How to Cook and Remove Meat from a Dungeness Crab

Step 1:  Keep crab alive refrigerated for up to 6 – 8 hours.  It should be alive when ready to cook.   Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add crab and cook for about 15 minutes.

Step 2:   Remove cooked crab from pot and you are ready to eat for a fun, but messy experience.  Sometimes people want to prepare it first as shown in the steps that follow.

Step 3:  Remove all legs keeping in mind liquid will be released as shown.  This can be done over the sink if preferred.

Step 4:  Remove top shell (body of the crab), by finding a nitch in the back part and it will easily pull off exposing the inside of the crab as shown below.  The top shell is shown and should be discarded.  Take the body and rinse under water to expose the succulent back lump crab meat shown in the next picture.

Step 5:  Now you are ready to crack the legs open with crackers shown in step 2 above and dig out the lump crab meat from the back with a small fork shown in step 2 above.  When removing lump crab meat it is sometimes best to use your fingers, to remove any shells.  Keep in mind eating a whole crab is messy, but well worth it!