Video: How to Clean Soft Shell Crab

This Season: Tailgating; New Year, New You; Tax Time

Tips for breaking down and cleaning soft shell crab; learn this and more in this free online instructional cooking video about seafood taught by an expert.

- How to Break Down a Whole Lobster
- How to Break Down Sections of a Steamed Snow Crab

Comments

robin.jerowsky Jul 02, 2011
This guy has no idea how to clean a soft shell crab. By the time he was finished, the cleaning, the crab. looked like mush. He also cleaned out the best pat, the tamolli, wich gives the crab alot of it's flavor.
ryanleblanc May 02, 2010
(Edited) Had no idea what to do when I was given 4 soft shell crabs by my wife. I love to eat them but had never prepared them. These instructions were very easy to follow...thanks!
ryanleblanc May 02, 2010
Had no idea what to do when I was given 4 soft shell crabs by my wife. I love to eat them but had never prepared them. These instructions were very east to follow...thanks!

Video Transcript

Hi! Today we are going to show you how to break down to clean or dress soft shell crabs. Soft shell crabs are actually blue crabs in a molting stage. A lot of seafood markets during the summertime will have soft shell crabs and the majority of those nicer markets will get those in live So ask the fishmonger behind the counter when you go there when they came in, this and that and sometimes they will still be moving. So the fresher the better is what we are getting at. So I've got a couple of specimens here and we are going to break these guys down from the underside and I am going to show you how to pull out the feathery gills that will be on the underneath side of these guys as well. First we are going to cut the faces off so essentially we are cutting the nose off to spite the face but we are cutting the whole thing off. Now I've got some culinary shears here so we are just going to take off the face and the eyes. The reason that we do that is because there is a lot of bitterness and not a lot of edible product in that part of the crab so we just want to go ahead and get rid of that. So going to go ahead and take those off. Again these are just regular culinary shears. All right so we are going to undo the flap on the underneath side of this fellow; loosen that up essentially. Now take that off. This is sometimes referred to as dead man's fingers. This is just the lung essentially. We are just going to pull those off because those aren't edible. Going to pull these; left and right side. These are lungs; actually gills preferably crab. The rest that is left is kind of the innards here. We are just going to kind of pull those loose gently with our fingers and I'm using some surgical gloves and I like to use these simply because they are sanitary but also at the same time once you've finished the messy job, all you have to do is pull the gloves off. None of the things that you are cleaning will stick to the gloves which is kind of nice. All right, so that's that guy and we are going to perform the same procedure on this other crab and we will come back here in a little bit and show you how to dust these with flour and I am also going to use different breading procedure for one of them so we will show you two breading procedures and we will sear these on the stove top with a little clarified butter and we will show you the finished product.