Japanese Crab Cakes with Spicy Mayo

 

This is a great recipe that makes for some scrumptious crab cakes. They're a bit finicky, though, as several steps are required to put them together. But they're not difficult to create.

More importantly, they need to be deep fried, so this recipe is *not* for everyone!

But we're not everyone so we bravely forged ahead. The Wonder Woman has lots of experience with stovetop deep frying as she has make wonderful spring rolls for lots of years (more about them in a later post).

Our deep fryer is a pot on the stove top. It's fine if you watch carefully and don't allow it to overheat and start smoking or burning. We keep the heat relatively low, too.

These crab cakes are very nice when served fresh from the fryer with some spicy mayo. The spice level is up to you, of course. Feel free to adjust the ingredients as you see fit.



Ingredients for the spicy mayo

• 120 ml mayonnaise (1/2 cup)
• 60 ml (or to taste) your favourite hot sauce such as Sriracha or Sambal Oelek or Tabasco (1/4 cup)
• 30 ml tobiko fish roe (optional) (2 Tbsp)
• 10 ml rice wine or rice vinegar (2 tsp)
• freshly grated lemon zest

Ingredients for the crab cakes

• 65 g flour (1/2 cup)
• 120 g butter (1/2 cup)
• 750 ml milk (3 cups)
• 500 g crab meat, in small chunks or diced. (1 lb)
• 1 small onion, finely minced
• salt and pepper to taste
• 125 ml rice wine (optional) (1/2 cup)
• 1 medium potato, cubed and boiled. mash it until it's no longer lumpy
• Flour for coating
• 1 egg, beaten, for coating
• Panko bread crumbs, from Japan, for coating. You can substitute regular bread crumbs but they won't have that special crunch.
• oil for deep frying

Directions for the spicy mayo

Combine all ingredients in a small blender, or stir vigorously. Refrigerate until ready to use.



Directions for the crab cakes

Start by melting the butter in a small saucepan. Mix in the flour and stir until well combined. Then gradually add the milk and stir until it's smooth.

Add mashed potato in the milk mixture. Mix well.

In a fry pan, carmelise the onion.  Add the crab meat onion and stir fry for a bit.  Add salt, pepper and wine to season.

Add the crab mixture to the potato and milk.  Remove from heat and set aside to cool enough to handle easily.

Lay out 3 medium-size bowls, one containing flour, one with the beaten egg and the last containing bread crumbs. Line a tray with wax paper to hold the finished crab cakes.

With your hands, take some crab mixture and shape into a ball, about 3 cm in diameter.

Dredge the ball in the flour. Remove it and shake off any excess flour. Then dip it in the egg until coated. Remove and shake off the excess egg. Finally, roll the crab in the bread crumbs. Flatten into a disc and place on the tray. Repeat for the rest of the crab cakes.

Heat the oil in the deep fryer or pan. The oil should be at least 5 cm deep to be effective. Otherwise the oil will cool too much when the cakes are added.

Have a plate lined with paper towels ready to drain the crab cakes as they're finished frying.

Once the oil is medium hot, add a crab cake, two at a time into the pan. They'll float to the surface. Watch them carefully and turn once when browned. Remove from the oil and onto the cooling plate. Repeat for all.  The purpose of the frying is to brown the breadcrumbs.  The crab mixture is already cooked so you don't need to deep fry for long, and not a very high temperature.

Serve while still hot along with the dipping sauce in small bowls.

Makes about 20 crab cakes.

Fried Clams and Poutine râpée

I recently posted about the lobster and steamed clams and pie from our recent vacation while visiting the Admiral Catnap (retired) and the Admiral Catnap (retired), i.e., my parents. I also want to show other dishes we eat while there. The food is unique to the area and worthwhile seeking out.

Fried Clams

Fried Clams

This is one of the few deep-fried dishes I never fail to get. But since it's usually only once per year, my conscience is clean.

Fried clams are a speciality of the area. I know of half a dozen restaurants which serve them, including a fast-food chain. There are some in south-eastern New Brunswick and in Maine. They are nowhere else in the world, as far as I know. Please let me know in the comments below if you know of any outside this area. I'd love to visit others.

Fred's

The best of all the restaurants my family and I tried is Fred's Restaurant in Cap Pele. It is consistently tops in my own experience, and in the one or two reviews I heard about. The original Fred sold the business many years ago and I don't know if the recipe was his invention or was perfected by one of his successors.

How do they prepare the fried clams?

Fried Clams

They start with fresh clams. They are usually not local to the restaurant's area but are within a couple of hundred kilometres. Nova Scotia is a popular source. The clams are made ready for eating, meaning cleaned of any sand or grit, and shucked. I very rarely get a shell fragment in the clams and never any sand.

They then coat the clams in pancake batter, which may or may not be an insider secret. That's right, their excellent batter is nothing more than commercial pancake mix. Coating the clams is a messy process and involves mixing the clams into the batter using their hands.

From the batter, the clams go into the deep fryer, where they're cooked to perfection every time. The servers wouldn't tell us any secrets to this, similar to how double-frying is best for french fries.

Then from the deep-fryer to the table, a short a trip as possible. When eating deep-fried it's always best to be hot and fresh from the fryer.

Homemade Onion Rings

We get the homemade onion rings for a side. They are just what you expect, rings of onion with batter and deep fried. Mmmmmm, a deep-fried dish to accompany a deep-fried dish. The batter for the rings is different and probably contains some bread crumbs.

We are always a group of four or more and we all love clams, so we end up getting 3 or more platters of clams plus a side of rings. The technique we've hit on is to ask them to bring out the platters one at a time, 10 minutes apart. This way, we share each platter and it ensures a supply of fresh, hot clams for everyone.



Poutine râpée

This dish is more subtle than the fried clams.

Forget everything you know about the Canadian fast food speciality of poutine, the french fries and cheese curds and gravy that's popular in most of the larger cities. The chip wagons serve nice poutine but that's not what I'm talking about.

Poutine râpée

Poutine râpée, despite the similar name, is quite different than poutine. It's an Acadian dish and goes something like this.

They start with cooked pork. Sometimes salted, but the ones we get are not salted pork.  The pork is wrapped in a mixture of potatoes. Part mashed potatoes and part raw grated potatoes. They are about 10 cm in diameter. The balls are boiled for a long time, perhaps an hour or more.

The balls are then served with a little of the cooking water, which now resembles a thin potato gravy. We put them in bowls, and top with fresh-ground black pepper and occasionally hot sauce.

They are a little bland but good. They're a delicious treat worth every bite. The pork looks a bit pink but it is cooked and safe to eat.

We get ours from a small store near Grand-Digue, and it's in the middle of nowhere. We take our own plastic container as we buy enough for everyone.


Next time you're in south-east New Brunswick be sure to seek out these regional dishes. You'll thank yourself.