#soft-shell crab

Soft-Shell Crab.

Yes, it is a sandwich.

Forever ago, there were soft-shell crabs, and I did things with them. This is their story*. Every time soft-shell crabs happen across my transom from someone else’s kitchen, they’ve been fried. A fried soft-shell crab is fine - I love them! It’s how the vast majority of the soft-shelled crabs I’ve ever eaten have been prepared! - but they deserve more. They’re a lovely ingredient, all the benefits of crab with none of the non-benefits of crab. They’re briny little heroes, and I love them and want them to be at their most delicious.

And that almost never means frying them, which makes just about anything taste good, but isn’t the best expression of just about anything. Except maybe potatoes, but even then, I’m not willing to call it for frying things. Fried things are great, but everything that is good fried is better when it’s prepared some other way. I will not be moved from this point.

Anyway, the crabs. Ideally, to make the most delicious soft-shell crab possible, I really should have lit some coals. So already I’m a big fat liar, and a hypocrite, and probably don’t deserve to be alive. But I cooked them on the gas grill because this was a Monday** and I didn’t want to wait for a chimney to light and all that stuff. So I lit the grill, the end.

I was going to glaze the crabs, so I put together a glaze of soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, some palm sugar, the juice of a couple of oranges, a big piece of ginger that I microplaned, some ground szechuan peppercorns, and some chili flakes. I stirred that all together and let it reduce a bit, then got it into a bowl by the grill.

I prepared some asparagus for grilling by cutting the very end off and peeling off the bottom parts of the some of the thicker ones. I laid some thinly-sliced cucumbers and red onion into some vinegar and salt to sort of semi-pickle, and I also thinly-sliced and salted some yellow tomatoes. They’re greenhouse tomatoes, this was, after all, in the dim and distant past, but they were fine, and they took the salt well.

Those sat and waited while I got the asparagus on the grill, then the crabs. The crabs were on the grill fairly briefly - brushed with the glaze, given a couple of minutes, flipped, brushed, flipped again, brushed again, flipped one more time, brushed for a final time, then removed to a plate. The asparagus took about the same amount of time, or at least that’s what I gave them.

I made little beds on the plate of cucumbers, tomatoes and onions, then laid the asparagus on top of their, drizzling that whole thing with a little bit of sesame oil. I chopped each crab into chunks and laid them on top of the asparagus.

It was terrific, and I loved it, and I was very pleased with how I treated the crabs. Everyone else seemed pretty happy with it, although I did agree with R that it would have been nice to have some rice or something underneath it. Ah, well. Sometimes I don’t make the rice.

* DUH-dun

So fried soft-shell crabs are absolutely delicious. Nobody is here to question that. It’s a fantastic way to eat a fantastic food, and I love them every single time. But what if….not fried soft shell crabs? Truly, the mind reels at the possibility.

Actually, it doesn’t, because people do non-fried stuff with soft-shell crabs all the time. But be with me here. Let’s be drama queens about it.

So I decided on a kind of stew/braise of them, because that would be tasty. I started a sauce of a can of coconut milk, some reconstituted stock, some gochujang paste and some peanut-butter powder to thicken and add some peanut notes. I also added a couple of lime leaves, a sprig of basil, a beaten-up (with the back of a knife) piece of lemongrass, a smashed chunk of ginger and four smashed bird chillies. I let this simmer while I put the rest of the thing together.

I brushed the crabs with tom yum paste and corn starch, and dropped them in oil in a hot pan to brown up a little on the outside*. When it was brown I added whole ramp bulbs and let them caramelize a little on the outside. I strained the solids out of the sauce and poured it over the crab, and let it simmer for awhile. When it was near done, I chiffonaded the ramp fronds and the leaves of a head of tatsoi and got those in at the end, letting them cook in the sauce.

