King Crab For Dinner

 

Thursday night I was already eating dinner when a friend called and asked if I wanted to go in with him on some king crab.  A crab boat was selling live king crab at the docks.  I opted in and finished my pizza.

He picked up two crabs and I took my crab cooker burner, can of propane, and big pot over to his house to cook the crabs.  They were HUGE.  The first step was to clean them - basically flip them upside down, put foot on tail, and pull up with legs.  The shell comes off - it stays on ground under your foot.  Then we broke the crabs in half with our hands and cleaned off the gills etc.  We already had a 'cannibal' sized pot of seawater boiling on the crab cooker.  The guys who sold us the crab actually filled the pot with sea water for us from the hold of the boat.

We put the crab in the boiling water and it came back to a roiling boil quite quickly.  We then waited 20 minutes before taking the crabs out and putting them into a pot of ice water.  We cooled the crabs quick - this makes them easier to clean and extract from the shell.

Then I took my share home and had a couple HUGE legs for a second late dinner.  Way better than the pizza had been.  Friday I ate more crab and picked the rest.  I ended up with a lot of picked crab meat.  So much more than you get out of a Tanner crab or lobster.  Now I am putting it on my salads, and eating a lot of crab.  Totally worth it!

Patrick

King Crab salad

cooling the crab after it has been cooked to 'release' the shell from the meat

Cleaned crab before we put it into boiling water