Low Country Crab Cakes

We spent the first eight years of my retirement in the beautiful South Carolina low-country, living on a little island called Callawassie.  It is located between Hilton Head and Beaufort.  The fresh seafood in the area is delightful and while living there I took a seafood cooking class from the chef of one of the Hilton Head country clubs.  It was run through the adult education program of a junior college.  We learned to cook a lot of the local seafood including, shrimp, oysters and crab. While most of us don't have our own crab trap or a dock to hang it off of, we can all get blue crab in our local grocery store. Costco probably has the best priced crab around and it comes in one pound cans.  This recipe calls for two ponds of crab meat, but you can easily half the recipe. If you had to "pick" the meat from crab that you caught, it would take a whole bunch of crabs to make two pounds. When crab is caught commercially it is either sold live or cooked right on the boat that caught it. Then it is sold either in the shell frozen or the meat is picked from the shell and canned. That is the most common way to buy crab meat.  So get yourself a couple of pounds of crab and make up a batch of these low-country crab-cakes.  Enjoy them with a green salad and an oaky Chardonnay.

Ingredients :

Two pounds of canned crab meat

1/4 of a red onion- chopped

1 stalk of celery - chopped

One red bell pepper- chopped and then with the moisture squeezed from the chopped pepper

2-3 tsp Old Bay Seasoning

Three large eggs

3/4 cup Mayonnaise

2 TBSP whole grain mustard

1 1/2 cups bread crumbs

Preparation:

Open Crab and Drain any excess moisture.  Chop Onion, celery and Red pepper.  Wrap chopped pepper in a piece of cheese cloth and squeeze all of the moisture you can out of the chopped pepper. 

In a large bowl, combine crab meat with onion, pepper and celery. Mix thoroughly. Season the mixture with two to three teaspoons Old Bay seasoning and mix well.  Crack the eggs into the mixture.  Add the Mayonnaise and mustard and fold ingredients all together with you hands.  Begin to add bread crumbs a little at a time and mix in.  Keep adding crumbs until you can roll the cakes into shape.  They should still be sticky and not too dry.  This recipe makes about 40 small appetizer sized crab cakes or about eight cakes the size of a hamburger if you want to use them for sandwiches or as an entree.  Saute the crab cakes on relatively high heat.  I like to use a combination of butter and olive oil to saute.  You can hold in a 200 degree oven for some time before serving.   

A simple sauce for the crab cakes can be made with one cup Mayonnaise, 1 TBSP Dijon Mustard, 1 TBSP Horseradish , 1/4 cup chopped capers and some ground red pepper to taste.