Once you get the over the heeby jeebies of picking up a live crab, the rest is simple. Easy peasy!
I get my crabs (man, that sounds wrong) off the docks in Half Moon Bay from the fishermen that bring it in everyday. They sell live crabs for around $5 /lb. which is twice the ol’ wholesale prices of yesteryear, but still lower than what you will pay in most markets. Expect to pay around $10 to $12 per crab.
A word of advice about buying crab off the docks: haggling with the fishermen over their prices unless you are going to do some serious buying in large quantities is just not worth it. They are selling it at the lowest prices they can right now. And if they go lower for you they run the risk of getting into trouble with their fellow fisherman and there have been some serious consequences for this. Wholesale crab prices are set in November and they stay set for the most part, throughout the season.
This year I’ve heard mixed reports on the Dungeness crabs but all that I’ve tasted have been sweet and delicious. A little on the small side overall, but still incredible. The crab season runs from November through June, but majority of big fat ones are caught in Winter, just so you know…
I fill a big pot with salted water, add my spices, bring to a boil and then carefully add crab one by one making sure the water comes back to a boil after each one. I cook them for 5-6 minutes. Most recipes say 10 minutes, but this is overkill. I take them out, drain them and let them cool a little before cracking and eating. Sometimes I spread the crab butter on toast – yum!
I know I’ve said this a million times, but Dungeness crab is just one of those items I think is good just the way it is. Drawn Meyer lemon butter on the side is a nice addition along with some real Sourdough and a fresh green salad. Does it get any better? Okay, some steamed artichokes too maybe…
Ingredients
- 3-6 fresh Dungeness crabs, alive
- 1-2 large pots of boiling salted water, enough water to submerge crabs completely
- 4 bay leaves
- 10 black peppercorns
- 2 tablespoons fennel seed
- 4 tablespoons Old Bay seasoning
- 4 lemons, halved
- 5 cloves of garlic, peeled
- 3 tablespoons smoked Hungarian paprika
- 1 bunch parsley, stems only
- 3 stalks celery, chopped coarsley
- 2 yellow onions, halved
The water that the crab is boiled in should be salty like the sea.
Add the rest of the ingredient (minus crab) to the pot and let simmer for 20 minutes. Taste. If the broth tastes good, the crab will taste even better. Adjust seasoning.
Once the broth is boiling, take the crab from the back so that the pincers don't get ya, and carefully lower it into pot. Put the lid over immediately so there's no escape. Wait for 20 seconds or so before adding the next crab. It's important that the broth back come up to a boil between each crab dunk.
Cook for 15 minutes. The crabs will turn bright red. Remove from broth and let cool for another 5 minutes before butchering.
To butcher: twist legs off from body at the base, set aside. Pull the back lid up and off of the body. Scrape out gills and throw away. Scrape out grey-ish green crab butter and reserve or toss (can be eaten!), break body into two pieces down the center – these are the 'knuckles' and you will see why they are called that when you split the body apart.
Serve with crab crackers to break shells, or if you want to pamper your guests use a mallet or the back of a heavy knife blade and gently crack the shells at all the joints.
Those Dungeness are some tough customers! Here in Baltimore we have the blue crabs that you can pick apart by hand, maybe with a nutcracker for the legs, but I never thought Dungeness were the sort of crab you could sit around and pick apart with a bunch of friends and no power tools. This sounds good though, the next time I see Dungeness I’ll try it!
Marcie! I would have thought you’d be a dungeness crab pro having spent so much time in the Bay Area! Good to hear from you and I hope you are doing well in Baltimore…
Hey Chef,
Nice to see that you have crabs (in a chef-y sense, that is).
These things are delicious but Dungeness aren’t exactly abundant over here on the other side of the continent. I think the last time I had Dungeness was in a crap dumpling at the Yank Sing.
So exactly how many of these things did you cook at one go?
Crap dumpling?!?! Now you’re as bad as me! I cooked 12. Ate half. Served the remaining. It was some of the best crab I think I’ve ever had in my life. Very sweet and nice & warm. I find when cooked crab is reheated it looses flavor and the texture gets a little funny.
Ah, how I so love when my typos make it through (it’ll teach me to make crab jokes). I’ll chalk it up to my fake accent.
Looking forward to hearing about that upcoming project you’re planning for next month, which would still be able to take advantage of the tail end of the Dungeness season.
I love your new design! What software are you using now? Is it still typepad? Did you design it yourself?
Thanks Helen! I’m using WordPress now. The layouts help to organize information much better and they have great templates too! I got a little help from a certain very special technically savvy person who really made the layout extra cool.
