Grocery Ninja: Fatty, Preserved Crab Roe: Not PETA-Safe
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here.
I know it’s only April, but this may be my food find of the year. Tiny, freshwater crabs—each barely two inches across—are soused with water, sprinkled with Kosher salt, and stuck live in the fridge. Hours later, they’re skillfully pressed and prodded to extract a grainy, coral paste that Pinoys like to mix with freshly steamed white rice, its richness cut through with a generous squirt of calamansi juice—a poor (or busy) man’s paella, if you will.
The thing is, I’m not positive what the gorgeously creamy, salty, slightly tangy stuff is. My bottle says it's "crab fat," and the Tagalog label of "taba ng talangka" concurs—"taba" is "fat" and "talangka" is what those little crabs are called. Yet, I’ve found roughly the same number of sources that claim it as either "crab roe" or "crab fat," and some fence-straddlers that call it "fatty crab roe." Seizing on that, the researcher beau helpfully suggested that since crab roe can be fatty, but crab fat isn’t necessarily roe, the yummy (calorific, cholesterol-laden, highway-to-a-heart-attack) stuff we’ve been sneaking spoonfuls of all weekend must be the eggs.
