Easter Treats Part II

As promised, a before-shot of my just-under-1kg crayfish feast for one.
Made a small lettuce, tomato, rocket and Parmesan salad to go with it, but why would you want to include that in a photo that's all about treats?
The after-shot is in today's Extra section. It's not pretty, but job done.
Like most lobster-like creatures (and prawns, come to think of it), the sweetest and most easily accessible chunk of meat is in the tail. When I was about to tuck in, I thought about grabbing the tail meat and weighing it on the kitchen scales, to compare with the overall weight of the crayfish.
My curiosity was well and truly trumped by the sense of occasion, which I quickly concluded would lose some of its lustre if I had to pause the feast to get up and weigh the tail.
But it provided me with an opportunity to do a best-guess manual comparison of the weight of the tail meat vs. the weight of the rest of the crayfish. It felt like the tail meat weighed somewhere in the region of half as much as the rest of the cray, which in this case means it weighed around 300g.
That seemed to be in accord with the retail prices asked for crayfish tails on their own - about three times the cost per kilo than for whole crays.
In effect, the current price for crayfish meat is about AUD$200 per kilo - which might seem pretty steep until you realise that that's around a half of the normal price before China's export ban came into effect in the early days of this year.
Before the ban, crayfish was around AUD$120 per kilo, largely because the cray fishermen could get a lot more for their catch exporting it to the China market than they could selling it wholesale on the local market.
If you assume comparable wholesale/retail margins, this means crayfish at the time was selling in the China retail market for at least AUD$120 per kilo. And even at this relatively extravagant price, Australia was struggling to keep up supplies to that market.
So when you hear about China's expanding middle class of high-end consumers, rest assured that they don't quibble about paying serious money for luxury seafoods, and that there are a lot of them.