One of the challenges thrown up by an approach of cook whatever is available, is having to learn to prep something you’ve never cooked before and thinking how best to make it tasty. My local fishmonger had two big crabs in stock so I thought I would give it a go. Armed with Sam, the fishmonger’s, instructions of cooking them in boiling water for 12 minutes, I then went home and started trawling through my cookbooks as to how best to make a meal out of them.
It turned out that none of the cookbooks I had have a recipe for a whole crab. There are many recipes using crab meat but I wasn’t going to just use the meat when I had the whole crab to play with. Unfortunately we do not have a gas hob otherwise the most obvious way of cooking these crabs to showcase their freshness would be to simply fry them in a hot wok with shallots and garlic.
Fortunately my mum still has her late 80s/early 90s cookbooks from Hong Kong including the classic ⌈方太與你⌋ by the great Mrs Lisa Fong who pioneered television cooking on Hong Kong television that I grew up with. One of the recipes in this was a whole crab recipe with salted egg and mince sauce that required frying the crab and then baking in a casserole dish.
I was lazy and didn’t want to have to deep fry the crab first so I modified 方太 ‘s(Mrs Fong) recipe a bit. I also wanted a buttery richness to it so decided to make a butter sauce with some shallots that I bought from our local farm shop that morning.
with ginger and fennel colour changes after its cooked before gutting After gutting, cleaning and dismembering – rearranged into shape
Prepping the crab was a bit more fiddly than I thought partly because I realised I didn’t have a pot that was big enough to cook both the crabs at once. Had to do them separately and boiled them with a few pieces of ginger and a bit from an old quarter of a left over fennel, just because… The crabs were sold to me on ice so they weren’t alive.
Then I removed the ’apron’ – that fan shaped covering at the bottom of the underside of the crab, this is also where you find out if a crab is male or female as I learnt. Removing the top shell was actually a bit more difficult than I thought, took a lot of brute force. Innards were then gutted and cleaned leaving the white meat. If I wasn’t hoping to serve the whole crab, this is when I would have picked all the white meat out for another dish.
Now to prepare the other bits:
salted eggs salted egg yolks for the butter
The twist in this recipe is to use salted egg and pork mince which goes remarkably well with crab. Once the mince has been mixed with the mashed salted egg. Salted egg (鹹蛋) is a pre-salted duck egg that you can buy from Chinese supermarkets. The salting process solidifies the yokes so don’t be too surprised when you crack that duck egg to find a ball of yoke. We are only using the salted egg yoke in this recipe which needs to be mashed and added to the pork mince along with the seasoning.
In the meantime, sauteed the garlic, shallots and spring onions in copious amount of butter, ready for use.
Spoon the mince pork on top of the reassembled crab, then spoon over the butter all over the crab. Place the top shell back on and bake in a pre-heated oven for 15-20 minutes at 180°C.
Happy eating!