Seafood boils are a key celebration of spring and summer get-togethers. They’re the best way to unite a crowd of people around a paper-covered table to feast on the best of the season’s crustaceans.
While seafood boils usually require heavy outdoor stoves fueled by propane gas tanks, the swamp bucket is a revolutionary new tool to streamline your next seafood boil.
The Swamp Bucket is a BPA-free plastic bucket with a built-in electric boiler and drainage system for an easy, hands-off seafood boil. Read on to explore four tips for the perfect swamp bucket boil.
While the Swamp Bucket offers a fool-proof mechanism for making the perfect seafood boil, below we have a few extra tips to take your swamp bucket boil to the next level.
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1. Add Ingredients in Order of Cooking Time
For a typical seafood boil, ingredients include potatoes, corn, and your choice of crustacean. Potatoes take longer to cook than corn and seafood, so you’ll want to place the potatoes in the boiling bucket 5 minutes before the rest of the ingredients.
If you place everything in the boiler at once, you’ll either get mushy seafood and corn or undercooked potatoes.
2. Add Your Favorite Seasoning
Seasoning is key to flavorful food, and even more so with boiled dishes. Instead of seasoning cooked seafood and potatoes fresh out of the boiler, you should add a hefty amount of seasoning to the water before bringing it to a boil and adding the other ingredients.
The seasoned water becomes a broth that infuses seafood and veggies with flavor.
3. Add Citrus to Seafood Boils
Citrus is a vital flavoring agent for all kinds of seafood. Everything from fileted fish to lobster dinners comes bathed in lemon butter for a reason.
If you want to add that perfect complementary citrus flavor to your seafood boil, add citrus juice and a bit of zest to the swamp bucket when you add your seasoning. Lemon, lime, and orange are all great options.
4. Let Ingredients Soak in Their Juices After Boiling
Stews and soups get better with time. Meats and fish are more flavorful after sitting in a marinade. Such is the logic behind letting your seafood sit in their boiling liquid for a good 15 minutes after you unplug the swamp bucket.
By sitting in the seasoned broth, all ingredients have time to soak up all that flavorful seasoning.
FAQs
Here are a few frequently asked questions to further your understanding of Swamp Buckets.
What can you boil in a swamp bucket?
You can boil anything you’d like in a swamp bucket. While the Swamp Bucket brand advertises its primary use as a seafood cooker for crawfish, shrimp, crab, and other crustaceans, it is a large boiler that will cook numerous dishes.
Customers have reported boiling greens, slow-cooking pork, and boiling peanuts in the swamp bucket.
How to make a swamp bucket cooker?
If you like DIY projects, making a swamp bucket yourself is an easy and economical task. You can find all the components at your local hardware store, including a 20-quart bucket, a water-tight conduit hub, spare cords, and a 150-volt water heater.
To assemble:
- Cut a hole in the bucket an inch from the bottom for the heating element to fit snugly in.
- Thread the conduit hub through the water heater
- Place the heater inside the bucket, securing it with a bolt
- Connect cords to the heating element for plugging into the wall.
How does a swamp bucket cooker work?
A Swamp Bucket is the easiest way to boil seafood, potatoes, and corn for your next seafood boil. By following these directions, you’ll have perfectly cooked and seasoned seafood in under 30 minutes:
- Fill the bucket to at least the minimum level watermark.
- Season the water with your favorite seasoning
- Plug the bucket into a power outlet and bring it to a boil
- Add desired seafood and place top on the bucket
- Boil for 2-3 minutes
- Turn off and let soak for a minimum of 12 minutes.
- Drain water through holes in the lid