I've got CRABS!

October 7, 2005 8:12 PM

How do I clean and prepare a crab and its parts so that it becomes edible?

Although I've experienced "crab picking" (digging into a pile of old-bayed crabs, busting them open and extracting the meat rather than the ugly organs) it was rather chaotic, messy, and imprecise. In the comfort and safety of my own kitchen, how would I go about, say, just boiling crabs? Tips, tricks, and any stories would be helpful.
Also, I'm very much interested in being able to identify the inedible components of a crab and techniques pertaining to their removal. Should I remove those organs before or after boiling? About how long should I boil crabs for, anyway?
Extra points for linking to a diagram that illustrates proper crab cleaning. Double extra points for a good starter recipe for crab. I'm a good, competent cook but I've just never cooked crab before.

posted by Jon-o to food & drink (15 comments total)

Basically, you just boil them until they are red. There's really no way around the "picking" process. Getting crab meat is labor-intensive (but worth it). This site has instructions with pictures that may be helpful.
posted by jrossi4r at 8:37 PM on October 7, 2005

Dirty crabs just need a good hosing down. If you have store-bought glass-case-living crabs, they should be ok.

There are several schools of thought regarding crab pain. 1) who cares, 2) Boiling = most humane, 3) Baking = most humane, 4) sticking something skinny and sharp through their genitals and into their vitals = most humane, 5) who cares.

I figure boiling is the way to go, but then again I'm not particularly humane.

Boil a LARGE pot of water to a roil (3/4 or 2/3 to the top so it doesn't spill too much). Drop crab(s) in. When shell turns red, take out (they cook very quickly, no more than 10 minutes, I usually take mine out about 5' or less.

Just about everything is edible but the lungs (the soft thingies with little, er, ferrules which are kinda tough and ... uh, my english adjectives leaves me at a loss here) aren't good eating. Just about everything else is. The greenish gooey stuff can be good, but it depends on your tastes. The reddish gooey stuff is even better.

Tips - heavy-duty kitchen scissors/shears (with sharp or thin tips) can be handy in cutting along the long end of the legs and thus render the flesh easy to get to (just open the exoskelton up like two sides of a hotdog bun). There's also *TONS* of good-to-eat meat in the joints between the main body and the legs. They come in sections - suck out a section, break off the empty section, and go-at-it at the next section.

If you don't have any specialized cutlery, the small pincher of the pinchers can be used to dig up flesh from the bigger pincher. If you don't have crackers (plier-like utensils to crack open crustaceans), the handle-end of kitchen shears/scissors does a fine job, as does the blunt end of a hatchet or a small hammer.

Instead of boiling, you could also kill the crab, *lightly* (very lightly) batter it and deep-fat fry it and serve it over a bed of fried garlic flakes.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 8:40 PM on October 7, 2005

The green and the red stuff is in the main carapace. Disclaimer: the green stuff is likely the liver equivalent and the red stuff if the ovaries equivalent in mammals. But oh. so. good. eating.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 8:47 PM on October 7, 2005

There are different crabs. Blue crabs? Soft shell? Alaskan King (going to need a big pot)?

For blue crabs, get the biggest pot you can find - no, you can find one bigger than that - BIGGEST, I said. Dump a tin of Old Bay into the water. Boil it. Throw some crabs in. Use long tongs to pull them out in a couple of minutes. Read up on crab disassembly methods. Get cracking. A mallet and a gentle touch are best - you're trying to crack it, not pulverize it. Most crab novices miss a lot of the meat in the body because there are internal cartilage fins/ribs that make it difficult to get at, but this is very tasty meat, and once you've slaughtered a few dozen crabs with your +1 Mallet of Crustacean Demise and have the technique down, you'll appreciate the hard-to-get pieces all the more.
posted by jellicle at 8:56 PM on October 7, 2005

Apparently putting the crab into the freezer for a while before boiling makes it unconscious, so boiling is less painful.
posted by cogat at 11:24 PM on October 7, 2005

Apparently putting the crab into the freezer for a while before boiling makes it unconscious, so boiling is less painful.
I haven't found the boiling to be painful, myself, but I haven't been on the wrong end of the pot handle.
Man, I wish I could get some good blue crabs out here in California!
posted by spacewrench at 12:15 AM on October 8, 2005

everything is edible but the lungs

The pedant in me wants to point out that crabs have gills, not lungs.
posted by squink at 7:14 AM on October 8, 2005

