Crab......

...Neesh...

No spot taken.

Smoking a blunt (banana OG & wax) and heading out soon to my niece's swim teams annual crab feed. Gonna have red tide tomorrow. Will have plenty of pics to upload. Have a good one guys!

Dungeness

Soft shell

Of the crabs we catch around here, Dungeness is the best.   Big and meaty:

But we also have Red Rock crabs, especially in Yaquina Bay.    Unlike the Dungeness, there are no sex or size limits and they are super plentiful.   The meat is very sweet, but harder to clean than the Dungeness    As a practical matter, you only keep the bigger ones, but with these guys, you can always go home with a cooler full of crabs, even if you don't get many keeper Dungeness:

Here are a couple big red rocks cooking:

Cleaning the Red Rocks is a lot of work, but they sure are tasty:

I just finished up all the Dungeness and Red Rocks I had in the freezer making crab cakes.  Time to get back over to the coast again!

It kind of depends where you are. Dungeness in the PNW is wonderful. I imagine people in Maryland think Blue crab is pretty fine.

(I thought you might be looking for a story from Crabneesh. That would be swell.)

Blue Claw Crabs from the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland are the best/sweetest crabs I ever had.

Spent the best summers of my life at my Aunt Pat's crabbing and cracking bushels down in Md.

The other crabs make good pets.

Best crab is the one you're eating.

Down here on the Eastern shore of Md. it's the "beautiful swimmer" blue crab.

Every possible Summer day of my youth was spent crabbing and fishing.. 

I had several methods of harvesting Blue Claw crabs and other seafood.   

I would sell whatever I had to this Native American couple who owned a small shack like jewelry store at the end of my road on the canal.   

Five bucks was a lot back then....

Now I leave the crabs alone.  But the blue claws taste better than lobster.  As far as lobster is concerned, North Atlantic is the best.

I like all the different Crab types,  but the Dungeness really surpass every other for flavor and texture.

Kings are awesome too.  Less work per 'forkful' as they are Big.

http://crabeatery.com

"The Blue Claw"  is the local shellfish orgy place.  They have been around since the 70's and have many flavors of Crab.  Pretty good cole slaw.

Got my fill at the Caesars Palace buffet once. $60 I think.

Dungeness -par steamed for 1 min, cooled in ice bath, cracked and cleaned.

Juice from inside the shell + crab guts blended into garlic butter.

Cracked crab, clams and boiled potato loaded into a cast iron or paella pan and covered in crab gut garlic butter, like a metric shitload of it. Roast until clams open - bam bitch best crab evah

Pound for pound (not taking into account the amount of effort cleaning to meat ratio) - Blue claw.   Hands down.

Snow crab is less work to get a meal and suits me fine, too.

I've honestly never had King crab that really beat Snow or Blue in taste. It's good, but I don't really see any justification for the additional cost.  If it was the same price, I'd still pick Snow crab over it every time.

Blue Claw crabs taste the best to me. I like them harvested from areas that have a good mix of fresh and salt water which adds a tang of salt to the sweet meat. The closer you get to the ocean, the saltier the crab. I miss the days with my daughter when we would take my canoe out a couple days in a row, load up on crabs, take a break and wade a few dozen clams, get some more crabs, repeat the next day and finally cook 'em up and spend hours picking the meat from the shell. Lots of effort with lots of return.

I've also been known to sit down for hours eating stone crab claws when in FL.  

"Blue Claw"  place on Rte. 130 near Burlington has raised their prices.

http://crabeatery.com/shellfish.html

Have not been there in a couple years.

And I was mistaken saying that they have been there since Early 70's.  The website says 1961,  which might be true.

They have  also updated their website.

I miss all the fun of going out to Yaquina Bay with  a boat and various Crab traps.  It was always a Hoot !!

A fellow I knew drowned out  there a few years back.  They were crabbing in a small Boat,  which capsized.  Some made it back to Shore.

I'm lucky enough to have ample if not sporadic supply of free Blue Claw that I don't ever buy them anymore... but the price I've seen for fresh picked and cleaned meat and the taste is good enough that I don't mind the picking for hours.  I've actually gotten pretty good at it!

At a restaurant, or when it's on sale in the supermarket, Snow Crab is more of a rare treat for me, in that I don't have it as often as Blue.  I won't order Blue Claw at a restaurant... the mess/hassle and time factor make it more suitable to be enjoyed at a leisurely pace at home, IMO.

I believe these have a short season:

https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/rubes/

Crab is a pain in the ass.  So for that reason, I prefer king's.   We dive for lobster around here, so there is abundance of Santa Monica Bay lobster in the house, always.  Lol, I'm sure that's healthy.

Best seafood buffet in Las Vegas was the Rio when I went in 2013

I would say the best seafood buffet I've had anywhere is the one at Deer Valley Resort in Utah. 

Jaiba! I used to love my Baja trips to San Quintín in the 70s & early 80s. Stayed at a place called Cielto Lindo on an almost deserted beach.
It was a motel/RV park with a diner and a small bar. The motel rooms were disgusting, but we used sleeping bags and it was really just a place to use a bathroom - when the generator was on. Could not beat the low prices, either. $18 for a room with two beds, if you would call them that. $5 would get you a kilo of cracked crab, drenched in a chili/garlic "sauce", plus rice, beans & tortillas. Drinks were cheap, but this was back in the day when a Corona cost a quarter. Good for brushing teeth. They also had a small airstrip and I once met a guy who used to fly down there from Alaska just for the crab dinner, which the place was most famous for.
There was only one phone in the office and it was really off the map, save for the annual Baja 1000 run. Heard about it one year while passing through and then went back each time me and the Baja Boys would go down for R & R. We'd whack golf balls up and down the pristine beach and shoot fireworks off at night. Warm water swim with dolphins. A really great place to forget about the rest of the world. At night the bar would be hoppin' with locals and RVers. They had a guitar on the wall, which I would tune and play and sing. Guillermo, the owner's husband, would ply me with drinks for as long as I played. One outstanding feature - they had an aggregate rock side walk that led directly from the bar to the rooms, so I was able to crawl back to my room without getting lost in the dark. But, oh, that jaiba! I wish I could duplicate their recipe. Tried a few times, but it was never quite the same.