Add Crayfish To Your Trout Expedition

If you are heading to the high country for some relaxing trout fishing, you can help your favorite trout lake or stream – and your taste buds as well – by catching and eating all the crayfish you can.

Crayfish are not native to Arizona. In fact, Arizona is the only state in the lower 48 that does not have native crayfish. Crayfish are negatively impacting high country streams and lakes, along with other waters in the state as well. These voracious crustaceans consume stream vegetation and aquatic animals, sometimes leaving streams denuded.

So help the environment, have some fun, and get good eating fare for your table all at the same time, go catch some crayfish for dinner.

Keep in mind that it is no longer legal to transport live crayfish from one location to another, with the exception of a small geographic area around Yuma. Crayfish can still be used live as bait, but you must capture them at the lake or stream where you’ll be using them. If you are going to transport them from the lake or stream where you caught them, please remove their heads or put them on ice.

Crayfish are easy to catch and simple to prepare for the dinner table, either at home or in camp. Something as simple as a stout string or small rope soaked with bacon grease and placed in the water and left for a while will get you lots of crayfish (yes, they just latch on). However, this method may not be a lot of fun to your youngsters.

Kids can have hours of exciting fun fishing for crayfish. First, find a rocky area at a lake or stream that has crayfish. Take a fishing rod, and put a piece of meat, such as bacon or pork fat, on the end of a line. Or use a long stick with string tied to one end. You don’t even need a hook. The crayfish will latch onto the meat. Then simply pull the crayfish out of the water, and knock them off the piece of meat and into a bucket or other container.

Be sure to kill the crayfish before leaving the lake. To kill them, you can separate the head from the body, pierce the thorax (chest) with a knife, or put them on ice (the ice freezes their gills). Putting them on ice is by far the easiest method.

Cooking crayfish is just about as easy as catching them. You can boil them, barbecue them, or even fry them. Even without seasoning, crayfish are good, but you can also get some crab boil to spice them up.

It is easy to over-cook crayfish. A reliable method is to bring your water to a boil, either on the stove top or the microwave, take the water off the heat, then add the crayfish. When the crayfish shell turns bright red, the meat is ready to eat, or add to other dishes. If you want lots of recipes for crayfish, get any cookbook and find a recipe calling for crab or lobster, then simply substitute crayfish.

For those of you that are weight conscious, crayfish meat is fat free. You just have to resist the temptation to dip the meat in melted butter, or add the meat to fattening dishes. But that’s an area where this writer lacks expertise, which is evident from a continually lengthening belt size

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