If they are blue crabs, steam them, please. Blue crabs are much more delicate and boiling ruins the consistency of the meat.
As to cleaning, here is the secret (showed to me by a 90 year old great-grandmother who had worked as a crab picker). Pull off the shell, now with a very sharp, short bladed knife, pare off the legs, cutting through the shell just to the body side of the joints. Now cut the crab in half, parallel to the bottom of the crab ( that is, if you were to lay the crab on the table, right side up, hold the knife blade parallel to the table). If you have cut at the right height (it will take some practice), you can just pry up large chunks of meat by putting your finger tip at the cut leg joints. An alternate is to break or cut the crab into right left halves first. And if you are scared of using a paring action to cut off the legs, you could lay the crab on a cutting board and use a big knife.
posted by 445supermag at 7:29 AM on October 8, 2005

Jellicle invoked the name of the wünderseasoning Old Bay, and its maker McCormick has some ideas for you as far as preparation.
posted by emelenjr at 10:54 AM on October 8, 2005

And I just have to add that this thread is making me 1) incredibly hungry and 2) incredibly nostalgic for the days when I lived in Chestertown, MD and could even get steamed crabs in the Washington College dining hall, not to mention all of the crabhouses dotted around the area where waitresses would bring you a dozen at a time and make sure your pitchers of beer were nice and full.
posted by emelenjr at 11:00 AM on October 8, 2005

No one mentioned steamin' them in beer?

Two cans of cheap beer, boil. Drop in the collander, drop in the crabs, drop in the old bay and slam the lid shut so the little fuckers can't crawl out.

Wait for the screaming to stop and add another can of beer and more old bay.

Enjoy!
posted by Mick at 5:10 PM on October 8, 2005

We have Dungeness crabs here (and blue crabs in the Chinese markets, so I bet you can get them in the Chinese markets in LA, too) and for Dungeness, even when you bake them you boil them first- just long enough to kill them. And not in beer or wine, which apparently have lower boiling points and so take longer to kill the crab.

I eat crab about 2 times a week during crab season. Here's my quick and dirty technique.

Get a big big pot. Fill it about 2/3 full of water. Salt the hell out of it. When it's at a full rolling boil grab your crab by the butt and stick it in the water upside down head first- the air all escapes really quickly and they only kick for a second. One crab per pot, or the water cools down too much.

After about 10 minutes (15 if it's a huge crab), pull it out. Wearing gloves, because it'll be really hot, pull off the tail thingie (previous link calls this an apron), grab a big knife and split the whole thing down the middle. When you finish cracking in in half the top shell will probably just come off. Pull off the gills (spongy things) and rinse off the yellow-y green-y stuff and voila- everything else is edible. It'll take you 5 minutes or so, once you get the hang of it.

I don't bother with pulling the legs off until we're at the table- it's easier to serve whole halves of crab. And because we're uncivilized, we usually dispense with the nut crackers or hammers and just crack everything with our teeth.

I don't advise the teeth technique for King crabs or any crab with a heavier duty shell than a Dungeness. I've never eaten blue crabs so I don't know anything about them.

Once you get used to eating crab that was alive until you boiled it yourself, it's hard to go back to the pre-cooked-god-knows-when crabs at the supermarket.
posted by small_ruminant at 8:02 PM on October 8, 2005

Update:

Thanks for all of the advice. The crabs turned out really well. As it turned out, the market had some pre-cleaned dungeoness crabs that were pre-boiled. I wound up just extracting all of the meat (which took about an hour) from the bodies and limbs, marinated it in an olive oil, lemon, butter, white wine, and Worcestershire sauce and then baked it with some bread-crumbs mixed in. Served with steamed artichokes and mashed potatoes. It wasn't bad at all for a first try, I'd have to say.
Next time, I'll be a little more adventurous and get whole (maybe live) crabs. I've got some reservations about boiling live crabs, not for any humane reasons, but because my big pot has a really nice non-stick coating that I don't want the flailing crabs to scratch up.
posted by Jon-o at 9:14 PM on October 10, 2005

Log on to "freezing crab". I could tell you all about it,but just read the damn thing. I just "put up" a dozen crabs, some lobsters, clams, mussels, oysters and "whole belly" clams for future orgies. Gilmores on line is the best and cheapest. No, I don't have ANY connection with them - they just do what they promise - good goodies at a fair price. Telling it like it is - Red Neck Ky ex-Maine-iac.
posted by jmikekim at 8:56 PM on October 13, 2005

First time here and like the comments REAL people make. I may fall short, but that's my shot - telling it like it is. Hey - anybody got a good fried clam recipe? Mine didn't come out as good as I'd hoped - got some left tho, like to try something else. Git 'er done!
posted by jmikekim at 9:00 PM on October 13, 2005