Man v Food Inspired Crab Cakes

Although the Hairy Bikers are my favourite cooks, the chap who hosts the ‘Man v Food’ programme on cable is rapidly catching them up. Adam Richman’s modus operandi is to travel the States taking on massive food eating challenges – like eating 7lb burgers in an hour or a gallon of ice cream in 30 mins.

Actually he doesn’t do it anymore – I think the doctors probably told him he was killing himself – so now he is going around the country getting members of the public to take on food eating challenges instead – clever!

Anyway, one programme they went to a diner where they served enormous crab cakes, and what I liked about those crab cakes was they contained crab…and hardly anything else. And they were big. So I thought I’d try and replicate.

That crab shell reminds me of Zippy from Rainbow on 1970’s children’s TV…

Now of course in this land-locked county fresh crab is as rare as a decent steak. So I wasn’t expecting much from the tin of crab meat (called lump meat apparently) and the dressed crab I got from the fresh fish aisle at Sainsbury. But I wanted to created crab cakes that didn’t contain potato or bread filler.

And I wanted to deep fry because that is how the American diner did it on TV; only question was how did they hold together?

Ingredients

• 1 tin of crabmeat, drained
• 1 small dressed fresh crab (or better still just another tin of crabmeat)
• 1 red chilli finely diced
• 1/2 onion finely chopped
• 1 tbsp mayonnaise
• Juice from half a lime
• 1 egg yolk

I served the results up with some Pak Choi, based on a Gordon Ramsay method I used a while ago:

• 4 heads of Pak Choi
• 1/2 pint vegetable stock
• 1 tsp grated ginger
• 2 tsp icing sugar
• 2 tbsp soy sauce

First combine all the crab cake ingredients in a bowl except the egg, trying not to break up the crab meat too much:

Now add the egg yolk and gently combine. Form the mixture into 3 patties using your hands:

Cover with clingfilm and chill in the fridge for half an hour. To cook these I wanted to deep fry them. I tried this but they (not surprisingly) went a bit mad in the oil and started to fall apart. So I only flash fried them and then finished them off in the oven for about 15 mins.

Meanwhile get the green stuff ready. Cut the pak choi in half and in a bowl sprinkle over the soy, ginger, sugar and a bit of oil:

Now heat a bit more oil in a frying pan. Add the pak choi and cook so that the sugar melts:

Pour the stock over the simmer away for 10 mins or so. Take the cakes out of the oven:

Mmm they look a bit frazzled….Anyway plate up. Place a couple of pieces of pak choi on a warmed plate. Place a crab cake on top:

Top with some mayo, chopped chives and a wedge of lime:

Obviously serve with ice-cold beer. Now I wasn’t expecting much from this creation – although the cakes didn’t fall apart in the frying process they definitely wanted to. However the verdict from the Mrs was they were very nice – and I know this is true because she actually ate them (sans beer, she had wine).

An inside shot of the cake is required because they looked very tasty in there:

Next up I’m going to cook an entire hog roast and eat it in ten minutes. With wine.