I don’t think I have ever posted a recipe for deep-fried crab before… it seems like too much effort for the results, particularly if you are averse to deep frying and you don’t want to waste a lot of oil. But it just so happened we had fresh crabs when we had the wok filled with fat for another deep-fried dish, so I went ahead and fried these crabs to delicious results.

Simply clean your alimango, removing the gills and gunk, rinsing the shells well. Split the body in half and dismember the claws. Smash the claws a bit so hot fat can get to the meat within. Dry the shells with paper towels. Beat 1-2 egg whites until frothy and dip the crab pieces in the egg white and sprinkle liberally salt, freshly cracked black pepper and lots and lots of Wondra flour. Use all purpose flour or cornstarch if you don’t have Wondra. I didn’t use egg white in the crab photographed above, hence the lack of fried coating on the shells…

Carefully put the crab pieces and shells into HOT vegetable fat, and step back for a minute or so while it lets off an incredible amount of steam and splatter. We fry things like this outdoors, to prevent a pain in the #@!$ mess in the kitchen and reduce after smells. We removed the crab pieces after about 90 seconds or so and drained them on some paper towels.

Serve immediately with a butter lemon sauce or if you are like me, I love a good vinegar dip with my crab. This crab was incredibly tender and sweet, and still very moist despite the deep fry. I guess the bath in the hot oil was really just enough to crisp the shells and cartilage, but left most of the meat just barely cooked and succulent and tasty. A really easy and different option for preparing your crabs. If you want to make oodles of garlic butter on the side and just spoon this over the fried crabs, I bet that would be a nice variation as well.

Serve a whole crab on a platter for each guest for a truly memorable meal. :)

The post Deep-Fried Mud Crab (Alimango) a la Marketman appeared first on Market Manila.

These amazingly fresh, clean and meaty alimango traveled from Culion, Palawan by plane. A crew member’s family was arriving from Culion and they generously offered to bring some stuff with them… I asked for two kilos of raw, sun-dried cashew nuts (not roasted, salted or sugared) and some crab if they hadn’t already filled up their baggage allowance. They arrived with this spectacular bounty, a small box filled with roughly ten kilos of alimango! Wow!

Packed just hours before and covered with dahon ng bakhaw or mangrove tree leaves, the crabs were incredibly feisty once freed from their tight quarters…

…and with massive and powerful claws just barely tied with a bit of synthetic straw, you had to be really careful while extracting them from the box.

Notice how incredibly CLEAN the shells of these live crabs are. That’s what they look like when they are caught in the wild, amongst the mangroves… these aren’t raised in crowded muddy fishponds and fed all kinds of questionable grub…

It was roughly 1pm in the afternoon when these were delivered to our home, and I just knew we had to have them for dinner. But there’s no way we could consume ten kilos worth, so we picked five enormous crabs weighing roughly a kilo each, and shared the remaining crabs with crew and families.

Despite being “tied-up”, the critters still managed to clamber up over the edge of the plastic wash basin and scampered across the tiled kitchen floor. These guys had huge eyes, and frankly, if we didn’t eat them for dinner, I would have feared for my toes if they had escaped and hid in some dark corner of the house, waiting to get revenge. :(

They can crawl surprisingly fast.

This crab weighed in at nearly a kilo in weight.

Waiting for the inevitable…

The post Air-flown Alimango (Mud Crabs) From Culion… appeared first on Market Manila.

In my formative years, my family had a healthy supply of superb alimango, the by-product of a Lucena fishpond/prawn farm experiment gone haywire. All of the pricey black tiger prawns raised in the ponds were being munched on by alimango adolescents that had snuck in from the nearby river… As the intruders grew up on this smorgasborg of black prawns, they in turn became the prized catch of the pond when harvest time rolled around. All of these fat alimango were packed up nicely and made the trip to our kitchen in Manila.

I never cooked crab until my mid-thirties. It just seemed so bothersome to clean and prep them. So I satisfied my cravings with restaurant Maryland-style crab cakes and restaurant chilli crab dishes. That is, until a few years ago, when I discovered just how easy and delicious homemade chilli crab can be. It has since become a signature dish in our household.

I only buy large 600-1,000 gram live crabs that are still spunky. If they don’t try to lunge at me when i make poking movements at their beady eyes I take that as a sign that they are near death and thus less fresh than they could be. Recent prices in the markets range from P250-350 per kilo, with females pricier than males due to the added bonus of fat crab roe (the orange coral that is pure cholesterol, I think). “Gay” crabs are priced somewhat in the middle of the range – but no one has really been able to explain what these are… if I recall correctly, a recent newspaper article surmised that they were males with eggs…let’s not go there, shall we? Aesthetically, crabs seem more balanced when they have both claws but it really doesn’t matter. In fact, you can get a much better price on one-clawed specimens as they have probably failed to get themselves exported to Hong Kong or Tokyo. I have been able to get good crabs from the FTI weekend market in Taguig, Seaside Mart in Baclaran and in Batangas markets. I recently saw two crab vendors at the Market!Market! mall and they were asking P450 a kilo for crabs when they could be had elsewhere for just P350 or less… what a rip-off! And you have to pay for parking too.

To clean the crabs, ask your brilliant cook if s/he knows how, and if yes, you are truly in luck! Otherwise, it is a royal pain in the neck. You brush the outside of the crabs until clean. You find a soft spot on it’s belly and plunge a knife through it to kill it while it writhes with pain. You open it up and remove the hairy lungs/gills and entrails, dismember the body, etc. In our household, there are at least three people who can clean crabs and prep them for cooking. I simply refuse. Some things I can but don’t have to do… Once clean, you can cut the main body into four pieces + the two claws. Please see third photo of clean dismembered crab. This is now ready for cooking. Be careful when handling live crab. Always keep their claws tied. A crab bite is not funny. The biggest crabs could probably sever a fingertip if truly annoyed.

Please check the recipe section in a week or so for chilli crab a la marketman and/or a crab cake recipe.

The post Alimango (Mud Crab) appeared first on Market Manila.