Preparing crab legs at home is easier than you might think, and these Baked Crab Legs in a Cajun Garlic Butter Sauce are a great place to start. Skip the restaurant price tag; you can have tender, sweet snow crab meat bathed in a luscious lemony Cajun garlic butter sauce at home. 🤤Just combine everything in one pan, cover, and bake! In just 30 minutes, you'll have the most impressive meal, perfect for any special occasion like Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, or just whenever the seafood craving strikes!

Baked crab legs with lemon wedges and butter pooled at the bottom of the baking dish.

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Who Knew Making Delicious, Buttery Snow Crab Legs Was THIS Easy!? 🤯

We LOVE fish and seafood in all its forms. We also love taking seemingly intimidating dishes and making them super approachable to make at home, kind of like these lobster tails poached in butter and our Cajun seafood boil recipe!

There's something so satisfying about bringing those special seafood restaurant vibes home, and snow crab legs are one of our favorite ways to do it! They look fancy, taste incredible, and require very little effort, seriously!

If you've never cooked crab legs at home before, this is your sign to try it! The Cajun garlic butter sauce does all the heavy lifting, and you'll wonder why you ever paid restaurant prices for something this simple.

As far as entertaining goes, we can't think of anything more impressive than serving guests buttery snow crab legs! This recipe will have you feeling like a top chef, and no one needs to know the secret of how easy they are to make. 😉

🦀Ingredients for Buttery Baked Crab Legs

This recipe comes together with just 7 simple ingredients like fresh garlic and lemon, a Cajun spice blend, high-quality butter, and snow crab legs.

Baked crab legs ingredients with text overlaying to denote each ingredient.

🦀Snow crab legs. Regardless of where you live, finding fresh snow crab legs usually isn't possible. The crab is already pre-cooked when you buy it (they cook and freeze it right on the boat!), so our main goal here is to heat it gently and infuse it with all that garlicky, buttery goodness.

You can use either thawed or frozen crab legs for this recipe, but we've learned that thawing them for 1-2 days in the refrigerator makes the shells noticeably softer and easier to crack.

❄️Using frozen snow crab legs. If you're short on time or forgot to plan ahead, you can absolutely cook the snow crab straight from frozen. Just add an extra 5-10 minutes to the baking time to ensure they heat all the way through.

🦀Snow crab vs. King crab. Snow crab legs are longer and thinner with more delicate shells that you can easily crack with your hands or a fork. King crab legs are much larger and thicker, with shells so tough you really need a crab cracker or heavy-duty kitchen shears.

For this recipe, we love snow crab because it's more affordable, easier to find at most grocery stores, and way more approachable if you're new to cooking crab at home!

How to Make Oven-Baked Snow Crab Legs with Garlic Butter Sauce

Learning how to prepare snow crab legs at home is easier than you'd think, especially when we bake them in the oven instead of boiling them! Baking them with a garlicky, lemony Cajun butter sauce infuses them with so much delicious flavor, without overpowering anything and letting the crab stay the star!

🔪🧄Prep. Preheat your oven to 400°F. While it's preheating, mince your garlic and parsley.

Fresh garlic is going to be KEY🗝️here! Since this recipe uses so few ingredients, they all make a big impact on the final flavor. We use 6-8 cloves of garlic in this recipe. If you really love garlic, add more!

Hand making lemon butter garlic sauce in a small saucepan and stirring with a rubber spatula.

Step 1: In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter with the olive oil.

✨Pro tip: We use a bit a olive oil to prevent the butter from burning!

Once the butter is melted and shimmering, add the minced garlic and cook for just 30 seconds until fragrant, being careful not to burn it!

Immediately add the parsley, kosher salt, black pepper, and Cajun seasoning to the garlic butter. Stir to combine.

🧈Use high-quality, unsalted butter. We use unsalted butter so we can control the salt level in the sauce. With the Cajun seasoning and added kosher salt, using salted butter can make the sauce too salty.

🧂If you only have salted butter, reduce the added salt by ½ teaspoon!

If you can, use a high-quality, European-style butter (like Plugrà, our fave!!) It really shines since it's such a simple sauce!

