Learn how to prepare the best seafood boil as a special meal with a variety of seafood, sausage, corn, potatoes, and seasoning. We’ll teach you all the tips and tricks whether you want to serve just your family for dinner or serve a large gathering of people. It’s a WHOLE LOTTA YUM!
How to Do a Seafood Boil
While we’ve eaten various types of boils at restaurants, especially a low country boil when we’re down South, we had it on our to do list to host our own at home. And while it might at first seem intimidating, hosting your own boil is honestly way easier than it seems. Plus it’s definitely cheaper than eating out, and it’s as festive as you can get for a special occasion.
The prep takes a little bit of time, yet the cooking goes very fast! Just make sure to set your watch or have a kitchen timer to help you keep track of the cooking time.
As a general rule of thumb, we allow a few potatoes per person, 1-2 corn sections, 4 oz sausage each, and about 1/2-1 lb seafood per person, depending on the type of seafood being served (many options come in a shell).
Serve the seafood boil recipe with seafood boil sauce, cocktail sauce, or garlic butter.
Seasoning the water
It’s easy to change up the type of seafood getting used or the quantity you’re serving, but seasoning your water is very critical. Here’s the ratio regardless if you’re making our exact recipe or plan to scale it up or down.
- 1/4 cup Old Bay per 2 quarts of water
- 1 tsp salt per 2 quarts of water
Ingredient Notes
Our seafood boil recipe as written will serve a group of 8 people. It’s easy to scale up or down depending on how many people you’re serving. The biggest factor is that you’ll be restricted based on how large of a pot you have for cooking. Using a large outdoor pot is best for serving a crowd, a batch indoors can be split between two stock pots.
** There’s a printable recipe card at the very bottom of the post **
- 1 1/2 lb potatoes (Yukon gold or red), cut into half
- 4 ears of corn, husked and each broken into thirds – fresh or frozen will work here
- 1 1/2 lb kielbasa or andouille sausage, sliced into 2″ pieces
- 2 onions, quartered – yellow, white, sweet, or red
- 2 lemons, quartered
- 10 garlic cloves
- 2 crabs (1 crab weighs about 1 1/2-2 lb, yields 8 oz crab meat after cracking). Recommend 4 people per crab when served with other types of seafood too. If you’re just serving crab then allow 1/2 crab per person or a whole crab per hearty eater.
- 2 lb large shrimp, peeled and deveined – buying frozen shrimp that comes peeled and deveined saves you time
- 2 lb clams – little necks are most commonly found at the grocery store in the meat department. Manila clams and butter clams are a little larger and meatier than little hecks but are regional and seasonal.
- 4 lobster tails – typically range in size from 4 oz-6 oz. We suggest 1 tail for 2 people to cut and share.
- Old Bay seasoning
- Bay leaves
- sea salt or kosher salt
Sauce to Pour Over After Cooking
SEAFOOD SAUCE
1 cup seafood broth – or seafood stock or chicken stock
1 Tbsp Old Bay
1 sticks butter, melted
1 tsp dried garlic powder
2 tsp fresh lemon juice
Equipment
- Very large pot for boiling the seafood. A 10-12 quart stock pot, an outdoor pot and burner, or a turkey frying pot all work well.
Step by Step Instructions
Make sure you have all of your seafood boil ingredients prepped and ready to go. This recipe goes very fast once the water is boiling and to avoid overcooking anything, you need to cook them in an exact timed sequence. Don’t worry, it’s super easy!
Prep Ingredients
- Fill a large pot with 6 quarts of water (20 cups). You’ll need at least a 10-12 qt pot or a large outdoor pot to hold everything, or you’ll need to split the ingredients between 2 pots. (we only had a 24-quart pot, we could’ve served an army!)
Cook
- Add the lemon wedges, onion wedges, crushed garlic cloves, Old Bay, and salt to the pot. Bring the water to a boil.
- Add the potato halves to the pot and cook them for 8 minutes.
- Add the lobster tails, live clams, corn, and crab sections and cook for 5 minutes.
- Add the precooked sausage chunks shrimp and cook for 2 minutes until they just turn pink. The clam shells should be open at this point, discard any shells that did not open.
- Drain the water from the pot (reserving 1 cup for the seafood sauce, and spread the seafood boil over newspaper on the table or on baking sheets. Let the seafood rest for 5 minutes.
- While the seafood is cooling a tad make our quick seafood sauce. Combine the 1 cup of seafood water, 2 sticks of melted butter, garlic powder, and lemon juice.
Serve
- Drizzle the sauce over the seafood, potatoes, and corn, and sprinkle everything with a little Old Bay and chopped parsley. Ready to serve a crowd!
- Serve the boil with seafood boil sauce, cocktail sauce, tartar sauce, lemon wedges, Cajun garlic butter, or salted melted butter for dipping.
