Lata serves his soft shells with an herb-and-radish salad and a briny tartar sauce.Caliber Car Wash is honored to participate in this year’s Blue Crab Festival hosted in Palatka, Florida, from Friday, May 27 through Sunday, May 29. The chance for creativity comes from the accompanying ingredients. His pan-fried soft-shell crabs are dredged in Old Bay seasoned corn meal before he gently cooks them in copious amounts of bubbling butter until they are golden brown. Like Harvey, The Ordinary's Chef Mike Lata thinks soft shells should not be fussed with too much. This will give the crabs their characteristic crunch and leave their delicate flavor intact.
Harvey recommends coating the crabs with flour before searing them in a hot pan. He affirms, "The best way to cook soft shells is to pan-sear them." He prefers pan-frying, but others like them deep-fried. No stranger to cooking seafood, Harvey was formerly a chef at Jasper White's Summer Shack in Cambridge, Massachusetts before devoting his life completely to the seafood industry. If you talk to any chef or crab connoisseur, they will tell you the correct way to enjoy soft-shell crabs is to fry them. They have to be careful, however, not to wait too long, or the shells will become too crunchy to enjoy eating.
Crabbers often let the shells harden just a little before processing so that they won't die.
The other difficulty, according to Harvey, is that when crabs molt, they are "extremely fragile." When handled almost immediately after molting, many soft shells do not make it to their destination alive. Because this whole process relies on nature taking its course, it is almost impossible for crab fishers to plan when they will have crabs to sell. When crabs have molted, they are taken out of the tanks to be handled and packed. The harvesters have to rely on their own observation to determine when the crabs start peeling. Instead, they harvest crabs as normal and keep them in saltwater tanks where they can monitor their progress. They cannot forage the ocean looking for crabs that have just molted. harvesters are experimenting with harvesting soft-shell green crabs, but none are commercially available yet (via ).įor soft shells, crabbers have to take extra steps to ensure the crabs are harvested at the right time. Green crabs are an invasive species that has been decimating other local sea life from eelgrass to Dungeness crab (via NOAA Fisheries). green crab industry is trying to break into the soft-shell market. A Venetian specialty, "moeche " are molted green crab, a native European species (via Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity). Harvey expounds that the rising U.S. Italy has a long-standing tradition of harvesting soft shells, but they are a completely different species. Soft-shell crabs are not unique to the United States, however. They also have lots of meat on their bodies, giving them an appealing experience.
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Blue crabs are, "More easily attainable in volume, and the industry has pinpointed how to predict when they will molt," Harvey notes. According to Max Harvey, blue crabs have certain characteristics that make harvesting them a worthwhile venture compared to other crustaceans. Although found along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico, blue crabs are probably most known as a Maryland specialty. Like any crustacean, all crabs molt, but only blue crabs are commercially sold as soft shells in the United States.
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