Louisiana Style Boiled Blue Crabs | Chef Alden B

all right y'all there's a big debate on whether you should steam Blue Crabs or boil them and I don't know if it's me just being from Louisiana or what but I just don't see the purpose of steaming crabs and throwing the seasoning on top but I guess everybody just has their own preference and this is mine you're season your water up to Perfection add things like onions garlic celery whatever you like to add that extra flavor and you're good to go none of that extra seasoning to anything is needed and those vegetables are like the onions and garlic a super tender and a great side addition to your crab boil and I know people say boiled crabs are waterlogged and just mushy but that's not true you're just not doing it right and that's why I'm here right now to show you exactly how to do it it'll be the most flavorful crabs you'll ever have and you'll never turn back it's super flaky full of flavor and I'm telling y'all it's precious and this is no disrespect to the Maryland way the way y'all steam them this is just how I was brought up in Louisiana so we don't have to have all those comments in between about one way is the right way that's the beauty of food and why I love everything about it and one person might like one thing one way and another person might like it the other and there's nothing wrong with that and if you aren't already subscribed to my channel make sure that y'all subscribe and turn on those push notifications because we get real deep down in the salt with these recipes and I would love for y'all to join this journey give this video a thumbs up and let's get into it so boom first we started off by hitting to our Seafood lot this is in Westwego Louisiana when dealing with seafood you want to find whatever has the freshest seafood and for us this is it the crabs alive and active and there's different brackets of what type of crabs you can get and the way you buy crabs about a dozen so you could get them from cheapest to more expensive from left to right of course the ones on the left will be smaller but every type of crab has its own purpose depending on the dish you're using it but since we want boiled crabs into the start of the dish we're gonna go with the biggest ones and the smallest ones go from 14 a dozen all the way to the biggest ones being thirty dollars a dozen and a great thing about Seafood Lots is they make their own prices so if you're regular or they just having a good day they'll give you a discount I got the 30 crabs for half price that's fifteen dollars a dozen and that's a dollar more than what the smallest crabs would be so of course this is a steal and I need all that now I'll explain the purpose for the isolator but for now let's get back home just like I did in my Crawfish Boil video you want to add some things to enhance that flavor to boil first we're gonna start off with a bag of onions you don't have to cut the skin off once it goes in a boil it'll just fall off and these onions will be super tender and of course garlic goes in anything just like with the onions you don't have to take the skin off we're going to throw this right up in there and it'll get super tender just like the onions I'm telling y'all the prep work for this is super simple not after we add that you could add stuff like celery and all that but we're not gonna do that this time I'm gonna go with a four pound bag of oranges to add that Citrus to the boil this will add a nice sweetness to go with that spicy that's gonna be in here some people add things like pineapples but I just don't like the flavor it gives it but some people love it and add it in there so again whatever you like you could throw it in though and of course another perfect pairing with seafood would be lemon some people say that acid from the lemons will break down the shells of seafood and make it easier to peel I'm not really sure if that's a fact or not you can look that up but I just like the flavored ads so I put lemons in all my Seafood boils now if you're having a bunch of people over and you don't feel like feeding them all these types of crabs it's perfect to have sides I'm going with potatoes you can add things like sauce message people had green beans mushrooms all that but since this is just a quick boil we're not doing too much extra we're just gonna add the potatoes I also like to add corn I just didn't do it this time as far as the potatoes go my favorite one to use would be baby red potatoes you don't have to slice them or anything in a perfect size just throw them right on in there don't be intimidated by a seafood boil pot if you have just a dozen or so you could do this in a big pot inside since I'm doing a lot of crabs I'm gonna go ahead and use my boiler outside you want to fill it up to the max line and then we're going to turn on our propane the propane tank I had was running out so I just used the last of what it had left but I just needed the water warm enough just to start dissolving those seasonings into it now you really don't need to squeeze the lemon and orange juice into the water all that Citrus will be pulled out while it's boiling I just wanted Savannah to be involved in the process so we squeezed it in there some people squeeze it but you really don't need to now once that's done we're going to go ahead and add in our vegetables we had the onions and garlic you could add celery or whatever else we just went with onions and garlic and now we're going to go ahead with our seasonings all right so two-thirds cup of garlic 2 3 cup of granulated onion two-thirds cup of salt or accent you don't have to use accent if you don't want the MSG and then if you want some spice you can add some cayenne pepper a lot of people don't use butter but we're gonna throw some salted butter in it and the seafood boil when the seafood is soaking it soaks up all the flavor of everything that's in a boil so why not add that richness of butter in there that's just my opinion if you don't think it does anything just don't add the butter into the maybe gonna come with a whole bottle of hot sauce usually yeah the tops that you can just screw it off but if they don't have that you're gonna have to sit here