Mala Crawfish Boil (Mala Xiaolongxia, 麻辣小龙虾)

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Mala crawfish (mala xiaolongxia) by The Mala Market

Chengdu Challenge #18:  Let the Good Times Roll

It’s crawfish season in the U.S. South, and that can mean only one thing (to me): It’s time to try the Mala Crawfish (麻辣小龙虾, málà xiǎolóngxiā) recipe in Sichuan Cuisine in Both Chinese and English. I love a good New Orleans-style crawfish boil—where they boil the crawdads in a spicy broth, mound them up on a newspaper-covered table and invite you to dig in for the feast—so I figured Sichuan crawfish had to be just as fun and delicious. Enter: Mala Crawfish Boil.

While Louisiana farms the vast majority of crawfish eaten in the world, Asia has its own crawfish species, and Sichuan has many rivers and waterways, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that they eat them too. They are called xiaolongxia, little lobsters, in Chinese. (And the direct translation of longxia is dragon shrimp, so they are little dragon shrimp. Isn’t Chinese grand?)

You don’t find crawfish in Nashville, so I went to Whole Foods, the only real place to buy fish/shellfish here. Unfortunately, the fishmonger told me, crawfish don’t live up to WF’s sustainability standards. Never mind. I then realized WF doesn’t sell any live seafood anyway. (It stopped selling live lobster in 2006.)

He suggested I get mine where he gets his, from a truck in East Nashville. They drive them up direct from the Louisiana Gulf every Thursday night, and you can pick the little critters up on Friday for your weekend crawfish boil. Perfect.

I called to place an order in advance, and, since I’ve never made crawfish before, asked the owner how much to get. He said 2 to 5 pounds per person is the norm. That’s a lot of crawfish, but anyone who’s eaten them knows you only get a small bite of meat out of each tail, so I settled on 6 pounds for the three of us.

A week later, I got the squirmy little mudbugs home ok, but panicked when I realized I wasn’t sure if I could keep them alive for a day, and decided to cook them immediately. And that’s when I actually read the recipe I intended to follow: It called for only 1 pound of crawfish, because you are supposed to 1) kill them; 2) quickly deep-fry them; and 3) finish them off in a spicy stir-fry sauce.

Oops! I couldn’t deep-fry and stir-fry dozens and dozens of crawfish in a home wok. Plus, it didn’t tell me how to kill them! Clearly I had to adapt. And that’s when the Mala Crawfish Boil was born. Why couldn’t I just stick with my crawfish boil plan, using the Louisiana cooking method with the Sichuan spices? And why couldn’t I just use a modified Sichuan hotpot broth, which is, after all, meant for boiling all manner of foods and creatures?

strainer of live crawfish for mala crawfish boil
Everybody into the pool! Just a portion of the 6 pounds we were cooking.

While a Louisiana spice mix would feature cayenne pepper, coriander, black pepper, allspice, oregano, bay leaf and sundry other dried herbs and spices, the Sichuan would feature mala—dried chili peppers and Sichuan peppercorn—as well as star anise, bay leaf and Sichuan specialties including Pixian chili bean paste (doubanjiang), preserved black beans (douchi) and preserved mustard green stems (yacai). The road starts at a common point—chilies, garlic, bay leaf, celery—then diverges to the Southern U.S. or Southern China. Makes sense to me!

making mala spice mix for crawfish boil
What mala looks like
mala crawfish boiling in pot
After the crawfish get a quick boil, turn off the heat and let them soak up the mala seasoning for about half an hour

So the ingredients here are a cross between the cookbook’s mala crayfish recipe and its mala hotpot recipe. And the cooking instructions are a cross between my crawfish monger’s and an Alton Brown recipe. And, if I do say so myself, it’s brilliant!

Actually, my husband and daughter said it too. Craig is a huge fan of a crawfish boil, and he thought this mala crawfish boil ranked as high as any he’s had. Fongchong eats most any fish, so we figured she’d dig it too. We sat on our back deck for the first time this spring, crawfish piled high on a newspaper-covered picnic table under a string of lights, and dug in.

Fongchong did take some coaxing, however, since crawfish do look like big bugs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we told her that after she peeled and ate the tail meat she needed to suck the head. She did. And she liked it. But not as much as she likes river snails, or chicken feet, or pig feet, or stinky tofu. Proving once again that weird is in the eye—and palate—of the beholder.

Of course I know the real reason she ate so many of them: She’ll eat anything bathed in a hot and numbing sauce. And so will I.

spicy girl smiling in foreground
Lamei (spicy girl)

Cooking notes for Mala Crawfish Boil

In case, like me, you don’t fully read recipes before you shop, this recipe is for 3 pounds of crawfish, enough for two people if you have sides. Do not try to cook a second batch of crawfish in the same pot of broth—as we did—as there’s not enough flavor left for the second round. Use extra pots with extra batches of seasoning if you plan to cook more than 3 pounds.

Also, next time I will make a second pot of the seasoned broth to cook small potatoes and corn on the cob to serve with the crawfish like they do in NOLA. There wasn’t room in my pot for everything, but if you have a pot big enough you can put the vegetables in the boiling broth for about 10 minutes before you add the crawfish and then cook them together for a full feast.

About cleaning: There are various places on the Web to find information about cleaning and “purging” the crawfish with water and salt before you cook them. I called my seller to ask about it, and he said purging wasn’t necessary or even recommended, and I also read that on the websites of other sellers. Our crawdads had been farmed and seemed clean, so we just gave them a few rinses. If your crawfish are dirty or muddy, you’ll need to wash them thoroughly in several changes of water.

Lastly, I fully confess to having my husband handle these squirmy, pinchy creatures—and especially their final seconds heading into the pot. Cooking live crawdads is not without its challenges.

