How to Freeze Crabs

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Paege Chafin and I'm the owner and executive chef for Roman Garden's Restaurant in St. Petersburg, Florida and today we're going to talk about how to freeze crabs. There are two different ways to freeze crabs and it would all depend on how many you have and how long you'd like to keep them. Freezing crabs is very, very easy. It's much easier than fruits or vegetables or any type of other seafood. If you're good, you have a lot of crabs, say more than fifteen pounds, you're going to want to freeze them in increments of when you're going to want to cook them. For example, you have a family of four and you're going to do fresh blue crabs for them so you would take how many crabs your family is going to eat at one sitting, we'll say eight and you would freeze eight crabs together. If you're going to keep 'em for more than six months, they need to be frozen whole and with all the parts still on them. They don't need to be cleaned at all. On the other hand, if you're going to freeze them for less than six months, you can clean the crab, take it apart, just leave the parts that are edible and freeze those in your portion bags for your meals. The crabs can be frozen in meat for soups or as a gourmet appetizer, say just the, the umm, claws or you can freeze the legs and all those things together. I don't recommend throwing any of the parts away. Boil 'em down and make a nice stock for yourself for soups. Don't waste any of the crab at all. That is the best way I know of to freeze crabs to get the effect that you want at the, on the end result and once again, I'm Paege Chafin from Roman Gardens in St. Pete. Have a great day."