LOCAL FOOD GUIDE

Sanmen Mud Crab 三门青蟹

Sanmen Qingxie

Sanmen Mud Crab is featured among the local specialties of Zhejiang.

AI illustration: A platter with cooked orange-red crabs.
AI illustration · AI 示意图(仅供参考,非实拍)AI-generated visual reference; not a restaurant photograph. AI 示意图,仅供参考,非实拍。

Sanmen Mud Crab (三门青蟹) is a seafood speciality of Sanmen (三门), Taizhou (台州). A provincial food feature describes its blue-green carapace, serrated front edges and large claws, while the county gazetteer records several local ways of cooking it.

Many crab dishes

The gazetteer lists steaming, boiling, frying and stir-frying. Household preparations include crab steamed with shredded ginger and huangjiu (黄酒) rice wine, fried crab, crab with steamed egg, crab cooked with bean noodles, and crab stir-fried with rice cakes. Crab also appears in an eight-treasure rice dish.

A crab-centred banquet

At the first Sanmen crab festival in September 2002, a banquet used Sanmen crab as its principal ingredient. Its dishes were named after local scenic places, linking the seafood meal with the county’s landscape.

Sources & reading

Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-30. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.