Crab questions

[morda]

Here in Australia it is actually against the law to cook crabs/lobsters/yabbies, etc. while they are awake and alert. You have to freeze them first or you can face animal cruelty charges...

I guess they only enforce this in restaurants? Or do the police burst into your kitchen as you throw the live and kickin' crabs into the steamer?

[Mabelline]

Thank the Big Guy no Ozzie Cops have emigrated to Louisiana!!!

[aidensnd2]

I guess they only enforce this in restaurants? Or do the police burst into your kitchen as you throw the live and kickin' crabs into the steamer?

They actually have a special branch of the Australian equivalent of the FDA devoted to live animal boiling related issues...

Just kidding. I have no idea how they enforce it, I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for it yet.

[Niall]

I usually buy them live and kill and quarter them before cooking chilli crab.. yum.

To kill them, I freeze them for a couple of hours. Then lift up the triangular flap, and pull the top shell off. Then cut in half. Clean then quarter. THis is how we were shown us how to it at the Sydney Seafood school a couple of years ago.

Northern Territories Fisheries PDF doc

[phaelon56]

Here in Australia it is actually against the law to cook crabs/lobsters/yabbies, etc. while they are awake and alert. You have to freeze them first or you can face animal cruelty charges...

So..... freezing to death is humane and boiling to death is not? That's worth a chuckle! I suppose, given my options, I'd choose freezing but I still find the whol thing humorous.

[morda]

Here in Australia it is actually against the law to cook crabs/lobsters/yabbies, etc. while they are awake and alert. You have to freeze them first or you can face animal cruelty charges...

By the way, what's a yabbie?

[balmagowry]

Cruelty? Feh. They die instantly.

As for throwing them in alive - OK, call me a bloodthirsty sadist, but I enjoy it. Crabs are not nice animals. Give 'em a chance, they'll nip off your toe as soon as look at you (not to mention that they're cannibals and happily devour their own kind). Self-defense? Yeah, I guess so, but I swear there's a mean glint to them as they chase after you. And yes, when they run it isn't always away! So I get a wicked charge out of giving them their comeuppance. I don't generally pick them up by hand, because though it is perfectly safe to do so from the back with one crab, that doesn't protect you from the other two dozen at battle stations in the bucket. So I use a long grabner (tongs to you non-Grossman folk). I try to do 'em one at a time, but sometimes they're clutching into each other too firmly for that, and you get a whole chain of three or four going from bucket to pot at once.

As for losing their claws - they do that easily enough while they're alive. Occupational hazard of jousting with each other in the bucket.

[Six-pack-to-go]

Cook 'em alive. Pain makes everything better. Jus look at reality TV.

[paul o' vendange]

Here in Australia it is actually against the law to cook crabs/lobsters/yabbies, etc. while they are awake and alert. You have to freeze them first or you can face animal cruelty charges...

So..... freezing to death is humane and boiling to death is not? That's worth a chuckle! I suppose, given my options, I'd choose freezing but I still find the whol thing humorous.

Owen, without knowing more of the actual physiology, at least the theory behind it has some basis - ostensibly, as cold blooded animals, their systems shut down with the cold, they essentially go to sleep, unlike us, where it hurts like hell on the way down. Sentience goes out the door, and they can thereby be killed humanely. So goes the theory.

I don't see a distinction between any animal I kill and eat - all should be respected and, if I am going to eat them, I try to kill them as painlessly as possible.

Paul

[aidensnd2]

By the way, what's a yabbie?

I believe in the States they would be freshwater crayfish.

Dan

[AndrewK]

They actually have a special branch of the Australian equivalent of the FDA devoted to live animal boiling related issues...

Just kidding. I have no idea how they enforce it, I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for it yet.

Yet another reason why I love Australia so much. God, could there be a cooler country?

On the extreme opposite end of that, I worked in a restaurant in France where our sous chef would dump a crate of live hard-shell crabs into our huge Hobart mixer and turn it on when he was making stock. What killed me was that all of the French kids would run up and start dancing around in circles with their arms raised over their heads, imitating the crabs, while the Americans would either turn green or haul ass out of the kitchen.

