The real Krabby Patty

Due to travel and general busy-ness, there has been a bit of a hiatus here at The Tripping Texan and for that, I am truly, madly, deeply sorry. There will be no primer for Baltimore (what we saw was sorta what I thought would happen), just a recap of the crab cakes...which starts now.

A decision I had to make this week, was whether to use real crab meat or imitation. Since I did not want to spend hours plucking expensive crab meat out of crab legs, I chose to go with imitation. I want to clear up something that I too had concerns about. Imitation crab meat is not "fake" crab meat. There is real crab meat mixed in, it's just not ALL crab meat. The type that I bought was crab mixed with Alaskan Pollock, which from what I can gather, is Alaska's version of catfish. So to make crabcakes, acquire through whatever means necessary the ingredients below (and butter), with the possibility of substituting real crab meat for the imitation.

Crab cake ingredients, minus the butter (he must have been late to the picture)

Let's begin. Start by melting the butter, and mix in the remaining ingredients except for the crab and the breadcrumbs. A crucial step that will make your life a whole lot easier than mine was is to mix these ingredients BEFORE adding the crab, not at the same time. I made it work, but that's because I'm awesome. Trust me though, you'll want to add the crab and crumbs after the other stuff is mixed together. Once you have that mixed, add the crab and bread crumbs, and continue to mix until it looks like this:

Crab cake mixture (that's a wooden spoon at the top of the picture, not some unmixed crab)

Now take a 1/2 cup measuring cup and use it like an ice cream scoop to scoop out the mixture, and mash it into a patty about 4-5 inches in diameter. Place these patties on a cornmeal covered pan, and put them in the fridge for at least an hour.

Ready for the fridge

When ready to cook, heat the vegetable oil until sprinkling cornmeal on it makes that telltale sizzle that you hear when frying food. Place the crab cakes in the oil and pray that they stay together better than mine did.

Sizzle sizzle sizzle sizzle sizzle sizzle sizzle sizzle

Flip the crab cakes once, and when they've reached that beautiful golden brown color, they are done. (Sidenote: has cooking helped any other color gain more popularity than golden brown? Milk white? Cocoa brown? Orange orange?)

Finished crab "cakes" and proof that I do eat what I cook

While there's no photographic evidence, I was able to get the last couple of crab cakes to stay together while cooking. However, even though it doesn't look like a crab cake, it still tastes like one. I found the imitation crab meat to make no difference in the taste or flavor (neither did the other people who had some) and the recipe prepares plenty, so have no fear of running short (I actually froze about half of the cakes I had prepared before cooking). All in all, a great Baltimore taste that pushes us to 5/5 on the year.