Maryland Style Crab Cakes with Old Bay seasoning are a creamy, lightly spicy cake with a golden, crispy crust and chocked full of tender crab meat. This recipe is incredibly easy to prepare and has minimum “filler” resulting in a crab cake reminiscent of a dream vacation on the Maryland seashore!
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Making crab cakes is incredibly easy and makes for an elevated, yet fast weeknight dinner. Prepping your ingredients will be the most time consuming in preparing this dish. If using canned lump crab meat, the prep will be much faster. Move over boring pasta!!
Hands down, the best skillet to cook with are cast iron skillets. Once well seasoned, a cast iron pan is naturally nonstick. They are also absent of the harmful chemicals added to modern nonstick pans, making them a far healthier for your family. They heat and cook more evenly as well!
Cast iron skillets also last a lifetime, making them a wise investment. You can pass it down to your kids later in life, allowing them to share with their kids the happy memories you are creating for them now! They come in a variety of shapes, sizes and features.
Traditional Maryland Style Crab Cakes are made with Blue Crab from Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. Blue crab are a bit sweeter and the meat has a higher fat content, helping to make the cake stay together with minimum filler. The less filler, the better the crab taste! There are no veggies in a traditional Maryland Style Crab Cake and they must have Old Bay Seasoning!
I have take the liberty to add a little onion to this recipe. I like the added flavor and feel it brings out the sweetness in the crab a little more. Feel free to omit that if you would like a more traditional Maryland Style Crab Cake.
Blue Crab
When selecting your crab, depending on where you live it may be difficult to get your hands on Blue Crab. If this is the case, you can easily replace the crab meat in this recipe with snow or king crab. We are seafood lovers in my house and we often splurge on King Crab legs. We save all of the knuckles to make crab cakes from the next day! The knuckles are a little more briny in flavor than the leg meat and far more work to separate. So they are perfect for next day crab cakes!
It is also permissible to use canned crab meat. Although fresh is always best, the flavor will still be amazing and it will be an even easier prep to use canned. Canned crab meat can be found in your grocer’s canned food section near the canned tuna fish. The price can range from incredibly affordable to quite expensive. Obviously selecting a high quality, lump crab meat will impact the outcome of your cakes but there are many affordable options as well.
Maryland Style Crab Cakes
Ingredients
- 1 Lb. Blue Crab Meat
- ⅓ Cup Butter Round Crackers (ie., Ritz)
- 1 Small Yellow Onion (about a ¼ cup diced)
- ¼ Cup Mayonnaise
- 1 Egg
- 1 TSP Worcestershire Sauce
- 1 TSP Dry Mustard
- ½ Lemon Juiced
- ¼ TSP Garlic Powder
- 1 TSP Salt
- 2 TSP Old Bay Seasoning
- ½ Cup Peanut or Vegetable Oil
Instructions
- Prepare all ingredients. Dice onion. Crush crackers. Ensure all shells removed from crab meat.
- In a large bowl, mix together all ingredients except the cooking oil.
- Shape the mixture into patties. Generally this will make 6 large cakes.
- In a large skillet, heat oil over medium heat until hot. Once hot, add cakes carefully. Cook in batches if necessary, to allow enough room for cakes to cook without touching one another.
- Fry until golden brown, about 4 to 5 minutes. Carefully flip and fry on the other side for about 4 minutes until golden brown.
- Remove from skillet onto a plate lined with a paper towel.
- Serve immediately with your favorite seafood sauce.
Video
Crab cakes make an amazing main course, delicious sandwiches, or an incredibly rich appetizer or first course at your dinner party. I prefer to use this recipe to make 6 large cakes, however it can be easily adjusted to make more smaller sized cakes to meet your entertaining needs.
I love the crispy, golden crust that occurs when pan frying the cakes. The crispy outer crust gives way to a creamy, crabby center. Old Bay is a classic seasoning for seafood and offers a slight spice to the cakes. A delicious combinations of flavors will transport you to the seashore!
