From the Cove shop
Seafood prep and kitchen kit chosen to make the guide easier to use.
Dressing a crab — picking all that sweet white and rich brown meat from the shell — is a satisfying kitchen skill once you know the steps. Whether you cooked your crab from live or bought it ready-cooked, here is how to remove the meat cleanly, what to leave behind, and the tools that make light work of it.
Seafood guide
A simple route through buying, storing, cooking and serving seafood at home without making the page feel busy.
Prepare a Cooked Crab is here to make seafood feel easier at home: what to buy, how to handle it, and how to cook it with confidence.
Start with seafood that looks and smells fresh, then keep the plan simple. Good fish, shellfish and coastal ingredients do not need a complicated route to the plate.
Seafood prep and kitchen kit chosen to make the guide easier to use.
Keep seafood chilled, unpack it when you get home, and cook it while it is at its best. A calm kitchen starts with good storage.
Use gentle heat, short timings and a little patience. Most seafood rewards simple cooking more than heavy sauces or overworked methods.
Serve seafood with clean flavours, enough time to rest, and a little confidence. Lemon, herbs, butter, good bread or a simple salad often do the job beautifully.
Read straight through, or use the seafood notes above to keep buying, cooking and serving simple.
How to clean and pick a crab to remove the meat (dress a crab)
Whether you have caught or bought a live crab and cooked it or whether you have bought a pre-cooked crab, you will now need to remove the meat from the shell.
If your crab is still alive follow these instructions to cook it:
Once your crab is cooked, if you are using the claws for a seafood platter or salad simply pull them off and save. The meat from the body will need to be removed before it can be used in a recipe. The video below demonstrates how to do this.
It is necessary to pull the shell off first and remove the parts that are not edible. Full instructions on how to remove the meat from a crab are detailed in our video.
Seafood tools specially designed to get in to the awkward areas of the crab make preparing it and eating it a lot easier. We have a full range of seafood utensils in our cook shop including seafood forks, crab and lobster crackers and shellfish tools kits.
Seafood prep and kitchen kit chosen to make the guide easier to use.
