Once the crawdads are cleaned it's time to cook them. The cooking time is a fun event that always fascinate my kids. The crawdads are roughly sorted by size so the cooking time is even for each batch.

One-by-one they are dropped in to the fragrant dill and beer liquid which has reached a roaring boil. One second the crawdads are dark, brown, even bluish in color and the next they are all bright - delicious looking red.

What follows here is my traditional Swedish Recipe for how (I) cook Crawdads. It is very different from the southern US way of doing it and gives a amazingly fragrant and tasty result.

I have several other tasty Crawdad recipes from Southern Louisiana Crawfish Boils to Spicy Cajun Butter Fried Mudbugs that I hope to share later. Stay tuned for more ...

Kräftkok - Traditional Swedish Crawdad

• 2 quarts of live, cleaned and purged crawdads
  
  Brine

• 2.5 quarts of water

• 2 bottles of dark beer

• English or Baltic Style Porters is to prefer. Stay away from chocolate or coffee flavored porters

• 0.5 cups of coarse cosher salt

• 3 tbsp of sugar or 1 tbsp of honey

• Lots of whole dill, at least 10 for cooking and 5 for later.

CRAWDAD COOKING

• Rinse the crawdads in cold water. Check that they are still alive.

• Sort the crawdads according to size Large - Medium. They should be boiled with roughly same sized crawdads for even cook time.

• Put all ingredients, except the crawdads in a large enough pot. Crank up the temperature and let it boil for 10 minutes.

• Use a slotted spoon to remove the dill. Put the dill aside - you will use it later.

• Drop the live crawdads in the boiling water. Only put a few in at a time - say 5 - 10.

• Let crawdads boil for 5-7 minutes. Once they are floating they can be picked up with a slotted spoon.

• Fill a large pot or container with cold water. When the crawdads that are done cooking are picked up they should be put in the cold water to cool down.

• Once all crawdads are boiled turn off the heat and let the water cool down.

• Once the brine is cool add back all the crawdads and the cooked dill to the brine.

• As a last touch, add the remaining dill on top of the crawdads.

• Leave the crawdads in the brine, in a fridge, for 24-36h.