The Viral Trick For Getting Crab Leg Meat Out Of The Shell In One Tap

Extracting the delicate meat from crab legs is something of a Herculean task. Different means of poking and prodding, cutting and cracking offer pros and cons, but most techniques end up tearing or shredding the meat. Since dipping a whole crab leg in clarified lemon butter is often the goal, demolishing leg segments is less than ideal. Fortunately, there's a pretty straightforward save making the rounds on social media. Though it requires a little practice, the technique–highlighted by Joshua Weissman, aka FlakeySalt on TikTok, boils down (pun intended) to giving each prepared leg section a good hard tap. This forces the meat from the shell like sliding a straw from its paper.

The hack is most useful on regular-sized crabs like Dungeness, where a traditional seafood cracker may be too destructive. Those tools are still great options for easily cracking open large king crab legs. But with softer or smaller legs, seafood crackers tend to bust everything up into a mess. Instead, using kitchen scissors, cut the ends off each leg segment. Weismann then holds the leg vertically in one hand, rapping hard against the base of his open palm on the other hand, forcing meat from the shell in one whole piece. He claims it works every time, and it seems to. It also helps to make certain your crab legs are perfectly steamed each time, so they're firm and loose inside the shell.

Start by snapping each segment of each leg apart at the joints. Success comes from cutting both ends of a segment about a half-inch in from the joint. The goal is to remove any tapered parts of the shell, creating an open-ended tube. This is more important on the exit end, but cutting the opposite end helps loosen the meat. Squeezing the shell a bit helps loosen the meat even more. It also seems to work best on the larger middle crab leg sections than either the uniquely shaped claws or tiny end segments.

While rapping one hand against the other works well, it can lead to sore knuckles, especially when practicing or serving up a lot of legs. Consider placing a folded towel on top of a wood block or the edge of a counter, and banging against that instead. Wearing padded gloves or banging your hand against your forearm can also work. If you opt to boil your crab in beer for more flavor, remember that hot liquid may have filled the shells. You'll want to be a bit more careful both while cutting the legs open and banging them against your hand.