everything big and throw it in the pot. You don’t soak your beans overnight, you just cook it for four hours until it becomes this creamy goodness. A half stick of butter, a pot spoon of ketchup. Onion, garlic, carrots, pickled pork—I put andouille sausage. But now, I brown my vegetables first, and they’re not only great, they’re amazing. It’s just that extra bit of love that makes the difference.

My mom cooked, well, she tried. That’s mean, but she had Dolores. She didn’t have to; Dolores cooked. Dolores did everything. She always made red beans and rice on Monday, and the best fried chicken in the world! It’s just salt, pepper, flour and chicken, but the secret is that the oil has to be fresh and you shake the excess flour off, don’t let it get gummy or anything. Wash the chicken, cut it up in pieces, sprinkle it with salt and pepper—generously; I’m heavy-handed like her. And she’d get a big brown grocery bag and put flour in there and throw that chicken in there and shake it up—genius. I told her, ‘You’ve got to be lying to me,’ and she said, ‘No, baby. That’s it.’

When did I last see her? Was it a year ago? Yes, it was. Because I go by my weight. Like a year ago, September. There’s an SNL skit called ‘Cooking with the Anal Retentive Chef.’ He’d chop up something and end up putting it in the garbage because it wasn’t perfect and then he had to get it ready for the garbage. I do that. In little Ziploc bags, so it won’t stink. [Holds up bag, zipping it shut.] See, isn’t that nice? [laughs]

Barbara’s Crawfish Stew

Photo by Elsa Hahne.

3 lbs Louisiana crawfish tails
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup olive oil
1 3/4 cup flour
8 cups chopped Vidalia onion
3/4 chopped celery
1 bunch parsley, leaves only, chopped
3/4 cup chopped green bell pepper
1 jalapeño seeded and chopped
1/4 cup (1 head) chopped garlic
4 (8-oz) bottles clam juice

Season crawfish with salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper. Prepare roux, using olive oil and flour, a dark chocolate brown. Turn heat down and add onion, celery, parsley, bell pepper and jalapeño and sauté for a few minutes. Cover and simmer over low heat for 1 hour until it becomes a bubbly ooze (periodically scrape and stir so it doesn’t burn). Add seasoned crawfish and garlic, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Add clam juice and keep cooking over low heat for up to 1 hour. Add more salt to taste. Serve over rice.

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Thank you so much, Alex (OffBeat editor), for showing me the fastest one-step way yet to peel a crawfish, but I think I need a better ointment than yellow crawfish fat… Look at me! The little dot right next to my heart line is actually the remainder of a crawfish splinter. The rest are stab wounds.

Alex’s way: Straighten out the crawfish with the head/body in your right hand and tail in your left hand (with your left thumb about mid-tail). Push tail towards the body so the second or third shell segment on the tail disappears into the segment before it. Pull out, separating tail completely. You should now have a big enough piece of tail meat exposed (what was inside the body and the first tail shell segments) to be able to grab it with your teeth and pull the rest out, while squeezing the end of the tail shell. Let’s call this the pump gun method.

The husband’s way: Sever tail from head/body. Peel off first two tail shell segments, by tearing them up and over, sideways. You should now have a big enough piece of tail meat exposed (what was inside the body and the first couple of tail shell segments) to be able to grab it with your teeth and pull the rest of it out, while squeezing the end of the tail shell.

The Swedish way: Use a nutcracker to crack claws (Swedes only eat big crawfish, so they’re old and tough). Use a toothpick to get all the claw meat out. Tear off all the little legs and suck on those. Suck the underside of the body where the little legs were attached. Gently squeeze and lift body shell up and forward. Lick the fat from the inside of the body, then tear body from tail. Use a toothpick to get all the fat from inside the head. While looking at the underside of the tail, using fingers, break triangular tips of tail shell segments off, exposing entire tail. (Now that took a while, which is why we drink one glass of vodka and sing a song for every crawfish we eat.)

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I boiled Swedish crawfish this weekend. With my two kids in the backseat of the car, doors open and the engine running, I pulled up to a roadside garden (on Baronne in Central City) and attacked a loving gardener’s towering dill plants with my hedge clippers. Did anyone ever go to jail for dill theft? Didn’t think so.

Swedish crawfish are a major deal in Sweden. At the prospect of eating even just five or six crawfish, we Swedes run out and purchase funny hats and blow-whistles. We even procure colored lanterns to hang over our heads while we eat a half-dozen crustaceans. We don’t have a lot of crawfish in Sweden, you see. But we love them dearly. When I moved to New Orleans in 2002, the last plant that processed crawfish for the Swedish market just outside Lafayette was shutting down. The dollar was high then, and Swedes were getting more and more crawfish from China and Turkey. Sweden is the biggest per capita importer of crawfish in the world, so it’s a valuable market considering that we’re willing to pay almost a dollar per crawfish. Growing up, the most I ever ate in one sitting was a dozen. But it was enough, considering that we drink a glass of vodka and sing a raunchy song with every crawfish we eat. We take our time too. Those itty bitty legs? We suck and chew on those as well; and yes—we suck the heads.

I didn’t expect my friends here to “get” Swedish crawfish. They do seem rather bland compared to the Louisiana way of cooking them. But many liked the super-dilly flavor. We eat them cold, after they’ve soaked in the brine overnight, and they’re plenty salty. I froze a batch and am going to bring it to my friend’s DVR Treme party tomorrow.

