Hairy Crab!!

Now, I’ve always been an avid fan of food, so the other day when my dad said let’s go eat “Hairy Crab”, I thought he meant a crab with a shell that looked like hair. Little did I know he meant a crab that was REALLY hairy. Seriously. I mean, crabs don’t have any hair follicles, so how’d THAT happen??

Anyways, we went to some classy restaurant called Ah Yat in Avenue K, and the “Hairy Crab” special course was only about RM99 per person. (which is why dining with parents is always a good thing…) So, I’ll skip the other meals and just tell you about the star meal. First of all, you need tools to eat a Hairy Crab:

Apparently the Hairy Crab is a delicacy in China and is only available during the winter time for only 2 months in a year. They can only be found in Yangcheng Lake which is why they cost so much. But if you read up about them in Wikipedia you’ll see that the ORIGINAL Hairy Crabs of China have long disappeared and what I ate was actually a Japanese subspecies. But what the hey, I’m not one to complain. Anyways, here is the infamous, Hairy Crab:

Notice the dark bits under the claw? That’s the hairy bit. It’s legs are also hairy and sort of resemble the hairs in my armpit. heh. The crab is about the size of a fist and looks kinda chunky. Anyways, what happened next was the manager came, put on some gloves and cut the poor fella up into smaller and seperate pieces. So it ended up looking like this when he served me:

It’s kinda freaky actually. I swear its like the crab is still alive and its staring at me asking, “Why me? What did I ever do to you? I was just minding my own business in a little lake somewhere and someone just picked me up and there you are, about to eat me. Please don’t eat me!”

Not that I’m heartless or anything, but, Yummy. One should start from the inside, suck up all that orange goo and add some vinegar for the other bits. The rest of the night was spent cutting, digging and sucking every but of meat from the little bugger. Honestly, it tasted a little like eggs…. and creamy crab meat. Hard to explain but it really was different from the usual crab I’ve eaten.

So these are the hairy bits that make the Hairy Crab. Like most women in China, these crabs also find no reason to shave. All natural baby….

And so, finally after a 30 minute battle to squeeze every bit of crab meat out, I reached the end of the meal. Now, the crab meat is apparently very “cooling” (lotsa Ying) so you have to replenish that with something heaty. (some Yang!) So you gotta end it all with some ginger tea.

And that was my little culinary education about some fine dining Chinese style. Was pretty interesting, but alot of hard work for a small critter. Still, it was pretty worth it. If you guys wanna try it out, better hurry over to Ah Yat. As of yesterday, there were only 20 crabs left!

~ by fooman on November 20, 2007.