China · Cantonese
Claypot Crab
A banquet dish of fried crab chunks stewed with potato, rice cakes and peppers in a savoury sauce, so rich that the broth is worth fighting over for the rice.
This is the dish that ended up on Chinese restaurant tables rather than in home kitchens, and its logic is a mix: the crab is fried first so it survives the long stew, the potato and rice cakes are there to soak the sauce, and the battering is what keeps the crab from going to paste. The sauce is built from several pastes at once, balanced against each other rather than used singly. Nothing is written down when it is ordered, so each restaurant guards its own ratio.
Ingredients
- mud crab500 g
- shrimp200 g
- potato450 g
- rice cakes200 g
- onion100 g
- garlic20 g
- ginger15 g
- dried chillies5 g
- green pepper30 g
- red pepper30 g
- oyster sauce20 g
- cooking oilExact
- seafood sauce15 g
- fermented yellow soybean paste15 g
- sweet bean sauce10 g
- tomato ketchup10 g
- cornstarch40 g
- rock sugar10 g
- chicken bouillon3 g
- ground white pepper2 g
- Shaoxing wine15 ml
- light soy sauce20 ml
- dark soy sauce5 ml
- beerExact
Directions
- 1
Cut the potato into 3 cm cubes, the green and red peppers into diamond shapes with 4 cm sides, the onion into 3 cm crescents and the rice cakes into 1 cm slices.
- 2
Cut the crab into 50 to 80 g pieces, dust them lightly with starch and fry for a minute at 180 degrees, then lift out.
- 3
Put oil in the wok and fry the garlic, ginger and dried chillies until fragrant, then add all the pastes and the rock sugar and cook gently over low heat until the oil turns red, taking care not to scorch the bottom.
- 4
Add the crab, the potato, the beer and water; bring to the boil and then stew gently for twelve minutes.
- 5
Add the rice cakes and the green and red peppers, turn up to high and reduce until the sauce coats the ingredients, then finish with white pepper.
Source: HowToCook · WorldBite adaptation · Unlicense source text; bilingual recipe adapted by WorldBite.