The whopper Oecusse crayfish!!

I’m always complaining that we never get any fish in Oecusse. In Dili, you can walk along the beachfront road and be knocked unconscious by the wafting bouquet of hundreds of wet, limp fish of all different sizes. In Oecusse, I wait eagerly at my home, hoping to one day hear the distant voice of a young man bearing a bamboo stick across his shoulders with fish tied to either end like balancing scales, calling out, “ikan!” (“fish!”) – usually to no avail. If by chance I do hear him, as I have done on one or two occasions, the fish are generally either sardines (which we have bought and enjoyed) or the type of colourful, tropical fish you would prefer to see in an aquarium, rather than on your dinner plate (bright blue or red with yellow tails, angelfish, etc).

So I was positively gobsmacked when early one August morning we were lured outside by the sound of our very excited security guard exclaiming loudly to a young man on a bike. And tied to the handlebars of his bike was this:

I was intimidated by its size. So intimidated in fact, that I turned down the offer to buy it for the ridiculously reasonable price of US$15 (market price in Australia is around $50 per kilo).

The conversation went a little bit like this:

Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  Er... um... my GOD it’s HUGE!
Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  Yes, but I wouldn’t have any idea how to kill it.
Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  Yes, but I wouldn’t know how to cook it.
Wade:  Do you want to buy it?
Me:  No. It’s too big! I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

The man on the bike shrugged his shoulders and rode off.

It just so happened that Wade’s mum was staying with us at the time. She came outside and said:

“I think I’d know what to do. I’d give it a go.”

Her taste for adventure put me to shame, but golly, I was glad for it.

With that, we called the man back and made our purchase. And our day of killing and cooking a mammoth crayfish began!

Step one: Keep it alive!

We walked across the road to the beach and filled up some buckets with sea water, and then came home and emptied them into a bigger bucket, along with the crayfish.

Step two: Solve logistical problems

Problem 1: We don’t have a pot big enough to hold it.

Solution: Thankfully, Wade’s office has a kitchen designed for feeding masses of people, so we borrowed a big pot.

Problem 2: There is no way the pot is going to fit over our stove in the kitchen (it may not even fit through the kitchen door).

Solution: Light a fire and cook it outside.

Step three: Kill it (humanely) and cook it!

In her Cook’s Companion, Stephanie Alexander says that the best way to cook a rock lobster (and in this case, a crayfish) is to put it in cold sea water and then bring the temperature slowly up to boiling. You can also put it in the freezer, but our freezer is about half the size of this thing, so that was no option.

We lifted the empty pot onto the fire, filled it with cold, fresh sea water and dropped the crayfish inside.

This photo is a bit blurry, but it gives you an idea of the sheer scale of the activity.

Unfortunately it took a REALLY long time for the water to come to the boil (not sure if this is a good or a bad thing for the crayfish), so we went through a lot of wood. But in the end, it looked like it was supposed to:

Now, this was the part where Ronda (Wade’s mum) played the starring role:

She was an expert with the knife, cracking the crayfish along its back to loosen the tail from the head.

... and she wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty, extracting all the meat.

The chickens got a good feed with the remnants from the head and other bits of shell.

Step 4: Eat it!

The crayfish turned out perfectly. The meat was so sweet and there was plenty to feed four people.  Cracking open the legs at the end of the meal, up to our elbows in shell and fishy juices was so much more satisfying than eating, say, a crab. The bits of meat we were pulling out of those babies were as big as a finger. 

I made an aioli as a dipping sauce to go with it. I also made cassava chips, which I think make superior chips to potatoes, for they are golden crunchy on the outside and really fluffy (but not squashy) inside. For those that don’t know, cassava is similar to a potato, but starchier and sweeter. Have a look at this for more information. My Brazilian friend Regis once showed me how to make cassava chips, which you do by quartering lengthways, then par-boiling, stripping the woody fibre from the centre and then deep frying.

I also made a green papaya salad (using papayas from our tree), adapted from a David Thompson recipe I found in a magazine. You can find the recipe here. I also added grated carrot and green apple, just because I had them on hand.

It was an all-round great day: a new cooking experience, a proud moment for the Oecusse fishing industry and a fine meal to top it off.