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Pottery Barn Party Planner Tips for Cooking and Cleaning Crab
how do you do, my name's Paul Johnson
uh the founder of monterey fish market in San francisco and berkeley
I've been working the docks for about thirty years now
and uh I've written this book called fish forever
and it relates some of my experiences on the wharf and it also tells you how to cook seafood
and how to choose the most sustainable and
healthy seafood
today we're going to talk about how to cook crabs
this is alaskan King crab
these are Florida stone crabs
and here we have some already cooked Dungeness crab which we cooked this morning
one of the most important things when cooking crabs
is to realize that they come from a
salty environment
you want to approximate the saltiness of the ocean and the flavor of the crab
is maintained
for each gallon of water
we're gonna add a quarter of a cup of sea salt and then we're going to take our live crabs here
come one, lemme go, lemme go...
and we're just pop them in the water
for about twelve minutes per pound
I'm gonna show you
how we clean a crab after you cook it it's really pretty simple truthfully
what you do is you grab the crab by the side of the shell
and you just separate the top shell
it comes right off
then the first thing we want to do is we want to take off the dead man's fingers that's
what these are called
they're the gills
you can snip them off with a pair of scissors
or simply pull them off
and then next we have the mouth parts right here
these things here
have to break those off
stick your thumb in this hole here,
break those off
turn it over
and what we have is called
the apron
pull this back
break that off
and discard that
the next thing we're going to do
we're going to cut this in half
right down the center line
with a French knife
when we cut it in half
we can see that there's this
yellow matter here this is what's known as crab butter to get rid of that stuff
give it a quick shake in the sink
we're going to cut in between
the legs so that we end up with a piece of
body
see look at that
beautiful piece of meat
body meat right there attached
to a leg
and your guests can just
take this pottery barn
crab cracker
and crack their own. If you want to be really nice to your guests
what you can do
is you can crack them yourself
here we have bought a pottery barn crab cracker
what we do is we put the crab
edge on
once you get going, once you do it,
it'll make it so much easier for your guests
that they'll love you for it
a nice tool to have
is a pick
makes it really easy to remove
the crab meat. See how this comes right out like this
all of that meat comes right out...simple
a great way to serve this is on a platter such as this from pottery barn
let the guests help themselves
it's a great thing to do to have
family and friends together to enjoy themselves a crab feast is wonderful
there you go
Please visit www.potterybarn.com/crab for more tips on fresh crabs. www.montereyfish.com