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

There are basically two kinds of crab pasta dishes. There’s the one that a lot of restaurants love to put out, because it’s easy and cost effective: a pasta dish—it almost doesn’t matter what kind—topped with a bit of picked crab meat. And then there’s the one we want to eat: a pasta that’s packed with crab flavor, where each strand of spaghetti is both infused and coated with a super crabby sauce, with plenty of picked meat in each and every bite.The key to this recipe is total utilization of a single Dungeness crab. The shells and tomalley are used to make a beautiful crab stock—roasted, blitzed, then simmered with a soffritto of aromatics, tomatoes, and rusted tomato paste. Then, instead of just building a sauce with that stock (which would have been delicious), we chose to take it a step further using the “pasta risottata” method; basically, cooking pasta like risotto, using the crab stock as the cooking liquid rather than water, adding a ladleful at a time to create a silky sauce, perfect for coating strands of spaghetti. The pasta absorbs the stock even as it reduces, intensifying the crab flavor, and since there&#39;s nowhere else for the starch leeching from the pasta to go, the olive oil and crab fat steadily form an emulsion. All the picked crab meat is tossed with the pasta right at the end, instead of just a scant spoonful on top, so every bite is a mixture of textures—silky sauce, perfectly al dente pasta, rich morsels of lump crab meat—that act as a kind of scaffolding for a truly incredible amount of crab flavor.

Dungeness Crab Fra Diavolo