The best Shanghai hairy crabs, the secret to farming them and the best ways to cook them
For the crab farmers of Yangcheng Lake in China’s Jiangsu province, it’s the excellent water quality there that makes their crustaceans the best
Every September, Yao Zhigang enters the most hectic period of the year – the hairy crab season. It is a month until the peak harvesting season for hairy crabs, but orders from around China have already flooded in.
He is one of several dozen crab farmers based on the northeastern shore of Yangcheng Lake, a freshwater lake in Jiangsu province, eastern China, that is famed for its Chinese mitten crabs.
Yao is the second generation of a family whose business is crab farming, and he began helping his parents with different chores when he was a child. Now in his thirties, Yao, whose main job is in urban management, takes care of a farm that produces around 60,000 crabs each year.
Customers want to get a first taste of the delicacy – its creamy roe, in particular – as early as in September during celebrations for the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Luckily for the crab farmers, their worst nightmare – typhoons – did not occur this year. “When it rains heavily, sea levels rise above the fence and crabs would escape,” says Yao.