Kitchen Technique: How to Dismantle a Live Crab

~I am so excited! This is my first how-to demo, made mostly in part for my best friend who lamented that there are no videos on youtube.com showing how to preserve the precious crab butter.

Taking apart a live crab is easy, quick, and oddly therapeutic at times. If this is your first time and/or you are a little squeamish, keep in mind once you’ve brought it home, you’ve committed. It’s not like you can return live seafood or release it into the wild. You’ll need to eat it that day, or it will die in your fridge overnight. And if you let it die, just know I will personally be disappointed in you, that you let a perfectly good crab go to waste. SHAME.

A few tips: get a vegetable knife or cleaver. As I explain briefly in the video, you want a knife that has a thick blade that will withstand the pressure of cracking open the crab shell. A thinner blade will not and it is a scary thought to have a blade snap off. The second reason is that the thicker end of the blade will help crack the crab claws and legs.

When selecting a crab, get one that is still alive and kicking. Just because it has been in the tank, doesn’t mean it’s not about to die. Poke it; make sure it is still moving around on it’s own. Also, look at the hind legs. The crab claws claws and shell are deceptive. If you want to know how to find a nice, meaty crab- look at the hind legs. The scrawnier they are, the less meat.

The more you do this, the quicker it gets. It used to take me almost 7 minutes at the beginning and now it takes me about 3 minutes =) Happy cooking, folks!