Ok, for you sensitive types (Katie) just stop reading now. And avoid the accompaning pictures. The rest of you can continue reading about my first foray into cooking crab. I've recently decided to use my Everyday Chinese cookbook more and I've also wanted to integrate more seafood into my diet. So a few Sundays ago we went off to buy some live crabs at the Super 88; I wanted to try out a recipe for the traditional ginger scallion crab.
So if you've been to 88, you're familiar with their seafood area, with its variety of live seafood and recently deceased seafood prepared to your liking. Tom and I decided to get stone crabs, which were much much cheaper than the larger Dungeness crabs that I'm more familiar with. Since the stone crabs were smaller in size, we decided to get 2 each, for a total of four crabs. The seafood guy fished them out of the tank and put them into a plastic bag for us, and at least 3 of them looked pretty lively. (I had my doubts about one, but turns out it might have been sleeping, or on it's last legs. haha.).
We quickly took the crabs home and stuck them in the fridge. Tom said this would put them "asleep" or at least make them more sluggish so they were less likely to put up a fight when we boiled them. I then went about boiling water and preparing the ingredients for my dish. The ingredients were actually pretty simple, it was the just the process of cooking, cutting apart, frying and recooking the crabs that was so time consuming and ultimately very messy.
Here I am pouring out some cornstarch, which would be used later
and here are the crabs in the plastic bag
I wanted to wash the crabs since the tank water at 88 didn't look so fresh
Unfortunately, I turned on the hot water by mistake, and this woke the crabs up. Here's one close up.
Ok, so I'll admit, I couldn't put the crabs into the boiling water. They were kinda thrashing around and that scared me, so I made Tom do it. No, there was no crying or screaming or clawing from the crabs once they hit the water. We just cooked them until they were reddish. Then came the messy part. I had to cut apart all the crabs so I could dip them in cornstarch and fry them. However, stone crabs have really really thick shells. So I stood there for quite some time just hacking these guys apart.
After I completed that task, it was into a dredging of corn starch, and off to hot oil to fry for one minute.
The last step was to stir fry the remaining ingredients together- ginger, garlic, green onions, and a sauce involving soy sauce and more corn starch. At this point, I wish I'd had a large wok, it would've made everything much easier, but my sisters are getting me one for Xmas. Here's the finished dish, along with a side of stir fried bok choy.
The verdict? After making this, I realized that it really isn't too hard. And I think it tasted pretty much right on with what I've had in Chinese restaurants. What I was disappointed about was the stone crabs. Those thick shells made it really difficult to eat, and the small size meant that the extra effort didn't yield much meat. In the future, I'll go for the Dungeness. Meanwhile, Tom was not a big fan of this dish. He's more accustomed to his mom's spicy chili crab, so maybe one day he'll make that for me to try.
