The Best Crab Cakes

This Recipe for Maryland Style Crab Cakes is great.  Lightly breaded with complimentary ingredients such as roasted corn and red pepper combine to give you a delicious crab cake that can be served as an appetizer or as a meal.  Browned in a skillet or on a grill, or even in a fryer.  The warm interior complimented by the crispy texture on the outside make this a winning recipe.

The Deliciousness of Crab

There is something about crab that is so delicious.  Crab meat tends to be sweeter in flavor in my opinion than even lobster.  Crab meat requires a little more work to attain it.  You have to crack the claws and pull the meat out.   You can buy crab meat already processed.  Most times it is available in cans.

The amino acids, found in high concentrations in crab, are said to be the secret to the sweetness of their meat. Crabs are like an ocean bug, they crawl around and scavenge on dead fish and anything they can get hold of to eat.  

Crab meat is a great compliment in seafood stuffings for fish, mushrooms, lobster dishes and other seafood dishes.  Crab meat is often delicate in nature and when cooked for long periods breakds down to thin string fibers.  Jumbo lump is desirable as well as king crab because they are a heartier meat.

Crab is such a complimentary ingredient it is in classic dishes such as Veal or chicken oscar.  These dishes are thin cutlets that are sauteed and finished with crab meat and holandaise sauce.  They are a very tasty alternative.  

Variations of this Recipe

There are several variations to this recipe.  The crab is the prized ingredient, however the jumbo lump is more costly and not crucial to the recipe.  The jumbo lump offers a textural and visual experience that make people impressed by the large chunks of meat.  They are less fiberous than backfin or special.

Crab cakes can be made completely with special crab or backfin crab.  The weight would need to equal in comparison with the recipe.  You would loose the big lump look which is appealing.  The look gives the confidence of the amount of crab inside the cake.  You also loose the higher cost that lump brings which can be a nice.

Another change could be to drop the mayonaise from the recipe.  The mayonaise is both an enriching agent as well as a binding agent.  So you will need to adjust the recipe to accomodate this.

You will double the cornflake crumb and add some heavy cream .  This recipe calls for 3/4 cup of crushed cornflake, and 1/2 cup of mayonaise.  You should be able to keep everything the same with the acception of these 2 ingredients.  You will double the cornflake and add 1/4 cup of heavy cream.  Combine these two ingredients together to soften the crumb before adding to the recipe.  

When you make this recipe change you are looking for your mixture to be a little sticky so you can press them together to make a cake.  This is the most important piece to get the desired cake like appearance in the final product pictured here.  If it is too dry add a touch more cream or corn flake crumb if too wet.

Making them more nutritious

To make this more nutritious I will offer two suggestions.  

1st suggestion

Follow the above change instructions with the additional corn flake crumb and in place of the cream add the same amount of milk.  Like listed above you will want to soften the crumb in the milk prior to the recipe.  Once mixed you will need to determine if it is able to clump to make cakes.  If it is good you are ready.  If it is too wet add more crumb, if to dry add a little more milk.

2nd suggestion

The other suggestion will alter the appearance to the final product slightly.  If you brown them in a pan without additional oil.  You will only use the pan spray to achieve the browning.  You won't get it to the final browing that you have here.  The cakes pictured here had more contact surface exposed to the heat through the oil.