We were walking a northern California beach at low tide looking for female Dungeness crabs buried in the sand for a friend’s PhD research project on Dungeness fecundity. My years of clam digging were paying off, the slightly angular buried crab image was easily identifiable and I found crab after wriggling female crab—orange egg masses bulging and claws attempting to pinch me. Back in the lab we (killed the crab and) removed the egg mass and estimated the number of eggs. Astonishingly, a female Dungeness can produce 2 to 3 million eggs per clutch. This is the reason she buries herself in the sand, its too many eggs to be carrying around. In Southeast Alaska, female Dungeness crabs bury themselves 5-crab deep and spend the winter hunkered down subsisting on stored energy reserves. The choice of where to bury is important because the eggs need to remain aerated during the approximately 6-month development period. SCUBA divers have found huge football field-size aggregations of these buried females in areas where the sediment has good water flow. In the spring, when the water warms up and phytoplankton blooms, females emerge from the sediment and fan their abdomens to release the attached embryos, which swim off to spend the summer munching plankton before settling to the bottom in the fall as baby crabs. About 5 years later, the crabs reach harvestable size. In Juneau, an evening’s skiff ride to pull crab pots or a trip to the harbor where commercial fishermen sell dockside, can net you a tasty 2 ½-lb Dungie or two. To be honest, I really don’t like messing around with fancy recipes for crab meat until I’ve eaten quite a bit simply boiled and dipped in butter! But after a couple of meals of unembellished fresh crab meat I’m ready to experiment. Here is one of my favorite recipes for Dungeness crab!
Dungeness crab melts
One Dungeness crab
8 cups water
2 T salt
4 dashes Worcestershire sauce
Juice of ½ lemon
2 T capers
2 T horseradish
½ t black pepper
½ c mayonnaise
6 English muffins
8 oz Monterey Jack cheese
Clean crab, crack its sternum by banging hard on rounded blunt surface, pull off carapace (shell), and break body into two halves; remove gills and any innards clinging to meat. Bring salted water to boil in large stock pan. Add crab halves and boil for approximately 10 minutes. Remove crab from boiling water and shell.
Combine crab meat with mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, capers, horseradish, and pepper.
Split, toast and butter English muffins, arrange on broiler pan.
Top muffins with crab mixture.
Grate Monterey Jack cheese and spread over crab.
Broil crab melts on high for approximately 5 minutes on second shelf of oven until cheese melts, then turn oven to bake at 400 °F and continue warming crab melts for approximately 7 additional minutes.
This recipe serves 4 to 6 people.