Crab Cakes That Endure

A crab cake is one of those foods that people get passionate about. Strong opinions exist about who makes the best crab cake. Food connoisseurs attend crab-cake contests across the country, searching for the chef who can create the perfect crab cake. But Phillips Foods, Inc., Baltimore, has been making award-winning crab cakes using the same recipe for over 50 years.

The public was first introduced to Phillips’ signature crab cake in 1956 when Brice and Shirley Phillips opened Phillips Crab House in Ocean City, MD. The idea behind the restaurant was to provide an outlet for the surplus crabs from the family’s seafood-processing business. The same family recipe is used today to produce crab cakes for the company’s eight full-service restaurants in the eastern United States, smaller restaurants in airports and other locations, and retail and foodservice clients. Consumers can even use that same recipe when making crab cakes at home, since it’s printed on the label of Phillips’ cans of lump crabmeat.

ANATOMY OF A CRAB CAKE

The method used to produce crab cakes in Phillips’ Baltimore plant combines culinary arts with modern-day technology. The wet ingredients are received as a preblended mixture of oil, eggs, mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice and seafood seasoning. This is then mixed with other ingredients, including crab. All crabmeat is tested by the quality-control department before going into production. The finished crab cakes consist of approximately 65% crabmeat.

Even though crab cakes produced in the plant are made using the same basic recipe that is used in Phillips’ restaurants, slight adjustments are necessary to maintain the quality in a frozen product, explains Bobby Love, director, global quality control, Phillips Foods.

Ingredients for the crab cakes are blended in 8-lb. batches in both the restaurants and the plant. In the plant, the initial crab-cake mixture is made with smaller pieces of crab. Then larger pieces of crab are added to the mixing tubs.

The crab cakes are then formed using an ice-cream scooper. First, several pieces of jumbo crab are placed by hand in the ice-cream scooper, then the scooper is filled with the bulk crab-cake mixture. When the crab cakes are released from the scooper, there is an even distribution of the large pieces throughout the crab cake.

The main reason the crab cakes are formed by hand is to avoid breaking the pieces of lump crabmeat. Lumps of crabmeat are very delicate, and the value of crabmeat increases with size. Machine forming of crab cakes would break up the lumps, decreasing the quality and value of the crab cakes, explains Love.