Five Day Shelf Life for Boiled/Chilled Crab Clusters

The King Crab in Brief

As it is impractical to operate with two different shelf lives for the same product, the overall recommendation is a shelf life of five days for boiled and chilled clusters.

• Today there is an increasing demand for boiled and chilled clusters of king crab. The increased demand may be attributed to the king crab having the desired quality. Norwegian companies may use this to their advantage because the season is longer than for their competitors and consequently the product may be supplied over a longer period of time.
• The king crabs are harvested on the Finnmark Coast by the coastal fishing fleet. After capture, the king crabs are transferred to tanks of sea water so they can be landed live. Once ashore, the king crabs are stored live in “hotels” (tanks of sea water).
• The king crabs are exported live, boiled and chilled or boiled and frozen. The hotel and restaurant segment is currently the main customer for this product.

“During production of clusters, the king crab is divided into two units. Each unit or cluster comprises three legs plus one claw attached to a shoulder. We have tested meat tissue from the shoulder and legs of the clusters with respect to microbiology, acidity (pH factor), colour, smell and taste,” says Nofima Senior Scientist Grete Lorentzen.

Shoulder and Leg

The standard for defining shelf life for food is stipulated in an EU Commission directive (no. 1169/2011).

“As the crab meat in the leg is well protected by the shell, the meat in the legs has a longer shelf life than meat from the shoulder. The shorter shelf life for meat located in the shoulder may be attributed to the fact that it is exposed and not protected,” says Lorentzen.

“After an overall assessment of the analysis results, we determined that the meat in the leg has a shelf life of eight days, while the meat located in the shoulder has a shelf life of five days. As it is impractical to operate with two different shelf lives for the same product, the overall recommendation is a shelf life of five days for boiled and chilled clusters.”

The Industry Decides

She points out that the EU directive contains rules that food products shall be labelled with a ”best before” date and specification of special storage requirements, e.g. chilling / cold storage temperature.

“It’s entirely up to the industry itself to decide the criteria that shall form the basis for determining the shelf life,” says Lorentzen. “In this trial, the development of smell and taste were the most decisive factors for setting the shelf life at eight and five days for meat from the leg and shoulder respectively.”

The crabs that were tested were produced by Storbukt Fiskeindustri AS in Honningsvåg, Northern Norway, in February. Following capture, the king crabs were stored live in tanks for one to two weeks prior to production. The production involves “breaking” into two clusters, boiling and chilling.

92 Degrees

After breaking, the clusters go through the following procedure: storage in fresh water for 5-10 minutes, removal of the gills by hand, bleeding for 20-30 minutes, trimming of remaining gills, grading, packing in metal containers (approximately 20kg), boiling for 22-24 minutes at a core temperature of 92 °C, cooling in seawater for 20 minutes, additional cooling in refrigerated sea water for 20 minutes and packing (approximately 10 kg net weight).