What makes one person’s crabmeat better than another’s?
When Donna Bridges closed her Sunshine crab processing business this past spring, after 21 years, some customers went into mourning. “You were spoiled once you tried Donna’s,” said Robert Dick, of Castine. “She’s justly famous.” Other customers felt put out. One called several times to say she couldn’t understand why Donna couldn’t pick her a pound or two.
It’s not that simple. Crab processing is done mostly by lobstermen’s wives because crabs are a by-product of lobster fishing – the creatures crawl into lobster traps, lured by the bait. The trapped crabs are held in crates that when full, hold 100 pounds. Crabs are, therefore, processed in approximately hundred-pound batches because of the effort involved, not the least of which is compliance with government public health regulations. Scouring and bleaching the mammoth cooking pot, bleaching the floor and anything the processor has touched, having one sink for hand washing alone, a second for washing the dishes used in processing and a third for rinsing and sterilizing them is just the beginning.
Regulations require that the processor have a separate room for cooking, a place for cooling down the cooked crabs, and a refrigerator in which to keep the picked meat.
Picking crabmeat is a complex process with an average monetary reward to the processor of $9 to-$10 per pound depending on the buyer.
Food historian and Working Waterfront columnist Sandra Oliver, of Islesboro, says Maine’s peekytoe crabs are very hard and brittle, unlike the soft-shell crabs of the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
“It’s really easy to end up with little chips,” she said. “You have to be careful there’s no scrap in them.” After that, Oliver said, it’s a matter of how a crab processor cooks the product and how soon the crabs are cooked after leaving ocean water. And here is where the individual crab processor has his or her own method or recipe to attain the finest taste and quality. Oliver said her nephew is a sternman who cooks his crabs within an hour of their leaving the water. When she and her family cook crabs for their own use, Oliver said, “I think salty water – clean, salt water – is best.” As for commercial pickers, she said, “Nobody does it anymore: it’s such hard work, and there are a lot of regulations.”
Ingrid Bengis, of Ingrid Bengis Seafood, in Stonington, buys Deer Isle crabmeat for some of the finest restaurants in the country. Chefs like John Georges Vongerichten and Thomas Keller insist on the best. Bengis sells them crabmeat processed by Tina Gray and Sonia Bunt, of Little Deer Isle, and from Reynold Hardie, of Sunset, a part of Deer Isle. She noted that shedder quality crabmeat is not as good as hard-shell quality and that she uses only hard-shell crab product. “Crabmeat is a very mysterious thing,” Bengis said. “There are a number of factors involved.”
Some processors boil the crabs at night, cool them overnight, and pick in the morning. Some boil in the morning, cool quickly, and pick shortly thereafter. Some cook the crabs longer than others; some steam their crabs.
It’s also a question of getting out all the pieces of shell and cartilage. Bengis said, “It’s critical for restaurants that the crabmeat be clean because they could be sued.”
Then, too, Bengis noted that the meat should be removed in such a way that it’s not in shreds and that the solid meat from the first knuckle of the leg, placed in the shape of a star on the top of the meat in the container, should be clean.
“The quality of crab very much depends on how it is drained,” Bengis said, explaining that when the crab is shelled, the meat is put into a strainer. She said some people squeeze the crabmeat to get the juices out, but that squeezes out the flavor. Some let the juices drip out of the strainer, and some leave their crabmeat wet. “The ideal,” she said, “is moist, but not liquidy. You shouldn’t see any liquid in the bottom of the container.”
As for adding salt, sugar, herbs or spices, Bengis says there shouldn’t be any, and if there are, they should be noted on the container because they are additives.
There’s an art to crab processing, in a way, and there are various methods of achieving the finest result.
Tina Gray has been processing crab for 21 years. She used to do it in her house, but built her own separate building 13 years ago, well before the federal Food and Drug Administration’s Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) regulations came into effect.
The main room is a 16-by-20-foot kitchen. The floor is cement, the walls and ceiling are tiled for easy wash-down. A small stainless steel hand-washing sink is to the left of a counter with scales and plastic containers stacked above. Beyond the counter is a big double sink used for washing and rinsing crab picking utensils. To the right of another counter is a refrigerator and to the right of that is a small, tidy desk. The room looks spare and professional. Gray works at a 4-by-8-foot-long fiberglass table built by her husband, Matt Eaton. Large enough for four pickers, it has four circular 4-inch diameter holes cut in it for shell disposal. On top of the refrigerator is a television set. Off the main room is a split 8-by-12-foot room for cooking and for cooling the cooked crabs.
