Onto the first bit of raw food.
I googled boil in the bag recipes, if there are any it’s buried in google somewhere deep under the thousands of entries for ‘seafood boil’
SeafoodboilKittleis something I would have dismissed out of hand as the sight of seafood, potatoes, corn on the cob and sausages jumbled together did not appeal.
BUT I remember CD posting a pic of this and thought well he’s unlikely to eat rubbish stuff so maybe it is worth a go!
Mine obviously didn’t look like a proper seafood boil because I wanted minimal ingredients so assembly is fast n easy, plus the ingredients will be available in any old supermarket. The pieces need to be small to ensure even cooking in a kettle.
To start things off I’ve avoided anything in it’s shell as cooking seafood in a kettle is new to me, I wanted to be certain it was cooked through, so I went with raw king prawns because it’s easy to tell when they’re cooked and will be easy to mix in a bag.
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Every Spanish supermarket seems to have jars of cooked potatoes and corn on the cob and that’s perfect - speedy, no precooking potatoes or sweetcorn.
I looked at this sad chopping boards worth of ingredients and nearly stopped
I used only half of everything except the prawns and put a couple of VERY large dollops of butter in with Cajun spices before mixing it in the bag n squeezing the air out.
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I suddenly felt it looked a lot more promising, amazing what copious amounts of flavoured butter can do
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First go 80 degrees for 20 mins to try and avoid overcooking the prawns, it wasn’t long enough, the prawns weren’t quite cooked. Back on at 90 for another 15mins and
it’s cooked
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Now absolutely piping hot, I checked the prawns and they are nicely done.
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This is worth eating whether on the move or not, so tasty.
I’d have a squeeze of lemon with it next time.
On a do over I would just have more prawns and forget about the frankfurter because quality varies wildly and moving about you wouldn’t know if they were any good. I think a bad frank would spoil it.
Overall it was well worth the small effort it took.
Needed a nice glass of cold crisp white to go with it though but heyho, who would have thought that unpromising pile of ingredients would have been worthy of a nice cold crisp glass of white wine!
I am a complete convert. Seafood Boil is going on my America list.
In a conventional cajun seafood boil, you would add ingredients in steps, for their appropriate cooking time. Starting with boiling water, and adding your seasoning .Potatoes take the longest to cook, then corn, sausage is pre-cooked/smoked, and the seafood only needs a few minutes in the rapidly boiling "broth." That would be a PITA in a bag, but you could cook everything but the seafood first, and add the seafood to the bag near the end.
I would think that the sous vide method would make the spices and seasonings really potent, but maybe not?
I am pretty sure that doing a conventional seafood boil in a kettle would render the kettle unusable for tea in the future, so you kinda' have to use a bag.
BTW, a few lemons sliced in half are added to a cajun seafood boil along with the packet of seasonings.
CD