This is my recipe, if you’d like to try:

10 pounds live crawfish

4 inches water in a 16-inch (diameter) pot

a bushel of fresh dill, including many flowers/crowns (enough to hug)

2 cups salt

1/4 cup sugar

6-pack of beer

2 tablespoons coriander seed

1 tablespoon celery seed

1 tablespoon white peppercorns

1 tablespoon dill weed

Hose the crawfish off. Bring water to a boil, adding all ingredients but the crawfish. When water is at a roaring boil, insert the basket and pour the crawfish into the basket. Cover. When the water comes back to a roaring boil, turn the heat off but leave the lid on. Let sit for 15 minutes. Lift basket with crawfish out of the brine, let sit for a few minutes and then pour into containers. When the brine has cooled (it should be bath temperature or cooler), pour enough brine into containers to cover crawfish. Seal and refrigerate or freeze.

Buy vodka. Invite friends. Wear a funny hat. It’s on.

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Sixty years ago, crawfish was cheap food for poor people. “My father would say, we’re so poor we’re going to have to eat crawfish,” says Marcelle Bienvenu, food columnist and cookbook author. “I remember my mother saying, don’t eat crawfish in front of strangers because they’ll think you’re barbaric.”

Today crawfish is an icon of Louisiana cuisine. “I think of it as a very indigenous thing,” says Michelle Nugent, food director for Jazz Fest. “Nobody cultivates it, fishes it and eats it like we do.” The boiled crawfish sold at Jazz Fest is definitely local, but the cooked crawfish are just as likely to have been cultivated in the south of Spain or the Jiangsu Province of China.

Louisiana crawfish, at least the peeled tail meat, is now expensive. At their peak, the tails can sell for almost as much as lump crabmeat. Even though local crawfish are widely acknowledged as better tasting, many festival vendors use imports because of the cost and, they claim, a lack of local supply.

“It’s cheaper, but I don’t think it’s as tasty,” says Bienvenu of imported crawfish. “I’ve cooked with it a couple of times, and I’m not very satisfied with the texture of the tails or the taste.” Nugent agrees that the local product is superior. She insists that certain dishes, such as the crawfish rémoulade, be made with Louisiana tail meat. “The rémoulade is a cold product. I think it allows the quality of the crawfish to shine through,” she says. “Whereas something that’s cooked, it may not be quite so important.”

John Ed Laborde, who buys roughly 4,500 pounds of tail meat for his popular crawfish bread, uses a mix of Spanish and Louisiana crawfish. The Spanish crustaceans, he says, taste the most like the local product. Pierre Hilzim also prefers Spanish crawfish over the more common Chinese imports for his Crawfish Monica.

Vendors who use fewer pounds of crawfish are more likely to buy from local sources. Jamila’s Café will use up to 300 pounds of Louisiana tail meat for its crawfish, spinach and zucchini bisque. Wayne Baquet of Li’l Dizzy’s Café will stuff 500 pounds of Louisiana tail meat into 7,000 crawfish heads for his traditional bisque.
The festival does not track how many vendors use Louisiana crawfish. OffBeat spoke with eight of the 14 vendors with crawfish dishes at Jazz Fest, and five of those vendors use at least some imported crawfish, primarily from China.

Nugent and several vendors claim that Louisiana does not produce enough peeled crawfish to supply Jazz Fest. Roy Johnson, director of market development for the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, disagrees and notes that Louisiana should generate 2 million pounds of tail meat this year. “By the time the Jazz Fest starts there is plenty of Louisiana tail meat on the market, but at a price,” Johnson says. “What they mean without saying is that they can buy the Chinese meat cheaper.”

“The supply is there if you’re willing to pay for it,” agrees Semolina’s Gregg Reggio, who buys up to 30,000 pounds of fresh Louisiana crawfish tails annually for his chain of restaurants. He pays between $7 and $9 a pound for local crawfish, instead of $4.50 for Chinese imports. “It’s a commitment that we’ve made. We like to help out the Louisiana economy, the Louisiana farmer, the Louisiana fishermen. I’m amazed the places that don’t use fresh Louisiana product.”

Matthew Goldman, the Press and Advertising Director for Jazz Fest, counters that using local products exclusively no longer makes sense. “People from all over the world come here, we have bands from all over the world,” he says, “and to think of specifying one item, and saying crawfish should only be from Louisiana, I think it’s not the way of the world anymore.”

Nugent studied the possibility of requiring that vendors use only Louisiana crawfish, but concluded that fest goers would not pay the premium for the local ingredient. “You wouldn’t be able to afford the food out there,” she says. “And the vendors, it wouldn’t be fair to them.”

For food vendors, Jazz Fest is always a financial risk. “In general, Jazz Fest is good,” says John Caluda of Coffee Cottage, “but you never know. If you have one or two bad days, that’s your profit. I could have 2,000 or 3,000 crawfish strudels left over. You’ve really got to watch your cost in all areas.”

When Quint Davis announced the lineup for Jazz Fest, he trumpeted that 87 percent of the musicians were from Louisiana. Why couldn’t Jazz Fest also let the world know how committed it is to local fishermen, shrimpers and farmers? If the festival won’t require vendors to use Louisiana crawfish, then perhaps it could identify those that choose to. If tourists from around the world don’t know where the crawfish they’re eating are, how will they know what they’re missing?

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