Recipe: Deviled Crabs from the Seabreeze Restaraunt

Disclaimer: This is not my recipe.  This is the way the Seabreeze did it for many years and this is the way I did it using the recipe from their cookbook.  I'm tweaking some amounts, but it's essentially the same.  The original recipe calls for FOUR POUNDS of crab claw meat, which makes more than most people would want, I'd think, so I'm going to cut that in half (as I did when I made them), but you could probably even cut it in half again if you wanted.  That being said, if you're going to go through all the trouble, you might as well make plenty, right?

Ingredients:

1 c. finely diced onion
1/2 c. finely diced green or red pepper
1/2 to 2 tbsp minced garlic (the original calls for 1/2 tbsp, but I think a bit more would be good)
1/2 c. finely diced celery
1/8 c. olive oil (I always vote for extra virgin)
1/4 c. water (I always vote for extra virgin...or tap, I guess)


Approx. 7oz. tomato puree (I just went with pure tomato sauce for this; no additional ingredients)
Approx. 7oz. tomato paste
1 to 2 tbsp crushed red pepper, according to heat tolerance
1/2 tbsp dried oregano


2 pounds of blue crab claw meat, fresh or frozen or, if you have it available, go with refrigerated and canned, which works great

OK, we'll stop there on the ingredients and come back for the dough.

1. Coarsely mix the onion, pepper, garlic and celery in a blender or food processor to make it small, but don't turn it into a paste.  If you have good knife skills, you could probably pull this off with fine chopping, but it's convenient to use the blender or a food processor, so it's really up to you.

2. Add the vegetables to a large saute pan with the oil and the water and cook over very  low heat for 1 to 2 hours.  Now, as I said in the writeup for this recipe, you could probably put your heat to medium and cut that time down considerably, but...well, this is how they originally did it.

3. Add in the tomato puree or sauce, tomato paste and red pepper flake and cook on low heat for an additional hour, stirring often.  Add the oregano and cook for 5 more minutes.  Turn off the heat and let it cool.  The sauce will be pretty thick by this point.

4. Flake the crab meat into a large bowl and make sure to pick it over for any small pieces of shell.  Gradually add in the sauce and mix until the meat is moist and holds together nicely.  Refrigerate the mixture until you're ready to fry.

1 loaf of white bread (I used a baguette-style Italian loaf)
1 loaf of Cuban bread (won't be as long as a baguette, but should be broader)
Bread crumbs
2 to 3 tbsp crushed red pepper


So that's it for the breading.  I know it's a little vague, but you kind of just have to get in there and see how it goes.  As I mentioned in the writeup, I would probably take the crust off the bread when doing this as it doesn't seem to incorporate as well as the interior bread (but it worked fine with it, so it's up to you).

5. Tear the bread up and put it all into a big bowl.  Add enough water to moisten the bread (it took more than I figured it would, but you just have to go until you feel you're at the right spot) and then mash it all together until it has a loose, doughy consistency.

6. Add in the red pepper and then add in enough bread crumbs to get to a biscuit-dough-like consistency.  Again, I know this is vague, but I don't think you can mess this up too badly.  Just get it to where it holds itself together decently and it isn't a gloppy mess.  If it gets too dry while you're building the deviled crabs, just add in a little more water and mix it well.

Safflower or Vegetable oil for frying

7. OK, now you're ready to put all of this together.  At this point, you'll probably want to put your oil on the fire.  You'll want a deep-fry thermometer to be sure you're right at 330 degrees.  Use a neutral oil like safflower or just vegetable oil.  I had around 2-inches of oil in my cast iron dutch oven, which worked just fine.  Keep an eye on the temperature, but be sure to just give it time to get to 330 degrees and then make adjustments as needed to maintain that.

8. Construction: you'll want 3 vessels here; 1 for the dough, 1 for the crab mixture and then a plate for bread crumbs.  Actually, one more plate will be required as you'll need somewhere to keep the finished deviled crabs while you make the others.

9. Grab a handful of dough and drop it into the crumbs for a quick roll just to minimize stickiness.  You also might want to get a little bread crumb on your hands if you can in order to help, but, no matter what, this is a mildly sticky affair, so just embrace that reality and get to it.

10. Mash the dough in the palm of your hand into somewhat of a round shape around 4-inches in diameter and about 3/8-inch thick.  Place a heaping tablespoon of crab filling right in the center and then bring the edges up and around it.  Pinch it off at the top and remove excess dough from the top if you have any. Just do your best to get all of the filling surrounded and close up the seams.  Roll the deviled crab in bread crumbs again and then move it to the plate.  What you're looking for is something about the size of a baseball, but oval-shaped.

11. Cue up "The Final Countdown" by Europe because you're almost done!  Fry these in batches at 330 degrees for around 7 minutes total.  I typically got 3 to 4 of them in at a time and turned them over at 3-1/2 minutes for even browning.  Once they have been in for 7 minutes and are nice and golden brown, remove them to drain.  I use an inverted cooling rack over some newspaper, which works perfectly (credit to Alton Brown for that technique).  If you put them on paper towels, they'll just sit in the oil that drains off and you'll lose the crunchy exterior you just spent all that time creating.