I decided it should be a two-part stew, served over shredded tofu. So I got a block of tofu out of the refrigerator, and ran it over the box grater until it was a pile of shreds, which I squeezed out and then pressed between a couple of sheet pans to get the liquid out. While this was happening, I started the wok heating. That takes forever. It’s fun to wait!

While the wok was heating, I cut a carrot into slanty coins, some celery into slanty uh...half-moon slice things, and a head of broccoli into florets, and the stalks into more slanty coins. One at a time, I stir-fried the vegetables in basically reverse order of sweetness (carrots first, then celery, then broccoli heads, then broccoli stalk slices), tossing them all the while with shaoxing wine and soy sauce.

When that was all done I re-oiled the pan and got the tofu shreds in there, stir-frying them with fish sauce and szechuan pepper oil. I combined the shredded tofu and the vegetables in a bowl and tossed them with the juice of a lemon (I didn’t have a lime) and a little bit of sesame oil.

I pulled the braised crab out of the sauce and chopped it into chunks. I plated the shredded tofu/vegetables, and then poured the sauce/greens mixture over the top. I added the chunks of crab back to the top of the stew.

It was pretty great - the whole thing sort of slurred together more than I thought it would, but that was nice; the tofu especially sucked up flavor from the sauce and that mixed with the things it had been fried with in a way that was very pleasant. I don’t usually make food that’s so mingled, but every bite being a different textural/flavor combination was pretty cool, and it ended up being a heck of a meal. I’ll definitely be doing it again.

Soft-shell crabs are less necessary to my well-being than the ramps or asparagus (or upcoming peas, or garlic scapes) that mark spring in the vegetable realm, but I hadn’t had one in a while, and they were there looking all happy, so I picked up a few.

Later on I would be willing to get experimental with them (see whenever the next post goes up), so for now I decided to do the easiest thing, which is just to fry them tempura-style. Some flour went into a bowl, cut with a little corn starch to help avoid too much browning. Some bread crumbs went in another bowl. I separated an egg and put the white in a cup or so of seltzer*, which I stored in the fridge while I did everything else.

This was a sort of brunch-ish big meal thing, so the accoutrements were to reflect that. I cut a sweet potato and a couple of little white potatoes into cubes and pre-cooked them in the microwave. I heated some butter in a skillet, and added a minced onion, which I cooked slowly and let get very soft, and then added the potatoes in to brown up on the outside.

I made another ramp pesto by adding the ramps to the food processor** with some toasted pine nuts and the last of the nutritional yeast. I guess my future pestos will have to actually be cheese-containing, at least until I buy more nutritional yeast. I pesto’d all that together, drizzling in olive oil until it was sauce. I then tossed the potatoes in with the pesto.

I poured the soda water (with the egg white in it) into the flour mixture and brought it all together quickly, with as little working as possible. I dunked each crab in the batter, then in the bread crumbs, then dropped them in the oil (oh yeah I also, y’know, made the thing happen with the oil) and fried them until the crust was set and they were just starting to change color to golden.

While that was happening, I debate briefly whether I wanted another sauce. I decided to go in the brunch direction and made some very soft scrambled eggs as a sort of compromise between sauce and not-sauce. I didn’t lighten them with cream or anything, just whisked the hell out of them in the pan with some butter and cooked them until they were just set.

The potatoes went down into a bowl, topped with the egg, and a crab on top. I doused the whole thing in enough hot sauce to cause myself to pause and wonder why I bothered in the first place, and then ate it all and was happy as a clam for the rest of the day.

A clam. That happy.

* very rarely do I do something without actually knowing why I’m doing it in the kitchen. The egg-white thing comes specifically from Ed Lee, and I have no idea what it’s doing there, but it’s how I do it, and it works every time, so I’m going to keep doing it. I’ll have to research what the egg white is doing sometime.

** last time I tempered them by pouring hot water over them. This time I skipped that step because the crab and the sweet potato are both very sweet and needed the aliumity*** of the full-on raw ramps.