(gentle music)
- Try to be careful 'cause these things
pretend to stay still and they pinch really hard.
It's definitely a funny characteristic of this crab
is that it's pretty pissed off all the time. (chuckles)
We have two specimens of red rock crab.
These are both harvested in Netarts Bay, Oregon
by Captain Kristen Penner.
She's associated with Blue Siren Shellfish
of the fishing vessel, Storm Trooper.
So these are caught in Dungeness crab pots
during bay season only.
These are a bi-catch ingredient of Dungeness crab fishing.
Some locals on the coast will eat these,
but as far as sport and commercial goes,
these are literally an untouched species.
They're just a little bit harder
to pick the meat out of the shell,
which is the only thing I can think of
as to why they're not targeted.
This crab meat has like a tropical flavor to it,
almost like a citrus flavor.
It tastes like it was dressed with grapefruit juice.
It's one of the most exotic tasting
seafoods we've had anywhere.
- It's so nice to have a chef that's willing to
use what other people would just discard and throw away.
- For instance, we were fishing for Dungeness crab today,
and the red rock crab came up in our gear.
There's a lot of traditional recipes that call for them, so.
- In Japan, they have 50 different kinds of crabs
you can find at the live seafood market,
and here, you know, we just kind of stick to
the ones that we know work.
We also just didn't really use Dungeness crab at all
before even though it's available.
We haven't really used it on the menu
until these specific ones became available
just because the story behind it really helps.
That was what Kristen first showed us about them
that was so cool was that,
yeah, there's less meat,
but there's still quite a bit on most of them.
And what ends up happening is that
seawater can get in the shell
and it kind of brines the meat,
so the meat is way more tender and more flavorful.
- They both have sweet meat,
but I feel like the texture of the meat
is slightly different too.
I think it's brinier, and just bitter.
- The red rocks? - Yeah, the red rocks.
They come up in the pots and they're like glowing jewels.
They are just the most stunning. (chuckles)
(gentle violin music)
- So this is a male crab here.
Really similar to stone crab
is that you can see the claws
are almost the size of the rest of the entire body.
There's a wide flap on the bottom of the female,
and a narrow one on the bottom of the male.
Typically, all of these female crabs
are filled with roe this time of year.
We'll steam these for about 12 minutes,
chill them down, pick the claw meat out,
and then we take the roe from the female crab
and make a sauce out of it,
and then that will just get
spooned right over the crab meat, that's it.
It's very simple.
(gentle music)
So, here we have the crabs that are cooked.
We just start by removing
all the legs and claws.
The prize of this crab is the roe from the females.
So, we're gonna remove the flap.
The body is removed from the shell.
It comes right out like that.
And then inside here,
you can sort of just start to pull everything away
and you can see the roe right in there.
This sort of follows the shape of the shell as well.
So there, it comes out just like that,
and then we leave this juice inside here,
'cause that will also be used to make the roe sauce.
Then you have your crab roe,
the body of the crab, flap, legs, claws.
Super umami crab flavor this roe has,
and you can kind of see when you clean it off
that beautiful like coral, bright orange color.
And then the next step after this
is that we would peel these claws.
It's pretty difficult to crack,
so we take a little rubber mallet
and then crack it really lightly,
then you can peel the shell away.
So the male crabs, as you can see,
have much larger claws than the female.
So, this is where we get the majority of our meat.
I should remove those claws, just like before.
And as you can see, just the size difference between the two
is pretty massive.
Even the male crabs have these little
what they call are crab guts, the crab brains,
is that most flavorful part of the crab.
There's no real research done
on how old these crabs are,
and because these aren't commercially harvested,
there can be some down there that have been
living for a very long time.
As opposed to Dungeness crab,
it's healthy fishery but it's rotated a lot.
On this crab you can really tell the age of it.
I mean, that takes a very long time
for barnacles to grow on something like that.
This is a Dungeness crab.
The whole body will come right out.
That's also the amazing thing about these crabs
is just the amount of juice that comes out of them.
I mean that right there,
you can just drink that out of the shell.
It's like amazing.
Yeah, it's epic.
So because it's a new shell, the shell is softer,
so it just twists off like this.
You can just eat the crab.
These are amazing.
They're also really preferred by locals because
you can just mow right through it.
You just eat a whole pile of crabs
without having to do really very much work at all.
God, he's gotta try this.
- [Producer] Sure.
- We're a little bit biased here in Oregon
about Dungeness crab, but,
it's kind of hard to find anything that beats that.
(energetic music)
- This is a standby for us, the pie crust.
We really like making tiny food,
it's one of the fun things
about working in a tasting menu format.
So, we're making our red rock crab pie here.
That just starts with a simple pate brisee, or pie crust.
We kind of underwork it
and then fold it onto itself a few times,
so that creates this kind of like puff pastry
or croissant-like texture.
We just cut out rounds of the pastry
so that we have a nice even shape.
(energetic music)
So these are our pie weights.
We just use these to hold down
the crust as it bakes so that it holds it's shape.
It's called blind-baking sometimes,
and then we remove those
partway through the baking process
so that they can finish cooking through.
- So this is the crab roe.
So this is just the innards from the crab
and the roe that have just been blended together.
We're gonna mix it with some egg yolk
and whisk it over a double boiler.
We're gonna season this with a little bit
of the garum that we make from mackerel.
Let it slowly warm up,
and then we'll continue to stir it more and more
as it starts to thicken when it warms up.
Crab roe is like a major delicacy.
You usually just don't see it in the United States
because it's illegal in certain fisheries
to keep the female crabs.
If these were to be kind of a commercial fishery
for longterm sustainability reasons,
we would not harvest the female crabs.
So as you can see, that just thicken right up.
It lands to a really nice creamy texture,
similar to a Hollandaise,
except that we're not having to add
any fat to this to thicken it,
so we have that pure flavor
from the crab roe sauce.
We have all the components here together
for our red rock crab tart.
This is the meat from the claws that we picked out.
It has a lot of flavor on it's own,
but we season it really lightly
with a little bit of lemon
and some finishing olive oil,
and then also some of that same garum
that we used to season the roe sauce,
sort of just reinforce that flavor.
A little bit of our roe sauce.
It's not the most efficient process.
I think for us, it's a lot more important
to be sourcing these native ingredients.
We're all about the quality of them.
You know, it's worth it.
(energetic music)