How to Cook and Eat Crab
Crab really is one of the treasures of the sea. It has a wonderful sweet flavor, it’s fun to pick apart from the shell, and it’s certainly a lot more inexpensive than lobster. Now, you could spend dozens, or even hundreds of dollars at your local seafood restaurant or you could learn how to prepare it at home.
Since most of the crab that you buy in grocery stores is pre cooked, it does lend for one of the quickest dinners possible, a goldmine in our busy lifestyles, and I’m going to share with you how to buy, prepare, and eat it like a champ.
How to Buy Your Crab
There are many different species of crab to choose from these days, moreso the closer you live near the coast, that range from the little blue or softshell crabs to the massive king crab legs that fine dining chefs buy like crazy. Today, however, I will be working with the medium sized and tasty Dungeness crab.
Dungeness crab legs tend to be full of delicious meat, with the bonus of some body meat that many seafood lovers claim to be the best part of the whole crab. When you are shopping for your pre-cooked Dungeness crab, there are a few things to keep in mind.
You want to make sure that it has a nice bright color, all of it’s legs should be intact, the shell on top should be intact, and try to avoid any crabs that have barnacles or black spots on them. Your crab should also feel heavy for it’s size and free of any odors that would suggest it’s been sitting in the seafood counter for too long.
Like with any sort of protein, a bad crab can come with some major health risks so you want to make sure the crab you’re buying won’t try to take your life with it.
How to Cook Your Crab
As I said, most of the crab that you buy in grocery stores are pre-cooked, so you’re mainly looking to heat it up so that the meat can start pulling away from the shell and you’ll have an easier time to pick it out.
Before you get to cooking, you’ll want to take your crab out of the fridge and let them come up to room temperature, it should take about half an hour. Although since the crab is already cooked you won’t have to worry too much about raw meat getting spoiled on the counter.
I find that steaming is the best way to heat up pre-cooked crab over boiling as it allows the flavors in the crab to wake up without the risk of losing those flavors. To do this, simply place the crab inside of a steamer basket and let that go over high heat for about 5 minutes, it really doesn’t take that long to heat up.
If you want to, you could also throw some potatoes in there, some corn on the cob, maybe some kind of spicy sausage would be nice to make it more of a full meal.
Now, if you don’t have a steamer pot big enough to hold your crab, then you can just fill up a wide pot with about an inch of water and it’ll still have the same effect. The crab doesn’t need to be fully submerged, there just needs to be enough water to steam the crab through.
Voila! Your crab is steamed so now the fun part begins, eating it!
How to NOT eat crab
You know what? I feel like it wouldn’t be right to explain the right way to eat crab without explaining the wrong ways to eat crab, because there are ways this can go wrong.
I’ve seen people take a wooden mallet or even a large hammer and just whacking away at the crab to try to get the meat out, this is wrong for so many reasons. The crab meat won’t be intact, but more importantly you’re just breaking up the shell into tiny bits and pieces and you may end up with bits of shell in your mouth. It is not hammer time.
The only tools you need for eating crab are a crab cracker or a pair of kitchen sheers and a small fork such as an oyster fork, and I’ll explain how these tools come into play in a bit.
Also, people often throw away the body thinking that it’s gross with all of those guts and organs and the crab butter, but by doing that you’re throwing away some of the best parts of the crab and, even worse, throwing away your money.
Ok, with those pitfalls out of the way, let me show you the right way to eat your Dungeness crab.
How to Properly eat Crab
You can start with either the legs and claws or the body if you want, that’s more of a preference, but I will be dealing with the body first. You want to pull off the large shell on the head, clean up the guts and organs (Don’t worry, I won’t show you that part), break off the legs and claws, then break the entire thing in half.
As you break apart the body, you’re going to come across different cavities of meat, it’s a bit like exploring a cave. You can use your oyster fork to pick out the meat from here. Also, you’re gonna come across a brownish looking substance as you do this, this is crab butter, it has a bit of a texture thing but it is delicious, you definitely want to try it.
When dealing with the legs, it helps knowing that the legs are divided into sections that that you can just bend and pull out, you should see a plate pull out as you do this. You can then take your crab cracker and use it to crack the shell around the leg sections and, with enough practice, be able to pull of the shell and pick out the meat in one solid piece which you can then dip in your waiting butter.
You can also snap the little end off the leg and use that as a little pick to help get the leg meat out.
Same deal for one of my favorite parts, the claws, you can break that apart into sections, and when you get to the claw itself you can generally pull the lower pointy part of the claw until it snaps off and use your cracker to help get the claw meat out. If you don’t have a cracker, then a pair of kitchen sheers can help cut open the shell so you extract the meat, but you do need to be careful.
Eating crab is as fun as it is delicious, the body is quite easy to get the meat out of but with the legs and claws you need to get out your tools and play with it to ensure you’re getting your money’s worth out of your Dungeness crab.