Two of Gray’s tools are unique: her cooker and her crab-picker. She and Matt took the cooker design from a galvanized zinc washtub, with its sides that splay out from the base. She couldn’t use a washtub because of regulations, she said, explaining, “The material breaks down.” So they took a sheet of stainless steel and made their own. Wiley Eaton designed her angled crab-picking tool from the head of a lobster trap, called the funny-eye. The tool looks like a combination of a dentist’s tool and an undecorated Indian crooked knife, with a screwdriver for a blade.
Gray likes what she does, but said after 21 years of it, she no longer loves it; she’s tired of it. And with good reason. Her day starts at 4 a.m. when she and Matt get up. By five, he is headed for the beach to bring back yesterday’s catch of crabs. By 5:15 she has the crabs steaming in one-half inch of plain, fresh water. Thirty-five to forty minutes later, depending on how full the cooker is, she removes the crabs and dips them up and down four or five times in cold water in a washtub before draining them. “In my point of view,” she said, “it separates the meat from the shell.” By 7 a.m., after the crabs have cooled a bit, she breaks the first crab shell with a stainless steel mallet, takes up her crab-picker, and starts removing the meat. She stays at it until between 2 or 3 p.m., giving her not much of a break before her younger kids come home from school. Her 20 year-old daughter, Tiffany, works with her the three days a week she’s not attending college in Bangor.
Gray’s friend and neighbor, Sonia Bunt, has also picked crab for 21 years. Although the two have known each other all their lives, were best friends in school, and raised their children together, their cooking methods differ – though minutely. Bunt said, “If you go to a hundred pickers, each one will do it differently.” She has five sinks, but only uses four.
Bunt and her husband, Robert, pick up the crabs he has trapped the day before, load them into their homemade stainless steel cooker within 20 minutes, and steam them for exactly 16 minutes after the water returns to the boil. Bunt said her husband helps with the cooking part of the operation because there’s a lot of lifting, tugging and pulling. They use a block and tackle rigged on the ceiling to lift the crabs into the pot and from the pot to a cooling tub. After the crabs have cooled for 15 to 20 minutes, she starts to pick, dishpanful by dishpanful, using a stainless steel lobster pick. She uses the round end only. Her husband covered most of the pick with a piece of rubber hose to make the grip easier and avoid carpal tunnel syndrome.
“The picking is the easiest part,” Bunt said. “Going to the dump [to dispose of the empty shells]; picking up around the dooryard, making sure there are no shells lying around; bleaching the buckets, baskets, everything; washing the floor and walls; making up the bleach solution for sterilizing you have to cook – it takes more than an hour to clean up every day.”
Bridges had a different system and her set-up was in her basement. She started at 1:30 in the morning and boiled her crab, her timing based on the time of the year. She said it takes longer in winter because the water is colder. After she’d placed the crabs in boiling water and the water had returned to a boil, the cooking time averaged 15 to 20 minutes. After a brief cooling period, she started picking, and by 9 a.m. was ready to start making her deliveries.
Reynold Hardie, who says he’s picked crab on and off all his 60 years, has managed to simplify the system within the law. He picks up the crabs himself most mornings, cooks them outside right away in a big potato kettle, the kind used in the military, washes his hands in the bathroom sink, and picks his crab in the kitchen. He boils his crabs for 15 minutes, according to state law. “It’s supposed to be 200 degrees when you get done,” he said. He picks the meat from the shells using a regular stainless steel kitchen knife. He said the meat doesn’t pick out well if the crabs are boiled at night and picked in the morning.
His cooling room is his refrigerator. He puts his picked crab in the fridge and lets the crabmeat drip into a bowl. There’s no set time for that, he said. “As long as they’re decent crabs, not new-shell crabs, not that much juice comes out of them.”
Considering all the hard work and compliance with HACCP regulations that go into producing crabmeat and what crab-processors earn for their effort, it’s easy to understand why Bridges would say, “All for two pounds of crabmeat? I’d pick soda bottles up first.”