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Fermentation Atlas

Fish and seafood from Korea

Gejang (ganjang-gejang)게장

Cleaned live crabs are packed shell-down in a crock and covered with boiled, cooled soy sauce. The sauce is drained, boiled, cooled and poured back three or four times over about two weeks, and the crab is eaten raw. It is a marinade more than a ferment, so pathogens and, in freshwater crabs, lung flukes can survive. Made in 4 steps over 14 days. The longest step, drain, reboil and pour back, three or four times, takes 14 days (Park Y. 2019).

Key numbers
Main step14 daysReported[michelin2019]Drain, reboil and pour back, three or four times
Temperature5 °CMeasured[cho2016]Keep cold or frozen
Fully documentedFish and seafood14 daysMore fish and seafoodMore from Korea

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedTraditional household dish with no fixed amounts; the crabs are simply covered with sauce.
Live crabs, preferably female, well cleaned[michelin2019]
Soy sauce, boiled and cooled · Modern recipes add aromatics such as garlic, ginger and fruit[michelin2019]
Starter: none (marinade)

Total time across the recorded steps: 14 days

Start
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What changes: Starting material: live crabs, cleaned and stacked shell-down in a crock

Step 1 of 4
Clean the live crabs and pack them in a crock
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented

Output: cleaned raw crabs.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

What makes this one different

Gejang is raw crab cured in soy sauce for days to weeks, not a salt-fermented paste like jeotgal. The repeated reboiling of the sauce, not a long ferment, is what preserves it.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Yangnyeom gejangMarinated in a spicy chilli-powder sauce instead of soy sauce.

Safety

Marination is the only antibacterial step, and in trials it did not kill Listeria, S. aureus, E. coli O157:H7 or Salmonella on crab kept at 5 °C for 28 days. Freshwater crabs can carry the lung fluke Paragonimus westermani; freezing for 48 h at -20 °C killed all larvae, while soy sauce with 5–10 % salt took 64 days. In crayfish, viable larvae survived 14 days in 10 % salt soy sauce, so a short cold marinade is not enough.

Hazards the sources name: Paragonimus westermani lung fluke (freshwater crabs and crayfish); Listeria monocytogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella (survived 28 days of marination at 5 °C); Vibrio parahaemolyticus (a cytotoxic strain was isolated from soy-sauce crab).

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

A spicy version in chilli-powder sauce (yangnyeom gejang) became popular in modern times.

  1. [michelin2019] Park Y. 2019, Gejang, a raw crab dish, Michelin Guide (Seoul feature)web
  2. [cho2016] Cho T.J., Kim N.H., Kim S.A., Song J.H., Rhee M.S. 2016, Survival of foodborne pathogens in raw ready-to-eat crab marinated in soy sauce, International Journal of Food Microbiologypaper
  3. [kim2017] Kim T.I., Oh S.R., Dai F., Yang H.J., Ha S.D., Hong S.J. 2017, Inactivation of Paragonimus westermani metacercariae in soy sauce-marinated and frozen freshwater crabs, Parasitology Research 116(3):1003–1006paper
  4. [kim2025] Kim E.M., Jin Y., Hong S.T. 2025, Survival and infectivity of Paragonimus westermani metacercariae in soy sauce-marinated crayfish, Food and Waterborne Parasitologypaper
  5. [hong2025] Hong Y.J., Kim Y.M., Kim Y.S., Cho T.J., Rhee M.S., Kim S.A. 2025, Microbial community of retail marinated raw crab, LWT (abstract)paper
  6. [chung2018] Chung H.Y., Lee B., Na E.J. et al. 2018, Potential survival and pathogenesis of a novel strain, Vibrio parahaemolyticus FORC_022, isolated from a soy sauce marinated crab, Frontiers in Microbiology 9:1504paper