[Music] today I'm going to show you how to cook and clean a Dungeness crab first thing I want to show you though is some people are scared to even hold them and want to show you that you put your thumb right on the top and put your fingers right here there's no chance that you're going to get your fingers caught in their claws so this is a way to pick up a Dungeness crab so again if I want to approach it just pick it up this way and you can handle it another thing that people
like to do is they take tongs you're really kind of squeamish you can just pick it up like so a lot of people will put the Dungeness crab right in pot still moving like this but it's kind of hard for a beginner because their claws sometimes we'll grab much the pot which is sort of sad so what I'd like to do is give it a little numbing tour in the freezer for about I don't know at least 15 minutes at the most 30 minutes it's gonna put it into sort of a numbed State it's gonna
be a lot easier to handle so it's a people actually to catch Dungeness crabs that are female because for obvious reasons the they need the females to stay in though in the waters to reproduce so it's always good to know how to tell the difference between a female and the male if you look over the the bottom of the this is called the apron a male's apron is going to look like the Washington Monument it's gonna be kind of narrow and straight up whereas a female it's gonna go from here and it's gonna go around
into basically a circle so you want to look for the straight line for a male and like I said a little bit of a circle for a female so we're gonna get ready to cook our Dungeness crab but one of the most important things to do is make sure there's enough salt in the water because Dungeness crab come from the salty ocean and if you cook it in a still water plain water without the salt in it you're gonna be drawing some of that salt out of the crab which is gonna lose a lot of
flavor so I don't really use a technical measurement it's basically just a sheesh load of salt per pot of water so you can watch basically I'm just gonna add a bunch and then taste it make sure it's salty like the ocean give it a little stir that tastes nice and some nice and briny so it's out of the freezer it's been in there for about thirty minutes and you can see it's not moving anymore a lot easier to put in pot and make sure it's completely submerged and I like to cook Dungeness crab for about
seven minutes per pound most engines cover about two pounds so we're gonna cook this one for fourteen minutes so the crab is ready now we're gonna take it out of the pot and you really want to plunge it into some ice water to cool it and that's gonna be the most important thing you can do because you really want to stop the cooking process so you don't overcook the tender meat so we're gonna put it in the ice water we're gonna leave it there for about ten minutes and then we're gonna clean it so we
have a nice chilled Dungeness crab here and I'm gonna show you how to clean it and maybe also had a cracker because some people don't know how to do that as well so it's a little bit messy so first thing I'm gonna do is just put over a bowl as I do this what you want to do is this is it called the carapace you want to locate the back of it and you want to put your thumb right in here and grab right by the leg there's a little bit of a place where it
looks like your thumb can actually go very easily you run just grab it and pull upward you pull up where you're gonna pull this whole top piece off just like so it's very easy to do you just pull that off this is some what's known as the crab butter right in here it's also the it's kind of like the liver for crab and some people eat this is considered a delicacy it's also where toxins tend to accumulate so it's something I would only eat every once in a while so I'm like I eat it today
at this point you're gonna find the gills right here that run along this way you're gonna take all those off your hands that come off very easily same thing you see them running this way and take all these off right here are the mouth parts of the crab right here and basically you just take your thumb put it in there and you're gonna break these pieces off okay at that point you flip the crab over you're gonna locate what we talked about earlier about how to sex a crab this is a male crab it's called
the apron basically you're gonna put your finger right in this part sometimes you need a little tool to get in here and oyster shuckers great you're gonna lift this part up pull back and pull off this part at this point you can just flip it you can break the crab in half this is really easy you just kind of fold it both ways like a book and it's gonna fall right in half okay sometimes people will just hit back like that and we'll knock some of this bit out I like to just rinse it under
cold water which I'm going to do I'll be right back once this is clean okay now we have two halves of a cleaned crab and I'm going to show you just very briefly how some cracking techniques in order to get the meat out so a lot of people aren't sure I'm going to do this the best way the way I like to do it is separate the leg from the body like so just break it into pieces okay like that sometimes a tool is a nice thing to use you can use an oyster shucker a
tooth chopstick is also nice and really if you're just gentle you can kind of pull the meat out all in one nice big chunk like that the me comes out I also like to break break the crab at different parts right here and right here well could we use crab crackers but you can really use any kind of tool it teaches this nice big rolling pin it's very easy for me you just take bread this one part and I hit it gently okay fine that point is just gonna break you just put your fingers in
there and break the shell and you can often get it all in one whole piece like so and that's basically all you need to know for how to cook and clean a Dungeness crab
