Choosing Crabs for Cooking

Hi! I am Alexandra VanCleve with Capt. Jack's Crab Shack and I am here to tell you how to choose the ideal crab for steaming. There is three important things to remember. First, you want him to be 5 inches point-to-point. Second, you want him to be hard, rusty belly, the wider, not so good. You don't want to able to push through the back of his belly and he has hard rusty, so he is good. And you also want to make sure that he is male, males have got a long cylindrical key and females have got a wider key.
Females have got red tips on their claws and you can tell that this one has blue, so he is a male. We prefer males as females that are sold, or part of the reason why the Chesapeake Bay has been depleted of crabs, you may find females at your other crab shacks and that's okay, the meal is known to be a little bit sweeter but preferably around this area and for us, we use males.
Coming up next, we are going to talk about culling your crab.


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