Crab Show

Hi there, y'all. I'm Paula Deen, and today I'm heading for the dock because it's blue crab season, and the only thing more fun than catching crabs is cooking crabs

So first I'm going to show you how to make a crab dip. It's spicy and tangy and just perfect

And then next I've got a crab dish that's so fast and easy you won't believe it

Then I'm going to show you how to make a crab cake with a lemony dill sauce to die for

And then there's steamed crabs in a virtual bath of garlic butter

So grab your bait and meet me on the dock, because we're cooking crabs

Hey

Do you know here in Savannah, our lives revolve around the water

the creeks, the rivers, and the ocean when we're not working. And today, we're going crabbing

Usually I go crabbing with my boyfriend, Michael, But today, we're going with a real professional

and we're going to get the biggest bang for our basket. So y'all stay with me

Hey, Ray. Hey, Paula. Ready to go crabbing? I'm ready, you. I am ready

Let's go get them. Is today going to be a good day, you think

Oh, yeah, it's going to be a great day. Is this one of our traps right here

This is one of them right here. I did it! You won't believe the crabs we got

What size crab do you like to eat, Ray? A large male like this, anywhere like about six inches

All right, now show us... That's from point to point. Now show us the difference between a female crab and a male crab

because I do get that confused. Now, this is the female crab. That's the female

See, it has more underneath when you look. It has more of a pouch, plus it has the red-tip claws

If you go to the market and say, buy live crabs, how would you store them? Now, if you wanted to keep them, put them in the cooler and ice them down

Or refrigerator, you keep them in your refrigerator. You keep them up there until he dies, and as long as he's still alive, he's fine to cook and eat

You don't want to cook a dead crab? You don't want to cook a dead crab. And why is that

Well, the meat starts to spoil. Paula, what are we going to do with these crabs

I'm going to make the most wonderful crab cakes with a lemon dill sauce

Oh, that sounds great. Doesn't that sound yummy? Yeah, it does. Nothing better than fresh crab, is it

Nothing better than a fresh blue crab. Well, here's your bushel of crabs

Oh, that's wonderful. So they'll be all right, and I'd like to get them home

They'll be fine until you get them home and cook them up. Thanks, Ray. I had a ball. Oh, I had a great time, Mom

The first two recipes that I'm starting off today are really, truly crowd pleasers

Plus, they're simple. I'm looking at maybe six minutes to put two recipes together, and you can't beat that

The first recipe I'm starting with today is Savannah Crab Dip. Now there's several different variations that you can do, but this recipe came from one

of the Matthews children. And the Matthews have been in the seafood business forever in Savannah

They cut their teeth on seafood. So I really like this one

And this is the one I want to share with you today. I'm going to start by grating a little Jack cheese

We want about a cup. And I'm going to toss it in to our crab meat, which you can see I'm using a wonderful solid

white lump meat. I'm going to use just parmesan cheese and green onions

You know, in Savannah, it doesn't matter what we're doing, you would not have any type of function

especially a cocktail party, without a hot crab dip. We're going to put a few tablespoons of Worcestershire

and a little bit of lemon, and lemon just seems to go with seafood, you know, especially crabs

And I've got some roasted garlic here that we've roasted off. Now, if you don't want to fool with that, that's quite all right

You can use chopped raw garlic. So we're just going to put a couple of cloves of that in, a little salt

a little dry mustard, about a half a teaspoon, a little hot sauce

just in case our jack cheese ain't hot enough, a little fresh ground pepper

And then we're going to bind it with our mayonnaise. And we just going to fold this together rather gently because we want our lump crab to still be in nice chunky lumps when we get through with it So all we going to do

is just put this into our casserole dish and throw it in the oven. And we're going to bake

it until it's just bubbly. Now if you're having a cocktail party and you're going to be eating

over a period of time, you can also put this in a chafing dish

But see how nice that is and how quick and simple? We're just going to put it in our preheated oven

And while that's baking, we're going to move on to the easiest bisque that you can imagine

I am certainly not above pulling out canned foods. Some of the products are wonderful

And we're going to start today with just a can of cream of mushroom soup

I couldn't survive without cream of mushroom soup. It really enhances gravies and sauces unbelievably well

And we're going to use an ordinary can of cream of asparagus. And we're going to turn those on and just blend those together

This is so good to have on a cool fall night, along with a little French bread and salad

and your home-free girls. I'm going to add a little half-and-half and a little milk

