How to Make Crab Cakes

Chef John McDermott prepares Crab Cakes with Plum Tomato Sauce

Good evening everybody. Welcome to Chef Live on fabulous downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, my name is Chef John. Now, crab cakes, the first thing we start we’re going to make a binder for this crab cakes. And the recipe I have tonight we’re going to call it the grab sauce. Okay and the first step is to take two eggs, we’re going to beat two eggs together. The eggs are actually is going to bind everything up later. Okay, so just kind of whip them together really quick. And to the two eggs we’re going to add three quarters of a cup of mayonnaise. We’ll work this together here real quick. The next is really in the a crab sauce, I’m going to season it up. You know what, when I recently started working recipe, we were using blackening spice, and when everything was blackened that cakes in trays and we had it going ton, caples and purple dome. It’s tough to find blackening spice these days. I guess it’s not that help anymore. So this is a creole spice and this is about teaspoon of creole spice goes in there, that’s still available pretty relatively. All right, the next ingredient, we’re going to add just a quarter cup of Dijon mustard, and I’m going to put about three finger pinch of salt in here. And we’re going to go with, this is fresh chopped parsley. I’m going to use about a quarter cup of fresh chopped parsley in there. Okay, once I’ve got all this work together, now my crab sauce is ready. Now to get prepare myself for the next step, after I mixed everything together, I’m going to put a medium. We’re going to light up this griller here. We’re going to start on a medium high heat to get that just to warm it up real quick all right. Come back to here. Now, I’ve got here, this is two pounds of lump crab meat. Now more of the other binding ingredients in this recipe is could be cracker or crumbs. You can use just nice crackers, when you get in the whole grains sometimes of those bits they are kind of hard, I would stay away from those but something that’s soft. These are Ritz crackers, I like this because they have that buttery flavor. So I’m just going to crush it with my hands like so. We’re going to turn them in to a cracker meal. You could do this also if you had a, get a zip lock bag and put your crackers in there and just roll on that with a rolling pin. But sometimes you can be creative too, so I’m just going to squeeze them, I’m going to crush them on my fingers here. All right, now once you’ve got that meal, it’s okay to have some big pieces in there, you see some of the pieces are a little bigger than, than powder, so that’s okay. Now, we’re going to take two pounds of crabs is going to go here on this bowl and to that I’m going to add about five table spoons we’re going five tablespoons of the cracker meal. Now to that this worked out to be about two cups of crab sauce, and to this mix here I’m going to put two cups of the crabs sauce right over the crabs and the cracker meal. So when I mix it, I’m going to do a very jellying, I’m going to fold to it. You have to do the folding and just push down jelly with the back of the spoon, like so. You really just want to bring everything together. Now, I use the flake, the lump crab you still have, the pieces are pretty small. You could work into this recipe. The larger pieces of the crab from the from the claws and I will put that in the last and really be gentle with that because I want my guest, I want them to bite into that, that big piece, so they’ll know what they got. They now I pay for the good crab meat. All right, so now once this is generally folded together, the next step we’ve got to do is, make sure this is hot enough, okay. You put that on a medium heat and I like to serve fried things and peanut oil because peanut oil gets this a high smoked temp, a high smoke point. So therefore, I can really turn off the heat before they all start to break down. I when I go to do my crab cakes will get the nice crust of that golden brown crust in the outside. So, on my skillet I’m just going to put enough just to cover the first surface of my skillet and you’ll spread this around. Now this crab cakes, you can go on a couple different directions. You can serve them as none tray, then we’ll make a larger pancake or as an – like I do tonight. We’re going to make small ones about one ounce portions. Also, I have served them before, I made a pancake about that size was some pouch eggs on tops with a sauce, almost like a nice blend, but now that was a big hit. I really like that one. So What I’m going to do now, I’m going to take about a tablespoon size pieces of the crab could really put that right down, were going to shape the cake with the spoon and flatten out a bit just like so. No nice ideas, you get a nice golden brown crust on both sides of the crab cake. We could always finish them in the oven. If you are throwing a party will make your whole bunch of them ahead of time with browning on my both sides and then maybe 15 minutes before I want to serve them I would put them into an oven about 300 degrees just to warm them up, just to finish cooking in that way, my guest would get nice fresh crab cakes. Less work for me too, all right. Now while these are cooking, I’m going to prepare the sauce. Now over here, inside my sauce pan here, we’ve got about a quarter cup of white wine vinegar. I’m going to bring it up, I’m going to boil it from a minute so I’ll reduce to just a bit, here we go. Now, once I reduced it down a bit, well I’m going to add to the, we’re going to add some fresh chopped tomato there. This is a plum tomato, I like plum tomatoes. The water content is low, you have more meat to a plum tomato, there is this more fruit there. Some of your beef steak tomatoes once you cooked them, don’t worry just runs right up. So with the more, with the high concentrations salt in the plum tomato you have a high concentration of flavor also and that’s what I’m really dig about plum tomatoes. All right, so now once I’ve reduces this vinegar just a bit straight to the pan, I’m going to add my plum tomatoes on there. Now you see, we want a nice golden brown color on the crab cakes. Let’s get okay. Now once over here are my sauce, I just want my tomatoes to wilt a bit inside the white wine vinegar that we put in there. Now, once I’ve get a reduction and my tomatoes are warm through, I’m going to take this away from the flame all together. Because the next time what I’m going to do is I’m going to finish the sauce and I’m going to put some whole butter in here. And we have about four tablespoons of butter here. That’s about four tablespoon read like that, okay and away from the heat I want to melt. I want the butter to stay whole. You know if put it on a full heat, it’s going to beak down. The oils would come from the salads and it’s kind of oily. You know there’s a greasy nice in your mouth, but if we can keep it, if you just melt a butter slowly, and French is called Mounter Au Beurre to finish with the butter. You see this is perfect right now. I’ve got, I’m going to keep the butter nice and creamy. And once all my butter is melted, I’m going to put some fresh tarragon sauce, like so. And then, we’re going to keep this, I’ll keep it warm on the side right over here. Now another thing, whenever I cook meats there’s a trick I learned when I was in culinary school, the chef told me one of the first things was if you put your index finger on your thumb together and you feel this muscle right here, that’s a raw feels like. The next one, you middle finger with your thumb together is medium rare, you feel again tougher as we go, all right. Now the ring finger and your thumb that’s medium and the pinky and the thumb that’s well done, you feel how tough that is now. So as a cook is going to push back, now the same is through with this crab cakes. As it starts to cook, you could feel it’s really going to get tougher and tougher as it cook. Get the nice golden brown color on both sides and we’re just right. Okay, then I’m going to top it with a bit of a tiny parsley, and viola! Thank you.