There is no way to describe the ingenious culinary process I went through to mutate a crab cake into a crawfish cake. If I tried to explain it to you, your brain would probably implode due to the intricacies of the process. Just kidding. I simply swapped in slightly more affordable but equally delicious crawfish meat for the oh-so-common crab. End of story. This sort of simple ingredient switch is exactly the kind of misdirection chefs use to look like some sort of genius.Please, take the time and energy to find domestic (preferably Louisiana) crawfish for this recipe. The tails are frequently a little smaller than their imported Asian counterparts, but there is less water content to them, and the one-pound bags they come sealed in are loaded with delicious fat (yes, crawfish have fat), which is where their flavor comes from. Whatever variety you find, they will be frozen. The best practice with these is to slowly thaw them overnight in your refrigerator. Keep this in mind when preparing to make this crawfish cake recipe. The tenacious among you might wait until crawfish season and harvest tails by hand. You will be rewarded with more delicious crawfish cakes and in heaven by a choir of angels. Cajun angels, of course.And for the record, it’s CRAW-fish, not CRAY-fish and, while we’re at it, pah-CAWN, not PEE-can (as my grandmother used to say, “That’s what we keep under the bed!”). Crawfish CakesReprinted with permission from Big Bad Breakfast by John Currence, copyright © 2016. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
