A Beginner's Guide to Alaskan King Crab (Yep, You Desire to Eat This)

Just like how many Americans retrieve they don't accept accents, I used to believe I was totally free of regional snobbery… until I moved away from Maryland afterward high school.

See, I grew up merely betwixt DC and Baltimore, I've got roots in the Chesapeake Bay stretching back at least 4 generations, so I know—Maryland doesn't really accept a ton of nationally-recognizable cultural touchstones, except for 1 matter: the Chesapeake Bay blueish crab. Marylanders are also persnickety about preparation methods, of which there are only three adequate options: deep-fried softshell on a sandwich; fried up every bit a crab cake with extremely sparse filler; and steamed with Old Bay, mitt-picked and dipped in melted butter.

So when I left my hometown and constitute other crustaceans being touted as "crab," my gut reaction was Human being, that'southward not crab.

You know what, though? I dear all kinds of seafood, so I was eventually willing to concede that here are a lot of other types of crab out there, and they were probably succulent. So I took it upon myself to endeavor out Alaska's most famous seafood exports: the Alaskan male monarch crab.

Like most crabs, the male monarch crab likes to hang out and grub in the muddy substrate of the sea floor. When it's young, it tends to stay toward the coast of the Bering Bounding main between Russia and Alaska, simply when it matures, it likes to caput out into the open up body of water at average depths of 600 feet beneath the surface.

Yous might recognize rex crab from the long-running Discovery reality TV show Deadliest Catch—commercial fishermen are the existent deal, and the N Pacific is no exception. King crab ain't cheap to buy because it ain't inexpensive to catch; you can guild male monarch crab legs online, merely grocery stores with a expert seafood section carry them as well. (I got mine at a Whole Foods in Raleigh, NC.)

Regardless of where you get it, chances are pretty good you're not going to be getting junk, because it'south kinda hard to fake crab legs. Unless you live near a crabbing community, y'all're going to be buying them frozen, since the crabs unremarkably go cooked and and boom frozen either on the boats or immediately back on shore. They're commonly sold by the cluster, but since I wasn't feeding a ton of people, I had the guy simply break off a couple.

How-To: Simple preparation of Alaska king crab legs

A thaw overnight in the fridge was enough to have them fix for lunch the side by side day.

You can eat the meat hot or common cold, and there are several means to heat it, all involving a gentle heat that mostly involves steam.

I slapped my legs onto a canvass pan and added a thin layer of warm water, covered the pan tightly in foil, and left it in a 350 degree oven for 8 minutes. All I needed was to heat it through, and this was perfect.

Since this was my first fourth dimension preparing king crab, I really wanted the meat to play solo, so melted butter and lemon juice were the only accompaniment.

I wasn't really certain what I was getting into, and since I'thou used to blueish crabs' main claws beingness really hard, I brought out some tools: my onetime trusty crab mallet and a sweet hand-carved spreading knife my wife and I got every bit a wedding nowadays from a friend in Kodiak.

(It turn out that no tools are necessary, since the shells yield pretty easily to firm pressure.)

A dip in the butter…

A native Marylander's thoughts on Alaskan crab

… it'south Delicious.

It's got that calorie-free, slightly sugariness flavour that I can only stupidly describe equally "crabby." The blue crab meat I'm used to—especially the prized backfin lump meat—is a bit softer by comparison, and so information technology was a bit like chomping into crabby-tasting lobster tail. (My family visited friends in Maine every summertime when I was a kid, and then I'm no stranger to good lobster.) However, if you had lied to me and said information technology was fresh from the Chesapeake I'd accept believed you lot.

That being said, I couldn't resist hit a couple bites with the stalwart standby seasoning…

Joel Selby is a storyteller and illustrator who lives with his wife, daughters, and cats in cardinal North Carolina. His current side projects include renovating a humble ranch on a half acre in the county and pursuing the perfect pizza. Y'all tin email him for freelance[...]