How to Cook Crack and Clean a Crab

Brian Streeter: One of the foods you’d probably look forward to more in northern California than any other would be crab season. First crabs that we see are usually a little bit for Thanksgiving, which just happens to coincide with about the time that we’re releasing our chardonnay.

Julianne Laks: We night harvest all the fruits. So, it comes in really cold, really fresh and in perfect condition. And then, we whole cluster press. If you did it any other way, you could loose some of the acidity, so that’s why we’re really proponents of whole cluster pressing. About 85% of our chardonnay is barrel fermented. And then the balance is fermented in tank, so we get the added benefit of toasty creaminess of barrel fermentation and the tank fermentation which retains a lot of the fresh fruitiness of the chardonnay.

Brian Streeter: I encourage you to buy live crabs. If you're buying them already cooked, you have no idea when they’re cooked. They may be sitting in the shelf for a while. They loose moisture and they’re not as good.

Boil them in a lot of boiling water. Usually, you want that water to be almost as salty as seawater. If there's not much salt in the water, it means that the flavor is going to be leached out of the crab into your water.

They’re going to take about 15 minutes. Put them in ice water to stop from cooking. Break off all the legs and then with the body, you want to grab the back of it and separate them out like that. In a lot of times, there's a lot of juice in there.

Some people eat what they call the crab butter inside. I happen to be one of those people on occasion. If you do, it also can be where toxins accumulate. So, it’s probably not something you want to do on a regular basis but it can be very tasty.

Pull of the gills or some people call it dead man’s fingers and with the body, you want to pull off this skirt that’s on the bottom. Crack it in half. You’re usually going to rinse this and then usually, depending upon the size of the crab, break it into two or three pieces on each side.

And then with the legs, all you want to do when you're having friends and family over is just to make their lives a little bit easier, is just to crack the shells a little bit. But today, we actually want to show all the meat.

When Dungeness crab is in season, it’s also about time that many of your winter vegetables, your things like broccoli and cauliflower, root vegetables are also at there peak. So, I think they’ll also compliment each other nicely.

You want a casserole dish that’s nice and wide like this one. I don’t want to break the pieces up in too small and you don’t want to crowd the pan too much. You have enough surface area, so they begin to caramelize it.

Drizzle with olive oil, salt. Toss/stir to Court of Appeals. Bake for 10-15 minutes in a pre-heated 450 degree oven stirring occasionally.

We’re going to use bread crumbs but I prefer that you make your own from scratch. The bread crumbs that you buy in the grocery store are more often they’re not ground really, really fine. The reason that we’re going to add bread crumbs to this pretty good dish is actually to give it some texture, some crunch. And you don’t want to just let it run, you want to actually pulse it.

Quite often you’ll see this technique employed in southern Italy. They’ll actually use this as a topping for a lot of their pasta dishes. It sort of takes the place of parmesan or grated cheese within a dish. It adds a little bit of contrast to the pasta dish and then also, sort of wakes your taste buds up by the crunchiness of it.

Grate lemon zest. Chop parsley. Chop garlic. Chop garlic, parsley and lemon zest together into gremolata.

The Italians call it gremolata. It helps to wake a dish up.

Sprinkle gremolata over cauliflower. Stir in crab. Return to oven for two minutes. Sprinkle bread crumbs.

This is a sort of an accompaniment to a salad and very easily, you could also have it with a couple other small salads. The other thing I think that would be nice is to take this and I -- it’s a little bit more involved but to sear off a piece of fish and serve this underneath the fish. And I suggest a little squeeze of lemon, enjoy.

Julianne Laks: Oh, beautiful. That is very, very nice.

Brian Streeter: Crab, when it’s in season and you invite friend or family over and have a glass of our chardonnays is just one of those things that I think makes living in this part of the country really special.

Julianne Laks: I think it’s a lovely compliment. The crab is so fresh and the cauliflower has such wonderful texture. It really brings out the richness in the wine and the fresh acidity. It just goes together very, very well.

Cakebread Cellar’s Recipe of the Month:

Crab and Roasted Cauliflower with Gremolata

For 6 people:

2 crabs
1 cauliflower
2 cloves garlic
4 tablespoon olive oil
1 lemon
1 cup parsley
Salt

www.CakeBread.com for the wine and printable recipe