You cooked it. You cleaned it. Now comes the best part — eating it.
If you haven’t cooked and cleaned your crab yet, start here:
How to Cook Dungeness Crab
How to Clean Dungeness Crab
Here’s how I like to eat Dungeness crab, three ways.
Eat It Warm, Right Out of the Pot
One of my favorite ways to eat crab is right after it’s boiled. It comes right out of the water, you clean it, and it’s still warm. We ice it down so it cools it down a little bit, and then you eat it.
I use a walnut cracker and a little picker or a little small fork. Crack the shell, get the meat out. Those tools get all the meat out real good.
A little garlic butter makes it really good. But straight out of the cooker is one of the best ways to eat it. And unless you’re really tough, you can bite some of these shells with just your teeth and get that meat out also.
Leftovers: Crab Omelette, Crab Cakes, Crab Salad
One of my favorite things is having the leftover crab in a small container and making a crab omelette in the morning. Let me tell you, a fresh crab omelette — oh, that’s pretty good.
Or crab cakes, or for having dinner, crab salad. There’s really not any way wrong to eat crab. You can just eat it straight, but a crab omelette’s really nice.
Smoked Leftovers
Here’s one more favorite thing I like to do. After I have a crab out of the cooler and it’s cooled down — a lot of times the next day the crab’s all clean, still in the shell — I’ll put it on my smoker on just smoke mode, which is about 110 degrees. Let it cook for about 10 or 15 minutes on that smoke so you get a little smoke flavor and warmed back up.
But on that Traeger, getting that little smoke into it is very good. You just got to be careful not to cook it too long. So if you got a cold smoker, that’s almost the way to go.
Same way to eat it after that — smoked crab omelette, smoked crab cakes, smoked crab salad. Same thing.
Catch Your Own
The best crab is the one you catch yourself. My Astoria crabbing trips run now through mid-December out of Hammond Marina, aboard a covered and heated boat, all gear included. Trips start at $160 per person.
Call or text Marvin: 503-314-5087
