Yellow Curry Crab is a delicious dish to make when the dungeness crab is in season. We like to go to the docks in the winter and get these prized crustaceans straight from the boat with their legs still kicking. It is a bit of a process to clean, cook and pick them but we find the effort to be well worth it. For Mr. Cook fresh crab is the pinnacle of the culinary mountain we are climbing. As such we are just going to use a few ingredients that augment the flavor of the crab rather than overpower it.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

Watch a Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Yellow Curry Crab:

Fresh Dungeness Crab

Let’s begin with the crab. The very best is to get fresh live crab and cook them yourself. There is a 2 Cooks in the kitchen video about how to clean and cook the crab. We clean them first and steam them and the meat comes out so clean and white and extra tasty. We also have a 2 Cooks in the Kitchen video that shows how to pick the crab to get the most out of them easily. You can also buy picked crab meat for a tidy sum. We’ll get about 1/2 pound of picked meat out of each crab and it takes around 1/2 hour to pick a crab. This recipe calls for 3/4 of a pound of picked crab meat so we will be needing 1 1/2 crab for this. No problem finding uses for the other half crab.

Butternut Squash

We can also get our butternut squash ready for this dish. You will need to peel it, remove the seeds and cut it into bite size chunks.

Cook the Yellow Curry Paste

We’ll begin our dish by heating several tablespoons of coconut oil in a large soup pot. While the oil is heating we can cut 2 3 ” pieces off the bottom of a stalk of lemongrass and pound them with a knife handle to release some of the juices. Once the oil is hot we will add the lemongrass and the yellow curry paste to the pot.

We want to stir the curry paste into the oil and let it cook until you start to see the curry paste color in the oil bubbles. You really want this merging of the two ingredients so at the end you get a nice yellow oil sheen on top of the curry. This first step is where we build that and it takes 4 or 5 minutes.

Add Squash and Coconut Milk

Once we have our curry paste ready we will add the butternut squash and coconut milk. You can use coconut cream here if you want. We usually see coconut milk in 13 or 14 ounce cans while the cream comes in 16 to 18 ounce cans. If you use the milk you may want to add just a little more water to bring it to the same level as the squash. You can also use potato, sweet potato, yams, or some other squash for this but we like the flavor of butternut and the texture of it after cooking. Once this boils again we will turn down the heat and let it simmer for 40 minutes.

Add Fish Sauce, Sugar, Lime Juice and Crab

Once the butternut has cooked we can remove the lemongrass pieces. They may have fallen apart so you don’t have to worry about getting all of it. You will see it as you serve or people can simply remove it from their bowl of curry. Now we are ready to add the fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and crab. We use the juice of a whole lime here since this will need some acid to balance out all the sweetness from the coconut milk.

Cook Briefly and Serve

Now we just need to stir this and let it cook until the crab heats up, just a couple minutes, and our yellow curry crab is ready to serve.

This style of curry is great just eaten by itself as a stew or you can serve it over rice.

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Here are some more delicious curry recipes for you to try:

• Red Curry Chicken
• Red Curry Pork Tenderloin
• Red Curry Salmon
• Yellow Curry Crab
• Crab Stuffed Mushrooms With Yellow Curry Sauce
• Thai Coconut Curry Crab
• Chicken Satay With Peanut Sauce
• Butter Chicken
• Southern Indian Lamb Curry

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