Buying crab off the boat in San Francisco

Fresh off the boat Dungeness crab from Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

On my February trip to San Francisco I was able to buy a live Dungeness crab directly off the fishing boat at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is news: first because the crab season is frequently curtailed by insufficient breeding stock (this winter it didn’t begin till the end of December) and second because direct sales from boat to consumer weren’t allowed before last year.

Delivery of my crab off the boat at Pier 45.

I purchased my crab from Shawn Chen Flading, who docks right next to The Grotto at Pier 45. I could have found two other crab boats by proceeding further down the pier, or the previous day I could have purchased from Fv Plumeria Matt Juanes, who docks next to Scoma’s Restaurant on Pier 47. The quality of crabs is identical as is the price, currently a reasonable $8 per pound. I brought my crab back to my kitchen-equipped hotel room at Ghirardelli Square and popped it into the refrigerator till I was able to cook it a few hours later by steaming for 7 ½ minutes per pound.

This video has great tips for humanely dispatching crabs, cooking them and harvesting the meat, from a chef who used to prep 80 of them a day in a fine dining restaurant. I didn’t watch it beforehand so missed out on her tip for dispatching the crab with a whack to its nerve center, but the time in the fridge put mine in a comatose state so it did not react when it hit the steamer (steaming not boiling to produce more flavorful meat). A few tips:

–use a blunt object (in my case a jar of pasta sauce) rather than a cracker to get at the claws, because the cracker is more likely to break shell off into the meat.

–use the tip of one of the pinchers to poke out the meat that lurks in knuckle joints.

–don’t worry about the very small amount of meat in the smaller leg pieces because you are going to make CRAB STOCK.

My crab yielded maybe 12 oz of delicious meat (with a bit of shell mixed in).

That’s right, crab stock. After I finished the meat picking process I discarded the gnarly bits and used the shell fragments and little legs to make an intense stock that was employed to make a cioppino with much of the crab plus some other seafood. Cooked it down by 50% over an hour, strained through a towel, and the result was delicious.

When I was in college, I would come to San Francisco on school breaks and buy a cooked crab and a loaf of sourdough bread from one of several sidewalk vendors outside the restaurants on Fisherman’s Wharf. The crab came with a setup of cocktail sauce and lemon juice and I would sit on the seawall overlooking Aquatic Park and eat the crab along with the bread dipped in the sauce. It was a treat at the time but cocktail sauce is way too blunt an instrument for this sweet, delicate meat.

Dungeness crab meat is special because of the complex flavor it offers without any adornment, after feasting on various objects found on the ocean floor washed down with mineral sea water. This crab was alive on the boat at 10, in my refrigerator by 1045, in the steam pot around 6 pm and on my plate by 10 the next morning. Technically you could cut a few hours off but this was full of briny flavor without any dilution from longer storage.

I sampled it unadorned (fantastic), with drawn butter (maybe even better) and with Meyer lemon juice and a butter/lemon juice combo (too complicated and a distraction from the native flavor of the meat). My 2+ pound crab yielded maybe 12 oz of pure crab satisfaction (with a tiny bit of shell mixed in).

If you’d like to enjoy a similar crabbing experience, your first step should be joining the San Francisco off the boat sales Pier 45 and Pier 47 Group on Facebook. This is where the crabbers post their schedules for the week. (During season there’s nearly always somebody there Friday, Saturday and Sunday and possibly in the middle of the week.) The group also offers tips like this from Matt Juanes on cleaning your crab. It’s a fine experience on many levels and one of the marvels of San Francisco that real commercial fishing boats ply their trade within a few yards of the tourist shops of Fisherman’s Wharf.