Singaporean Chilli Crab

This is going to be my debut recipe for this blog, like I said I'm not a very good cook so if i can make it all of you out there can definitely succeed. I was buying my weekly groceries at the market on saturday and came across some crabs and thought I should try this dish out since I've always wanted to try making it. Singaporean Chilli Crab has always been one of my favourite crab dish because it is so full of flavour and the sauce with the deep fried mantou (chinese sweet buns) is so delicious and I'm not a sauce lover!

There are lots of ways in achieving this dish, you could buy the instant sauce packet from asian groceries store or you can make the sauce from scratch. I always had a impression that it would be very difficult to make this dish from scratch but after some scavaging on the net I have adapted a recipe from Rasa Malaysia - Easy Asian Recipes and it was unbelievably easy and according to Mr Syu & Miss Choco they absolutely love it!

Ingredients

4 Blueswimmer Crabs
3 tbs of Oil
1.5 inch ginger - peeled & minced
4 cloves of garlic - minced
2 tbs of cornstach + 3 Tbs of water (mix together)

1 egg beaten

6-12 mantous

Sauce:
7 1/2 tbs tomato sauce (I used Heinz)

3 Tbs hot sauce (I used Lingham Sirancha, but I think other hot sauce should work)

1 1/2 tbs oyster sauce

1 1/2 tbs Shao xing wine

1 tsp lime juice

1 1/2 tsp sugar

1 1/2  cup water


Method:

Crab

1. Clean and chop your crabs. The crab shell could be open from the little flap on their belly and make sure you rinse it and pull out any bits that doesn't look too right. Keep the tamale (the yellow mustard thing) attached. There are some recipes that ask you to pull it out and keep it elsewhere first but I think it works just as well having it attached because it will fall off into the sauce anyway. Make sure you remove the gills from the body!  Disjoint the claws and cut the bodies in half. My crabs wasn't that big so I don't need to cut it into many pieces. Drain all the water from the crab.

2. Mix all the ingredients in the sauce together and leave it aside for now.

3. Heat up the wok with the oil, and then fry the ginger and garlic until a little bit brown.

4. Add the crabs in to the wok, fry it for 30 secs to a minute.

5. Pour the sauce into the work, stir the crabs and make sure the crabs is well mixed in with the sauce. Put a lid on your work and let the crabs cook until its red or cooked thoroughly. It should like about 5- 10 mins.  Crabs doesn't take that long to cook. 

6. Pour in the cornstach & water mixture, stir well and you should see the sauce starting to thicken. I've add some salt here to taste. 

7. Add the beaten egg slowly and stir so you get little strands of egg in the sauce.

8. The crab is now ready to be served.

Mantou

1. Heat up some oil in a pot.

2. Add the mantou in and fry until golden brown

3. Serve with the crabs


So a quick question for you all:  What's your favourite way of cooking/eating crabs?