Crab Lasagna
Oh readers, how I have failed you. It has been a full five months since I promised I’d fill this site with more crab recipes. Crab, as I’ve mentioned too many times, is one of my favourite foods and although I will always love eating them simply cooked and served with mayonnaise best of all, it would be criminal not to experiment. I would be letting the side down.
In the archives, then, you will find Louisiana crab cakes, crab fried rice, hot crab dip and now, this. Get your baggiest pants ready my friends because this arrangement of carbs and crabs (*notes important order of letters*) is going to beat you into submission until you are a quivering wreck of happiness, belly up like a flailing beetle.
If this lasagna were a particularly camp and bitchy young fashion magazine employee it would walk, steps crisscrossing one another like knives in a vicious sashay, telling everyone it would slay you. And it will. This is possibly one of the richest dishes I’ve ever made, despite attempts to curtail said richness with the addition of lemon and herbs. It’s the kind of dish you eat a small portion of then ask for another but regret it, like the kid who makes himself sick on chocolate cake then voms it up on someone’s white sofa.
So yeah, it’s really great. Make it. You’ll need four full crabs so maybe this is one best left for when you want to really impress someone or put them off crab for life. Could go either way.
Crab Lasagna Recipe
This fills a 9 x 9 x 2 inch baking dish.
The meat from 4 cooked and prepared crabs (white and brown), or just buy 4 whole dressed crabs
500 g ricotta
1 handful tarragon, finely chopped
1 handful chives, finely chopped
50g butter
50g all-purpose white flour
500ml whole milk
Juice of 1 lemon
White pepper
Pecorino
Lasagna sheets
Preheat the oven to 200C.
Separate the white and brown crab meat. Mix the white meat with the chopped herbs, ricotta and lemon juice. Season with salt and white pepper.
Melt the butter in a pan, then add the flour and stir vigorously to form a paste. Add a little of the milk at a time until all the milk is incorporated, stirring constantly until you have a smooth, slightly thickened sauce. Season and mix in the brown crab meat.
Dip the lasagna sheets in very hot water (easiest in a baking dish). Layer up in alternating layers so white mixture, pasta, brown mixture, pasta and so on. Finish with an aggressive grating of Pecorino.
I struggle to remember how long we baked this for – 20 minutes or so I should think. Just bake it until it’s golden on top, basically.