Chilli Crab

Variations

• Black pepper crab: the other half of the pair in Singapore. Coarsely cracked black pepper fried in butter instead of tomato and chilli, with almost no sauce — so no mantou is needed, and the heat is a completely different kind (black pepper).
• Choosing the crab: Sri Lankan mud crab is the benchmark, with a thick shell and firm meat that survives a long simmer. Blue swimmer crabs work but have thinner shells, so cut the simmer to under five minutes.
• With prawns or lobster: the same sauce over large prawns is far simpler and far less messy. Drop the simmer to three minutes.
• How hot: despite the name, not very. Deseeding the dried chillies keeps all the colour and takes out most of the heat (chilli and heat).
• The mantou: steamed, they soak the sauce up softly; fried, they hold their shape once wet. Fried is the more common choice in Singapore. Same family of dough as char siu bao.
• Against ganjang gejang: the same animal, treated in opposite directions. Gejang steeps it raw in salty soy and lets time do the work; chilli crab cuts it up and puts it over fire. One leaves the meat translucent, the other cooks it until it lifts clean out of the shell.
• Origin: it is generally traced to Cher Yam Tian, who from 1956 sold crab fried in tomato sauce from a pushcart. The ketchup came later, and today making it without is the unusual choice.

Tips

• Wait ten seconds after the egg goes in. This is where the dish is most often lost. Trickle and stir at the same time and the protein disperses before it can set: the sauce goes cloudy and no ribbons form at all. Low heat, a thin stream, and then hands off — all three are needed (cooking eggs, egg).
• Fry the rempah until the oil splits. Red oil weeping out at the edges of the paste is the signal. Before that, there is still water in the garlic and shallots and the raw edge has not gone. Five minutes feels long; do not shorten it (blooming spices, garlic).
• Cornflour on the cut faces only. Dusted over the shell as well, it turns gluey where the sauce meets it. All you are doing is sealing the exposed meat.
• Crack the claws. Two reasons: sauce gets inside the shell, and people can open them without tools. Doing it while you butcher beats hunting for a mallet once it is on the table.
• Twenty minutes in the freezer for a live crab. It stops moving, which makes the butchering safer, and it is the kinder way round. Do not use one that has been dead for a while — the meat goes soft.
• Do not be shy about the ketchup. It is not a Western substitution, it is an authentic ingredient here, carrying sugar, acid, savouriness and the colour all at once. Leave it out and you are making something else.
• Make plenty of sauce. The crab is really only half of it; the other half is the sauce and the buns. Make just enough to coat and you have removed the most popular thing on the table.
• Season before the crab goes back in. After that you can neither stir freely nor taste easily. Get the sweet-sour-salty balance finished at the point where the water comes to the boil (balancing flavour).
• Simmer it covered. The shell is thick, and heating the outside does not cook the inside; steam is what drives heat through it (steaming).
• Keep the leftover sauce. Fried through rice the next day it is a meal on its own (reviving leftovers, egg fried rice).