We're just going to whisk that together and let it get hot

The cream of asparagus soup gives it a delicious different taste that you're not expecting

And now we're going to add our crab meat, meat. And you can see I have saved this jumbo lump for my stew. And we're going to use about

half of this because when I bowl it up, I'm going to use some of this to garnish the top

with. We're going to very gently do this because there again, we don't want to tear up our

crab meat. And last but not least, you can't have any seafood bisque or crab bisque without

some good sherry. And honey, if you can't drink it, don't put it in your food

My crab dip should be ready and I've got the neatest chafing dish here

It's actually kind of like a trivet. The holes in the trivet is going to allow

the heat to come through, so that's going to do great keeping our crab dip hot

You know, I have to say, that Matthews family really knows what they're doing when it comes to seafood

And I think they've got another winner here with this recipe. Look

It's hot as a $3 pistol. It's divine. Next, I'm going to come over here and I'm going to plate up our bisque

And as you can see, it's hot and bubbly. It takes about five minutes to get it to that point

and I'm going to bowl it up just like I would the crab stew at the restaurant

Look at those big lumps of crab. Now you can garnish this any way you like

I'm going to garnish it with black pepper, a little grated Parmesan cheese

a little paprika just for color, and if you wanted to at this point

you could actually pour a little bit more of your sherry onto it

it would be just fine if you're a real sherry lover. But I'm just going to serve this along with a few saltine crackers or soda crackers

And it's just that simple. It's ready to eat. It's out of this world

Y'all stay tuned because next I'm coming back and I'm going to show you how to prepare a dear friend of mine's recipe for crab cakes

with a lemon dill sauce. So stick around. I think you'll love her recipe

We've got everything prepared now to start our crab cakes. and Savannah's kind of like Marilyn

in the fact that crab cakes are everywhere. And today I'm using my friend Martha Nesbitt's

favorite crab cake recipe with lemon dill sauce. In fact, Martha and my friend Damon Fowler

and some of the old restaurants in town was the inspiration for me to write a

From My Peers chapter in my second cookbook because I really have a great deal of respect for my friends

I'm starting today on the lemon dill sauce. It's mayonnaise and fresh chopped garlic, lemon zest

about a quarter of a cup of buttermilk, and fresh lemon juice And we just gonna stir that together I really like Martha recipes because I think she has the same theory that I have that

simple is usually best. We're gonna snip a little fresh dill and a little fresh parsley

We're gonna just chop this up and toss it into our sauce, and then we're gonna put it

in the refrigerator and let it sit while we're getting our crab cakes together

You can't get any simpler than that. The lemon in it gives it such a wonderful zing

I'm just going to stick this in the refrigerator and give those flavors a few minutes to blend together

We're going to start with a little butter and just a little olive oil. I love the blends of the different oils because, as you know, butter burns very easily and

the olive oil will help slow down the burning process. It's just a nice combination together, nice marriage

All right, we're going to simply now saute our green onions, scallions, whatever you call them

chopped red bell pepper, and some fresh garlic. And we're just going to saute these until they're limp

The great part about crab cakes is you can make all of this earlier in the day

so when your guests come in, all you have to do is pull your crab cakes out of the refrigerator

and fry them up, and you're ready to go. Now those are nice and limp

And we're just going to put these over into our mixing bowl. We're going to make sure we get all that butter and olive oil into our dish

We're going to add a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, fresh parsley, a little ground red pepper

Now I can't tell you how much of this to put because that really depends on you and how

hot you like your dishes. We're going to put one whole egg, and then about half of our breadcrumbs

And the other half we're going to put over here into our platter, and we're going to

mix them up with Parmesan cheese. And this is going to be our coating for our crab cakes

Sounds delicious already, doesn't it? And we're going to add a little cream

And then we're going to mix all this together. And as you can see, I have not added the crab yet

And the reason for that is when we add our crab, it won't be hard to blend them together

And we're going to gently fold this together. And now all we have to do is mold them into the patties like so

And that egg that we put in it is going to help bind them together

And then we're just going to dredge them in our cracker crumbs and cheese

Now the great part about these crab cakes is that you can do this early in the day and

stop at this point. You can put them on a parchment lined baking sheet and stick them in the refrigerator and

then all you have to do is pull them out right before you're ready to eat and fry them up

for your guest. All right, our pan's ready and we're fixing to drop these little jewels in and just ever

so gently saute them in the mixture of oil and butter. You can see that they're starting

to sizzle. And we're going to cook these probably about three to four minutes on each side

