Go to the Article: Cleaning Crab
I have an important question. Here in Europe the best part of the brown crab, in my opinion, is the brown flesh that you find inside the crab.Of course you have to take care to take out the stomach, but apart from that most of the interior of the crab is edible. In your video it looks like you are washing out a lot of crabby goodness. Or is the Dungerness crab fundamentally different from the European brown crab?
I'm like you. I eat the inside I except for the lungs (dead man fingers) as we call them. I love the orange and yellow stuff in the crab. I'm used to the Blue Crabs or MS Gulf crabs though.
I live in Central Oregon and even when on the coast never see crab that is not already cooked. Are they very quick to go bad? Is there a reason for this??
Seems like a lot of extra steps to me. Whenever I go crabbing, I flip the crab on its back and plunge a knife right at the tip of the abdomen then drag it down toward the rear of its body. Then just get a firm grip on all the legs on one side and pull that half off of the shell. Same to the other side. Just rip off the gills and it's ready to boil. Maybe it's different if you prefer cooking the crab before cleaning?
I find it extremely disturbing that a magnificent product like this will half go to waste like shown in this video.
The only thing that needs to be discarded are the gills and the stomach.
The brown meat should be gently cooked until done and then either mixed with the white meat, or mixed with a bit of soft butter to make a fantastic toasted bread spread.
The shells, remaining parts of the carcass and the leaked liquid should be pan fried on high heat and used to make a stock by adding suitable vegetables.
I love the Chefsteps videos, but this is the first one that I have reservations about, especially in view of the new trend of "no waste".
See my remark above (after 2 years, lol). I hadn't read this comment because I saw this video on facebook today.
Update on the question of consuming crab entrails:
As a regular recreational crabber, I will share my practices as guided by the California Dept. of Fish & Game. This depends on timing and local conditions. Presently, global warming has allowed our regional waters to increase in temperature enough to encourage larger, more frequent, and longer lasting algal blooms (Red Tide in our case). The algae releases domoic acid into the water and shellfish are especially susceptible to it.
Minor cases of human domoic acid poisoning include nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. More severe cases include numbness, short-term memory loss, and death. On the lighter side, the yellow/green stuff (“tamale”) is the coagulated blood, and itplus the other entrails are rather high in cholesterol and other nasty things trapped in the liver (the body’s filter) or floating around the crabs’ blood stream, so I won’t go near any part of the crab other than the meat/muscle tissues.
We are lucky to have some amazing crab and lobster locally here in South Wales which is delicious just the way nature intended. However, we do have to freeze it sometimes which yields less delicious results.
I tried what was called an atlantic burger at a local fish fair and it apparently had frozen lobster, potato and was covered in panko with a mango salsa... Mmmm, mmm, but I have failed to find such a dish anywhere since and failed sooo many time to crate it.
Please, please could you create a recipe for an atlantic crab or lobster burger. I'm sure you'll create one-shell of a recipe and I cannot wait to your cray-sea take on this dish.... Sorry.
