Baked Crab with butter, garlic, lime and herbs and served with the crab gravy it’s a simple and yet tasty crab recipe. The simple seasoning and cooking process preserved the natural sweetness of the crab meat. This baked crab recipe is a quicky and too easy recipe that can be prepared a few minutes before the dinner, but i guess this must be a foolproof recipe.
Simple butter garlic baked crab recipe is a kinda runaway dish once you’ve got bored of spicy and kicking dish with a lot of spices and quite an effort to made it. My mom used to bake dunguness or blue swimmer crab once it’s on season, but in a very simple seasoning. My mom seasoned the blue crab with salt and lemon or lime juice, just as simple as that, nothing more added into it. Right after my mom popped out the baked crab, we gathered to enjoy it with spicy chilli sauce or a mixture of chopped birds eye chillies and kecap manis or Indonesian sweet soy sauce.
Oven baked mud crabRecipe is my special flashback childhood memories .Instead using lemon juice, i add jeruk purut or kaffir lime juice for more citrusy and tangy flavour. Some chopped bacon and a mixture of freshly chopped basil and daun kemangi or lemon basil enrich the baked crab. You should try this recipe once you’e tried Stir Fry Crab with Salted Egg Yolk and Cheese Sauce, Steamed Crab Wrapped in Lotus Leaf with Chinese Black Bean Paste, Chilli, and Garlic Sauce, Thai Green Curry Crab, Rice Noodle in Rich & Spicy Crab Curry Soup, and Hot and Spicy Chilli Crab. I guess it’s like you’ve missing your old home bed once you’ve travel around the globe.
The crab gravy is another improvised recipe because i can’t discard the juice that dripped out from the baked crab. I think this would be a nice dipping for the succulent and sweet baked crab meat. I add some roux to make the crab gravy a little bit thicker, then a pinch of the salt and freshly grounded peppercorn added to adjust the taste. This crab gravy is superb even more since i’m browned the butter before i added some flour to made the roux.
I’m using 1.6 kg mud crab from Papua Island, Indonesia. The gigantic crustacean claw is almost as big as my palm (i’m 5’11” or 180 cm heigh and weighed 95 kg or 190 pounds). This male mud crab is pretty big and four of us who joining the dinner got our stomatch fullfilled within it. The verdict of this pricey gigantic male mud crab meat is quite good, the meat is perfectly cooked, succulent with stringy flesh. The flavour is sweet and milder than the smaller crab that i’m used to cook previously, then the crab gravy pairing idea quite works this time. I guess if you craving the best texture and flavour of mud crab, i recommend mud crab weighed about 700 gr to 1.2 kg from my experience
Recipe Butter Garlic Baked Crab with Lime, Bacon, and Herbs:
Ingredients:
- 1.6 kg mud crab (or you can use 3 medium size mud crab each weighed about 500 grams)
- 1 tbsp kaffir lime juice
- 3 cloves garlic, finely minced
- 1 tbsp daun kemangi or lemon basil leaves, finely minced
- 1 tbsp basil leaves, finely minced
- salt and pepper to taste
Instruction:
- Preheat oven on 350–375 °F (180–190 °C)
- Brush and clean the mud crab properly with running water to get rid the muddy aromas
- Season the kaffir lime juice, salt and pepper. set aside
- Meanwhile, mix the butter, garlic, lemon basil and basil leaves in a glass bowl, set aside
- Drain the liquid from the crab, put it in a metal baking tray
- Add the butter mixture all over the crab (you can crack the crab shell a little bit)
- Wrap the baking tray with alumunium foil, bake for about 30 minutes (you need to check the doness for every 10-15 minutes, smaller size crab needed less than 30 minutes)
- Save the dripping liquid in the baking tray for making crab gravy
- Serve it immediately with steaming hot rice and crab cravy
Crab Gravy Recipe :
Ingredients:
- 1 cup baked crab dripping
- 1 tbsp butter
- 1/2 tsp all purpose flour
- salt and pepper to taste
Instruction:
- Heat up and melt the butter in a heavy bottom sauce pan, let it browned a little bit
- Remove from the heat and add the flour, stir occationally
- Put the sauce pan back into the stove, let the flour is throughly cooked and browned a little bit for another 30 second
- Pour the crab dripping and let it boil
- Simmer the crab gravy until thicken