If we had our pan too hot, it would not allow the inside to cooking because remember we

got a raw egg in here. So we want it to cook completely through, but we don't want it burning

because then you just have a cooked outside and a raw inside, so we want to avoid that

But these are just doing marvelous. All right, these have been cooking for about three minutes

so we're going to start turning them. Look at that beautiful brown color that we have

How delicious does that look? There are so many different crab recipes

but I think we've got a winner today. I don't think Martha's going to let us down

Our cakes are ready now. I'm going to take them up and just put them on some paper towel

and let them drain just for a second before I move them to the platter

These turned out a beautiful, beautiful golden brown today. All we need now is our dill sauce, and we're ready to eat

So y'all stick around because when we come back, and speaking of back, I'm going to show you how to back a Savannah blue crab

So come back. All right, I've got the crabs now

I'm just going to pour them over into the sink. I'm going to let these cool for just a minute

because I want to show you how to back them and remove what we call the devil's finger

And then after we get them backed and cleaned, we going to bathe them in out garlic butter sauce Talking about messy and sticky but they going to be heavenly Now when I refer to backing a crab

I'm talking about taking it out of its shell. We're going to start by lifting this piece

in the back of the crab. We're going to just pop it out, and that allows us to get to his house that he lives in

Look at all the wonderful juice that comes out of him. And you'll see these spongy little things right here

In Savannah, we refer to these as the devil's fingers. You don't want to eat those

So I'm just going to take those off, and they come off relatively easy. And then we're going to pinch this little part off right here

and then we're just going to remove this insides that's not located in the membrane of the crab

The meat is inside the body of the crab, all in here

This is where your lump meat comes from. Now, at this point, I'm going to snap him in two

because when we go to give him his bath, he'll just be easier for me to handle

You can see that cleaning a crab is very, very simple. This is actually the easy part

The hard part, the work, is when you go in there to get that scrumptious meat

Now while I'm getting these ready for the pot, I'm going to drop some butter in and let it be melting

We're getting their bath all ready. And look how nice and big these crabs are

Now we've got our butter going, and we're going to put plenty of fresh garlic in

A lot of people say that blue crab are just too much work, but they are certainly worth every bit of the effort

In fact, I think the meat is probably sweeter than lobster. We just can't get enough of these in Savannah

So our butter is melted, and we're going to just drop these in. I'm going to sprinkle them with just a little white wine and a little lemon

And we're going to sprinkle them with a little fresh parsley. Looks fabulous, doesn't it

A little black pepper. And remember, I've already steamed our crabs, so they're cooked

All we want them to do is stay in this skillet long enough to soak up the butter and the garlic

which won't take long. We are going to give that wine, though, long enough to dissipate into our pan

I'm gonna sprinkle these now with just a little bit of salt

This is another one of those fun, fun foods to eat with friends and family

I'm just gonna pour them onto the platter. And I'm gonna sprinkle them with a little Obey

just because I just love the taste of that. It gives it such a nice flavor

I'm gonna just serve it with a little French bread and an icy cold beer

And when we come back, I'm going to tell you what I do with their shells. So stick around

I'll see you in a minute. Before I leave today

I want to share just a couple of things with you about crabs. The most important rule of seafood is always store it properly

This goes for crab, shrimp, oyster, scallops, any of your seafoods, when you store them in your refrigerator, make sure they sit in a bowl of ice

And another thing I want to share with you that I do that I just have fun with them

After I've backed the crab, I'll boil these out and sterilize them

And then I put them around the house in baskets. And when I'm ready to make my devil crab, I just go to my basket, rinse my shells out, and stuff them

And then we've got fresh deviled crab. And it's so much prettier in these than the tinfoil things

Our tray of blue crabs bathed in the garlic butter completes our menu today

We've got our crab dip over here waiting on us. These yummy crab cakes with a lemon dill sauce, thanks to my friend Martha

And we've got a crab bisque, an easy three-minute dish. There's not an easy way to eat these crabs

So before we go, I'm going to show you the way that I found best

But we're going to pick them up and break them at the joints

Look at that beautiful white crab meat. Mmm. So this does require a little work

but it's well worth every bit of the work. Until next time, America, happy crabbing

and best dishes from my kitchen to yours