Cleaning a Louisiana blue crab depends on what you plan to do with it.
If the crabs are headed into a traditional seafood boil, they are usually washed and cooked whole. The shell stays on while the crabs boil, and diners open and clean them as they eat. Explore Louisiana’s seafood-boil recipe, for example, adds live Louisiana blue crabs directly to the seasoned boiling liquid.
For gumbo, stew, grilling, frying, or other recipes, cooks may instead clean the hard-shell crabs before the main cooking begins.
That means removing the top shell, gills, and unwanted internal material so the crab body can go directly into the dish.
This Article Is About Hard-Shell Blue Crabs
Louisiana blue crabs are harvested in both hard-shell and soft-shell stages.
The hard shell covering the crab is called the carapace. Blue crabs also have large claws, four pairs of walking legs, and a final pair of paddle-shaped swimming legs.
Soft-shell crabs require a different cleaning process because the entire crab is generally cooked and eaten once the gills, apron, eyes, and mouth area have been removed. Louisiana Cookin’ documents that separate technique.
For ordinary hard-shell Louisiana blue crabs, the process is different.
First Decide Whether the Crabs Need to Be Cleaned Before Cooking
Not every crab recipe begins with a cleaned crab.
For a crab boil, leave the crabs whole after washing them.
For gumbo, stew, barbecue-style crabs, or fried hard-shell crabs, some Louisiana recipes clean them first.
Louisiana Cookin’s crab-and-shrimp stew, for example, begins with live blue crabs that are stunned, opened, cleaned, divided, and then simmered in the stew.
Louisiana Seafood’s fried hard-shell crab preparation follows a similar pattern before the crab halves are marinated and fried.
So before doing anything else, know what your recipe expects.
Keep Live Crabs Alive Until Cooking
Blue crabs are highly perishable.
Louisiana Sea Grant advises keeping live crabs cool, moist, and supplied with fresh air until they are ready to cook. They should not be placed in a closed container filled with water because they can suffocate.
A damp covering and cool shaded storage are better.
Sea Grant also advises discarding crabs that have died before cooking because dead crabs deteriorate rapidly.
This is one of the most important rules in blue-crab preparation.
Start with live crabs.
Wash the Crabs Thoroughly
Before boiling or cleaning, rinse live crabs well with clean water.
Louisiana Sea Grant recommends thoroughly washing live crabs to remove dirt and unwanted debris before cooking.
Louisiana Seafood’s hard-shell fried-crab preparation similarly begins by washing the live crabs in clean running water.
You are not trying to soak the crabs for hours.
You are removing mud and debris from the shell, legs, and underside.
A strong rinse is generally sufficient.
Be Careful with the Claws
A live blue crab can defend itself.
Its large front claws are designed for grasping and crushing, and Louisiana Sea Grant identifies those claws as the crab’s primary defensive appendages.
Handle live crabs from the rear when possible, away from the claws, or use sturdy tongs.
Some Louisiana recipes briefly scald the live crabs before cleaning so they can be handled more safely.
Louisiana Seafood’s fried hard-shell crab recipe places washed crabs briefly into boiling water until they just begin changing color, then cleans them.
Louisiana Cookin’ uses a similar brief hot-water stun before cleaning crabs for grilled and stewed preparations.
Step 1: Remove the Top Shell
Once the crab can be safely handled, turn it so you can reach the rear edge of the top shell.
Lift and pull the carapace away from the body.
Louisiana hard-shell crab recipes describe this simply as removing the back or top shell before cleaning the interior.
The main body of the crab will now be exposed.
Do not be surprised if the inside looks considerably less tidy than the crab did from the outside.
That is what cleaning is for.
Step 2: Remove the Gills
Along each side of the body are the crab’s feathery gills.
These are sometimes casually called dead man’s fingers.
Pull or scrape them away and discard them.
Louisiana Seafood’s hard-shell crab instructions specifically call for scraping away the gills after the top shell is removed. Louisiana Cookin’ likewise removes the gills before the crab enters a stew or goes onto the grill.
Do this on both sides.
The gills are not the meat you are trying to preserve.
Step 3: Remove the Mouth and Unwanted Interior Material
Different recipes clean the center of the crab to slightly different degrees.
Louisiana Seafood’s fried hard-shell crab instructions remove the mouth area and scoop unwanted internal material from the body before rinsing.
Louisiana Cookin’ recipes similarly direct cooks to clean the center after the top shell and gills are removed.
Use your fingers, a spoon, or a small tool to remove loose unwanted material.
Avoid digging unnecessarily into the chambers that hold the crab meat.
The goal is a clean body shell ready for cooking.
What Is the Yellow Material Inside a Crab?
When you open a blue crab, you may find yellowish material inside.
Louisiana cooks sometimes refer casually to rich internal material as crab fat, much as the term is used with crawfish, although crab anatomy is more complicated than that kitchen shorthand suggests.
Whether it remains in the recipe depends on the preparation and the cook.
Some cleaned-crab recipes remove most internal material. Others preserve more of the flavorful juices and tissues.
Follow the needs of the dish rather than assuming every crab must be scraped completely bare.
