It also works on already cooked blue crab. It will make cleaning live blue crab easier than you ever thought possible. Trim off the gills and repeat on the other side of the crab. The Blue Crack’n Crab Cleaner Is a system designed to clean live blue crab Quickly and Easily It can be also be used to measure your blue crab for legal size. Lift one end of the crab’s carapace (top portion of the shell) to reveal the gills.
With a pair of sharp scissors, trim off face to remove the eyestalks and mouthparts.įlip the crab over and remove the apron (or sex plate in video). Some chefs prefer cooking with the entire green crab, which is common in Venice. Rinse the thawed frozen crabs well and then dry with paper towel.
We recommend keeping the crabs in their original package until thawed since the legs are prone to breaking when frozen. Remove frozen green crabs from the freezer and place them in the refrigerator overnight or for a few hours until thawed. Use the crabs within three months of freezing, following the thawing instructions below. Pat the crabs dry and individually wrap them in plastic wrap or pack them in vacuum sealed bags (preferred). If trimming the crab, we recommend doing this prior to freezing since a thawed crab may be slightly more delicate. If you’re freezing the crab at home and prefer a trimmed crab, follow the trimming instructions below. To note, this tutorial is designed for home chefs using a standard freezer and refrigerator.įrozen Soft-Shell Green Crab (if using live crabs, skip thawing instructions).
#Cleaning blue crab how to#
In this tutorial, we’ll go through how to freeze, thaw, and trim a soft-shell green crab. To prevent this from happening, some processors and fishermen freeze their soft-shells as soon as they molt (also common for soft-shell blue crabs). However, a few days after molting the soft-shell begins to turn hard. The soft-shell means the green crab can be eaten whole or trimmed like a soft-shell blue crab (which we’ll go through in this tutorial). One reason chefs love cooking with soft-shells is that they require minimal preparation in comparison to their hard-shell counterparts. This summer, Chatham fisherman Jamie Bassett and organizations such as Manomet and New Hampshire Sea Grant worked to produce soft-shell green crabs locally, getting chefs across the East Coast excited about the local ingredient. Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Aruba, Austria, Azerbaijan Republic, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde Islands, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Comoros, Congo, Democratic Republic of the, Congo, Republic of the, Cook Islands, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), Fiji, Finland, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Gabon Republic, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Macau, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mayotte, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niger, Niue, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Reunion, Romania, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Swaziland, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Vanuatu, Vatican City State, Virgin Islands (U.S.Whether you’re whipping up a beer battered soft-shell sandwich or serving Venetian style moeche, there are so many reasons to love soft-shell green crab.