In The Kitchen: Cooking With Live Crab, Part II (Roasted Garlic Crab Recipe)

Here’s the second part of my two-fer on live crabs. It’s this really super easy way to prepare it after you’ve killed and cleaned it. It tasted soooo good that it was one of those rare occasions where I forgot to take a picture of the final dish to accompany the recipe below. The fragrance of all the garlic, butter, wine and crab juice melding together was so enticing that I started eating it right away once I was done filming the demo. Oh well, you can see the finished product in the video. Enjoy!

Roasted Garlic Crab
Copyright 2008 by Cooking With The Single Guy

Ingredients:
1 fresh Dungeness crab (about 2 lbs.)
6 T butter
6 cloves of garlic, minced
white wine (about ½ cup)
cilantro or parsley for garnish

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Kill and clean your live Dungeness crab, cutting it into sections with the legs. Place the pieces (including the top shell) in a 9”x13” baking dish or roasting dish lined with aluminum foil. Sprinkle butter pieces and minced garlic all around (not just on top but underneath as well). Add wine to create a ¼-inch layer of liquid for steaming. Cover your pan with aluminum foil and place in oven and cook for 20 minutes.

When done, transfer crab pieces into serving dish (if you use a nice ceramic baking dish, you can just serve straight from the oven in the same dish), making sure to reassemble the pieces to make it look like a crab and keeping all the juices and melted butter from the pan. Garnish with cilantro or parsley. Serve immediately with bread.

Makes one to two servings.

Pair with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.

TIP: Before placing crab pieces into baking dish, place them on a cutting board and cover with kitchen towel. Then with the side of a hammer, hit the pieces to create some cracks. This will help the crab cook faster and infuse it with the butter and garlic. It’ll also give you a head start when ready to eat.

IT’S ALL COOKED: If you don’t feel like buying a live crab and killing it yourself, you can do this same recipe with a pre-cooked crab. But cook it for maybe 5 to 10 minutes to basically warm up the crab and to let the butter melt and infuse the crab.