Seafood cocktail supreme 

Hard to believe that crayfish used to be such a commonplace item amongst our cuisine heritage. These days, it is a luxury export item and the most expensive Kiwi seafood you can buy.

Which means you don’t want to waste one on a dull recipe, or one that smothers the delicate flavour. We have created this simple, but delicious salad recipe for those lucky enough to indulge in a crayfish this summer, plus provide a recipe for the leftover shell.

For this seafood salad, we used a 500g crayfish, which was selling at $99 a kilo at the time. The flesh from the body and larger legs came to 22g, which meant the final price of our meat was over $200 a kilo, or twice as much as whitebait.

For this reason we add prawn meat (and squid also fits nicely into this recipe) to the salad. The only other ingredients are avocado, which adds creamy richness to seafood, with everything combined with lime juice and a mayo flavoured with lime zest and juice, and sweet chilli sauce - simple, flavoursome and cuisine heritage.

For a touch of retro we have served our salad on mesclun greens in a cocktail glass, but if you want to make the mixture go a little further then serve in small china spoons.

You need:
500g cooked crayfish (about a half)
250g whole prawn meat
2 squid tubes (optional)
1 ripe avocado
2 limes (one for zest & juice and another for serving)
175g mayo (half a cup)
3 tbsp sweet chilli sauce

Method
Take cooked and cold crayfish meat out of the shell carefully and cut into mouth-size chunks. Simmer prawns until just cooked, cool and carefully slice length-wise for presentation.
If adding squid - cook quickly in simmering water to just cooked and tender, cool and cut into chunks.

Peel skin from avocado and slice into same sized chunks.

Make mayo up by combining lime juice and sweet chilli.

Very gently mix mayo into seafood and spoon on top of rocket and present each serving with a lime wedge.

 

Summer 2012

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