Step 4: Rinse the Cleaned Crab
After removing the top shell, gills, and unwanted material, give the body a final rinse under cold running water.
Louisiana Seafood’s hard-shell crab instructions explicitly rinse the cleaned crabs after the interior has been prepared.
Do not leave them soaking.
A quick thorough rinse removes loose material without unnecessarily washing the crab for a prolonged period.
Allow the crabs to drain.
Step 5: Leave Whole or Cut into Halves
What happens next depends on the recipe.
For some grilled preparations, the cleaned body remains relatively intact.
For gumbo and stew, crabs are often divided into halves so they fit into the pot and expose more of the shell and body to the cooking liquid.
Louisiana Cookin’s crab-and-shrimp stew splits cleaned crabs and removes the claws for stock.
Louisiana Seafood’s fried hard-shell crab recipe cuts each cleaned crab straight down the middle, producing right and left halves.
A heavy knife or sturdy kitchen shears can be useful.
What About the Claws?
Keep them unless the recipe has another purpose for them.
Claws contain meat and can also contribute seafood flavor while simmering.
In the Louisiana Cookin’ crab-and-shrimp stew recipe, the claws are removed from the cleaned crab bodies and reserved for making stock.
Other recipes leave them attached.
If they remain on the crab, lightly cracking the claw shell can make the meat easier to reach later and may help cooking liquid interact with the shell.
Louisiana Cookin’s barbecued-crab preparation cracks the claws without removing the shells.
Cleaned Crabs Are Excellent in Gumbo
Whole or halved blue crabs have a special role in Louisiana seafood gumbo.
They are not there merely to provide a piece of crab meat.
The shells, body juices, and crab itself contribute flavor as the gumbo simmers.
Explore Louisiana’s seafood gumbo adds jumbo blue crabs directly to the dark roux and aromatics before the stock goes into the pot.
Another Louisiana gumbo recipe uses several gumbo crabs along with shrimp and oysters.
That long simmer extracts crab flavor into the broth.
What Is a Gumbo Crab?
In Louisiana markets, the phrase gumbo crab commonly refers to blue-crab bodies or pieces intended primarily to flavor gumbo.
They may contain less accessible picked meat than premium whole crabs, but the shell and remaining crab contribute strongly to seafood stock and gumbo.
Explore Louisiana notes that commercially available gumbo crabs may be the bodies remaining after larger pieces of crabmeat have been removed.
For that use, the goal is not necessarily a beautiful whole crab for the table.
The crab is helping build the pot.
Do You Clean Crabs Before a Seafood Boil?
Generally, no.
For a Louisiana crab or mixed seafood boil, live crabs are typically washed and then boiled whole.
Explore Louisiana’s seafood-boil recipe adds 24 live Louisiana blue crabs, shells intact, to the seasoned pot and cooks them before corn and shrimp are added.
The diner then opens the cooked crab at the table.
That is a completely different situation from putting cleaned crab halves into gumbo.
Both are Louisiana blue-crab traditions.
They simply prepare the crab at different stages.
How Do You Clean a Cooked Whole Crab?
After a whole boiled crab is cool enough to handle, the basic anatomy is the same.
Pull off the apron on the underside.
Remove the top shell.
Discard the gills and unwanted internal material.
Then break the body into sections to expose the chambers of crab meat.
Crack the claws separately.
Unlike crab being prepared for gumbo, the point here is not to create cleaned body halves for further cooking.
You are opening the crab to eat it.
Do Not Cross-Contaminate Cooked Crabs
The container that held live raw crabs should not automatically become the serving container for cooked crabs.
Louisiana Sea Grant specifically warns against putting cooked shellfish back into the same cooler used to transport live crabs unless that cooler has first been thoroughly cleaned.
Wash hands, utensils, work surfaces, and containers after handling live crabs.
Keep finished food on the cooked side of the operation.
A seafood boil can be informal.
Food safety does not have to be.
Cleaning Hard-Shell Blue Crabs at a Glance
| Step | What to Do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Keep live crabs cool, moist, and supplied with air |
| 2 | Discard any dead crabs before cooking |
| 3 | Wash live crabs thoroughly with clean water |
| 4 | Safely stun or otherwise handle them according to the recipe |
| 5 | Remove the top shell |
| 6 | Pull or scrape away the gills |
| 7 | Remove unwanted mouth and center material |
| 8 | Rinse the cleaned body under cold water |
| 9 | Leave whole or split into halves according to the dish |
| 10 | Keep claws for the dish or reserve them for stock |
Louisiana cooking sources use this basic pattern for hard-shell crabs destined for frying, grilling, stew, or other preparations.
Blue Crabs Are Worth Learning to Handle
Cleaning blue crabs is messier than peeling shrimp.
There is no point pretending otherwise.
But the technique is straightforward once you understand the anatomy.
Wash the crab.
Remove the top shell.
Discard the gills.
Clean the center.
Rinse.
Split the body if the recipe calls for it.
From there, Louisiana cooking provides plenty of destinations.
Gumbo.
Crab stew.
Grilled crabs.
Fried hard-shell crabs.
Or leave the crab completely whole, drop it into a seasoned boil, and make everybody at the table do their own work.
That may be the easiest cleaning technique of all.
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