and do it like that then you have a 3.5 ounce container of dried bay leaf and with crabs you usually have to season it a little bit more than what you would season crawfish with so we're gonna go with a whole bottle of liquid concentrate they have different flavors to this lemon garlic and onion this one's just a regular this is a boil booster this one's so free so you don't have to be hesitant about how much of this you had it'll just enhance the flavor of the garlic and herbs and lemon and all that and when it's not seasoned enough you still add in about four pounds of your favorite crab boil and when seasoned right the crabs will absorb every single flavor that's in here it might not look seasoned on the outside but the inside will be full of flavor that's why I never really understood why I throw the seasoning on top because you want your actual meat to be flavored but to get this boil really going we're gonna go ahead and change out our propane tank and get that flame high this double burner on full blast will really get this water boiling in about 10 minutes it's very convenient and once our water starts to get hot we're gonna go ahead and add our potatoes and let it cook for about 10 minutes because this will take the longest to cook and while that's going I told y'all earlier I was going to explain to y'all the reason behind putting the ice on top of your crab and here it is first you want to make sure that any excess water in your ice chest is drained because you don't want them soaking in that ice water it'll kill them we still want them alive when crabs go in the boiling hot water they tend to detach their claws from their body it's just a natural reaction so you want to add that ice on top because it basically puts them straight to sleep it gives the same effect of anesthesia so the crabs are still alive and fresh they're just asleep and lose that sensation to detach the claws when they go into the water now I'm gonna go ahead and show y'all how you tell the difference between a male and a female crab on a male crab they'll have the back plate on them that is very narrow and their tips of the claws will be blue whereas on the mature female crab they'll have more of a wider back plate and the tips of their clothes will be an orange color you can kind of think of it as the female crab has fingernail polish it's really that simple now that we have our water boiling we're going to go ahead and get ready to throw our crabs right in there now we got two dozen crabs we're using another dozen that we're gonna put on the grill okay now what you want to do is bring your water back up to a rolling boil and I like to let them boil for about six to eight minutes and with a Boiling Pot you even adding those frozen crabs this water will come right back to a boil within minutes that's why I love it so much but now we're just gonna close it off and let it cook and this isn't a sponsored add to anything I just love the way this boil pile works I got this one from Academy it boils everything super efficient and I love it for all of my Seafood boils Outdoors and believe it or not this is the smaller version now after the crabs have finished boiling this is an essential part of the whole thing this is called the soak I like to soak it two different ways the first one I turn the heat off and let it have a hot soap for about 15 minutes as you can see the clothes are still attached to our crabs so it did exactly what it needed to do in that ice after a hot soak I like to do what's called a zesty soak we're gonna add ice into it and let it really absorb those flavors and I know a lot of people are going to say adding ice to it is gonna make it dilute the flavor but you add so much flavor to this it's not really going to do anything to it and here goes my daughter trying to make sure daddy stays hydrated it is hot out here in this Louisiana he's for real now you know your Seafood is done once they start to sink to the bottom that means they've shocked themselves and absorbed all the flavor and pulled it in and sunk themselves to the bottom I did the zesty soak for about 25 minutes the longer you let them soak the more they'll absorb that flavor just pull them out and look at that yes Lord nice time to go ahead and dump them out and you really could let them cool for a little while because they'll be super hot but I needed to try these right now first we had the onion as you can see the skin is off and it's super tender it's delicious it has a sweetness to it I just love it now we have our garlic the garlic you can squeeze it right out add this on some garlic bread eat it as is it's just super flavor before and another thing that I love then you have your potatoes the super tender full of that spicy flavor dip them in some butter you're good to go now we're gonna break down a crab first we're gonna start off with the claws that's my daughter's favorite part so I'm gonna go ahead and break it down for her and a lot of people have the crab crackers and stuff but we just cracked the clothes with our teeth in Louisiana now I'm gonna go ahead and get that piece to my daughter and then break down the rest of the claw and then we're gonna get into breaking down the crab first we're going to go ahead and remove that little back plate then put your thumb in between and separate the shell from the body you can clean the shell save it and make stuffed crabs with them and what I'm doing right here is removing the lungs that's not edible you want to take that out and unlike the popular snow crabs and king crabs the meat is not in the legs it's in the body they have meat in the legs but the majority of your meat is going to come from the body so you want to break that down and get all that meat out and a lot of people are going to just say it's too much work but in Louisiana it's therapeutic y'all go ahead and leave in the comments whether y'all like steamed crabs or boiled crabs and if you enjoyed this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel and just like my name you're all done

Channel: Chef Alden B

Views: 18,938

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Id: cY0ZzlexkR0

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023