Cookin Crawdads: What am I doing wrong?

So my best buds in High School were from NOLA.

Once a year, their Dad would come home with these huge bags of cooked crawdads. I remember them being berkeleying delicious...but maybe I was just underfed and really high.

Anyway, I've caught a ton of them in the creek lately. Finally had enough to warrant a mudbug-boil last weekend.

I looked up a bunch of youtube videos on how to prep/cook them. I let them hang out in a big Homer bucket full of water, changing out the water frequently. I didn't go full-on "crawfish boil" with sausage & corn & lemons & E36 M3, but I did boil them live with a ton of seasoning in the pot.

What I ended up with was a tiny bit of tail meat and a ton of green slimy stuff, and some little orange things, which I assume were eggs(?)

Should I give up on crawfishin? Try a "proper" crawfish boil? Use only the tail-meat and attempt mudbug etouffee? 

They don't call em mudbugs for nothing. My guess is what you had was really small ones. The green slime (the tamale if you're Andrew Zimmern, the nasty green E36 M3 if you're me) is normal. The tail meat is really the only thing worth eating....maybe try that etouffee. I've done crawdad bisque before, and it's pretty good. 

Not too sure but this doesn't seem to be the 'season' for Bugs............I'm used to March thru late June....just sayin'

First mistake is failing to catch shrimp.

Crawdads are always a disappointment to me. 

Buy 5 pounds of shrimp and do a Beaufort Stew instead. 

Tail meat in etouffee is amazing. Seriously.

That said I either buy the frozen bags of tail meat or just go to the local Chinese buffet when I want crawfish. 

I can't get into killing small creatures for insignificant rewards. 

Prawn sized crawdads would be fun. Just as lobster sized shrimp are awesome. I've murder some serious Blue Crabs in my day in pursuit of the Old Bay infused delicacy. 

However, going through all that trouble and killing off a bunch of little bug lives for what amounts to a half-pound of meat seems disappointedly guilt ridden. 

Take it as a sign. The bugs outsmarted you in death. 

The little dudes we catch around here never get as big and are a different color from the ones we buy by the lb. from down South.  I've always assumed they're a different species.  That said I once grilled some of the local, little ones, they were okay, but too small to really be worth the effort.

Now for the real deal, we buy them live by the lb. from a few places that bring them in starting in late March until sometime mid Summer.  So there is a season for them.

Other than Zatarans,  Old Bay, or similar spices, corn, sausage, potatoes, and lemon, the only other thing we do different than what you describe is to purge them in salt water.  While they're in the brine they poop out a lot of their nasty stuff, I usually purge them for 30 min to an hour in salt water, rinse them, then purge them one more time for another 30 min or so in a fresh brine.

I've read folks that dismiss purging, but it makes a big difference in how much vein their is to peal out.  I've never tried just rinsing them in fresh water.  I learned the double salt water purge method from the daughter of a guy who had a very busy, fairly large catfish, crawfish, and sundries catering trailer.

I read to purge...and then read some "crawfish 10 commandments" type E36 M3 saying "THOU SHALT NOT PURGE." But berkeley it. I'll definitely give it a shot. I'll also play with the recipe/seasoning-to-water ratio as well.

I'm not sure how big is "big," but when I pulled the trap last time I exclaimed "HOLY E36 M3, THESE MOTHERberkeleyERS ARE HUGE!" I'll post pics for reference later.

FWIW, the "creek" is more like a river than a "creek" in the traditional sense. It's 30-40' wide, a whole bunch of miles long, and feeds Carter's Lake...so it's not like we're decimating the population or anything. Little guys get tossed back in, just like all the bass & sunfish/panfish/bluegill/whatever we've been catching.