Make that a LOT of help….
Amy, I love your new design. Very user friendly, nicely organized, and simple to navigate. I look forward to reading more of your fun recipes.
Mark
Great looking site. Makes me hungry just looking at it. Will you be posting updates from your upcoming European vacation?
I really like the new site, too. Simple, clean, easy on the eyes… what more could a reader ask for?
As for the Dungeness crabs, well, it’s the Northern California natives’ favorite delicacy, don’t you think? My grandmother was born in Daly City and grew up in Alameda, so the bounty of our local ocean has always been a big part of my family’s traditions. Some things had to be reserved for trips to the ocean, like sand dabs which are rarely found at inland grocery stores. But crab was ALWAYS on the Christmas menu. Well, crab salad, anyway. The crab meat picking “parties” that my mother, grandmother and I would have while seated on bar stools around the newspaper covered bread board were some of the best family times of my life. We would pick, eat crab in its pure and natural state, tell old family stories and laugh our asses off. We may have started with four crabs but in the end we would only have about four cups of crab meat, just enough for the salad. I always preferred to eat my crab cold with some lemon and horseradish-heavy cocktail sauce. Don’t get me wrong, I like it pretty much any way I can get it, but chilled is my personal favorite. I like the traditional crab Louis a lot, too.
One of my most successful lunches when I worked at the private gun club was a chilled crab luncheon. We were experiencing a winter like this last one, where we didn’t really have a winter, and I asked one of the members to bring crab up from the City. I made all the fixings for the members to make crab salads or cocktails: that horseradish-heavy cocktail sauce, lemon halves in their little yellow cheesecloth wrappers, Louis dressing made the traditional way with chili sauce, mixed greens, wedges of the last of the fall tomatoes at the farm stand, halved hard cooked farm eggs, snipped chives, ice buckets with chilled Jordan chardonnay, all served out on the seventy degree deck– complete with blinding white linens, china, crystal wine glasses, and a gorgeous view of the smallest mountain range in the world. It really was one of those sublime experiences that one never forgets.
CaliChef! I love, love, love your stories they always make me smile ;)) And I also love the fact that you worked at a private gun club – that also puts a smile on my face and I can’t exactly say why, but it does. Louis dressing made from scratch is seriously good, I think bottled version has taken over which is unfortunate. The only prob with crab salad is picking all the crab, not fun, but so worth it in the end….
“The only prob with crab salad is picking all the crab, not fun, but so worth it in the end….”
That’s why you serve it as cracked crab, crab salad is reserved for only those people we truly love! (Unless the food budget will allow for the purchase of picked crab, of course!)
You would have loved working at the gun club. It was in my contract that I had an unlimited food budget and never had to cook for more than 30. Usually I only cooked for a dozen or two, at most. The only time I was called upon to cook for 30 was for a Ducks Unlimited meeting and that was just cocktail snacks. My boss told me to really put out a fabulous buffet that day, and boy did I! There was some left over elk salami and I had a lot of Belgian endive and Cabrales cheese, plus I got lucky that day and there were stone crab claws at the market!
When I say this place was “exclusive,” I’m not kidding. The “poor” guy was only worth about $20 mil. and one of the members was a bona fide billionaire. (I’ll bet you can guess who the billionaire is if you read my previous comment.) However, this was 12 years ago, before the economy fell apart, so I don’t know who among them remains. I saw an ad somewhere looking for prospective members and the buy-in price had gone down by about 25%, so… :-/
I wouldn’t have missed that opportunity for anything. I was meant to work there having grown up with that gun club as one of our nearest neighbors, three or four miles down the road. You just don’t find anyone more local than that! My guys absolutely LOVED seeing the old photo albums with pictures from a flood when I was a kid. The camera was pointed toward their club from my back porch in some of the photos with nothing but water, partial fences and telephone poles in sight. They’d all seen the club in a flooded state, but it looks really different on 60s Kodachrome from a new perspective.
You need to steam them, not boil, in a mixture of water, beer and vinegar, each layer of crab liberally sprinkled with salt and old bay!
That sounds delicious. But I’m not going to steam crabs alive…. takes too much time to kill them…
Posst writing is also a excitement, if you know then you can write or else it is difficult to write.
I appreciate your posts. We enjoy crabbing as a family relaxing recreational experience. Due to the recent West Coast crab restrictions, we only just started up this February, last night to be exact. Off piers and jettys, We typically find rock crab and just the ocassional dungeness despite the battle with the crazy sealions that tear our cages apart. I wonder about cooking for just five minutes, how will i know they are cooked through without opening? these crabs are quite heavy by the time they hit proper size.