Even though it’s an oft-touted item on restaurant menus, very
little goes into making a good crab cake. It’s simply a matter of
making a flavorful mayonnaise-based sauce to flavor the crab,
using the freshest crab you can get*, and treating the crab gently as
you combine it. Douglas doesn’t serve his crab cake with tartar
sauce or any other mayo-based sauce because there’s already so
much in the cake itself; instead, he recommends any acidic accent,
such as tomatillo salsa, salsa verde, or, as suggested here, just
lemon wedges and dill.
2 cups fresh crabmeat, from either Dungeness or blue crabs,
cooked and shelled
½ cup Dijon mustard (Maille is a good brand to use)
½ cup mayonnaise
A big pinch of Aleppo pepper (see Clark’s Kitchen Know-
How)
¼ cup chopped chives
1 whole egg
1 egg yolk
Zest and juice of 1 lemon, plus 1 lemon cut into wedges
A pinch of kosher salt (optional)
2 cups panko bread crumbs
Clarified butter* (see Davis’s Kitchen Know-How), regular,
unsalted butter, or canola oil (enough to coat your pan)
¼ cup chopped fresh dill