How to Boil Seafood
Hosting a seafood boil involves a little math! All of the items getting added have a different cooking time. Here’s a quick cheat sheet to help you out on how long to boil seafood depending on what you decide to add if you’re wanting to cook different seafood than we used for our recipe. ** We do include our exact order and cooking times in the recipe card at the very bottom of the post. **
So for example, if the crab takes 7 minutes to cook and you’re also adding shrimp that only takes 2 minutes to cook, you’ll add the shrimp 5 minutes after the crab started cooking.
Total Cooking Times
- Crab sections – 7 minutes for cooked (from the grocery store), 17 minutes for whole raw crabs (as in you just caught them out in the water).
- Crab legs – 3 minutes
- Lobster tails – 4-7 minutes
- Crawfish – 3 minutes
- Clams – 5-7 minutes
- Mussels – 5 minutes
- Oysters – 5 minutes
- Shrimp or prawns – 2 minutes
Variations
Instead of making a seafood boil recipe with crab, lobster, clams, and shrimp, you can also add as many of those as you like or even just one! Popular boils include:
- crawfish boil
- crab boil
- shrimp boil
- lobster boil
Common Questions
You don’t need to add a lot of side dishes when serving a seafood boil since you already have the main protein and hot veggies covered. Some nice add-ons include garlic bread, a green salad, watermelon slices or a fruit salad, homemade macaroni and cheese, and of course a simple dessert such as ice cream, pie, cookies, or cupcakes.
Yes, you can use frozen seafood and simply cook them frozen. You’ll just need to add a couple of extra minutes to the cooking time for that particular item if it’s lobster or crab, frozen shrimp still cooks in 2-3 minutes.
The best way to reheat boiled seafood, corn, sausage, and potatoes is to steam them on the stovetop. In a large pot add 2 cups of water to the pot and a steamer basket. Bring the water to a simmer, add the leftovers, and steam for 3-5 minutes until everything is heated through. We don’t recommend boiling the leftover seafood unless you saved some of the seafood boil liquid.
More Seafood Recipes
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Seafood Boil
Learn how to prepare the best seafood boil as a special meal with a variety of seafood, sausage, corn, potatoes, and seasoning. We'll teach you all the tips and tricks whether you want to serve just your family for dinner or serve a large gathering of people.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 lb potatoes (Yukon gold or red), cut into half
- 4 ears of corn, each broken into thirds
- 1 1/2 lb kielbasa or andouille sausage, sliced into 2" pieces
- 2 onions, quartered
- 2 lemons, quartered
- 10 garlic cloves, separated, peeled and smashed with the back of a knife
- 2 crabs (each crab weighs about 1 1/2-2 lb each, cracked yields 8 oz crab meat)
- 2 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined
- 2 lb clams
- 4 lobster tails
- 1/2 cup Old Bay seasoning
- 3 Bay leaves
- 1 Tbsp salt
- SEAFOOD SAUCE
- 1 cup seafood broth - or seafood stock or chicken stock
- 1 Tbsp Old Bay
- 1 sticks butter, melted
- 1 tsp dried garlic powder
- 2 tsp fresh lemon juice
Instructions
- Fill a large pot with 6 quarts of water (20 cups). You'll need a 10-12 qt pot or a large outdoor pot to hold everything, or you'll need to split the ingredients between 2 pots.
- Add the lemon wedges, onion wedges, crushed garlic cloves, Old Bay, and salt to the pot. Bring the water to a boil.
- Add the potato halves to the pot and cook them for 8 minutes.
- Add the lobsters, clams, corn, and crab for 5 minutes.
- Add the precooked sausage chunks shrimp and cook for 2 minutes until they just turn pink. The clam shells should be open at this point, discard any shells that did not open.
- Drain the water from the pot (reserving 2 cups for the seafood sauce), and spread the seafood boil over newspaper on the table or on baking sheets. Let the seafood rest for 5 minutes to cool a bit.
- While the seafood is cooling a tad make our quick seafood sauce. Combine the 1 cup of seafood water, 2 sticks of melted butter, Old Bay, garlic powder, and lemon juice.
- Drizzle the sauce over the seafood, potatoes, and corn, and sprinkle everything with a little Old Bay and chopped parsley. Ready to serve a crowd!
- Serve the boil with cocktail sauce, tartar sauce, lemon wedges, or more melted butter for dipping.
Notes
The recipe can easily be cut back or increased depending on how many people you're serving. The ratio of seasoning is 1/2 cup per 2 quarts of water of Old Bay and 1 Tbsp of salt per 2 quarts of water.
Any type of seafood will work, or you can do a seafood boil with just one variety such as a crab boil, lobster boil, shrimp boil, or crawfish boil.
If you're cooking raw whole crabs in a seafood boil, increase their total cooking time to 17 minutes.
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