Snow Crab Legs In Garlic Butter Beer Sauce

Category: Main Dishes | Blog URL: http://soufflebombay.blogspot.com/search/label/crabs

This recipe was entered in The Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook contest, a compilation of the world’s best food blogs which was published in Fall 2010.

Ingredients

5 pounds of snow crab legs

2 pounds sticks (½ butter)

4 good sized cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 cup chicken broth

1/2 cup beer

3 tablespoons Old Bay Seasoning

Additional Old Bay for seasoning

French bread for dipping

Preparation

Melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat.

Add in the garlic and saute for 2 minutes, stirring often.

Add in the chicken broth, beer and Old Bay.

Stir well.

Bring to a rapid boil for 2 minutes, stirring often.

Set aside.

Reheat sauce just to a boil when crabs are just about ready.

Cook your crabs (we have a very large turkey cooker that hooks up to a propane tank, that we only use for crabs, so easy and it's all done outside, an extra perk)

Frozen crab legs are already cooked, all you are really doing is heating them up.

We steam them frozen in batches for approximatlet 8 minutes a batch.

The bigger that batch, the longer it takes. Again all you are doing is heating them up.

If you do not have a turkey fryer, in a vegetable steamer or colander over heavy

And rapid boiling water (fill pot about 1/3 of the way with water.) Cover tightly and steam them 10-12 minutes until heated through.

As soon as they are ready, begin dunking and basting them one cluster at a time in the sauce. As you place each one onto the serving dish, shake a good amount of Old Bay Seasoning onto one side of each crab cluster. Once your dish is full spoon some of the additional sauce over the crabs, if necessary give a couple of additional shakes of old bay and you are good to go. And don't forget some good French bread for sopping up the sauce in the bottom of the bowl, dip your crab into it as well if you like and please lick your fingers every once and a while, all rules are out the window when eating crabs!!

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About

If you can believe it, I never had a crab until I was 29 years old.
I live in Pennsylvania so not having them easily available doesn't explain it.
Plus we spent a lot of time down the Jersey Shore, hmmmm.
Crabs are just something we didn't eat growing up. My Dad is a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Other than lots of seafood during Lent, meat and potatoes is what we typically had for dinner. Once I was on my own, I remember coming across crabs every once in a while at various get togethers. But whenever offered a crab, I was like..."you need to do all that work and get all messy to get that little bit of food...ummmm, no thanks!" I couldn't quite wrap my head around the attraction.
Enter my husband. The Summer after we started dating, a bunch of us went to Ocean City Maryland for a week. Half of the excitement of the group was to hit a restaraunt called Watermans, where they served all you can eat crabs.
We get there and they seated us in this rough wooden booth, pulled a big piece of brown paper off of a roll and covered the table. I looked around, there were so many people with huge coolers of beer, engrossed in what they were doing and they looked happy.
The waitress comes and literally dumps a huge amount of steaming crabs onto the brown paper covered table (right on to the table...I was shocked), then she dumps shrimp, then fried chicken, then corn on the cob. Hands immediatley start flying, folks are grabbing, moaning and doing the happy food dance! (You know the one, when you are so loving what you are eating you do a little wiggle in your seat)..
I timidly reach for a crab having nooooo idea what to do. John walks me through it (can you believe a whole crab has a pull tab to get going...a pull tab!)
Well, let me tell you I think I heard the angels sing that day. I never touched another item of food and if someone hadn't pulled me away I would still be there.
That my friends, was my first and last experience with whole crabs because THEN I tasted crab legs.

Needless to say we are known in our circle of life for our crab nights. We have them at home either one or two couples at a time or on a larger scale at out annual crab fest.
We always have a crab night when we are away with friends and family on weekend getaway's or on a full vacation. We have a well traveled crab pot!
Double, triple, quadruple or beyond the sauce for your needs. My rule of thumb for a crab night is 2 1/2 pound of crab legs a person.