How to humanely kill, cook and crack Dungeness crab (new and improved video!)

many of you or some of you might have seen my old crab video um that I recorded about 5 years ago and I have learned a lot since then and um because of you I am doing a new one and um so anyway I'll link below to my old dungeoness crab cooking video I've learned a couple pretty significant things one I already felt like I was probably going to hell for how many crap I've killed in my life um so I've learned since then that probably want to go about the more humane way um since

we have a little bit more information about that now so instead of just throwing a live crab into boiling water I'm going to do it in what appears to be a much more brutal way but supposedly is a much Kinder way I chilled it for a while which puts it into a less pain receptive State um and instead of boiling it in general I'm going to steam it because I've done some tests over the years and prefer the flavor of steamed crab over boil crab and also like that it's a little bit drier and doesn't

retain a lot of that water so here we have a dungeoness CB and um just to go over a little bit of anatomy um again this one's not moving very much because it's been chilled but when you pick out the crab you want to make sure you get one that's really Lively in fact I I usually ask the person to get one that's like the bully of the crabs you don't want to get one that's in the corner like because like yeah no they don't have enough like life force and energy you want to get

um kind of like the crab that's the one that's going to have the best um energy flavor Etc and there's really no scientific proof behind that I don't even know why I said that anyway you only want to get males it's legal to actually capture female dungeoness um and uh you can see this is called the apron and it's a little phallic looking that's how you know it's a male crab if it was a female crab it would be a little bit rounder um and you want to make sure that it has all of its

um legs and front claws a couple ways to hold a a live crab and hold it this way uh you can use tongs um or the way I tell most of my students is to grab the back legs and then to hold it like a crab purse so if you hold it up in the air and then when you walk with it you can just put it to the side and then not put the claws too close to your leg but sort of just swing it like a fashionable purse this way so the way that

um there's several ways to to kill crab uh the way that I'm doing it now um there's a major nerve center that's right here also one in the mouth um I think what's easier for for me as far as teaching my students is just to hit this nerve center right here um and then quickly go ahead and take the um the shell off uh and split the crab in half um and you want to be decisive and you want to be quick about it okay so the first thing I want to show you is how

you're going to hold the crab before you uh kill it so you want to grab the back two legs kind of like you're um operating a motorcycle I guess so not really a really tiny motorcycle and you're going to put your thumbs right here and remember you you want to hit the crab right in the nerve center right there so find a sharp area and I put a paper towel down on the floor catch any juices and PPP in my dog will get anything that I miss and you want to line it up with that

top part and take a couple practice swings and the worst thing you could do at this point is to do it too soft you want to do be really decisive and and Humane about it I mean I guess the most Humane thing would be don't eat crap but here we are so I'm going to just do a couple practice swings like this and then I'm going to just do one really hard one to kill it so this is how you do it and when you see the juices come out the bottom like that and the

um legs go limp it's pretty much dead we're going to quickly move it over to the part where we split it to make sure so now you want to pull off the legs and split the C grab in half to clean it and I have found that the easiest way to do that is just to Twist um one way and twist with the other way with your hand so I'm just going to turn you see how I'm doing that just turn and twist the crab legs off okay so that's one side the other side is

much easier because you just have the shell here and you're just going to grab the shell so now we have some clean up to do these are the lungs and these are inedible so we'll just pick those off this is the part of the mouth okay now this part right here which does not look very attractive is very very delicious and this is called sometimes a crab mustard or crab butter it's the uh liver and other internal organs um you can go ahead and cook this up in a in a a pot with um shallots

and butter and some lime juice and make a really great sauce for your crab but I only do this every blue moon because um the crab uh are Bottom Feeders they eat a lot of stuff and there's also um this is where if there were toxins or pcbs they would accumulate in the organs so this is like a special treat I try not to eat it very often but I want you to know that this is delicious and you can absolutely use it we're going to take the the legs and you can just give a

little whack on it to get more of that out this is pretty much ready to go into my steamer pot okay so this again this is the carrus or the shell um just quick sustainability me message here um the way that we knew that this was a good crab to take was that the measurement from this point to this point at least in SEO area where I live was uh uh 6 and um 3/4 which is the currently the the minimum size to take a crab so that's where you would measure it from so this

is more of of of the crab butter I talked about and some of these juices I'll also use for a sauce um because there's a lot of flavor in here okay so we can save that that for a sauce but back to the crab this is the apron in a female the eggs would be trapped under here we take this off you can use these parts by the way to you can um kind of brown them up in a pan and make a crab stock with it so you can use all these parts take the

