Posted on 12/10/2022 7:05:16 PM PST by DallasBiff
Do you like crab? Do you like eating crabmeat? This is a list of the best kinds of crabs to eat
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We take our crabs very seriously.
The kind you catch while out sailing.
In my case it was Dungeness. in the Pac NW.
I caught it and ate it the same day.
If you can afford it, fresh, not frozen, King crab is the best.
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Dungeness is the best crab meat period.
Stone crab, King crab, blue crab.
King crab is indeed King but I love me some Dungeness. I won’t pass up a blue crab either.
Soft shell hands down
I grew up loving Mrs. Pauls seafood tv dinners.
I didn’t eat the dinners but I loved the Mrs. Pauls was it deviled crab? Ate them as a child and after we married. I’ll never forget the flavor....yum
Exactly true. No crab meat tastes as good as Dungeness.
Still, King is my favorite to eat. A lot more eating, a lot less work.
I don't even understand why people bother with Blue Crab. I had a place in VA where I could catch as many as I wanted in my back yard, but who wants to mess with them? Even when softshell, they're just OK...
I love lobster. It's great. Delicious. But...it is lobster. There is something about crab meat that to me, brings it above lobster. And not just any crab meat. Blue Crab meat. I know it is a matter of taste, but...there is a subtle taste to Blue Crab that I don't get from other crab meat, even if I do madly enjoy it!
Sometimes I suspect it just tastes better because I have to work harder to get it. Kind of why pistachios in the shell taste better to me than a bag of shelled pistachios, I suppose.
For shellfish, I eat shrimp, lobster, conch, clams and crab. Don't care for raw oysters myself. For lobster, I don't eat much except for the tail, claws, and legs, and if I haven't got my fill of crab from the claws and legs, I'll go inside the carapace and pick at the inside muscles of the legs, and those are pretty good.
And when I get the muscle out of whatever it it, I have to clean it off. I don't want guts all over it, though I do eat steamers which IS the guts.
I used to go crabbing in the Chesapeake bay with my dad as a kid, getting up at 3:30 AM, me and my two older brothers and my dad, gather up the nets and bushel baskets, rent a little powerboat, and head to the pilings sticking out of the water. The crabs would be clinging to the sides of the pilings, so we would lower chicken necks tied to strings into the water near a crab, and when they grabbed it, we would pull it up and scoop them with nets before they let go and tried to swim away. I always thought swimming crabs looked silly and ungainly.
We had six hungry kids, so this was something my parents could feed us that was only limited in quantity by how many bushel baskets we came home with, so we did it often.
My mother would cover the table with newspapers, and with the big pot on the stove with water on the bottom, using big tongs, would transfer the crabs one by one into the pot. She would throw in three or four, pause, pour (not sprinkle...pour) Old Bay Seasoning all over them. Then transfer a few more, stop, and pour more seasoning, making a crab and Old Bay parfait until they were all the way to the top. She covered it and steamed them, and when they were done, she would pile all the crabs on cookie sheets and put them on the table where we would devour them. I was always squeamish about the insides, but I ate the claws and legs. I used to spike my butter just like my mom, with scads and scads of ground black pepper, lemon juice, and...Tabasco sauce! I would extract the meat, and throw it into my butter-bowl concoction to marinate for a few minutes, then take a break from cracking the claws to eat that crab in the hot butter. This was ingrained into me, this love of Blue Crabs.
I went to a conference in Baltimore some years back, and the vendor took us out to a crab house, steamed crabs covered with Old Bay Seasoning, and lots of butter, all you could eat. I tore into those things like a fox tears through a henhouse, and smashing them with wooden mallets, I was piling up carcasses while bits of crab, shell, and crab guts were flying around. The majority of the people in the group were from the midwest, and seeing their faces of fascinated horror as they watched me eat, I am certain they thought I was a brutal, carnivorous madman piling up the crab carcasses trophy-like, looking for all the world like Vlad the Impaler to them.
