One of the joys of being on the West Coast is the availability and relative ease of catching the sweet fleshed Dungeness Crab. Our restaurants specialize in cooking this delicacy in a number of ways and if you are so inclined, you can drop a crab trap baited with just about any type of smelly bait into the waters off our coast and return a couple of hours later to find a number of these crustaceans waiting to be cooked for dinner. These crabs aren't picky. They will go after rotten bacon, fish heads, open tins of sardines or chunks of chicken. All you need is a crab tag from a fishing supply store and away you go!These crabs can grow to dinner plate size (around nine inches) but regulations state that they must have a body diameter of at least 6.5 inches. Furthermore, you cannot harvest any female crabs in order to assure the ongoing viability of the species. Your friendly fishing store staff will tell you how to tell the difference between males and females (there is a slight difference in the shape of the underside of the shell) and will also supply you with a cheap measuring tool to make sure you are within legal size limits. You can confuse the Dungie with a Red Rock Crab which is also quite abundant but Red Rock Crabs have dark claw tips and the Dungeness has light coloured slender tips. Red Rocks aren’t quite as good.
There of course, are a lot of different recipes for this species which for years was used almost solely for canning purposes. Fresh is better because of the sweet tender body meat and the silky smooth and slightly firmer claw meat.