If you are squeamish about this, you can put the crabs in the freezer for a few seconds to stun them. This will kill the crab immediately and painlessly. To clean the crabs, snip off the mouth and eyes with a pair of kitchen shears.Avoid crabs wrapped in cellophane-that is a definite sign that they have been frozen. The crabs need to be cleaned just before you cook them (ask the fishmonger, or try it yourself with steps 2-4). When buying crabs, look for live crabs that still have their soft shells.He grabs a piping-hot specimen in his hands, juggles it until it’s cool enough to hold, and takes a bite, the gory scene of the assassination long forgotten.
Now we can’t wait for the season to roll around so we can grab a bag of at one of the markets in Chinatown and take out our scissors.Ī couple of lemons are rolled on the counter, halved and squeezed over the crustaceans still cooking on a paper-towel-covered plate. Which is how, one day last spring, we found ourselves squeezed into our tiny Manhattan kitchen, pan-frying soft-shell crabs.
CRAB OPENIN UNDERBELLY FLAP HOW TO
We’d start with how to make pasta and work up to dishes like beef Wellington and matzo ball soup. One night a week we would have a “lesson” another night he’d squeeze some time into his busy banker’s schedule to watch me cook. In order to avoid unnecessary strain on our relationship (although the teacher/student situation sounded pretty sexy, he’s certainly not used to me giving him instructions or critiquing him), we came up with a regimen of cooking activities to ease my husband into the realm of food self-sufficiency. Like a good soldier, he dredges them into the mixture, happy that they no longer squirm. I show him how to dredge the creatures in the mixture to create a crisp fried crust. Not yet used to the figure-eight motion of using a whisk, flour flies into the air and onto the counter. When my husband announced he was ready to learn to cook, I was thrilled, and honored that he trusted me to guide him.įlour, salt, pepper, and a sprinkle of chili powder are whisked together. It was time for him to take matters into his own hands. He had tasted his way through enough $250-per-head dinners to know his way around a menu. He was used to living with a food freak who could easily talk about cheese or pickles for hours. When he was 27 years old, it became clear to my husband that it was time him to learn to cook, and increasingly he was becoming anxious to do so. As the pile of dying crustaceans grows, so does his confidence. Sludgy, fishy water runs down his wrists to his elbows. One after the next, the crabs are mutilated. He happily grew up on meals culled from quick-concept and fast-food joints, with the occasional home-cooked chicken parm dinner (breaded and fried chicken topped with Prego and melted Polly-o over spaghetti) thrown in for good measure.
It could no longer see, could no longer breathe.įor my husband, cooking was something that seemed necessary to survival but didn’t necessarily need to happen in the home. Using the back of the scissors, he scraped the white webbing out from the underside of the flailing crab. The first time I decided to bring my culinary blood sport home my husband grimaced, not particularly thrilled with such ritualistic murder happening in the confines of his squeaky-clean sink. My favorite sous-chef would pull me aside with a glint in his eye, hand me a pair of scissors and we’d go to town, creating a crabby massacre. When I worked in a French restaurant in New York’s Theater District, I used to wait with anticipation for the seaweed-filled boxes to arrive from the supplier. Soft-shell crabs are about 95 percent edible, but there are some body parts that must come off. Soft-shell crab season runs only a sliver of time in the spring, when crabs have shed their exoskeleton and are soft while regenerating their shell.
But wait, there’s more! There’s also a recipe for crispy Maryland soft-shell crabs, courtesy of the most excellent chef Laurent Tourondel. Below that, the steps to give it a try yourself.
The following is an account of a woman teaching her man to cook soft-shell crabs.
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