lungs off again and now we have two halves of a crab ready to be steamed so I'm going to head over to the steamer pop them in put a timer on for 14 minutes and then we'll be back and I'll show you how to crack crab okay I've got the crab out of the steamer now and I'm going to show you my way to pick crab first I separate them all into their um their parts by the way just as background I worked um in fine dining uh for many years and at this one particular

restaurant that I worked at I'm going to take these snap these off right here I'm holding back this joint I was in charge of dispatching about 80 crab a day and picking them all and so you you learn to get really fast at that kind of stuff so that you can be done with it faster so I'm going to separate them all body meat and then I'm going to take off all the pincers and put them in a different pile okay so we have pincers here we have this leg meat right here we have our

body meat here ideally you keep these on if possible obviously I didn't do such a great job over there but this makes it a little bit easier for begin ERS to be able to pull this apart now we have our claw sections you want to take this part off from this part from this part to crack it more easily so you're going take your your um heel of your palm and push that over same thing here going up you can break it a little bit that way sometimes your hands are better and snap that knuckle

off so then we have those pieces so once again like that and break the knuckle off okay so now we have these guys make actually great Pickers um so I always save one back these I use in Crab stock there's still meat in here so also um this is sort of like the chef snack so you can break it dip it and eat it and pull it out but it's a lot of work for very small amount of meat the claws um there's you know maybe five people in the world who can effectively get the

whole claw out with both pincer meat attached and that's really hard so I just tell my students just to take this part out and sacrifice it to your Crab stock pile because it makes it easier to get the other meat out okay you're going to probably think that I'm going to recommend a crab cracker to crab your crack your crab with but I don't actually a crab cracker um will squish the shell into the meat which is really not what you want to do so I recommend getting just a a a heavyduty tool and the

idea is that and I'll show you on this piece first the idea is that you're not not so much squashing and cracking the shell into the meat as you are opening up the shell so you can get the meat out in a nice piece so what I'm doing is actually hitting and then bringing back the um what do you call this a mallet I don't know crab cracker so I'm going to go like this with as much energy in the coming back so I don't know if you can see that but I'm just trying to

break the shell so I can get in there okay and open up the shell because once you open up the shell you can get the entire leg out and it's not smashed to hell okay also there's a little bit of meat left here and you can use the the pincer to get in there and pick that meat out okay so then the next one I want to show you is the is the knuckle piece here same idea find the flat side and you're just using enough energy see how it just cracked that one piece just

so you can break it open and it's like bam right you got a nice whole piece of crab okay moving on to the um claw part put it um this side down uh so it's flat you don't want to be working on it when it's rolling and you're going to there's a kind of a a sweet spot right here okay when you get that crack it open and if you're lucky not lucky but let's try it again on another one that sucks I only got two okay next part uh attach to the cloth same thing

flat down you're just breaking this part right here so now we're ready to do um this piece and then you can expose just enough so you can pull out the whole leg okay now you have the body meat and what I usually do is to take a tool in between here and you can see like a line and I'm going to separate between and there's a ton of body meat in there sometimes you can use your finger or a tool and a lot of this body meat is going to come dropping out the bottom you

can use a tool from the top or your finger and a lot of that body meat it's going to come out Okay so we've got a lot more picking to do but I want to show you um how important it is to pick through your own crab meat for for little bits of shell if you if you pick it correctly you're going to have a lot less shell but it's still important to pick it so what I do a lot of people will just put it in a bowl and just keep picking through it like

this but it's really hard to know if you've missed a shell that way so what I recommend people do is is put all the crab meat at one end and then work with the crab meat under your fingers to the other side of um the plate or the tray so that you know that this is clean and what I recommend also doing is that you have a friend come in and I'm going to bring my friend in C and she's going to pick the meat from here to here because she might find a Shell so

she's just going to pick it under her fingers and bring it over there I think I left a shell right there in the the front so as she goes through she's going to check my work and you almost always find a little bit more shell pretty good and then her bonus is a big leg with some mise that we made and I there's a video down below for that uh oh we're filming thanks for watching my videos my name is Becky seling gut uh really appreciate you hanging out here with me for a little while

feel free to check out my website at www. Becky selling.com or either of my cookbooks I've written uh goodfish and shroom and I'm working on a new one called how to taste and what else can I tell you um if you liked any of the silly dad humor or humor in any of my videos feel free to check out my comedy podcast look inside this book club and check a look at take a look at all the uh other videos that I have on my my channel thanks so much cheers