[culinary bear]

Right... I'm looking to make a crab mousseline, and I need to know - can you extract crab meat from a crab in its raw state?

You can with lobster, of course, which leads me to think that it can be done with crab; I've not seen any references to this, though.

Has anyone tried this? If so, what were the results like?

[Luckylies]

it is very, very difficult and extrordinarily not worth it to try, unless you have some freak show big sized crabs...then perhaps it may work. even a very quick steam with a bit of vinegar in the water will help immensely...

[culinary bear]

why help? is the meat horribly difficult to extract when raw?

Edited January 20, 2005 by culinary bear (log)

[stovetop]

Most of the meat is encased in a shell and the legs, it would be a lot easier to blanch it and then put in a ice bath then take out all the meat, it is slow and tedious hand work.

steve

Edited January 20, 2005 by stovetop (log)

[culinary bear]

Slow and tedious is something I can probably cope with; shelling any cooked crab is relatively slow and tedious work at the best of times. I'd rather not heat the crab at all as I want to preserve the quality of the finished mousseline, but it's something I'm willing to consider...

[Mayhaw Man]

There is something else that you should consider. Crabs are nasty. They live in the mud, or the sand or whatever and they eat dead stuff. Their shells, by their very nature, are giant piles of infection waiting to happen. They are delicious, but I wouldn't eat raw crab on a bet.

One of the things that you are doing when you heave a crab in boiling liquid is sterilizing, to a degree, the shell. The chances of getting a painful infection from little crab cuts are a zillion times lower with a cooked crab than a live one.

Alarmist? Nope. I live on the Gulf of Mexico.I have a couple of neighbors who make their living catching crabs and shrimp. They asked me, "why the hell would you want to do that? Why not cook them? The meats easier to get out and beisdes, crabmeat is too mushy to get out in any real pieces until you cook them somehow."

I know crabs. I catch crabs, boil them, and eat them. I love crabs. But I would not reccomend fooling around with ones that have not been cooked in some way. I am sure that somebody somewhere does it, but if they do it long enough they will eventually find themselves eating antibiotics and wishing that their fingers would go back down to normal size.

Of course, I am talking about Blue Crabs here, but I suppose this would be more or less true for all of them-but maybe not.

[stovetop]

Maybe just a quick bath???

I have done it raw, it is even more tedious.

[culinary bear]

*laughing*

I know what you mean; cuts from oyster shells are a similar level of nastiness.

I'd be wearing latex gloves, probably doubled.

The reason I want raw crab meat is not to eat raw, but to utilise the meat to make a classic mousseline, which involves pounding the flesh and passing it through a sieve before mixing with cream and egg to use as a stuffing - this will then be cooked thoroughly.

Cooked meat won't give nearly as fine a texture to the mousseline, hence my dilemma.

[fiftydollars]

Considering you don't need to keep it in whole pieces and you plan to cook it; I don't see why you shouldn't extract it raw.

I agree that crab, at least dungeness crab, is too mushy to get out in nice big pieces, but there is no reason you couldn't get it out in small, droopy glops of crab goodness.

[stovetop]

Try it both ways

choose what works best

steve

[cstuart]

if you boil the crab to just to kill it, maybe a minute or two, the meat is still translucent and easier to remove than in its raw state.

here's a (crappy) pic from the last time i made crabs in which you can see the meat after a quick bath:

the meat is closer to raw than cooked and would pass through a sieve fine.

and i was able to get out whole leg pieces after wacking them with a cleaver, however the body took a little more work.

Edited January 20, 2005 by cstuart (log)

[iriee]

make a normal mousse of a basic white fish like sole and fold some nice cooked crab meat into it to flavor it. u didn't say what you were going to do with the finished mousse???

[stephenc]

Much easier just to buy lump raw crab meat if you're gonna do it that way.

[Kent Wang]

I personally think claw is better. It has much more flavor. It's also less than half the price at my fishmonger ($12/lb vs a $25/lb for white). What do you think? I guess it's kind of like the debate about white or dark meat for poultry. For the record, I prefer chicken breasts and turkey legs.