Top 24 Crab Recipes: Cakes, Dips, Bisque, Pasta and Boils

Crab meat is graded by where it comes from on the body, and the grade decides the dish. Jumbo lump and lump are large, pristine pieces from the back fin — sweet, expensive, and worth saving for crab cakes and salads where you want to see whole chunks. Backfin and special are smaller flakes, perfect for dips, soups and stuffings where the meat disappears into the mix. Claw meat is darker, browner and stronger-flavored, cheaper, and best in bisque, boils and anything robust enough to carry it.

Pasteurized refrigerated meat in a tub is the everyday choice and very good; fresh-picked from the seafood counter is the treat. Frozen works too, but thaw it slowly in the fridge and drain it well, since waterlogged crab dilutes everything it touches. Whichever you buy, tip it onto a tray and pick through it with your fingers for stray bits of shell and the thin, translucent cartilage — do this gently so you do not shred the lumps you paid for.

A clear word on real versus imitation. Imitation crab (often labeled surimi, krab, or "crab sticks") is not crab at all — it is mild white fish, usually pollock, pulped, bound with starch and sugar, dyed and flavored to mimic the real thing. It is cheaper, sweeter, rubberier and a fine, sturdy choice for California rolls, casual crab Rangoon, salads and budget dips where it is heavily sauced. But it cannot stand in where crab is the star: in a lump crab cake or a she-crab soup, real crab is doing the work and imitation will taste flat and faintly artificial. Buy by the role the crab plays.

The defining mistake with crab cakes is too much binder. A great cake is mostly crab held together by the barest minimum of egg and breadcrumb — when you look at one, you should see lumps of meat, not a beige paste. Start with a single egg, a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise and just enough fine breadcrumb or cracker crumb to make the mix cohere when you cup it, then stop. Fold, do not stir; you are coating the lumps, not mashing them. The seasoning that does the heavy lifting is Old Bay, a little Dijon, Worcestershire and a squeeze of lemon.

Chilling is what saves them. Form the cakes, then rest them in the fridge for at least thirty minutes — an hour is better — so the binder sets and the cakes hold their shape when they hit the pan. Cold cakes go into a hot pan with a film of oil or butter and are left alone; the urge to nudge and flip early is exactly what breaks them. Give each side three to four minutes over medium-high until a deep golden crust forms, then turn once. A crust is your structure, so do not crowd the pan and drop its temperature.

Because the crab is already cooked, you are really just heating the cakes through and building a crust, so they cook fast. Pan-frying gives the best crust; for a lighter version, brush with butter and bake at a hot 425°F until golden, or finish pan-seared cakes in the oven. Serve them the moment they come off the heat with lemon and a quick remoulade or tartar. Hold them warm too long and the inside dries out and the crust softens — crab cakes are a cook-to-order dish.

Frozen crab legs — snow, king or Dungeness clusters — are pre-cooked, so you are only reheating them through, which takes minutes, not the long boil people fear. Thaw them overnight in the fridge if you can. To steam, set the clusters in a basket over an inch of boiling water, cover, and go five to seven minutes until they are hot and smell sweet. To boil, drop them into well-seasoned water for four to five minutes. Either way, the moment to stop is when they are heated through, not "cooked" — there is nothing left to cook.

A crab boil is theater and the seasoning is the whole point. Build a court-bouillon: a big pot of water made aggressively savory with Old Bay or a crab-boil blend, salt, lemon halves, bay, garlic and a glug of beer or vinegar, and let it simmer to infuse before anything goes in. Add ingredients by cook time — potatoes and sausage first, corn next, and the crab and any shrimp last for just a few minutes — so everything finishes together and nothing turns to mush. Tip the whole lot onto a newspaper-covered table and eat with your hands.

To get at the meat, crack the shell at the joints with kitchen shears or a cracker rather than brute force, which sprays you and shatters meat into the shell. Run the shears down the soft underside of a leg and the meat lifts out in one piece. Serve crab legs with drawn butter — warm, clarified butter with a little lemon and garlic — and keep the dipping butter gently warm so it does not set. Save the shells; simmered with aromatics they make a stock that is the soul of bisque.

Bisque is built on extraction, not on the lump meat you stir in at the end. Sweat aromatics in butter, sweat the shells with them if you saved any, add tomato paste and a splash of brandy or sherry, then a good stock, and simmer to draw out the flavor before you blend and strain it silky. The richness comes from a roux or a cream finish, the depth from the shells and a base of mirepoix cooked down properly. She-crab soup, a Lowcountry classic, leans on the same idea with a hit of sherry and the prized roe folded in at the end.

For any crab soup or chowder, the cardinal rule is the same as everywhere else on this page: the meat goes in last. Build and season the body of the soup completely — taste it, balance the salt and acid, get it right — and only then fold in the crab and warm it through for a minute or two off a hard boil. Crab simmered in soup for any length of time turns stringy and gives up its sweetness to the broth as a faint muddiness rather than a clean flavor.

Crab pasta is one of the fastest luxurious dinners there is, precisely because the crab is already cooked. Build a quick sauce while the pasta boils — garlic and chilli softened in good olive oil, or butter loosened with a little cream and lemon — then toss the drained pasta and a ladle of its starchy water through it, and fold the crab in off the heat at the very end. Linguine, spaghetti and ravioli all suit it. Keep it light; crab is delicate, and a heavy, over-reduced sauce will bury the very thing you are cooking.