How to Cook and Shell Crab? Dungeness Crab Breakdown 😋

[Music] crab is in season and we have some beautiful Dungeness crabs that's worthy of any celebration in this video I'll show you how to prepare crab and how to take out the delicious meat I think these guys are ready so let's go [Music] they're normally here on the West Coast the crab season starts around in November December however this year there was a bit of a delay so now we're in February and crab is on sale I was able to get these beautiful Dungeness crabs for 3.99 a pound on sale at our local grocery store

I've not seen these types of prices for a very long time so when I saw them I had to get some and I will say that I usually like to get them fresh and still alive especially from the boats however these were too cheap to pass up so these are already cooked as you can tell by their reddish color on the shell but also that makes a better video as they are not squirming and much easier to handle check these Beauties out for three of them they were about five and a half pounds look at

that beautiful color all the legs are intact which is something you want to look for and the user is marked as fresh so they're freshly cooked you want these as fresh as possible and while they were cooked they were never Frozen which is kind of nice but whether you're cooking raw crabs or you're reheating cooked crabs the process is the same so let's get to it so we'll be steaming these in a large pot on the stovetop we'll just add about an inch of water to the bottom and put that to a boil as the

water is heating we'll add a steaming rack to the bottom so that if you put your crab in here they won't be submerged in the water [Music] now that the water has come to a full boil it is time to put in our crowd now if you do have live crab you want to use some caution as they will be moving around but these are already cooked so we're just going to reheat them now the key is put them back side down or the large shell upside down and for a couple reasons one is if

they are alive this will prevent them from trying to jump out as their legs cannot push off but two there are some great juices you want to collect in that shell and if you have them right side up they may just leak out now I cook these for exactly 10 minutes 10 minutes should be enough to fully cook the meat or reheat the meat and it won't dry out the steaming method is really great as it will keep moisture within the crab there are other ways to make crab like baking it but then you do

have to make sure that the meat doesn't dry out so 10 minutes just take it out it is going to be hot so I do use some tongs and the way to tell that it's fully cooked is that that shallow will be bright orange now since these were pre-cooked they already had that orange but it's even brighter now that we reheated it and again flipping it upside down allows those juices to collect in that shell She's a Beauty now time to serve so we're gonna shell this crab now shelling a crab is not hard but

you do need to know what to look for it's not super intuitive and I didn't know how to do this until my grandfather showed me when I was a kid so first thing you want to flip it on its back and look for this tail piece it's in a triangular shape sort of near the bottom you can tell this is a male crab as it's a long and thin triangular shape a female crab will have a wider piece at this bottom actually it's illegal to fish female crab and you need to throw them back so

if you buy these in the store they will almost always be male so you just flip that tail out and start breaking it off and you can also remove some of the smaller bits that are attached as well so you have a clear opening so once that's removed you'll see that there's a bit of a hole on the bottom as that opening that's where you want to stick your finger in and start to pry the shell away from the rest of the body now you do have to be careful as this is hot and this

is where steam may come out so you may want to let it cool down for a little bit but if you give it a quick pry it should come apart just like this so all that soup is left in the shell and you don't want to throw that away that is delicious Umami goodness either makes seafood soup out of it or just drink it straight out of the shell but please don't throw that away that is liquid gold let's give it a try yep that's so full of flavor so salty as well I might put

this in soup later but it is delicious so next thing you want to do is clean it meaning taking out all the lungs and the parts that you don't want to eat so here a lung actually fell out and what you can see is they're a little bit spongy and pointed they basically cover the entire inside on top of a more harder shell so all of the soft stuff you want to remove those are the lungs and they are not good for eating [Music] rip these things right out they're not very hard to take out

but there are a lot of them so just take your time you remove all these pointies soft spongy things and there may be little bits and pieces of shell that you may want to take out at this point now what's nice about Dungeness crab is a cooked shell is quite brittle and so you can really maneuver this just with their hands you don't need any Machinery shell crackers or tools to to open up the shell and pick out that delicious meat putting these mandibles in the front you guys take them out because kind of heavy

sharp and you don't want to bite into that you can see this is a hard shell there hard shell here all the lungs are gone you can take this out as well it's nasty oh now here is the mustard it's sometimes yellow or orange and many people actually eat this and this crab it doesn't look that super tasty but contrary to popular believe this is actually not fat it is part of their digestive system and if you want to eat it it's supposed to be a delicacy I'm not a huge fan so I normally just

wash that out in the sink or with a knife okay so now I cut right in the middle all that stuff is gone it's inside cavity just take a knife and slice it down the middle or good enough just cracks right apart all that meat look at all that meat we could just start taking the claws off which claw leg chunk of meat on it serve it like this and I'll show you this is just me right here pull that up delicious because I'm just grab can pull that meat out there is nothing there's nothing

left in the Shell so you don't need this piece anymore and we'll just work our way through the rest of the legs and claws to get all that meat out now it's easiest to break these at the Joint as it'll separate quite easily pull out the meat now as a pro tip to get out all that meat you can use the crab's own legs or the sharp end of its legs to scrape out any existing meat inside its shell depends on how hard you want to work there's a little bit of meat in here almost

just peel these things right here we need a cracker for the smaller pieces you can almost just suck them right out of the shell if you're eating turkeys or if not eating directly then you can use that tip to scrape that meat out so you could do the exact same thing through each of its legs but now we're going to work on the claw which is a little bit different nobody same thing you can just shells or mouth make sure the meat comes off prayer crafting that's it just work our way through dungeons crab and

the shells are quite soft sure there take out the meat Michelle with all the meat the claws just breaking up the joint now some of the thickest shell will be at the claw area so here it may not crack open as easily I just use the flat blade of a knife or Cleaver to crack that open it can even be a fun toy so for the thicker shells I'll just take a Cleaver the flat side and press it over and give it a quick whack and now the shell comes apart easily to peel off and

expose that meat there's also a tiny bit of very soft meat inside the Pincers now it does take a bit to get them out so it's up to you if you want to get those or not but I usually try to get as much meat as I can out of each crowd [Music] sure so same with this one just use the flap side of a Cleaver and give it a whack foreign oops I might have whacked a little too hard it's a little flat but it's okay you just peel off the shell and still access

all that meat I find the claws to contain some of the juiciest and largest chunks of meat so definitely work your way through it look at that just large pieces of Dungeness crab meat so I'm just going to work quickly through the rest of this crab at least that's half the crab and take out all the meat from the legs and the body and we can save that meat aside if you don't want to eat it right away and make crab cakes at a later date and anytime there's some meat that's difficult to come out

well the crab's own legs is the perfect tool to pick those pieces of meat out and after having eaten most of the hard work we can save the rest of it in a bowl and look at that all of this delicious crab meat from just one crab you can either eat it in a crab salad right away or put it in the refrigerator and save it for another day so that's pretty much it hopefully hopefully after this video cooking and breaking out a crab won't be such a daunting task and we'll look at some recipes

that will use these crab meat for at another time until then thanks for watching please like And subscribe and have a great day [Music] oh