14 Crab Cake Recipes to Try at Home
Making your own crab cakes might sound intimidating, but this popular dish is actually easy to pull off at home, regardless of which coast your crabmeat comes from. Here are our favorite crab cake recipes to inspire you — from classic Maryland-style crab cakes to spicy Keralan crab cakes with mint chutney — as well as faux crab cakes and crab balls.
Crispy Crab Cakes with Tomato Butter
The late chef Patrick Clark's crab cakes at Tavern on the Green are legendary, taking on a pop of flavor from chopped fresh jalapeño and a crispy exterior from panko. Chopped whitefish provides the structure in these crab cakes, offering more flavor and a richer texture than traditional binders like breadcrumbs.
Crab Cakes with Smoky Onion Remoulade
Smoky onion remoulade is a terrific accompaniment to these crab-studded cakes from Marc Forgione at American Cut in Manhattan. At the restaurant, he smokes onions, but the sauce is also great made with charred onions and seasoned with smoked salt.
Baltimore-Style Crab Cakes
With minimal filler ingredients, these quintessential Baltimore crab cakes shine with pure crab flavor. In 2018, Food & Wine named this recipe one of our 40 best: "This is the best crab cake recipe you will ever find. If you don't overmix, and don't pack your mounds too tightly, you will experience pure, unadulterated crab cake heaven," chef Andrew Zimmern says. "Seriously, they are that good."
Keralan Crab Cakes with Mint Chutney
Padma Lakshmi created this recipe to meld an American classic with the hot and tangy flavors of her native Kerala. Since crab dishes are abundant in South Indian cuisine, the marriage is a happy one. She liberally uses hot green chiles; shredded coconut gives the dish a South Asian twist, and dried mango powder adds sourness.
Louisiana Lump Crab Cakes
"My aunt Christine taught me how to make crab cakes over the phone," chef Melissa Martin writes. "And what I learned is that you can use leftover boiled shrimp as a binder instead of breadcrumbs. When you grind shrimp in a food processor, it becomes sticky, and just a small amount will hold crabmeat and smothered vegetables together well enough to form into patties."
Crab Cakes with Horseradish Cream
Lump crabmeat is mixed with only enough breadcrumbs and mayonnaise to hold it together, then coated with more crumbs and fried to a golden brown. A mixture of sour cream and horseradish provides a lively accompaniment.
Maryland-Style Crab Cakes
© FREDRIKA STJÄRNE
These luscious crab cakes are proportionally perfect: heavy on glorious hunks of crab, light on breadcrumbs. And instead of frying the cakes, Baltimore chef Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen serves them "brold" (Baltimorese for "broiled," he says). "I can't overemphasize how important it is to use fresh, carefully processed meat from blue crabs," he adds.
Crab Cakes with Lemongrass Mayonnaise
Though chef Hans Röckenwagner makes homemade mayonnaise for this recipe, you can substitute 1 1/4 cups of jarred mayonnaise blended with a tablespoon of minced lemongrass, from the tender white bulb, and a teaspoon of finely grated ginger; let sit for 30 minutes.
Crisp Cayenne-Spiced Crab Cakes
Growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, cooking-club member DeeAnn Budney attended all-day Chesapeake blue crab feasts organized by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Now that she lives on the West Coast, she makes these fantastically spicy crab cakes with sweet Dungeness crab meat, but either kind works.
Spicy Crab Cakes with Mango Puree
When making crab cakes, it's customary to keep the crabmeat in chunks. Here, it's best to break up some of the meat to keep the crisp patties together.
Crisp Crab Cakes with Chipotle Mayonnaise
These amazing, light, and simple crab cakes are bound with fish, not cracker crumbs, for a deep seafood flavor.
Crabless Cakes with Hearts of Palm and Corn
That's right, these are faux crab cakes! When chopped, hearts of palm break down into shreds that look like fresh crab meat. Here they get seasoned with Old Bay, vegan mayonnaise, and Dijon mustard for a sensational main course.
Blue Crab Beignets
Here, beignet batter thinly coats a creamy, warm crab filling with a crisp, light crust. The batter, which includes amber lager, is loose and can be tricky to shape at first; keep frying and practicing — your beignets will improve with each batch. These are ideally eaten while still very hot, so make them while enjoying aperitifs in the kitchen.
Crab Balls with Grapefruit Salad
The crab and grapefruit in this dish first appeared at the restaurant Spice Market tossed with cold glass noodles. Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten decided it was a "messy pile," but liked the flavors, so he reconfigured them into crab balls rolled in panko and sesame seeds.
For more Food & Wine news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!
Read the original article on Food & Wine.
