Well, then halving the recipe makes perfect sense!!
The only worry I have about the bell pepper, much as I love using it when I cook, is that crab can be so delicate it might be overwhelmed by the bell pepper. Which might also be my personal taste. Regardless, you should be in for a good round of crabcakes this evening.
Any of those whites would do well. I’d also recommend Sancerre (Suavignon blanc from the Loire Valley), Muscadet, Gruner Veltliner, and certainly Chablis. More generally, Chenin and Chardonnay would be fantastic.
Woke up in Fort Worth this morning and needed a lunch place. Walked a few blocks to Salsa Limon, and it almost makes it OK to be in Ft. Worth. Their El Capitán is even better than the Pirata at Taco Flats in Austin. Think I’ll have another.
Tuesday I was in Ft Worth and I ate at Zeke’s Fish and Chips off of Camp Bowie and Bryant Irvin. Excellent cod, the chips weren’t anything special, but the cod was great.
Not to be contrarian, but IMHO crab and bell pepper are a match made in heaven. There is a dish local to Tampa that I grew up on called crab chilau, which is basically crab stewed in a spicy tomato-based sauce with copious amounts of bell pepper. It’s what makes the dish.
That sounds fantastic and will have to look it up. Kara and I chatted about this last night. She made a great point that when we think of crab cakes we’re thinking of Maryland style crab cakes (typically, no bell pepper). That’s probably coloring my thinking.
More importantly, @Lefty how were the crab cakes and white wine last night??
We made pork sausage ragú and accompanied it with a bottle of Nerello Mascalese (indigenous grape to Mt. Etna on Sicily). Pitch perfect for a rainy Friday evening.
They were awesome. I used a bit of yellow bell, torched and skinned and chopped small, mostly for color but the sweetness (I’d never try a green one) worked well.
Maryland crab cakes are what I like, I used this guy’s recipe, and I like his site. This is the 3rd recipe I’ve tried and he has not steered me wrong yet. Next time I’ll try his Crab Imperial and stuff a fish with it.
My local fishmonger is from Baltimore and makes awesome crab cakes. I’ve made them myself, but it’s usually just easier to buy from him when he has them available.
Outstanding!! When it’s Dungeness crab season out here, we always make a couple of rounds of crab cakes. Now I’m even more impatient for that to happen.
And I’ll have to do a deep dive into his recipes. Always looking for inspiration.
I love Dungeness crabs. One my favorite crab eating experiences was at Half Moon Bay. We walked out on the dock as the crab boats were returning and picked up three or four that just came out of the water. A little bar right there cooked em up for us, a bucket of cold beer on the picnic table…I was in crab heaven.
As a kid in the 70’s-80’s we’d rent a beachhouse at Jamaica Beach every summer with a few other families. My dad’s favorite activity was running crab traps. I can still see those milk jugs floating, and one year being big enough to wade out to help him empty them. Every few days there would be a crab boil.
Growing up around the Chesapeake Bay was crab heaven. My dad and uncles would usually run the traps, but he would also give me, my brother and my sister, a long string, a chicken neck and a long fishnet, and we would hang over the side of the dock trying to catch “the big one“ they were always too smart to go into the trap. It’s a magical thing to slowly pull up the string from the bottom with a massive crab, clinging to it, and move slowly and gently enough to get it in the net. And, we felt like we participated in the gathering when we would bring back three or four massive crabs for the parents for that nights crab boil. I like Dungeness crab just fine, but for me, nothing compares to a Maryland blue crab.
The recreational crab season usually starts in early November and the commercial season in mid to late November. This is the seventh year in a row that they’ve both indefinitely delayed due to the migration of humpback whales (so they don’t get caught in the nets). Some chatter the 2024 season might not start until late December or early January.
Back in 2015, we almost didn’t have a season at all. There were seriously high levels of neurotoxin in the water from algae blooms. That sucked.