Keeping Cool - the crab course

The Case of the Missing Summer

Naturally, as soon as I start preaching about competing with the heat, the heat just up and runs to Montana. It's been raining for forty days and forty nights, now (give or take an order of magnitude), and the temperature in Austin probably won't make it out of the 80s today. So, my incentive for serving cold food is weakened a bit. My joints are achy and I'm bitchy enough that on the drive home I'll probably run down and kill the next moron who cuts me off in traffic.

I did say I'd follow up with the cold crab menu, though, so I'll get that out of the way before going on to some hot crab dishes, fish dishes, and various tartares and carpaccios.

Ice Cap Food

You just can't beat king crab (Arctic) and snow crab (Antarctic) for cold crab dishes. Both provide large, rich, sweet, meaty legs. Both are available year round. Both are usually sold fully cooked. Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference, but to me, blue crab, stone crab, and dungeness all taste a bit off when served cold.

Safety warning: whatever you do, do not use my recipes with artificial crab (also called krab, sea legs, or seafood sticks). Artificial crab is far more artificial than crab. It's actually a surimi (fish purée) of generic fishy white-meat fish like pollack, whiting, or hake. To imitate the sweetness of actual crab meat, the manufacturers add corn syrup. Spam of the Sea: ick. My daughter is fond of California rolls, which are usually made with this so-called food product, so I try to concentrate on other things when I know she's eating said rolls.

But I'm not talking about California rolls. I'm talking about cold crab recipes. Be aware, I have placed a curse on this blog entry. If you use artificial crab meat with my recipes, expect one or more of the following:

• one of your diners will spit it out in a planter when your back is turned, which your cat or dog will eat and later gack up on a fine silk garment or oriental rug


• you will suffer a nine-year bout of constipation following which you will bear a striking resemblance to the late Richard M. Nixon


• you will die (eventually)

King crab with avocado cream

dramatis personae

one pound of king crab legs
one large Hass avocado
one cup cream
juice of one lime
one tablespoon nonpareil capers

quality of ingredients

King crab legs, which are sold pre-cooked (steamed) and frozen, come in various sizes. I used two half pound legs for this preparation, and that was just barely enough to feed three people. In the next recipe, I used a single one-pound leg. Use only the leg meat for this recipe. The claw meat is tasty, but the texture would feel odd in combination with a thick cream sauce. Snow crab should work as a substitute. In either case, the legs should be intact, have no black spots, and should smell sweet.

I discussed avocado selection a while back in Skirting the Name Issue. Those comments apply here. If you can't find ripe avocados in your produce department of choice, see if they sell the vacuum-packed, peeled, and seeded avocados.

Just about any brand of capers should be okay, but I wouldn't recommend the Alessi brand capers packed in white balsamic vinegar. You want tart and salty, not sweet.

preparation notes

I know this is going to be a cold dish, but I recommend steaming the legs for about ten minutes before prepping them for the plate. Once they're done with their little steam bath, let the legs cool enough to handle. King crab legs are covered in thorny projections that are sharper than they look. Wear heavy gloves or wrap a pair of towels around the leg sections. Depending on how stiff the shells are, you should be able to break the legs at the joins. When you pull the sections apart, you should see two cartilage strips pull out of the meat. If you don't see the two strips, you'll have to pull them out another way. Pliers will work for this. To remove the sections of meat intact, snip away a portion of the shell at either end of the section and slide out the crab meat. If the meat won't slide out (usually this is only a problem with snow crab), you might have to cut the shell lengthwise.

The avocado cream is incredibly simple. Blend the avocado with the cream. Once they're thoroughly blended, add the lime juice and blend to a smooth consistency. The lime juice clabbers the cream, so this concoction thickens quite a bit. You might have to stop the blender and scrape down the sides a few times to get it all blended. Depending on how you want to present this, the capers can be scattered over the dish or blended with the cream.

King crab salad

dramatis personae

one pound of king crab legs
one small avocado
one green celery rib, sliced thin
one half cup thinly sliced radicchio
two mandarin oranges

for the dressing:
one quarter cup peanut oil
one half can coconut milk
juice of two limes
one teaspoon wasabi powder
sea salt

preparation notes

I prepared this salad to go with gazpacho, so I didn't want the spices competing. The wasabi powder is just enough to give a hint of heat. If I were pairing the salad with something a less spicy, I would probably add a pinch of nutmeg and a minced red hot chili (probably a fresno or hot fingerlong), and I would also leave out the wasabi.

The coconut milk probably seems an odd choice to some. Mayonnaise is the standard dressing base for crab salads, but I consider this a long-standing screw-up. I don't dislike mayonnaise (my wife and daughter do), I just consider it too heavy for crab.

After you've shelled the crab and removed the cartilage, bias cut the segments into half-inch pieces.

1. You want the avocado skinned (duh), pitted and cut into pieces about the same size as the pieces of crab. Here's how I do it:
2. Pluck out the stem piece, and cut straight down through the stem end until the blade makes contact with the pit.
3. Cut the avocado in half buy running the knife blade all the way around the pit. The cut should come back to the same starting point.
4. Twist the two halves of the avocado and separate them. The pit will stay in one half.
5. Remove the pit. I want to tell you how to do this cleanly, but without pictures to help clarify the instructions, someone could easily find themselves minus a finger or three. So, once I get the pictures, I'll revisit this topic.
6. Once the pit is out, with the peel still on, cut both halves length wise into half-inch strips.
7. Depending on the ripeness of the avocado, the skins might peel off easily. If not, removed them with a paring knife.
8. Cut the avocado strips to half their length.

The mandarins are, admittedly, something of a pain to prepare. They peel easily, but removing the membranes from the segments is a bit of work. I nick the membrane with a paring knife and then peel it off of each segment. Some of the segments tear in two or three pieces during this process, but it looks good that way. If this sounds like too much work, canned mandarins packed in their own juices are okay. If you use the canned fruit, discard the syrup and rinse the segments.

Make the dressing in a separate bowl by pouring in all the ingredients except the coconut milk. Then, with a whisk in one hand and the coconut milk in the other, slowly drizzle in the coconut milk while whisking vigorously. If you do this slowly enough, the emulsion won't separate right away.

One point about the limes: limes vary quite a lot in tartness, juiciness, and size. The limes I used produced about two or three tablespoons of juice. The quantity matters less than the impact of the juice on the dressing. Always taste your vinaigrettes—especially if you're using citrus juice as the souring agent.

Toss the crab, avocado, celery, radicchio, and mandarins in a large bowl with enough dressing to coat everything.