Recipe> Butter Garlic Crabs

Text by: Tanya Munshi

We were taught how to identify crabs by a fish seller. According to him one should be careful while buying crabs. At times, a fish seller/ fisherman will try and sell you mud crabs or land crabs. Mud crabs are plain and dirty to look at. Sea crabs usually have some kind of design on their shells and will look somewhat cleaner.

You can ask the fisherman to clean the crabs for you or do it at home. But the process is quite tedious and one has to know exactly how to clean crabs.

I recently tried out a recipe called butter garlic crab which I learnt through one of the cookery shows on television. Crab has the softest meat and it tastes kind of sweet. In the the cookery show, they recommended that crabs should be cooked in least possible masalas to keep the taste of crab meat intact. Too much of masalas can have an overwhelming effect on crab meat. I tried this recipe at home and it tasted superb.

Ingredients
2 large crabs
-or-
4-5 small/ medium size crabs
1 bowl of chopped garlic
2-3 slit green chilies
1-2 tbsp of salted butter
1 tbsp olive oil
Salt to taste (optional)

Method

• Heat the wok and add the olive oil first.Then add the butter.
• The butter is added second along with the oil to prevent it from burning on the work.
• Now add the chopped garlic and the slit green chilies.
• Sauté very lightly, here we do not want to brown the garlic.
• By now the oil would be hot so add the crabs and mix well.
• Cover the lid and allow the crabs to cook in the steam.
• After 5-7 minutes, take off the lid to check.
• The crabs should turn a shade of pink to red.
• Mix well.
• Try and taste the juices/ gravy. If need be you can add a pinch of salt. This is because we have already added salted butter. We don’t want salt to override the crab meat.
• Cover again for about another 10 minutes. But keep checking in between to see that it does not burn.
• Serve hot with steamed rice/ parantha/ garlic bread.
• It tastes best with steamed rice and mind you, there won’t be much of gravy, just the juices of the crab meat mixed with garlic and chilies.

Note – You can add/ subtract the number of chilies depending upon how spicy you want the crabs to taste. But I suggest you keep the flavour mild.