4846

Check his recipes for Kung Pao and General Tso’s chicken; that’ll knock out about a dozen more of them easily.

Also make basic Indian dal dishes? You can toss some red chilies into the tadka at the end for a really, really nice flavor. If that’s gibberish, let me know, but I’m assuming that as a Brit, you may know :)

I think you’re British. 80% sure. Maybe 60%.

4847

White crab… is that just another word for Dungeons, Snow or King… I’ve never seen something labeled as just white crab.

By the way, that fried rice looks awesome. I’m going to have to try it.

4848

It’s referring to the meat of a given crab rather than the type of crab. Generally crab meat is split into white meat and brown meat (though sometimes claw meat is broken out of white meat as its own thing).

Generally if you buy generic crab meat/picked crab in the UK it’s about 60%/70% brown meat and I really don’t like the flavour or texture much. If you get white meat only it’s much more expensive.

4849

Dual citizen, but yes.

4850

Huh, that’s weird.

The dark meat is all from the legs and claws, isn’t it?

The mix you are getting probably had something to do with the type of crab. Crab meat in the states, on the east coast anyway, is generally from blue crabs, and basically all of their meat is white meat from the body.

The meat here is usually priced based on how big the lumps are, which generally comes down to which part of the body it came from.

4851

Do you folks think it would be acceptable to start a What Have You Eaten Recently That You Did Not Cook Yourself , That Was Great thread?

4852

Never! Home cooking is the One True Way! Burn, filthy heretic!

Probably, yeah.

4853

Yeah in Oregon it’s pretty much all Dungeness and based on how big the chunks are liike @Telefrog said. I think it’s all considered white crab, but I have no idea. I’ve never seen it labeled that way. It’s pretty easy to get King crab here too, but a lot more spendy and not nearly as good to me. Then there is that watery stuff they call snow crab.

I was completely weirded out by the soft blue crabs the east coast has. They like bread the whole damn thing and stick it in a sandwich, like eating a spider sandwich, and they’re so small. When i saw a jar of the meat though, I think it was white.

So like QT3’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives?

4854

I say go for it! Maybe you already have. I was offline a lot of tonight >.>

4855

Definitely not.[quote]According to the peerless Alan Davidson’s North Atlantic Seafood, brown meat “consists mainly of the digestive gland or ‘liver’ and reproductive organs”. [/quote]

I don’t think it has much to do with the type of crab, except in so far as the types of crab eaten in the US are large and plentiful enough that you don’t have to bother with the brown meat.

4856

Heh, well bear in mind, softshell crabs are only for a small part of the season, when the crabs are molting. Most of the time, blue crabs are the same hard shell crabs you’re used to eatting (only BETTER).

But you said the crab you get is 60% that stuff? That’s nonsensical.

I mean, that’s stuff that is either used for sauces, or thrown away. I mean, it’s not like it’s a significant portion of the crab’s weight, anyway. It’s just the gunk inside when you rip the shell open.

Something is messed up if when you buy crab, you’re getting 60% the back gunk.

4857

Yes it is, namely that (fresh) white crab meat is very expensive here, so it pads out the weight. The stuff I made my fried rice from costs £50 a kilo, though admittedly that was from a fancy fishmonger (via Amazon Fresh). Even bog standard supermarket crab is expensive - eg this, £37.50 a kilo for mixed meat. White crab meat from the same place is £50 a kilo.

4858

Well, crab is pretty expensive any way you slice it, unless you’re getting unprocessed live crabs, which are a lot of work to eat.

To give an idea of what we’re dealing with here in the states, here’s some jumbo lump meat. That is, it’s going to be made entirely of the largest pieces of meat, connected to the backfins in the body. Basically, every piece is going to be about the size of a large olive:
https://www.wegmans.com/products/seafood/crab-and-lobster/crab/crab-meat-jumbo-lump-562866.html

So it’s $18 for 8 oz, which is about $80 for a kilo. At today’s exchange, that’s about 60 british pounds.

More expensive than what you bought, but again, this is pretty much the highest quality crab meat you can get (just based on part, not brand… I’m certain you could pay more for certain brands).

Regular lump crab meat (which is still going to be all white meat crab), is something like this, where it’s also going to have smaller pieces.

Still talking about 38 british pounds for a kilo of it.

Where do your crabs come from? Do they live locally around britain? Do you know what species of crab they are?

4859

I’d have to check to see what the ones I actually used were, but, yes, they’re generally local brown crabs (ironically enough), Cancer pagurus. Wikipedia claims two-thirds of the edible meat is brown meat, apparently well sourced.

4860

Right now we have $5.99/lb for a whole dungeons crab. One of those is probably a couple, few pounds. I find breaking them apart not that difficult. At peak season, big crop they goo to 4.99/lb but no matter how you dice it, not cheap.

4861

Ya, Dungeoness are easier to eat than bluecrabs. They have much more meat in their claws and legs. Bluecrab legs have virtually no meat at all, and their bodies are smaller than Dungeoness.

That link in wikipedia seems to be calling the body meat brown, and the claw meat white. Which would potentially make more sense, in terms of the breakdown.

4862

I don’t know what to tell you to convince you, but it’s definitely not just a question of body v claw.
Here’s a UK government report on cadmium in crabmeat:[quote]The brown meat from crabs is obtained from the main body of the crab (the cephalothorax) and consists mainly of the crab’s digestive organ (the hepatopancreas), gonad and non calcified new shell material. Of these, the hepatopancreas makes up the greatest proportion (Davies et al, 1981). The brown meat from crabs is defined in the Codex Code of Practice for Fish and Fishery Products as ‘the edible parts of the crab, excluding the claw, leg and shoulder meat, which may include the liver and gonads or parts thereof’ (Codex, 2003).[/quote]
Here’s what brown meat looks like:

4863

Yep, that’s definitely the body gunk. So when you buy that crab, it’s like a can full of slop?

I was just going from this part of that wikipedia reference you made:

Around one third of the weight of an adult edible crab is meat, of which one third is white meat from the claws (see declawing of crabs), and two thirds is brown meat from the body.

I know the stuff you’re talking about though. It’s the goo. Usually I just wash it out when I’m cleaning crabs, but I know that it can be used in stuff like shecrab soup. It’s got a stronger flavor than the meat itself. I guess I never considered it “meat” since it’s not muscle or anything.

Good to know though, if I ever see it referenced. Might just be a british thing?

I guess part of what makes it weird, is like I said, when you clean a crab there just isn’t that much of that stuff, compared to the meat, so getting 60% of that stuff seems weird.

For certain things though, it could be a good choice. Soups would probably be ok. It’ll taste more “crabby”.

4864

Ah, there is of course specifically info about this on wikipedia:

Looks like it’s a term used specifically in Europe for grading crab meat, and does include the goo at the top of the crab… also, I think maybe part of the confusion for me, is that it seems like the crabs you have, the Brown crab, have MORE of that goo, and potentially it’s different, from the goo I’m used to in blue crabs. So that’s potentially why it seems weird to me.

4865

Isn’t this on par with people sucking the heads of crawfish and my uncle used to do the same thing with lobsters. He call’d it lobster butter. It’s the main reason he wanted the whole lobster not just the tail. I am… grossed out either way, but like you Timex when I open up a whole crab I just trash that extra goo and gills and things. There is a lot of meat in the body of Dungeoness though so I put in the effort.