Chili crab vs spicy crab

Like any good Oregonian, I love Dungeness crab.  When I was little, my mom's side of the family would go to our beach house and order a case of cooked whole crab.  We'd spread newspapers over picnic tables outside dump the crab on top with some loaves of sourdough bread.  We'd crack and eat our crab dinner, and when we were done, you just roll up the crab shells in the newspaper and put the whole thing in the garbage.

The best piece of crab meat is if you can get one of the claws out whole.  If you do manage to get a whole claw out, and then you give it to someone else, it's the ultimate sign of love.  I remember how sweet and special it was when my grandpa Choo Choo would give me a claw.

So I love crab.  And I love spicy food.

Asians know seafood and spice better than anyone.  It's like spicy shellfish heaven here.

When Agnes and I first met up, we decided to have lunch at a place called Spicy Crab.  The menu was only in Chinese, and none of the wait staff spoke much English, but with such a promising name, we decided to make it work anyways.  Between trying to find some of the characters in Pleco (a helpful but tremendously confusing and poorly designed app), and resorting to just walking around the restaurant and pointing at other people's dishes, we were able to order a small bowl of spicy crab and shrimp, medium spicy.

This is what we got.  A pretty darn big bowl of smallish crab cut into quarters (I think they were mud crabs which are common here, but I'm not sure), shrimp, young bamboo shoots, peanuts, celery some fat little Shanghai noodles and LOTS of dried Sichuan chilies.

It was delicious, but we had to work hard for our meal.  The prawns and crab required a lot of work to get to the meat.  And the crab meat really stuck to the shell, so you had to scrape the flesh off with your teeth.  I think we both ended up eating a fair amount of shell, but hey, it's fiber, right?  I would love to try to recreate this dish at home with Dungeness crab and larger prawns.  And those chewy Shanghai noodle bits were like chewy gnocchi and soaked up all the chili oil. 

Since the Spicy Crab lunch, I had been wanting to try a famous Singaporean dish called chili crab.  Jumbo Seafood is a small chain of Singaporean seafood restaurants with an award-winning chili crab dish.  I started talking about it when I was working late on a pitch, and I got my co-workers excited too.  We decided to go together on a lunch date when we were done with the pitch.  So last Friday, eight of us went to iapm (my favorite mall in the world) to put the hurt on some seafood.  When you walk into the restaurant, you're flanked by giant fish tanks with tons of live seafood, so you know it's going to be really really fresh.  

First, let's talk about the chili crab.  It comes in a chili sauce that's actually a kind of sweet (I think Singaporean food is generally pretty sweet), and you scoop up the sauce with these little fried buns (pictured in the background).  They give you plastic gloves, crab shell crackers and your chopsticks, and you go after it.  It's very messy, so I didn't take any pictures.  All these photos are stolen borrowed from the Jumbo Seafood website.  The internet is great when you do a sloppy job of preparing to blog about your food.

 We also got a black pepper crab, which was really good too.  I don't normally love a lot of black pepper, but this was nice.  I think I appreciated having something that was less sweet.

 We had salted egg golden prawns, which sounds weird, and it kind of was.  The egg coating was a little bit powdery and grainy.  Like maybe it was sieved egg yolks?  It probably tastes better than my description makes it seem, but I wouldn't choose to order it again.

And we had the (unfortunately named) donut with seafood paste.  These were really good.  It was basically a fish stick, but if your fish stick was coated in savory donut batter and sesame seeds.  You dipped it into a sesame, soy sauce, garlic dip.  I would eat these over a Gordon's fish stick every time.

 We also got a steak stir fry, some scallops and broccoli in a translucent sauce, and a few orders of Haianese chicken rice (more about that famous dish in another post).  And whole coconuts to drink from.  I never saw the bill since the account people expensed it, but I know it wasn't cheap.  It was a really nice sign of appreciation after working over a holiday weekend on the pitch.

So which dish won the spicy crab vs chili crab faceoff?  I like the flavor of spicy crab better, but I liked the kind of crab used for the chili crab and the Jumbo Seafood dining experience better.  Maybe we'll just have to make both dishes with Dungeness crab when I get back to Portland, and you guys can decide for youself.  I'm pretty sure I can find young bamboo shoots at Fubon market.

Here are some links to a couple of promising-looking chili crab recipes if you want to start experimenting in the meantime.
Serious Eats recipe 
Tyler Florence recipe

Enjoy, and next time I see you, I'll happily give you a whole crab claw.