Crawfish a.k.a mudbugs.

Bearcat89 wrote:

We use a cheap minnow trap from fleet farm and bait is a can of cat food. Works every time.

Do you have to purge these things before cooking? We tried making them one time and it was like eating sand. LOL

CaptainMusky wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Bearcat89 wrote:</div>
We use a cheap minnow trap from fleet farm and bait is a can of cat food. Works every time.

Do you have to purge these things before cooking? We tried making them one time and it was like eating sand. LOL

Soak them in a big tub of water and lots of salt. It cleans them out

Bearcat89 wrote:

Soak them in a big tub of water and lots of salt. It cleans them out

Perfect! I will have to try that sometime. I love crawfish.

Used to trap them in high school on bald eagle lake. We’d catch a handful a day and then have a small boil once we had 15 or 20. No idea if they were clean or had nuclear waste in them but they sure tasted good. Cat food or scraps of sucker minnows worked for us.

My wife thinks I am crazy for wanting to try and do a crawfish boil… I just want to prove her wrong!

dhpricco wrote:

My wife thinks I am crazy for wanting to try and do a crawfish boil… I just want to prove her wrong!

How would you feel if you proved her right?

Would not be the first time! I have faith at least something in the pot will taste decent.

We did this with some Leech Lake Rusty’s a few years ago, kept them in a cooler for a day to flush out, and they were delicious. Can’t use too much old bay in the boil imo!

Real windy day on mille lacs about 10 years ago they were rolling onto shore in the waves by the thousands. I filled up a small lunch cooler and had myself a boil that night. Not a ton of meat on the ones I got but they were good!

We catch hundreds of the up in the bwca always have 1 night were we boil them up and mix with zatarans rice

There all good in mn. I trap them in the larger rivers below dams or under bridges where rocks are present. I use fish carcasses for bait in homemade minnow traps.

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If I trap some over a few days how do you guys keep them so they stay alive? In or out of the water?

Also can you just get the seasoning at Cub Foods?

I will answer my own questions to hopefully help someone else out! We had a successful crawfish boil. Ended up catching a lot of those little buggers. Used a cheap trap off amazon and every time we had fish guts we would rebait the traps. Set them right off the dock and within an hour or two they would be full. Only issue is there was a pretty wide size range of crawfish. I tried putting them in a cooler, but after sitting in there without changing the water for half a day most of them died. Probably lack of oxygen. What worked best was use a fish basket trap to keep the crawfish in through out the week. Just empty the trap into the basket and all the small ones would escape through the holes and you were left with only the larger crawfish. Kids had fun checking the traps every time we went down to the dock. I was not able to find the seasoning locally so ended up ordering it from amazon and had it delivered to our VRBO rental. They tasted pretty good , but it is a decent amount of work for how much meat they yield. The claw meat was actually more tasty than the tail meat.

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dhpricco wrote:

If I trap some over a few days how do you guys keep them so they stay alive? In or out of the water?

Also can you just get the seasoning at Cub Foods?

Sorry I missed your message, looks like you did great! We kept them in a cooler with ice and they lasted for the 36 hours until we boiled them. And we just used a whole bunch of old bay, garlic, onions and lemons in the boil.

Yeah, it’s a lotta work for a little meat but a really cool experience and I’m sure the kids loved it. Even if you never do it again, now you can say you did it! Thanks for sharing your experience!

That looks like a lot of fun and I am sure the kids had a blast! The fish basket is a brilliant idea!