How do you quickly kill a crab and clean out its innards?

Crabs in water mainly feed on rotting small shrimp, small fish and the like, so both their body surface and their insides contain a large amount of bacterial toxins, and they must be cleaned thoroughly before eating. So how do you quickly kill a crab? And how do you clean out the innards properly?

How do you quickly kill a crab?

1. Take a chopstick and poke it straight in between the crab's two eyes, then give it a slight turn outward, so the crab appears dead but its flesh still keeps the fresh, springy, bouncy texture it has when alive.

2. The edges on the left and right sides of the crab are its most fragile and soft parts; you can brace the crab against the edge of a table to lever off its shell.

3. After prying off the shell, clean away the digestive gland sticking to the center of the shell.

Great little tips for cleaning the mess inside a crab's stomach!

(1) Soak in salt water

Live crabs bought from the market should first be rinsed clean of surface dirt with plain water, then soaked for a while in lightly salted water, which makes the crab spit out the dirty matter in its stomach. During soaking, be sure to change the water often, until the water the crab spits out is clean. Then pinch its back with your hand, hold it suspended near the edge of a plate, and let its two claws just grip the rim of the plate.

(2) Soak in baijiu

Let the crab soak in liquor for 5—10 minutes for a thorough bath. The stimulation of the liquor makes it expel the waste from its body, and the baijiu can also stun the crab drunk. The liquor removes the crab's fishy smell and also stops the crab from struggling, making the following steps easier. Of course, if you do not have baijiu at home, you can scald it unconscious with 45°C warm water. If the water is too hot, the crab's legs and claws will drop off - anyone who has boiled crabs will surely have noticed this - and this way you will not scald the crab to death outright, which would affect its nutrition and taste. Put the crab into the warm water for about 3-5 minutes, and once the crab stops moving, that is enough.

How to clean a crab's innards:

(1) Remove the stomach: located in the front half of the crab shell, it contains mud or not, and it is where bacteria grow and multiply. The crab stomach is commonly called the “crab monk”, namely a small triangular bony packet at the center of the front edge of the back shell, containing dirty sand.

(2) Remove the intestine: located in the middle of the crab's apron, appearing as a black line.

(3) Remove the crab heart: located in the middle of the crab roe. The crab heart is extremely cooling in nature and hexagonal in shape, also called “hexagonal flesh”; it sits at the center of the crab, under a black membrane, and when eating you can pick it out with the tip of a crab leg.

(4) Remove the gills: two rows of soft, spongy things growing on the crab's abdomen like eyebrows, also called “crab tripe”. On both sides of the crab's body, they carry relatively many pathogenic bacteria and contaminants.

Tips: The parts above are both dirty and of no edible value, so never chew through them carelessly, lest you cause food poisoning.

If a crab is not thoroughly cleaned before eating, eating it is bad for your health, and cleaning the crab's innards in particular needs to be even more meticulous. Below let us look at how to clean a crab's innards, the three major steps of cleaning a crab.

Step two of cleaning a crab: scrubbing the crab

Once the crab has spat out the contaminants in its stomach, it is time to start washing the crab with water. When scrubbing, be careful not to turn the water flow on too strong, and scrub the crab with a toothbrush, applying force as you brush.

The specific steps for scrubbing a crab:

(1) First scrub both sides of the crab's body, the back, the abdomen and the mouth, then scrub the bases of the crab legs and claws.

(2) The crab's apron is a part that needs special attention, because the apron holds a lot of contaminants and excrement. Before cleaning, you should first squeeze out the excrement from the apron, then use a brush to scrub the dirt off the apron.

(3) Finally scrub the crab claws, then rinse with clean water and it is done.