Seafood Boil

I love getting back into the kitchen during the summer months.  Plenty of mouths to cook for but the key is making it easy.  We did this seafood boil the other night, a few sous chefs on hand to help and it turned out great.  Lessons learned too.

There isn’t really a clear-cut recipe to this.  You need a really big pot.  We used quarts of fresh made fish stock as our base.  I dumped about 1/4 of a jar of Old Bay and water too in the pot.  I wanted the water to be high enough to cover the seafood.  I also used a bunch of nets to separate each component out.

Bring the liquid to a boil.  Add the potatoes first because they take the longest.  I let them stay in the put by themselves about 15 minutes.  Then I added in the lobsters.  We had cut the lobster tail into 3 pieces, separating the claws and the body.  Put all of this in.  We used 3 2 lb lobsters.  There were 9 of us.  Let this stay in for about 8-10 minutes and added the corn as well as andouille sausage to this at the same time.  Each time we added something to the pot, we kept the heat on high and the top securely on.

Next in was the mussels, the clams, and the steamers.  This took another 8 minutes or until I saw them all opening.

When it was done, you can toss the whole thing on top of a newspaper-lined table but we drained the pot and took each of the nets out individually, cut the open and spread them in large rimmed cookie sheets.

It was delicious.  Easy, simple and a perfect summer meal.