Key takeaways
- Almost all the edible meat is in the legs and claws. The body carries relatively little compared with a common crab.
- Boiled or steamed briefly and served with butter, bread and lemon. Norwegian practice is to do as little to it as possible.
- Legs are usually served already split along their length, so the meat comes out in one piece rather than in fragments.
- King crab is a lithodid, more closely related to hermit crabs, which is why it has three visible pairs of walking legs rather than four.
Which parts you actually eat
Almost all of it is in the legs. A red king crab has three visible pairs of walking legs and a pair of claws, and those limbs hold the great majority of the meat. The body carries comparatively little worth the effort, which is a real difference from a brown crab where the body meat is a large part of the point.
That is why king crab is nearly always sold and served as legs and clusters rather than whole. It also explains the shape of a meal: what arrives is a pile of split shells with long pieces of white meat inside them, rather than something you pick apart looking for pockets.
Why it is not really a crab
A small point of natural history that changes how you look at the animal. King crabs are lithodids, and the evidence suggests they descend from hermit crab ancestors that abandoned the borrowed shell and evolved a hardened body of their own. That is why you count three pairs of walking legs rather than the four a true crab has: the last pair is reduced and tucked away under the shell.
It also explains the asymmetry you may notice if you look at a whole animal closely, a legacy of an ancestor that spent its life curled into a spiral shell. None of this affects how it tastes, and all of it makes the thing in front of you considerably more interesting.
How it is cooked here
Briefly and plainly, which is the whole Norwegian approach to shellfish. Boiled or steamed for a short time in well-salted water, and then served with melted butter, good bread and lemon. That is essentially it, and the restraint is deliberate rather than lazy.
The reason is that king crab has a specific delicate sweetness that a strong sauce simply erases. The meat is firm, closer in texture to lobster than to brown crab, and far less briny than most shellfish. Anything assertive competes with it and wins, which is not what you want when you have gone to the trouble of pulling one out of a fjord.
Split king crab legs served with butter and lemon
Opening a leg
Easier than the armour suggests, and the reason is that somebody has usually done the hard part already. Legs are typically served split lengthways along the shell, which means the meat can be lifted out in one long piece rather than excavated.
The technique is to work the meat out whole rather than picking at it. The knuckle joints are where resistance lives, and bending the joint frees them. What you should not do is attack it like a lobster claw needing to be cracked; it is a much more cooperative animal than it looks, and the spikes are for defence rather than for making your life difficult.
What it tastes like
Sweeter and cleaner than people expect. If your reference point is brown crab, this is a long way from that: less of the strong marine flavour, none of the richness of brown meat, and a firmer bite that pulls apart in fibres more like lobster than like crab.
That cleanness is why it carries butter so well and why over-seasoning ruins it. It is also why a great many people who think they do not much like crab turn out to like this. Eating it an hour after it came out of the water, which is the situation on the boat, is about as good as the ingredient gets.
Buying it in Tromso
You can, and it is worth doing if the trip left you wanting more. Fishmongers in town and the fish market by the harbour sell king crab both fresh and frozen, and restaurants around Tromso put it on menus in one form or another through the year.
The practical distinction to understand is between fresh and processed. Fresh crab is a same-day proposition and does not travel. Frozen, cooked and vacuum-packed legs are made to be transported and are what most people take home, and they are genuinely good if handled properly.
Taking it home
Possible, with caveats worth checking rather than assuming. Frozen vacuum-packed legs in a sealed pack, kept cold and carried in checked baggage, are the standard way people do it, and shops that sell to visitors will pack for travel if you ask.
What varies is what your destination allows. Rules on importing animal products differ considerably by country and change from time to time, and travelling within the EU or EEA is not the same as arriving from outside it. Check your own country's current rules before you buy rather than discovering the answer at a customs desk with a bag of thawing crab.
One last distinction worth knowing if you go shopping. King crab and snow crab are both landed in northern Norway and both sold as legs, and they are different animals. Snow crab has thinner legs, a slightly sweeter and softer meat, and comes from deeper Barents Sea water. It is very good and it is not the same thing you caught.
