Spaghettini with Dungenes Crab










Chef Oscar

Solaia
Bar & Restaurant

Spaghettini with

Dungeness Crab

Steam Cook a Dungeness Crab. Remove crab meat from shell and cut into chunks. Reserve the shell for filling with pasta and sauce.

Prepare spaghettini (spaghetti's slightly finer cousin) al dente.

Sauté chopped onion and garlic in a touch of butter until soft. Add a light tomato sauce, salt & pepper. Flambee the sauce with brandy and cook until the sauce is slighly reduced.

Add cooked spaghettini and crab meat chunks to the sauté pan. When entire mixture is hot remove spaghettini and crab meat and place in reserved crab shell. Pour remaining sauce over spaghettini and crab meat and serve.

How to Sauté
A sauté cook learns the art amidst fire and smoke. This is a method of cooking best suited for small pieces of meat and is accomplished in a wide flat pan over fairly high heat using clarified butter or oil, or a combination, as the cooking medium.
The job of a sauté cook in a restaurant is perceived by eager young hotshots as a desirable one, and so it is, if one knows what one is doing. Novice sauté cooks seem to spend a lot of time shaking the frying pans and profiling in front of the range. The essence of the job is accuracy, speed under pressure, and economy of motion. Technique is everything. With the food properly prepared and the pan hot, a sauté can be completed in mere seconds, for instance, a shrimp dish.
The steps to a successful sauté are:
The initial browning in the proper size pan with the correct amount of cooking fat; addition of any nutritive or aromatic elements such as shallots, garlic, mushrooms, capers, etc.; flambeeing with an alcoholic beverage, which is done mostly for flavor; deglazing, or the addition of a liquid into a hot pan; reduction or the boiling down of the liquid used for deglazing, and finishing, where cream or butter is added and swirled into the pan.
Proper preparation of the food pieces to be cooked is important. They should be of an even thickness and size, and dry if they are to be dredged in flour. Here are the steps:
•Place the pan on the heat, jack up the fire, and wait.
•Place the food pieces in the hot fat. This will help to keep in the juices. The heat must be regulated according to the size of the food being cooked.

A veal scaloppini needs quicker cooking, thus higher heat, than a tournedo of beef an inch thick being cooked medium. A chicken breast requires more moderate heat, as do duck breasts, NY sirloins, and veal chops.
After browning the food on both sides, and the degree of browning is again dictated by what is being cooked, add any other flavorings into the pan such as garlic, shallots, mushrooms, etc. If the recipe indicates, flambeeing is carried out at this point.

Flambeeing is often the first step of deglazing (not every dish is flambeed) and is done by pulling the pan off the fire and pouring in a flammable alcoholic liquid such as brandy.
The handle of the pan is lifted and the edge of the pan with the sputtering liquid is tipped into the flame. The contents will usually ignite and the resulting fireball will burn off most of the alcohol, leaving only its flavor.

There are cases where you might want a little more zip, Steak Diane for instance, and to accomplish this, don't allow the alcohol to ignite, or if it does, smother the flame immediately.

Most food, after being floured and dropped into a thin film of hot fat, will stick to the pan a little, leaving brown bits of flour and meat stuck to the bottom of the frying pan. By adding a liquid to the hot pan and rubbing the bottom of the pan briskly with a wooden spoon while the liquid boils, these brown bits will become dislodged and dissolve and help thicken the liquid being used.

Simple flambeeing or deglazing with brandy or wine, or even stock or water or lemon juice or balsamic vinegar will accomplish this and one could stop the sauce-making process at this point and have a nice little self-sauce, so to speak.

It could be further and simply enriched by swirling in a lump of butter. The cooked food is then replaced in the pan to heat through and then plated and served.
If any wine is used for deglazing it must be allowed to reduce by half to eliminate a raw taste. Add Sauce Demi-Glace, and allow this to reduce. If the recipe calls for cream, mustard, creme fraiche or any other amendment, it is added at this point.

When the sauce is just "tight" enough, and experience alone will enable you to judge this point, you could swirl in a lump of sweet butter to enrich and smooth out the sauce. The food is then replaced and allowed to heat through before being served.