Northwest Fishing Reports

is it better to cook the crab first before freezing? and how long beforfe it gets bad?

I say cook it first. Freeze it in either a vacuum seal bag or in a freezer ziplock in water or milk.
I had some dungeness that I'd frozen in a tuperware container and 6 months later it smelled like ammonia (sign that the crab has gone bad). A guy I know told me to freeze it in milk. I thought it was weird, but froze a couple of cups of meat in milk. Over a year later I opened it up expecting it to be nasty, thawed, rinsed and drained and it tasted great. Could have been a fluke, but it seemed to work. I have a vacuum sealer now, so will try that in the future.
Would like to hear of other people's opinions on this.

I've vacuum sealed many different types of seafood and meats and have had positive results with all of them. If you want a higher quality product that lasts for a good long time pre-freeze your seafood and ice glaze it before sealing. This will help prevent freezer burn, if there are any pockets of air left in the bag, and it also stops the vacuum from squishing your product during the sealing process.

This is what I do:

Cook and clean all my extra crab (de-shell)
Fill tupper-ware 3/4 full of crab meat.
Pour in SALTWATER. (better to have to much salt than not enough)
Make sure crab meat is TOTALLY covered, with no meat sticking out of water.
put on lid, freeze. lasts for months with no freezer burn.

Vacuum sealer works good to, I have just found it easier to deal with plastic containers than bags. (ie less problem with air pockets).

Just make sure you freeze your cooked crab in saltwater, and you should be good....

I've tried freezing traditional cooked crab legs, and it just isn't the same. Air pockets in the legs and the meat seems to stick to the shell more after freezing whole.

What do you mean "pre-freeze" and "ice glaze" G-man??

It's a neat little trick and you may notice that when you buy packaged fish or chicken products is has a coating of ice on it. What you do is quick freeze the item you want to glaze, I usually put it on a tray next to the cold air outlet of the freezer. Then you get yourself a tub of water, I salt mine a bit, and then you quickly dip the frozen items in the tub and place them back on the tray. The frozen item should quickly freeze the water clinging its surface, you can repeat the process to get a thicker coating. Essentially your doing the same thing as freezing the item in a tub of water, it just saves room and lets you take just the portion you need for dinner.

Our packaging process for a year's supply of dungies is to cook them in native seawater as soon as we land the boat. These crab are literally going from livewell to cooker in 30 minutes or less. Put on your boil based on the number of crab in the pot (everyone is different), then pull them, cool with running tapwater, and clean to your personal preference. We usually leave half on the shell and half get cleaned. The cleaned ones get eaten fresh or soon, and the shell-on crab are left for later on. Leaving the shell tends to preserve meat moisture really well in our case, but we don't typically vac seal the pointy little buggers. Vac packs haven't worked well, so we use zippered freezer bags, and double bag the crab that are going to wait for a long time before being eaten.



We crab in Oregon instead of Wa because the fishery is more stable, limits are much higher (12/pp/day), and pressure tends to be lower. Also, we crab in November when weather reduces pressure further and commercial crabbers haven't been given the green light yet.

The result? BIG CRAB





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Oh crap....now look what you've done...now I'm hungry for crab AGAIN!!! (lol)