Today we present to you a simple cajun dish, Cajun Seasoned Grouper Sous Vide topped with Crawfish & Shrimp Sauce. Might tasty dish that we all enjoyed. Looks good, too. 🙂
If you haven’t figured this out yet, we eat a lot of fish. It’s a great protein, very low in fat and calories, and has tremendous variety. You have strong flavored fish like tuna, salmon, catfish, etc. Then you have the mild not so fishy tasting fish like tilapia that serve as the backdrop upon which to build flavors. Somewhere in the middle is codfish, barramundi, halibut, etc. which have a nice sweetness to them. Also, different types of fish have different textures. For instance, perch is a nice, sweet white fleshed fish with small flakes. Halibut, on the other hand, has large white flakes. Then you have tuna, shark and swordfish which have a steaky, meaty texture. So, when we go to the market we always stop by the fish market to see what they have in stock. On this particular trip to the market they were having a sale on grouper. We like grouper a lot and it makes a fabulous traditional ceviche. Needless to say, I bought a few filets for dinner not knowing what I was going to do. When we got back to the hacienda and were discussing what to do for dinner, it dawned on me that it had been a while since I had made a cajun dish. I already had some frozen crawfish tails and some frozen shrimp in the freezer. I also had some leeks that I needed to use. On top of that, it had been a while since I had played with the sous vide setup and I was afraid Stefan would think I forgot how to use it. 😮 Sous vide always makes an amazingly moist, perfectly cooked fish. So, a Cajun Seasoned Grouper Sous Vide topped with Crawfish & Shrimp Sauce dinner it became and this is what we did.
Ingredients
- 4 grouper filets (6 oz @)
- 12 oz cooked crawfish tails
- 12 shrimp, 26 – 30 count, peeled and deveined
- olive oil
- cajun seasoning (recipe found here)
- 2 Tbsp butter
- 1 cup leeks, white part only, sliced
- 1 Tbsp garlic, minced
- 1/4 cup brandy
- 1 tsp (or more to your liking) hot sauce
Instruction
Brush filets with olive oil.
Season with cajun seasonings.
Place filets in vacuum seal bag.
Seal.
Place bags in water bath at 55 C/132 F and cook for 20 minutes. Now, obviously, if you don’t have a sous vide setup and don’t want to spend the bucks to buy one, you can cook this in a skillet or on the grill, the choice is yours.
While the fish is cooking sous vide, add the butter
and the oil to a sauté pan over medium high heat.
Add the leeks and sauté.
Next, the garlic.
Followed by the crawfish tails.
Then the shrimp.
Add a good splash of brandy just for good measure.
Then add a little lemon.
Season with some salt.
And we want just a tad more heat and flavor so add some hot sauce to your liking. I used our homemade hot sauce which is really killer stuff.
By the time you get all of this done, the shrimp will be cooked and you’re ready to serve. Get you dinner plates lined up and place some rice (about 1/2 cup) on th plate.
Put the grouper filets atop the rice.
Top with some of the crawfish and shrimp sauce.
Toss a few green beans on the plate for some added color and viola, Cajun Seasoned Grouper Sous Vide topped with Crawfish & Shrimp Sauce. Serve & enjoy!!
REMCooks 
I love the layers of flavours that cajun food has and I would love to have some crawfish! Another lovely dish. 🙂
Thanks Virginia. I love cajun food and crawfish is one of my favorite foods. I dearly love crawfish étouffée and almost anything with crawfish. It’s also one of the very few things I buy prepackaged and frozen. With Daniel home, he missed a lot of the prior posts and he truly loves cajun food. In fact, he was going out when I made this dish. He stayed home for dinner and then left. 😀 The grouper is very moist cooked sous vide. It really does cook proteins perfectly, fish especially because the maillard reaction (browning) is not nearly as important with fish as it is beef, pork, etc. The seasonings absolutely shone through beautifully. It was complimented perfectly with the shrimp and crawfish sauce. If you like cajun food this would work with a lot of Northeastern seafoods. You just need a nice, medium flake, sweet white fleshed fish. I would imagine striper would go beautiful with the sauce. Of course, you could just eat the sauce with some rice and that would be a nice meal.
I’d stay home too with this kind of food! Because my husband really doesn’t like seafood I like the idea of using the sauce on other things. Though I could make this just for my daughter and myself. 🙂
Hi, Richard. I was indeed starting to wonder if you still knew how to cook sous-vide 😉 This recipe looks very interesting. In fact I’d decided I wanted to prepare fish tomorrow, but had not decided on anything specific yet. On the one hand I really like fish prepared the Italian way (i.e. do as little to it as possible and don’t use more seasoning than olive oil, salt, lemon, and perhaps a bit of parsley), but I also like to blog about fish as I like to promote fish but there are only so many posts I can do about fish with salt and olive oil. I am curious what the fish will taste like with cajun seasoning, as I don’t really know what cajun seasoning tastes like 😉 So I guess I know what’s for dinner tomorrow 🙂 Now I only have to decide on a substitute for grouper, which is not available here.
Hi, Stefan. I love fish simply cooked/broiled/grilled with a good quality, fresh fish, some salt, pepper and a little lemon so the fish is the star of the show. At the same time, I like to enhance or accent the fish favor with a sprinkling of seasoning. Given I like spicy things, cajun seasonings are perfect for me. 🙂 I will wait for your post on your take of this dish.
Here is my take on cajun style fish sous-vide, it turned out really well 🙂 Thanks for the inspiration. http://stefangourmet.com/2014/09/07/fish-sous-vide-cajun-style/
Another winner fish and shrimp dish! I love Cajun and anything spicy so of course I love looking at what you made. 🙂 No sous vide here, but I’d probably plank-grill it. Yumm!
Thanks Kathryn. Plank grilled would be wonderful. I may need to give that a try. 🙂
Beautifully presented, as always! Such a wonderful recipe!!!
Thanks, Serena, for the nice compliment.
08:24 on a Sunday morning and I’m drooling. That really looks excellent. Here in Ireland, we have a crayfish problem. At some stage, they were introduced to our rivers. They are very damaging to the ecosystem. That should be available in abundance but they are a rarity. We really should dredge them and eat the suckers. But, we don’t.
As always looks so tempting !
Thanks, Lea. I love cajun food. It’s always very fresh and spicy. 🙂
Though I haven’t sous-vide equipment, this dish makes me wish I had. It looks wonderful, Richard. I’ve not seen grouper around here in ages and those steaks you prepared are so nice and thick. Boy, to have had a seat at that dinner table! 🙂