Those days have been long gone, and I don't have access to crabs like that anymore. A few years ago, I took a trip down to Maryland and brought back a couple of bushels of blue crabs. But somehow, even taking them that far made them seem to lose something in flavor, kind of the way it is said Coors beer used to be back in the mid-Seventies. You could only get it out in that area, and just the act of crossing the Colorado State Line somehow seemed to trigger a degenerative response in the beer that caused it to lose its life before someone in then next state could take a swig.
Never mind the East Coast. I don't appreciate beer well enough to know if any of this is true, but when I cooked those Blue Crabs at home, they were good, but...somehow, lost their zing. It is irrational, I know. I kept those crabs cool and moist in ice and layers of seaweed, but dang, they just were missing something!
Perfect elegance if you observe meatless Christmas Eve.
Salmon en Croute / Crab Champagne Sauce
Ingredients:
Fillet of Shetland salmon (1.2 kg)
Two Packs Frozen Puff Pastry (Defrosted)
Piece of root ginger grated or fresh Japanese sashimi ginger
Crystallised Ginger
4 Tangerines
Teaspoon Cornflour
Sprig of Thyme
Sea Salt
Freshly ground Pepper
Saffron or Paprika
Generous glass of Champagne.
Take a fillet of fresh salmon, cut into two pieces. Salt the fillets with
sea salt and pepper and fresh thyme. Grate some root
the fillets, flesh side down in puff pastry sealing ginger, or
Japanese pink ginger if you’re so lucky, also a little crystalised
ginger and apply the mixture to the flesh side of the fillets.
Place the filets flesh side down on puff pastry, wrap the
whole parcel and bake an a medium oven for about 30 minutes, the
pastry will look “done”.
10 minutes before you take the salmon out
of the oven, quickly saute some crab in olive oil
laced with ginger and tangerine zest. Add champagne, some heavy cream and thicken a bit.
They have a huge claw for ripping coconuts open.
Taste like a cross between lobster and Alaskan king crab.
Delicious!
Stuffed crab made with blue crab.
As for types, I’ve mainly had king crab and snow crab. The choice between those two mainly comes down to how hard you feel like working. I like being able to just snap the snow crab legs instead of having to get out the heavy hardware. More convenient, but king crab tastes even better and once you do manage to crack it open there’s a bigger reward for your effort.
Obviously the next one.
MMmmmmm! Crab Louie with Dungeness Crab!
Ingredients:
Dressing:
• ½ cup ketchup
• ½ cup mayonnaise
• ¼ cup minced yellow onion
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon dill pickle relish
• 2 teaspoons dried dill
• 1 teaspoon prepared horseradish
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
Salad:
• 8 asparagus spears, trimmed
• 1 medium head green-leaf lettuce, torn
• 2 medium tomatoes, cut into wedges
• 2 hard-boiled eggs, quartered
• 2 stalks celery, sliced
• 1 ripe avocado, sliced
• ½ medium cucumber, sliced
• 2 scallions, sliced
• ½ cup sliced canned pitted black olives, rinsed
• ¼ cup sliced red onion
• 6 ounces cooked crabmeat
• Lemon wedges for serving
Directions:
• Step 1
To prepare dressing: Whisk ketchup, mayonnaise, yellow onion, garlic, relish, dill, horseradish and lemon juice in a medium bowl.
• Step 2
To prepare salad: Bring 1 inch of water to a boil in a large pot fitted with a steamer basket. Place a bowl of ice water near the stove. Add asparagus to the pot, cover and steam until tender-crisp, 3 to 5 minutes. Transfer to the ice bath. Drain and pat dry.
• Step 3
Place lettuce on a serving platter. Arrange the asparagus, tomatoes, eggs, celery, avocado, cucumber, scallions, olives and red onion on top. Top with crabmeat and dollop with half the dressing (reserve the remaining dressing for another use). Serve with lemon wedges, if desired.
A 2nd on the blue crab.
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