This is one of the most fun, most unique all animal-product recipes I have made yet. Make these as a snack, appetizer, or meal, serve them to guests, and eat the leftovers for lunch the next day!
The crab cakes are flavorful, crispy on the outside, and moist on the inside. No seasonings are needed and you can easily make a non-dairy version.
Ingredients
- 1 cup crab meat or other seafood
- 1/4 cup cream
- 1/2 cup cracklings or pork rinds
- 1 egg
- Salt
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
- Break up and grind your crab meat and cracklings/pork rinds into small, fine pieces. It may be easiest to put both together in a food-processor or blender and grind.
- Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. It should make a wet paste.
- Heat a pan to medium-high heat with a generous coat of oil on the bottom. If you have it, I recommend a cast iron pan that can be transferred to the oven.
- Add a large scoop of the mixture to the pan and form into a cake while it cooks. Once the bottom is browned and it is just cooked enough to safely flip, turn over and repeat on the other side.
- Transfer the cakes, in the pan if you can or on a baking sheet, to the oven and bake for 15 minutes to complete cooking.
Crab meat may be hard to find for this recipe. You can buy crab legs, cook, and remove the meat, or find containers of refrigerated, pre-shelled crab meat at stores like Safeway. Either option is a little expensive. I high recommend avoiding imitation crab. I have never found one that didn't include ingredients like sugar and cornstarch. However, you can make these cakes with all kind of different seafoods other than crab and they will still turn out great! For the cakes photographed here, I used langostino tails from Trader Joe's. Langostino tails come from squat lobsters, which are crayfish looking animals most closely related to hermit crabs. However, their meat looks and tastes like lobster.
If you avoid dairy, you can substitute the cream with broth or simply water. Before cooking, the mixture may seem overly wet, but this amount of liquid is necessary to make the moist insides the crab cakes are known for.
For this recipe, I used cracklings made from rending my own tallow. (See instructions for making tallow and cracklings from leftover meat fat here.) Cracklings are more flavorful and fattier than pork rinds, but either will work well. Salt to taste. If you wish, you can add seasonings like garlic and onion powder.
To put a fun spin on this recipe, try adding ingredients like cheese or bacon pieces!