Other cooks use cornmeal or a mixture of flour and cornmeal. This gives you a very light, slightly crisp crust. The simplest way to prepare crabs for frying is merely to dip them lightly in flour. Even within the narrow realm of frying, there are many choices to be made. There really is only one best way to cook soft-shell crabs - frying (there are recipes for broiling, but these are to be tried only after you’ve had your absolute fill of fried). Most places air-freight the crabs in several times a week, but if you’re not picky, sometimes you’ll still get crabs that are limp and drained. When you’re shopping for soft-shells, try to get the biggest, plumpest ones you can. This is fine as long as you’re planning on cooking the crabs within a couple of hours. Lift the tips of the shell and cut out the gills, or “dead man’s fingers.” Cut off the apron underneath and the crab is ready for cooking.Īt most seafood markets (at least the ones fancy enough to sell soft-shells), the counterman will clean them for you. This kills the crab, though it may still twitch a bit. The first step is cutting off the crab’s “face” about a quarter-inch behind its eyes. The trickiest part about cooking soft-shells is cleaning them, and that’s not so much hard as horrific. That’s when we get them, flown in and, ideally, still alive but stored on ice so their metabolism has slowed enough that they may appear otherwise. There they are inspected three or four times a day in order to be harvested at just the right moment - when they have shed their old shells and before the new soft skin has had a chance to harden (something it will begin to do within a matter of hours if left alone). Just-caught crabs are sorted accordingly and stored in saltwater cages.
When the leg shows red, they’re just about ready to bust. When it turns pink, it’s a matter of days. The next-to-the-last small swimming leg is the key: when a trace of white appears, the crab will molt within a couple of weeks. Watermen who catch crabs have learned to recognize signs that tell them how soon this will happen. When they get bigger, eating size, it can take several months. When the crabs are young, they grow rapidly and may do this as often as every several days. Essentially, they get so big they simply burst out of them (a feeling with which many soft-shell crab eaters probably have some sympathy).
To grow, crabs need to shed their hard shells. Harvesting soft-shell crabs is as much craft as catch. In fact, it’s just short of a miracle that we get them at all. That soft-shell crabs cost so much is no mystery. Serve it with a nice tart salad and a simple sauce and you’ve got a meal you’ll remember for years. Do it just right and you get an irresistible combination of crunchy crust and sweet, buttery, briny crabmeat. Roll a crab in a little flour and fry it quickly. There are few things that are easier to fix and there are almost none that are better. Even when you cook them yourself, they are still expensive - almost $6 a piece.ĭon’t let that put you off, though. In the first place, soft-shells are seasonal: They’re here only in the late spring and early summer. Imagine, soft-shell crabs whenever you want them. Once a regional specialty or restaurant splurge, they are now available at fancy groceries in Southern California. Freed from that poorly designed packaging, they deliver all of the sweet crab flavor with none of the fuss. Once a year, though, blue crabs give us a break. But when it takes five minutes of determined cracking through sharp bits of shell to get at a paltry couple of ounces of meat, you really begin to recalculate the cost-benefit ratio. Blue crabs (the toast of the East and Gulf coasts, which nature has tragically deprived of our vastly superior Dungeness) are sweet enough, it is true. Soft-shell crabs are blue crabs (genus: Callinectes: “beautiful swimmer” species: sapidus: “delicious”) that have been captured in mid-molt. Soft-shell crabs: what a great invention. In fact, let’s go even further: One of the world’s most inconvenient foods also comes in a convenient easy-to-cook package. In the quest for ease, other attributes - such as flavor - get tossed willy-nilly by the wayside.īut there is an exception. Convenience foods have a horrible reputation, in most cases entirely justified.
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