Maryland Jumbo Lump Crab Cakes with Bread & Butter Fennel
Maine may be the best place to eat lobster, and New Orleans is known for its signature gumbo, but Maryland is the mecca for crab cakes. So when Fed Ex showed up with a styrofoam cooler marked “PERISHABLE”, with the return address of Parkville, Maryland, I knew that I was in for a real treat.
I received a crab cake delivery from Pappas Seafood Co. and was thrilled to experience my first, authentic Maryland crab cake! Little did I know, this massive puck of sweet, succulent jumbo-lump crab meat would make all other crab cakes inferior.
It’s a similar situation that I have with the lobster roll at the Raw Bar in New Seabury, I can never order one anywhere else without feeling utter disappointment.
What makes them so amazing? First of all, you can tell just by looking at them that the crab to filling ratio is like 90:10. I had trouble just trying to get them to keep their shape while frying them in the skillet. Pappas mixes the crab, filling and seasoning together with extreme care and a gentle hand with as little movement as possible so that the golf-ball sized lumps stay completely intact.
Not to mention, they do it “to-order” right before packaging with every single online sale. No buckets of commercial crab cake mix here, just fresh, colossal jumbo lump crab meat straight from the Chesapeake Bay.
Their seasoning is spot on as well; subtle and simple so that the sweet crab meat remains the star.
My crab cakes mysteriously lost at least a half of an inch in diameter prior to cooking because I couldn’t help myself picking the meat out and eating it. Surprisingly, the finished products were still enormous!
I just fried both sides in a skillet to obtain a golden brown crust and then finished them off in a 375 degree oven. I served them with a few spears of roasted asparagus and a mound of bread & butter fennel. I sliced the fennel paper-thin and pickled it with a heavier concentration of sugar in the brine as you would to create bread & butter pickles.
Simply topped with some celery leaves, a drizzle of lime vinaigrette, and a shake of Old Bay Seasoning. Old Bay is a Maryland-born seasoning mixture that is a blend of 14 different unique spices, used in heavy doses on all types of seafood.
I fell in love with Old Bay in college to the point that I ordered Old Bay flavored potato chips on the internet. The only problem was that I couldn’t just ship one or two bags, rather I was forced to order 2 dozen, large party bags per shipment.
At 3:00 in the morning after the bar, my roommates and I would return home and tear through our stash of Old Bay potato chips, only to awake with slashes on the roofs of our mouths and Old Bay and stale beer mustaches. Post college, I took a brief hiatus from the Maryland spice.
I served these crab cakes with a bottle of 2010 Falernia Pedro Ximenez from Chile. Pedro Ximenez is actually the name of the grape, not a relief pitcher for the Colorado Rockies.
It’s the same grape that is used to make Sherry, but here in Chile it is served pre-fortified. It’s a rather simple wine, medium-bodied and a perfect blend of acidity and minerality. Underlying citrus and floral notes bring out the fresh, sweetness of the crab and complex notes of the Old Bay Seasoning. After destroying three huge patties, I was so full that I thought I was going to burst, yet somehow I couldn’t stop picking at the mountain of crab on my plate knowing that it may be long before I eat another morsel of crab cake.
If you’re a fan of crab, I urge you to get on their website and order yourself some of their crab cakes. They will change your life! If only Baltimore could put together a baseball team as solid as these crab cakes, they’d have a chance to get out of the basement of the American League East.
Tags: Best Crab Cakes, bread and butter fennel, Falernia Pedro Ximenez, jumbo lump crab cakes, Maryland crab cakes, Pappas Crab Cakes, Pappas Seafood Company, pickled fennel
