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Now these little guys have been boiling for five minutes in salted water and I'll tell
you my number one tip; boil them in two different pans. In here, clean water and any rubbish
that's on the shells or anything like that has been removed in here, two more minutes
then under the cold tap to cool down. Meanwhile, I'll get my pasta on.
Now we're going to run those under cold water until they are completely chilled. I would
say for about six or seven minutes.
Let's get some of these beautiful, little, ripe vine cherry tomatoes going and this dish
is wonderful. I learned to cook this dish years and years ago when I worked in France.
Okay, I'm going to chop some garlic. And now you're going to think there's too much garlic
in this dish but you know what, there isn't.
Going to take a single one of these hot, red birds eye chilli's and these are hot little
suckers. It does help a little bit removing the seeds.
Okay, now this is an induction hob. I love induction, I use it at the Game and Wild Cookery
School. Particularly I like these ones made by a company called De Dietrich they make
fantastic induction gear. It's very slick, it's very sort of out of the way. You can
use it as a work surface as well and wow, that's hot.
Olive oil. A lake of olive oil and into the olive oil the chilli's and all that garlic.
Cherry tomatoes, make sure the heat's not too high. The idea is to infuse that garlic
and soften it.
Here are my peeled and cleaned crayfish. All I'm going to do is rip off the tails and the
claws. Heads go in the bin but the tails and the claws are fabulous. What you do is you
take the crayfish tail like that and you squeeze the edges together and they break in the middle.
You then peel them apart like that, then slip the little *** out and then there you are.
Now here's the big tip, get a hold of it and peel it backwards and there is the whole pipe
of nastiness that we don't want. That, is that we're left with.
Now when you get a really big crayfish like this. Break off the claw, pull the lower part
of the claw out until you break it. Then put the claw down on the board, using the heel
of your knife you can break them and then, if you're very careful, out comes the beautiful
claw meat.
Okay we're nearly done on this dish, we're just going to grab a nice handful of beautiful
wild garlic.
Some parsley.
And take some lemon and I'm going to put some lemon zest in there for freshy sharpness like
so. Cut myself a little bit of lemon. A good tip is to put the cut sides down in your hands
and just squeeze. Pits stay in, juice goes out, just what we want. I need some white
wine, haven't got any white wine, we drank it all, what I have got, astonishingly, is
half a bottle of rather nice champagne. Oh you beauty, look at that. And now I'm going
to bring it up to heat and really give it some. And I'm going to quickly reduce, almost
all that liquid away. Okay I'm going to season this, quite a lot of salt and pepper actually
and I've got to say this is not a rough, rustic, riverside boil of crayfish, this is a really
elegant little dish and you could serve this in the best restaurant in the land to the
finest people. Look at that, lovely and rich and thick.
Holy moly.
Okay let's get everything here together and here we go, in with all that lovely greenery.
That's the crayfish themselves, the wild garlic, oh my goodness look at all the colours in
there. And before we lose colour, take the linguini, and in this case it's actually spaghetti,
and give it a good mix.
Straight into a lovely big bowl.
Pile loads of crayfish up on top so we can see what we're eating. A last little drizzle
there of wonderful sauce and to me, that is the river in the springtime in England. Crayfish
and wild garlic, what could be better?