Talking Food with Cory Bahr: Crab Cakes

I'm Chef Corey Bahr and today we're talking crab cakes. Starting this off, we use only jumbo lump crab meat from Louisiana. We picked this over for all the little bits and pieces of shell and cartilage. Takes some time, but it's well worth it. You can get this locally at Captain Avery Seafood Market. Or you could just come to the restaurant and enjoy them or cook 'em for yourself. So it's just a few simple ingredients because the deliciousness, that sweet succulence of the crab is something we want to enhance, not cover up. If you're spending the money for jumbo lump crab, you don't want to break it up. So we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to mix our wet ingredients first. So we have a little mayonnaise and sour cream there. Some Creole mustard. You can use any whole grain mustard you like. We just like using Zatarain's Creole mustard, and an egg. Let's crack that right in there. You just want to fold this together lightly. So everything's well incorporated.

Add some green onions, salt and Old Bay. I like Old Bay because it reminds me of my childhood growing up. I mean, you know that cold Zatarain's Old Bay seasoning that you put on your seafood. Just kind of makes you think about childhood. Now we're just going to slowly pour this in over our jumbo crabmeat. Then we're going to do this motion here, we're just gonna fold. Fold it together lightly, because you want to preserve those big chunks of crab meat. We add just a little bit of untoasted Japanese breadcrumb, just to bind it just a little bit. Otherwise, they'll kind of melt and fall apart. We just still want it to be super tender. And once you put them together like this, you want to store this in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes and what that will do is cause everything to tighten up and you'll be able to form your crab cakes. So here we are with some formed crab cakes. You can see all those big chunks of crab meat. They're beautiful. What I recommend doing is just pop them in the oven under the broiler for about eight to 10 minutes or you can also saute them. They worked really well that way. Just garnish it with a little bit of lemon and arugula and you've got the perfect crab cake.