Food - Drink

The Ingredient That Will Elevate Your Crab Cakes

By LAUREN ROTHMAN

Typically crab cakes are made with crab meat, a bready filler like bread or cracker crumbs, eggs, and added flavorings. However, these ingredients, while helping the cakes hold together, can mask the sweet crab flavor; to avoid having your crab cakes from tasting like generic patties, an ideal filler option is shrimp.

Former chef Lan Lam explains that while making mousseline — a seafood mousse — she would purée fish and cream together, resulting in a sticky glue-like substance. It occurred to her to use a shrimp mousseline in crab cakes instead of traditional fillers, a substitution that intensified the crab's flavor instead of diluting it.

Cook’s Illustrated recommends preparing a simple shrimp mousseline using four ounces of deveined shrimp and a quarter cup of heavy cream, then folding the mix into seasoned lump crabmeat. After the crab cakes are shaped and have chilled for 30 minutes, they're coated in panko and then pan-fried.

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