Crispy Golden Coin Crab Boxes 金钱脆蟹盒
Crispy Golden Coin Crab Boxes is featured among the local specialties of Macau.
Crispy Golden Coin Crab Boxes (金钱脆蟹盒) are round, crisp-fried parcels of crab, shrimp and pork wrapped in a thin sheet of pork fat. Macao Daily (澳門日報) calls the dish a fixture of old-style Macau cooking that the city's restaurants have served for decades. In 2008 it was one of ten Macau dishes chosen for the Chinese Culinary Culture Encyclopedia (中国烹饪文化大典), and in 2018 the China Cuisine Association (中国烹饪协会) named it among Macau's ten classic dishes.
Ingredients
The main ingredients listed by Macao Daily are fat pork for the skin, shelled shrimp, pork, crab meat, dried shiitake mushrooms, coriander and yellow chives. Each kitchen has its own mix: some add olive kernels or cashews, and some use crab meat picked fresh from the shell.
How it is made
The fat pork has to be sliced very thin. Some restaurants cure it first into an "ice skin" (冰皮) that bites with a slight crunch; others leave it uncured so the skin fries crisp with the aroma of lard. The batter, mostly egg white mixed with starch, must be thin: the Macao Daily writer counts a box as top quality when it fries crisp, shows the filling through the coating and is juicy inside.
Because diners worry about eating so much fat pork, Macau chefs have developed variants on the same filling: a taro version with a skin of mashed Lipu taro (荔浦芋), called lirong golden coin crab box (荔蓉金钱蟹盒), and a "new-style" version built on a slice of sandwich bread with a dim sum wrapper on top. Vegetarian restaurants make a meat-free one; the Macao Daily writer remembers it at an all-vegetarian banquet at the Buddhist monastery Pou Chai Sin Un (普济禅院), with a bean-curd-skin case and a filling of mushrooms and mixed vegetables.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.