Maryland Crab Cake Pasta (Crab cake pasta? Are you nuts?)

Stinky The Clown

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Thu Apr-14-05 05:38 PM
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Maryland Crab Cake Pasta (Crab cake pasta? Are you nuts?)

Maryland crab cakes are arguably the best in the world. There are as many variations on them as there are crab cake cooks. Secret - even mystical - ingredients abound. Blue haired old ladies have them at tea time. They're sold for a very dear price ($15 per, or more, in places) at raw bars and seafood bars frequented by attorneys standing side by side with sanitation workers. Restaurants in the best part of town fail to sell bad ones, and the seediest dive you can imagine has wait lists when they have a reputation for good ones. The very best crab cakes have no bread or cracker filler. Just mayonnaise and egg as the binder, the seasonings, and jumbo lump crab meat from either the Chesapeake Bay, the North Carolina coast, or Louisiana (all at least $25/lb).

Here's my spin on them .... as a sauce for macaroni. Think of it almost as Alfredo meets Freddy. I made this up a few years ago and have never shared it anywhere or ever seen it made. Only a few guests and family have ever had it. But now I think it may ready for prime time - although it is still a prototype. Call it Version 0.99. So here ya go. I would ask only that anyone who makes this let me know what you think of it .... good or bad.

As for time, this is another sauce you can start at the same time you set your water on the stove. This is a nice, quick meal. Maybe 15 minutes start to finish.

Here's what ya need:

Flour and butter for a roux. I used exactly the amount you see in my butter dish and a commensurate amount of flour ... say three or four tablespoons full. Macaroni - I like Farfalle for this, but you can use any pasta that will hold the sauce and the crab meat. Long macaroni, like linguine, won't work as well. Tabasco, Worcestershire, no salt, no pepper. Not shown here is mustard, but it is in a later picture. Old Bay (a seasoning blend that is the quintessential crab cake seasoning, marketed forever by McCormick's - a Baltimore company, by the way). Clam juice. You could, I suppose, also substitute some white wine for this. Or maybe even sherry, but that's not how I make it ... or at least how I've made this so far. And of course the crab meat. Now .... as I said above, jumbo lump can run upwards of $25 a pound ... or even more. And I've used that for this dish. But this time I used (non jumbo) lump. Smaller pieces, but just as yummy. You could also use back fin or even claw meat. They both taste as good - certainly in a dish like this. But the downside to both back fin and lump is the presence of shell bits. You need to be careful to pick over the meat to get 'em out. They won't hurt you, but picking them out of your teeth at dinner kinda reduces the whole cache of an elegant dish ... yanno? :shrug:

Okay, now make a roux. Melt the butter. Add the flour to it and stir - pretty much constantly. Cook the roux until it juuuuuuust starts to brown at the edges. In the end, you want it to have the color shown in the picture and a consistency of about wet sand.

Add the clam juice - slowly ... a tablespoon at a time at first. The liquid will immediately be absorbed by the roux. Add a bit more.

Keep doing this until the roux/liquid volume has doubled and is nice and smooth. Some people use a whip to mix their roux ... and that's fine. I don't. I just add the cold liquid slowly and stir virtually nonstop for the first minute or three. Once you get about a half bottle of the clam juice in, you can add more at a time. You want a nice thick, smooth sauce. Be careful after you get a whole bottle in. The exact amount of liquid needed depends on the precise volume of your roux, the temperature of the ice atop Mt Fuji, the number of left handed redheads in Dublin .... you get the idea. Just don't add too much. There's no way to thicken a roux based sauce other than making more roux and adding the thin sauce to the new roux ..... just add carefully and in small amounts again when you get close to the viscosity you want and you'll be fine. For this batch, I ended up using 1-1/2 bottles of clam juice. I then drank the leftovers!

Now add the tabasco and Worcestershire to taste. A good amount is 10 drops or so of the tabasco and maybe a tablespoon or two of the Worcestershire. Mix to blend in.

Add some mustard (a classic crab cake ingredient). Say a tablespoon or two ... to taste. I'd avoid American yellow mustard. Use a darker one. Guildens, maybe. For me, however, I really *do* like Grey Poupon!

Add the Old Bay. If you've not worked with this before, taste a bit of it before you use it so you can take a more educated guess at how much to use. It has some (red pepper) bite to it. We like that, so we use a good bit of it. 4 tablespoons, probably. This is also the essential flavor in the dish, so if you prefer things less hot, you may want to omit the tabasco. Try to use a goodly bit of the Old Bay.

Mix it all up and adjust the seasonings as needed. Note ... no need for salt or pepper ... the ingredients (including the crab meat, which is already cooked) have plenty.

Add the crab meat.

Fold it more than stir it so as to keep it as intact as possible. It is kinda fragile ... not totally, but it ain't beef! So just be gentle. This is the completed sauce.

Drain the macaroni. Fold in the sauce and enjoy. I prefer a nice dark beer with this instead of wine. The flavor of this is "big" to say the least. It can stand up to a red wine or a beer. White wine with this seems, to me at least, wimpy next to it, hence my preference for a really dark, thick stout or porter or dark ale.

Again, if ya try this, please lemme have your comments - good or bad.