Seafood Atlas · Main
Singapore Chilli Crab
- Advanced
- 75 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, acid holding everything up to the light, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 2 mud crabs (~1kg each), cleaned and cracked into sections, claws pre-cracked for mercy (your fishmonger will do this; let them)
- The rempah: 8 dried chilies soaked + 4 fresh, 6 shallots, 4 garlic, thumb of ginger, 1 tbsp belacan, blended
- The sauce: 4 tbsp tomato ketchup + 2 tbsp chili sauce, 1 tbsp sugar, 500ml stock, 2 tbsp tamarind water
- The finish: 1 beaten egg swirled in off the heat; the silken ribbons are the signature
- Fried mantou buns (or thick toast): the sauce outranks the crab and demands a vehicle
The skills inside
Frying the paste until the oil splits
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Fry the rempah in oil until it splits and smells like the hawker centre, 8–10 min. 10 min
- Ketchup, chili sauce, sugar, stock, tamarind; simmer to a loose gravy.
- Crab sections in; lid on; 8–10 min, tossing twice, until the shells blaze orange and the meat is just set. 10 min
- OFF the heat: stream in the egg, folding once. Ribbons, not scramble. Pile into a platter, sauce flooding; mantou standing by. Bibs are issued, not offered.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.