Pat’s Wildways: Blue Crabs

By Pat Foster-Turley

October 28, 2022

Blue crabs turn red when cooked.

I’m sure lots of you readers have happily feasted on steamed blue crabs laid out on a table covered with newspaper, and served whole complete with nutcrackers, seafood picks, hammers and other utensils. For the most part, though, this feast is limited to the Chesapeake Bay area and some coastal areas nearby. You might be surprised to know that many of the crabs served there actually originate in our Florida waters and are shipped north to meet the demand for crabs there.

But here it is not the custom to serve whole steamed blue crabs. Any number of local restaurants have crabs on their menu, but never local blue crabs. In many places here you can easily feast on crab cakes made from some kind of canned crabmeat and even king crab legs imported from Alaska, but never whole blue crabs, unless they are they are soft-shelled blue crabs that are frozen right after they molt. If you travel to St. Augustine or Palatka, or Kingsland or Brunswick, Georgia you can locate a crab shack where they can steam blue crabs for you—but it’s a drive.

Lofton Seafood usually has live blue crabs for sale.

For the most part, here, when I get a craving for steamed blue crabs it’s a do-it-yourself project. Often Atlantic Seafood at the marina, or Lofton Creek Seafood off-island have live blue crabs, but it always pays to call first to see if they have any on hand. Once the crabs are pulled from the traps set in our waterways they only live a day or so out of water and their availability depends on when the crabber brings in their catch.

When I procure my half-dozen live blue crabs I immediately set to work getting a big pot of water boiling along with some lemon slices, Old Bay spice, black peppercorns, and whatever else is on hand and seems appropriate. Just for the fun of it I sometimes show the live crabs to my indoor cat, Dumela, who is fascinated, but afraid of their pinching claws—rightly so. I once worked for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife ring-netting Dungeness crabs from docks and measuring them. I know the drill about handling them from the back end—away from those claws.

So, I carefully dump the crabs into the boiling water, put the lid on and in a few minutes I have delectable cooked crabs ready for picking. Here’s how to do it. Turn the crab on its back and look for the “apron,” which is an external plate that is wide and rounded in a female, or narrow and pointed in a male. You need to lift up the apron and yank the whole top shell off, revealing gills that need to be scraped from the remaining hard clusters that contain the succulent meat. Then with the aid of nutcrackers and small hammers, if necessary, you crush the hard body and claw pieces and then use a seafood pick to extract the meat. For more instructions, there are any number of YouTube videos that can help you out. Some blue crab aficionados say that the best tasting crabs come when you actually rip up the crabs while they are still alive, and just boil the meaty parts but that’s a bit too gruesome for me.

If you are like me, you will easily consume all the meat from six good sized blue crabs while you are picking them. Um, um, good. It’s a messy task for sure. At least it tastes good. This last time I cooked and picked six blue crabs and retained the meat. It only amounted to a few ounces of food, not that satisfying from a quantity perspective but delicious nonetheless.

I must admit that for most people this task is tedious. It certainly is much easier to buy canned, refrigerated blue crab meat that someone else has picked and it is easy to explain the allure of crab cakes with the meat mixed with fillers that appear on many restaurant menus here. But for me, some of the fun is in the process.

You must hold live blue crabs from the back end to avoid their powerful claws.

I enjoy visiting fish stores like Atlantic Seafood and Lofton Creek Seafood and seeing what they have currently on sale. I don’t enjoy killing the crabs but I do it as quickly as possible and relish the sweetness that comes with crabs that are freshly cooked. And even the picking process is fun for me every so often—a Zen-like experience trying to extract every last tender morsel. Maybe you will enjoy it too—you just don’t know until you try.

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com