Kyl Haselbauer has 20 years of experience working in fine-dining and modernist kitchens, including Bar Cotto and Anchovies &amp; Olives in Seattle. He is also the owner of Bright Spot, a café and coffee shop in Seattle.

Kyl Haselbauer

Going to town on a whole, cooked Dungeness crab with nothing more than your hands and a tub of clarified butter is a perfectly acceptable way to eat the delicious critter, but it’s not the only way. If you want to use the full flavor potential of a single crab to produce an elegantly crab-tastic meal, this supercharged crab sloppy joe is for you.Wait, sloppy joes? Well, sort of, but fancy-like. Imagine if that school lunch stalwart was given the fancy tasting menu bread service treatment, and instead of sweet ketchupy ground beef, it was packed with deep Dungeness crab flavor coming at you from all angles. Sounds pretty, pretty good, right?How do we turn the crab-o-meter up to 11 with just one crab? By not wasting a thing. We start by cooking, cleaning, and picking apart a crab (we’ve got a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/dungeness-crab-guide">super-detailed guide</a> to walk you through that process). After the shells and tomalley are roasted, they’re first used to make a crab-infused butter for brushing onto pull-apart milk bread rolls, and then they’re blended into a bisque that we toss with the picked crab meat and also serve up for dinner roll dipping. Whether you present these to your dinner guests with your best fine dining front-of-house voice as “Dungeness dinner rolls, with locally harvested Pacific Northwest crab, crab butter, and a bisque made from its shells” or go with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5QwNBqHbyc&t=3s">Billy Madison lunch lady sloppy joe sales pitch</a> is up to you. Your guests are gonna love ’em no matter what.

Dungeness Crab Sloppy Joes