Recipe Recommendation: Rasa Malaysia's Creamy Butter Crab

With Dungeness crab being so cheap right now due to crab season in San Francisco, I'm eating a lot of these delicious crustaceans. I love simply steaming them and dipping them in butter and aioli, but I also love trying new crab recipes, and Rasa Malaysia's Creamy Butter Crab recipe certainly caught my eye. How could I resist those three words: creamy, butter, crab?

I found most of the ingredients at Duc Loi, a Vietnamese grocery store at the corner of Mission and 18th Streets in San Francisco. They had the key ingredient - fresh curry leaves, although they can be purchased online here and here. Duc Loi also had the plain Chinese steamed buns (mantou) that the recipe calls for. I recommend not omitting these - they are so yummy when dunked in the creamy butter sauce! I can't find an online source, but if you can't find them at your local Asian market (or don't have a local Asian market) here is a recipe for mantou. The bird's eye chilies can be found at Asian markets or online.

The recipe is really easy to make, and doesn't have too many ingredients or too many cooking steps. I hope I've made the shopping easier by providing online sources. This is so worth making; the creamy sauce has the unique curry leaf seasoning, and isn't too spicy, and combined with the succulent crab and the crunchy, sweet mantou - oh! So good!

Get the recipe! Rasa Malaysia's Creamy Butter Crab

(Image: Kathryn Hill)

Comments (4)

thank you posting where to get the fresh curry leaves! i was using curry powder as a substitute. it turned out well but i wondered how it would taste with the curry leaves.

also for an added twist, you can fry the mantou to make the outsides crispy. it's delicious dipped in the butter cream sauce!

No,no, no...please don't ruin another Dungeness crab with sauces and heavy spices. This is the 4th post in two weeks hiding Dungeness crab...the best crustacean available....in heavy spices or creamy sauces. Dungeness Crab is so expensive ($29.00/lb cleaned) that it's perfect just the way it is. I can't believe anyone would want to play with mother nature.

Hi Kathryn, thanks again for trying my crab recipe. And yes, you should deep fry the mantou the next time because it makes the dish even more successful.

Hi Iona - I don't agree with you that plain Dungeness crab is the best. My crab recipes accentuates the sweet taste of it; they don't hide the flavor in heavy sauces. Hope you get to try these recipes one day.

@mariet @rasamalaysia Sorry if I wasn't clear originally, but I did fry the mantou and that was great - you really need the crispy texture of the bread to make this dish - so good!

@Iona, I guess that is a matter of personal preference, I like crab in all sorts of ways. Where do you live, because $29.99/lb sounds very high - here in SF it is $2.99/lb.