Eating Crab
Tips on Eating Crab
The first couple of things you will need for eating crab are a knife and a little wooden or metal mallet. If you are eating in a restaurant, these will come with your meal. A lot of people dip crab meat into hot, melted butter, so you will probably want to have a nice glass of something to drink with your meal.
The wooden or metal mallet is used in cracking crab claws. A knife is a good utensil to help you in initially opening the crab and when you are separating the meat from the shell. You can tell if you have a female or male crab by the size of the abdominal covering. The female’s is wide and the male’s is narrow. This is only important in eating crab because some people like the taste of either a female or a male crab better than the other.
It is also good to know in case you ever decide to go crabbing yourself. In some states or regions of the world, with some species, it is OK to harvest male crabs but not female. It depends if the species is thought to be vulnerable to over-harvesting. Also try and select a crab with large claws that is nice and heavy with plenty of meat inside.
The first thing people usually do when eating crab is to remove the two front claws by snapping them off. Eating crab really gets down to the nitty-gritty, so expect to be pulling apart limbs, and be prepared for the messiness of the whole process. Sometimes, especially at home, people will just cover their whole table with newspaper so that you can just throw the paper away and there won’t be much to clean up.
So, remove the two claws and set them aside for later. Next, you should remove the smaller crab legs. There is just a little bit of meat at the end of each joint that you don’t want to miss as you pull off the legs. Then, depending on how strong you feel, you can take your knife and slide it under the tip of the apron underneath the crab and pull up and back. That will snap the apron off. You can also do this with your own brute strength if that appeals to you. Now you have separated the body of the crab from the shell.
Remove the face area and the gills as they are not edible. There is also a yellowish, slimy substance that you will notice on top of the body or between shell and body. Some people eat it but others don’t, citing the fact that it can get contaminated by ocean water. Then you should break the body of the crab in half, and then once again in half. Each time you do this you will reveal the delicious, white crabmeat. At this point you can just use your fingers and no one will care.
When you are eating crab, the claws are the last part to be attacked. Pull hard and the claw will come apart at the joint. Then you should be able to get every little bit of crab meat out of the shell of the claw. If your fingers aren’t doing the job, you can crack the shell with the mallet and use your knife to dig out the crabmeat.
The more times you eat crab, the easier the whole process will get. Once you have had a taste of fresh, steamed crab, you won’t be able to wait until you have a chance to do it again.