🧂Salt note. We use Diamond Crystal kosher salt in all of our recipes because it's less salty than other types of salt and dissolves better because of its flaky shape. If you're using Morton's kosher salt, table salt, or sea salt, reduce the amount by half since those salts are saltier.

If your Cajun seasoning or butter has added salt, make sure to reduce the added amount!

🌶️Cajun seasoning. This adds a subtle warmth and complexity to the butter sauce without making it spicy. We love how it complements the natural sweetness of the crab! Be mindful of added salt content here!

🔥If you want more heat, you can add cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes when you add the Cajun seasoning.

🦀For a classic coastal-style crab, add 1-2 teaspoons of Old Bay seasoning along with (or instead of) the Cajun seasoning.

Hand zesting a lemon into a buttery sauce in a saucepan.

Step 2: Add the lemon zest to the butter sauce. Make sure to zest the lemon before you juice it - it's much easier!

Hand squeezing lemon juice in a sauce pan of garlic butter.

Step 3: Squeeze in the lemon juice.

🍋Why add both lemon zest and juice? Because we do need both! 😉Both the zest and juice brighten up the rich butter sauce and cut through the sweetness of the crab meat.

The zest has all those aromatic oils that really amplify the lemon flavor, while the juice adds a bright acidity that helps balance the richness of all that butter.

If you can, we recommend using an organic lemon since we're using the zest, and this is where pesticides are found most often (on the skin of the lemon).

Pouring garlic butter sauce over baked crab legs in a casserole dish.

Step 4: Arrange the crab legs in a 9x13-inch casserole dish or baking dish. Pour the garlic butter sauce evenly over all the crab legs, making sure to get some on each piece.

Cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil. This traps the steam and helps the crab legs heat through evenly while keeping them tender and moist.

Bake for 15-20 minutes. If you're using frozen crab legs that haven't been thawed, increase the time to 20-25 minutes. You'll know they're ready when they're heated through, and the internal temperature reads 140°F with an instant read thermometer.

⚠️ Don't overcook! Since the crab is already cooked, we're just reheating it. Overcooking can make the meat tough and rubbery, so keep an eye on the time.

Remove from the oven and carefully remove the foil (watch out for that hot steam!). Give the crab legs one more good baste with all that delicious butter sauce that's pooled in the bottom of the pan. 🤤 We also like to serve these with lemon wedges to squeeze over the top for a little extra brightness.

Baked crab legs with garlic butter and lemon sauce in a casserole dish.

How to Crack Open & Eat Snow Crab Legs (3 Easy Steps!)

If you have a crab cracker or kitchen shears, those work great for getting into the shells. But honestly? You don't need special tools for snow crab legs! Here's an easy method:

Hands demonstrating how to crack a crab leg at the joint over a baking dish full of crab legs with buttery lemon garlic butter.

Step 1: Break the crab leg at the joint using your hands. The shell should crack pretty easily, especially if you thawed the legs first.

Hands inserting a fork inside a crab leg to remove the meat.

Step 2: Insert a fork (pointed end down) into the opening you just created and wiggle to break it loose.

Hand holding a piece of snow crab leg meat pulled from the shell.

Step 3: Pull the fork out, and the crab meat should slide right out! If it's being stubborn, just wiggle the fork a little or rotate it gently.

Hand dipping crab meat into a spicy garlic butter sauce.

Now, just dip that beautiful crab meat into the remaining garlic butter sauce and enjoy every bite!

💡Pro tip: Keep a small bowl on the table for discarding shells, and have plenty of napkins handy. Eating crab is messy, but that's part of the fun!

🦀What to Serve with Oven Baked Crab Legs

Snow crab legs are rich and buttery, so we love pairing them with sides that complement without overwhelming, and cut through some of that buttery richness.

Enjoy with fresh and light sides like baked zucchini or roasted garlic lemon green beans.

This Cajun fried corn would pair really well, and roasted asparagus is also wonderful with crab!

You can't go wrong with a side of potatoes or some warm, crusty bread to mop up all of that delicious garlic butter sauce! 🤤

Make it Surf and Turf! 🦀🥩 For an extra special dinner or date night at home, serve your easy baked crab legs alongside our Cast Iron Skillet Ribeye, which is guaranteed delicious every time! A fancy-feeling meal you can totally make at home on your own!