Preparing Crab Meat for Crab Cakes

Part of the Video Series How to Cook Lobster, Crab, & Shrimp

Viewing videos requires the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player.
Get the latest Flash player.

Getting the crab meat ready to make crab cakes; learn this and more in this free online instructional cooking video about seafood taught by an expert.

Rating:
Views: 2,021
Comments: 1 (read)

Favorited: 1 | Add to Favorites

Tags: cooking, food, Louis Ortiz, recipe, recipes, seafood
Bookmark at:

All Videos in the Series, How to Cook Lobster, Crab, & Shrimp

Member Comments

Posted by Maitri on Friday, 02 May, 2008 at 2:10 PM

(mark as spam)

Thank-you for telling me how to be SURE about whether the crab meat is good or not! To know that the presence or absence of "the slightest whiff of ammonia" is a definite answer is very useful. No other odor is a problem with regard to the crab meat: so simple, so helpful. Thank you!

Video Transcript

Preparing Crab Meat for Crab Cakes
Hi! Today we are going to show you how to make crab cakes from scratch and I've got a pound of crab meat and this is actual lump crab meat. Now these come from blue crabs and there are three different styles I should say. There is claw meat, regular lump and jumbo lump and they increase in price as you get closer to the jumbo lump. I got the regular crab meat today to show you and I like using this cut simply because it is fresh picked. Again, this is wild crab meat and it's not pasteurized and there's a vast quality difference and a vast flavor profile in crab meats when you start canning them and making crab cakes out of the pasteurized. So we've got some good nice fresh wild crab meat and I know that it is fresh because I went to a reputable seafood market to get it. Also you can see on the cannister and this is a 1 pound container, its usually how it is packaged. There is an actual sell by date. Other companies will put a pick date on there and usually within 6 days of a pick date you're still going to be okay. Just to make sure you want to always go ahead and open obviously the container and take a whiff of the crab meat itself and if there is the slightest hint of ammonia, then that means the crab meat has gone bad. It's never an in between. It's either good or it's bad. So the ammonia actually will indicate that the crab meat is all bad. So we've got a good batch here and we are going to come right back and show you how to pick through this and get the preparations started for the crab cakes from scratch.

About the Expert

Expert: Louis Ortiz is a professional chef instructor at a culinary institute. He has been working in the culinary industry for 10 years. Read More