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.
Not JUST because of this post, but it definitely helped ;), I nominated you for a blogger award! Thanks for the good reads! http://thekeyofkels.com/2013/02/07/beautiful-blogger-award/
Very kind! I do love those awards
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Love the image at the top!!
The next time you visit the US, you need to check out the “Big Texan” in Amarillo, Texas. 72 ounce porterhouse steak, shrimp cocktail, salad, bread, and dessert – all free if you can eat it in 30 minutes, otherwise $75 – lots of takers, not many winners. Lots of barf bags – only in America.
I’t amazing what you can actually get into a human body!
I had the best crab cakes years ago in Baltimore… Haven’t tasted it that good since… Looks delicious! 🙂
Americans do shell fish so much better than us Brits. Mind you, you do have the advantage of more sea to go fishing in
Looks like these turned out just perfectly!! I’d have a glass of wine with them as well:)
Yes they were much tastier than they looked. I’ll be looking of real live crabs nest time though
This looks delicious with the lime too. I am with the Mrs., I love the wine!!
I love your new site. I went ahead and did another follow by email because I wasn’t sure if everything was new. This looks really nice 🙂
Thanks I think it looks a lot ‘cleaner’
I love the rotating banner. I wish my WordPress site had that feature.
You should be able to do that – you can always change your theme….
I applaud your effort of creating a crab cake with as much crab as possible.
Happy new year!
Yes who needs filler – stick to the crab
I absolutely love a good crab cake & couldn’t agree with you more about how they should actually be mouthfuls of crab & not filler. I also agree w/buying the meat & not taking a crab apart. Being from New England I can rip apart a lobster faster than you can blink but was clueless about crabs until I visited N. Carolina a few years ago. I’d heard about this place called Dirty Dicks (I know…) being the place to go for crabs. Crab cakes were awesome but I really wanted to try the whole thing & told the waitress I didn’t know where to start. Great waitress that she was, she ordered a heaping plate of them, a pile of napkins & sat down with me to show me exactly what to do. They were great but truly a mess to eat.
God the only thing I found more difficult than eating a lobster was preparing mussels
This looks amazing! I love crab cakes. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve always been somewhat jealous of Adam and wondered how long he could hold out eating all that food.
Oh he is definitely off that gig. He does a clip show at the mo on UK tv and he looks like he is still sweating those pulled-pork rolls off!
I can just imagine!
Can’t watch Man V Food. The sight of a bloke sweating pork fat and stuffing himself is not my idea of entertainment. Love the cakes. I also notice that you snuck a glass of white into the ingredients shot.
Happy New Year,
Conor
TV entertainment, I have found, is directly correlated to the amount of booze consumed. You must be abstaining…!
Love it! I was just thinking about mayonnaise as a binder 🙂
Happy New Year to you too, by the way!
Mayo unfortunately is a poor binder – I very nearly lost those cakes – they started to disintegrate big time
So I actually met Adam when he did a talk here in Atlanta a couple of years ago. He was really nice and said that he was actually in the best shape of his life, cause the days he wasn’t filming, he was eating super healthy. Who knows how true it is, but I quit watching when he outsourced the eating to ‘regular people’ 😉 Love your recipes!
He is a miracle but i think he reached his limit – no one can eat that amount of food and keep going, bless him for trying though!
Being from Maryland, I always appreciate a good crab cake recipe. I’ll have to try it out sometime soon!
Thanks for thinking its good – and thats from someone who’s never seen a live crab!
Thanks for sharing that recipe! I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to cook it any time soon but I appreciate your wit and humour with regards to cooking crab. And drinking beer. I’ll be looking forward to the next post.
I know they were really touch and go!
Yes, one of my favourite shows on television. Loved the crab cakes.
He’s great can’t wait for the audience participation series to come on tv
I love this, thank you for sharing….and of course, with wine, my favorite ingredient! Sometimes I even add it to my meals 😉