Bought 6 of these beauties yesterday, they weigh about 350gm each. (Cost me R200 for all 6, that’s about £12 🙂 )
Now to decide how to cook them, I’ll probably light a fire and braai them, any suggestions?
We call them crayfish, you?
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Oh drool! Them there are carangeujo here. Best barbied with garlic butter or grilled if it is hissing down outside. A light tomato and onion salad dressed with salt, cider vinegar, olive oil and fresh oregano (cilantro for the Septics) is all that is necessary, not forgetting a crusty bap to mop up the garlic butter.
OZ
Scrummy! Nice recipe, OZ! A little caviar on the side for the garlic bread too! 🙂
They’re yabbies in Strine – and very popular too, especially for the Christmas barbie.
Oh bloody hell, Bearsy. You’ve just reminded me of Moreton Bay bugs too. Sob!
OZ
Good price and a good suggestion re recipe, I’ll bring a bottle!
Used my Castle Lager Lemon & Herb marinade 😉
Accompanied with spicy brown rice and 3 salads (2 of which were [over] loaded with feta)
I’m told that I can make them again next week! ~ Ja sure 😉
That is the trouble with being a good cook, they get to know your dishes and want repeats!
In recent years Australian yabbies have invaded Lake Kariba, which some of you may know is the largest man-made reservoir in the world.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Kariba
http://www.zimeye.org/the-australian-invasion-causes-crisis-in-kariba/
Although they have become a pest, there is a reluctance to commercialize them on a formal basis. From what I have been told, if it were legal to sell them and they proved to be a lucrative trade, then people would introduce them to dams and rivers all over the country, which would be an ecological disaster.
The other problem is that our indigenous brethren have not yet acquired a taste for them. They will eat mopani worms, rats and locusts, but not the Red Clawed Crayfish. So the demand is limited to the country’s disenfranchised minority and Chinese. One does occasionally see them in certain butcheries (we don’t have fishmongers here) but it is rare and they are expensive. I suspect at some point the price will plummet.
I ate some last year while on Spurwing Island. They were not particularly nice, but I put that down to the chef.
Google images of
Kariba Houseboats
Kariba Tiger Fish
Spurwing Island.
Kariba Yabby
I refer our cherished colleague, Sipu, to my original comment yesterday. Just do an ‘Oscar’ on the chef and cook the things yourself. They are absolutely delicious and you will be saving your bit of the planet as well as having a bloody good supper.
OZ
Oneself? In the kitchen? My dear fellow, standards! 😉
Hi Soutie
If they are salt water crayfish, we confuse them with langoustines and sell most of both species to London and Paris for megabucks.
If they are fresh water crayfish, we call them invasive American bastards who are destroying the trout and salmon rivers of Caledonia. We never had native freshwater crayfish before but many of our waterways are now infested by signal crayfish from the US who are hoovering up all the food and starving our fish. I blame Alex Salmond.
They are also polluting English and Welsh rivers and wiping out their native white-clawed crayfish. It would seem that they are the aquatic equivalent of the grey squirrel
We are advised not to eat them when caught but to kill them immediately for the same reason that Sipu says is advanced in Zimbabwe. The goal is eradication and the suggested method is stomping.
Down with the migration of species! Are you there, CO?