Crack a Crab
Mmmm mmmm mmmm I love crab!Mmmm mmmm mmmm I love crab! Cracking a crab is the same procedure if you are cooking with it or if you are just going to eat it. It's easy to crack a crab and you can save a couple of bucks by doing it yourself.
Procedure
The first thing to do is to remove all the legs. Hold the leg close to the body and pry it back like you would do with a chicken drumstick. Try to pull out the long tendons that should be attached to the lowest leg joint.
Once all the legs are off, remove the large outer shell (the back) from the body. Put your thumbs along the seam at the back and just pull it apart. You can discard he back and all the gunk inside the body. Make sure you remove the lungs also known as feathers and dead man's fingers (your kids will love that).
Style note: You can save the back for presentation. If you scrub it out it can be used to hold cooked food and it makes a cool way to present your dish.
Conservation note: Many folks have tried to convince me over the years that you can save the gunk inside the body of the crab. The gunk is made up of the crab's lives, intestines, lungs, and whatever else and that this makes wonderful fish stock or you can eat it as is. It's complete nonsense. Throw it all away.
Once the bodies are cleaned crack them in half. You can push your thumbs together in the middle of the crab's body and it will crack into two pieces pretty easily. After this give everything a good rinse and remove as much of the liver as you can. The liver is usually a green or yellowish color. It explodes when the crabs are boiled and it will be all over the interior of the crab. Rinse it off it tastes weird.
Next you need to separate all the legs at the joints. Just bend the joints over backwards and they will come right apart. For the claws pull the pincher down and it will come out with the "feather" attached. The feather is just a big tendon. You can't eat it so just chuck out.
Crack all the leg sections using a crab cracker. You can use anything...nut crackers or even a pair of pliers. My wife will just bite them. Whatever works for you. Just make sure you use something clean, after a crab is cooked once you don't generally ever heat it up again (at least not a temperature that would kill bacteria)
If you are gentle you can get most of the crab meat out in whole pieces. I don't know why exactly but I much prefer whole pieces. I you work to hard crab meat kinda turns to mush and I an not a huge fan of that...unless we're making crab cakes!
The next part is the body meat. The body meat is often overlooked by the amateur crab eater (much to the delight of us veterans). The body meat is referred to as the "white meat" and it is the sweetest meat in the crab. You can get at it by pulling the leg body sections away from each other. The sections will separate along the lines of membranes that define each section. Once you pull a section away you can push the back of a fork into the leg hole and a nice big piece of white meat should come right out.
That's it. Cracking crab is easy and gets easier with practice. I think I can clean and crack a crab in less than five minutes now. You know I bet there is a contest somewhere for crab cleaning. I wonder what the fastest time is?
