Live Up 2016 with Thai-Style Black Pepper Crab

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Food

Live Up 2016 with Thai-Style Black Pepper Crab

The secret's in the sauce for this recipe from Maenam, which blends black pepper, garlic, and fish sauce with a handful of other pantry staples into a dressing fit for a crab.
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Even the term "finger-licking good" doesn't do justice to this black pepper crab with all of its sweet, peppery, and fish sauce-butter-lacquered flesh. "Lick-the-whole-wok good," maybe does the job, but just barely, since that is what you will be inevitably be doing as soon as you finish cooking this.

This recipe comes to us from Maenam's chef Angus An, who our dear Matty Matheson proudly calls "a motherfucker who knows how to cook"—an esteemed accolade that not many other chefs can claim.

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RECIPE: Black Pepper Crab

January is also the best time of the year to take up the art of whole-crab cooking, both because it is crab season and because you will be sending out "I can afford to eat crab for dinner in the new year" positive vibes to the universe. Drawn butter is cool and all, but leave that for the end of the year when you just want to chill. Right now, it's all about setting yourself up for the best year you will have yet, and this peppery crab is just the thing to kick it off.

Both oyster sauce and fish sauce—umami bombs in their own right—are used when concocting the sauce here, effectively making the glaze immediately swoon-worthy. But the secret may very well lie in using both black and white peppercorns, the latter of which packs a mysterious, addicting spiciness that no chile pepper out there can ever replicate.

Here's to an amazing, crab-filled 2016, ya'll.