Watch how to make
classic crab cakes—full of sweet meat and just enough crumbs to hold it all together.
Hi, I’m Annie Copps, I’m the Food Editor at Yankee Magazine, and today we’re making crab cakes. For all you SpongeBob SquarePants fans, those are “Crabby Patties.”
Okay, so, what I did was I cooked up some onion and celery in garlic, and that’s going to add some really nice flavors to our fresh and lovely crab cakes. It’s all about building flavors, like any other recipe. Set that aside.
A cup of breadcrumbs, you could use panko, or you could make your own home-made, but you want the unseasoned ones. Into the bowl that goes. I also have some tarragon and parsley that we chopped up pretty finely. Little bit of salt, touch of mustard, and again, this is going to be all about building flavors, just about a teaspoon. A dash of Worcestershire — Okay, three dashes, who’s counting? And a nice, couple shots of Tabasco. Building flavors, building flavors.
Now, look at all this gorgeous crab meat. You’ll notice that the ratio of filling to crab meat: there’s much more crab meat. You know why? Because they’re crab cakes: we want them to taste like crabs. In this goes. Oh, this is going to be great. Into there.
And also, for flavor and color, some finely chopped red pepper. It’s going to add a little crunch to it, too. We cooked the celery and onion, as you remember, because they were a little strong, we found, if we didn’t cook them. But the red pepper just adds a beautiful color and crunch. Can you see that? This is gorgeous.
Now, with pristinely clean hands, we’re going to form them into cakes. There we go. And we’re going to set those on a wire rack, and we’re going to finish off the rest of this mixture here.
And then, let them air dry for about 15, 20 minutes. You can do that in the refrigerator if it’s going to be longer than that, but they’re fine outside on the counter, if it’s just going to be 15 or 20 minutes.
Okay, so while the crab cakes are resting, we’re going to make a nice aioli, which is a fancy-pants name for mayonnaise. And we’re going to use roasted red peppers to really spice it up. We’ve roasted some red peppers, we’ve roasted some garlic.
We also have in here some mayonnaise. You want to use a good quality mayonnaise, not that you’d ever use a bad quality mayonnaise. Some chopped capers, some lemon juice, and some salt. Let me just get that lemon juice in there.
And you can use this aioli for a number of different things, for dipping sauces, whatever you’d like: you can put it on potato cakes, you can put it on your eggs in the morning. Or you can not make it with roasted red peppers. You can make it with any roasted vegetable you like, or just garlic. Or you can just dip them in soy sauce, whatever you like.