Alexandra VanCleve: Hi! I'm Ali VanCleve and we're here at Capt. Jack's Crab Shack in Spotsylvania, Virginia. Today, I'm going to show you how to cook and eat Alaskan Snow Crabs. In this series, I'm going to talk a little bit about snow crab information, how to prepare and cook them, particularly sea meal today, and how to get to the good part, eating them.

Snow crab is known for its sweet, white, snowy meat and its versatility has made it perfect for soups, chowders, appetizers, main dish and some much more. And since it's available year-around, you can enjoy it anytime you want to.

Snow crab is harvested from the icy waters of the Bering Sea, steamed and frozen within a couple of hours to lock in that freshness. Unless you have a friend who is a fisherman out in the Bering Sea, most of the snow crab you're going to get is fully cut. So that means that when you get your snow crab, you're really just preheating, and you can do that by boiling, grilling, sauting, anything you want.

The tools I'm going to use today to steam the Alaskan Snow Crab are an electric steamer, tongs, and the tools that I'm going to use today to eat the Alaskan Snow Crab are drawn butter, Old Bay, lemon, seafood cracker, and a crab needle. There is one safety concern when cooking Alaskan Snow Crab: Depending on how much you've had to drink, you want to be careful around the electric steamer as it is boiling water. Before I begin, let me tell you a little bit about Captain Jack's Crab Shack. We are voted best seafood two years in a row in our area. We're pride of ourselves on, if it swims or crawls, we sell it all. We were also voted AT&T's top 10 small business of the year for 2009.

So let's get started cooking and eating Alaskan Snow Crab.