Mala Crawfish Boil (Mala Xiaolongxia, 麻辣小龙虾)

By: Taylor Holliday | The Mala Market | Inspiration & Ingredients for Sichuan Cooking

Ingredients 

  • ¼ cup peanut or canola oil
  • 1 ½ cups dried Sichuan chili peppers 40 grams
  • 1 tablespoon whole red or green Sichuan pepper
  • ½ cup Pixian doubanjiang (chili bean paste)
  • 8 scallions, cut in sections
  • 2 tablespoons ginger, sliced
  • 2 star anise
  • 1 bay leaf
  • Optional additional spices such as caoguo (black cardamom), cassia bark, fennel
  • 2 tablespoons Sichuan preserved mustard greens (yacai)
  • 2 tablespoons douchi (fermented black soybeans)
  • 2 tablespoons Sichuan ground chilies
  • 10 cups chicken stock and/or water
  • 3 tablespoons Shaoxing wine
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 2 teaspoons freshly ground Sichuan pepper (see note)
  • salt to taste
  • 4 whole garlic cloves, peeled
  • 2-3 stalks celery including leaves, cut in sections
  • 3 pounds live crawfish

Instructions 

  • Add ¼ cup oil to a large soup/stock pot and heat over a low flame. Add chili peppers and whole Sichuan peppercorns and stir-fry until fragrant. Add chili bean paste, scallions, ginger, star anise, bay leaf and any additional spices and cook briefly to bring out their aroma. Stir in yacai, preserved black beans and ground chilies.
  • Add the 10 cups stock (or water or combination of the two), turn up the heat and bring to a boil. Add Shaoxing wine, sugar, ground Sichuan pepper and salt and mix well. Add the garlic cloves and celery and, finally, the live crawfish.
  • Boil crawfish for about 3 minutes (or more if they are large). Turn off heat, cover pot and let crawfish soak up the spicy seasoning for about 30 minutes. Fish crawfish out of the water to a serving platter and dig in!

Notes

Ground Sichuan pepper: Sort Sichuan peppercorns and discard any black seeds or twigs. Toast in a dry skillet or toaster oven until pods start to smell very fragrant, but do not brown them. Let peppercorns cool, then grind in a spice grinder or in a mortar & pestle to your desired coarseness. Sift out any yellow husks that don't break down. Sichuan pepper powder will retain its potent flavor and numbing punch for only a few weeks.

Tried this recipe?

 

About Taylor Holliday

The Mala Market all began when Taylor, a former journalist, created this blog as a place to document her adventures learning to cook Sichuan food for Fongchong, her recently adopted 11-year-old daughter. They discovered through the years that the secret to making food that tastes like it would in China is using the same ingredients that are used in China. The mother-daughter team eventually began visiting Sichuan’s factories and farms together and, in 2016, opened The Mala Market, America’s source for heritage Sichuan ingredients and Chinese pantry essentials.

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6 Comments

  1. I would love to try this! I am in Houston. Where can I purchase the exotic ingredients such as the douban Jiang, cao guo (black cardamom), cassia bark, fennel, and yacai? Also the Shaoxing wine.

    1. Hi Cheryl,
      You’ll need to buy those things at a Chinese market. I see from a Google search that Houston has two locations of 99 Ranch, where you can probably find them. Alternatively, you can order most of them online at http://www.posharpstore.com/en/
      I hope you can find everything. You can leave out the black cardamom, and substitute cinnamon stick for cassia bark. I think you’ll find this a fun change from your usual crawfish. Good luck!

  2. Congratulations on your store. I think that providing access to authentic ingredients is a wonderful idea.

    I do have a question, however. Robert Delfs includes a stir-fry dish that he calls ‘Ma La Chicken’ in his Sichuan cookbook. None of the more authentic sources ((Dunlop, your web site, or the Sichuan Institute book) include such a recipe–although Delf’s recipe has a family resemblance to some of the Xiang-La recipes. Is the Delf’s recipe simply a Taiwanese approximation of a the category of ma-la dishes in general, or does his recipe correspond to a dish actually cooked in Sichuan province? I have always rather liked Delf’s recipe, although he clearly reduced the level of spiciness considerably–probably to cater to American tastes. If his recipe does correspond to a real dish, I would be interested in seeing an authentic recipe.

    1. Thanks for your kinds words, Alex. And for the question–although you’re testing the limits of my knowledge here. 🙂

      It’s interesting that the recipe is called Ma-La Zi Ji, in his words, which is very similar to the currently popular La Zi Ji. But his recipe does not deep-fry the chicken as in La Zi Ji, so it’s really not very similar to that. It also has water chestnuts, which Sichuan stir-fries don’t normally have. So I’m thinking it’s Taiwan-specific. There are probably a lot of Taiwan-Sichuan recipes, which could be a whole field of study in itself, considering the flee of Sichuan chefs to Taiwan after the revolution and the divergent development of the cuisine in those two locales. Perhaps we need to locate Delfs and ask him!

  3. Just did this recipe for 15lbs, 7 people. My guests loved it! And they are into Sichuan food a lot. I multiplied the quantity of ingredients for 15lbs. I cooked garlic noodles with it as side dish. The longer it soaks the better. We let the crawfish soak for 45mn and served a little at a time to keep them warm and soaking more. I got some leftovers that I heated the day after and it was just even better because it soaked for a day! I love Sichuan peppers so next time I will probably double the Sichuan pepper corn quantity and put some fried crispy ones at the end but that’s just my taste. Thank you so much for this awesome recipe!!!

    1. Oh my gosh, I love this! It sounds like you have perfected the recipe and side dish. I’m going to have to try it for a crowd myself.

      Please send me photos if you have any. (I’m running a giveaway for a mala apron for photo submissions until May 1, 2017.)

      Thanks so much for reporting in on this!