12. You might let them sit for 5 minutes or so, but serve immediately with hot sauce (I prefer Frank's Red Hot for these).  If you want to do a bunch in advance, they should keep just fine in a low oven while you fry the rest.  They reheated pretty decently after 10 to 15 minutes in a 350 degree oven, as well.

Makes 16-20 Deviled Crabs

A Friend of the Deviled Crab is a Friend of Mine

If you grew up in the Tampa Bay area, as I did, at some point, you likely crossed paths with some sort of Cuban or Spanish food since the area is well known for it.  Obviously, Miami has the lock on Cuban cuisine, but Tampa more than holds its own in this respect thanks to an influx of Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants in the early part of the 20th Century.  Tampa's popular Ybor City district originated in the late 1800's around the highly Cuban product of cigars, so, really, this all makes a great of sense, now doesn't it?  Just say, "Yes" and we'll move on.

One of my earliest and (eventually) fondest memories of my Dad coming back from daily business trips or whatnot to Tampa was a brown paper bag, usually with more-than-a-few grease spots on it, filled with Deviled Crabs from the Seabreeze Restaurant.  When I was quite young, I always thought they looked and smelled pretty good, but I knew they had a little kick to them and they were filled with crab meat, which wasn't something I was at all interested in as a kid.  Like I said though, I eventually became a fan of crab and, even more than that, I became a fan of Deviled Crabs - essentially, a crab croquette filled with peppers, onions and lots of crab claw meat before being breaded with Cuban bread (not Cuban bread crumbs!) and deep fried.  Last, but not least, it is pretty much required that they be served with a side of hot sauce.

Now let's get the disclaimer out of the way right now: you'll not be seeing an authentic recipe for this on Rachel Ray's Half Hour Dinnertime Spectacular of Quickness anytime soon.  The end result is pretty outstanding, but you definitely have to work for it.

So my plan for posts like this will be to just post the recipe in its entirety separately since you don't necessarily need to read all of my ramblings when you simply want to cook something.  That being said, I will try to put some information in here that might be helpful to read ahead of time, so, by all means, read on...

The ingredient list for Deviled Crabs is none-too-outlandish, but there are a few things on there that might require some searching.  Obviously, your Deviled Crabs are only going to be as good as the crab you use, so that's a pretty important ingredient.  I am lucky enough to be near Trader Joe's and they carry nice refrigerated cans of crab claw meat (one pound of meat per can) at the fairly reasonable price of around $9 per pound.  I will say though that I struck out finding something similar at Ralph's where I was told that they typically only carried things like that around the holidays.  Of course, fresh crab from your local fish monger would be great and I know you can find good seafood at Whole Foods and similar stores, but you'll not find it priced this well and, for an application like Deviled Crabs, I don't know that you'll truly taste the difference.  I would avoid canned/non-refrigerated crab for this.

The only other ingredient that might not be readily available everywhere would be Cuban bread.  If you're in Miami or Tampa (or most major cities), you'll be fine.  Regardless of your location, just track down a local Cuban grocery or bakery and they'll have what you need.  If you don't seem to have a local Cuban grocery or bakery, you can get away with using all French or Italian bread.  Cuban bread is great and there are subtle differences between it and French or Italian, but not enough to bail out on making these if you can't find it!

For the most part, this is a pretty straight-forward recipe/procedure, it just takes some time and has one step in it that, to me, was pretty atypical.  You start out with coarsely chopped vegetables and aromatics including the Cajun trinity of peppers, onions and celery, so it really does seem to be a multi-cultural affair.  Interestingly, the recipe calls for these to cook over low heat for one to two hours(!).  Would you see a marked difference if you turned the heat up a bit and did this for 20 minutes?  My guess would be that you would not, but I also know this is how they made them at the restaurant all those years ago and they were damn good, so best not to mess with what works.

You then add in the tomato ingredients (paste and puree) and some herbs and spices before cooking further...for another hour.  Again, I'd imagine you could get away with a little less time, but, well, you know.

So you finally add the sauce to the crab meat (which you really should pick through a bit beforehand because tiny pieces of shell do indeed make their way in there on occasion) and you have a gloppy mess of tastiness that will eventually be the filling to your Deviled Crabs.  I will confess, my breading-to-filling ratio didn't go exactly as I had planned, so I had some of this leftover, but it made for a lovely Sloppy Crabby Joe or two later on.

Now for the weird part.  The breading for the Deviled Crabs consists of, well...dismantled bread?  You take your loaves of bread and wet them down with water to turn them into a kind of "dough", which you season a bit and then add in bread crumbs to make it tighten up again.  I tore up the bread before doing this and, though I failed to do so, I would also recommend going crustless on this step since the crust doesn't really get as mushy as the interior bread.  It's an odd move and one that I had never heard of or seen done before, but it did work.  I'm guessing this was put into practice as a way to utilize day-old or slightly stale bread in order to prevent waste.

Final steps include assembly and frying, both of which are pretty standard.  It is a bit odd to turn your "dough" into a thick pancake that you then wrap around the filling, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly and it does work surprisingly well.  I'd say to just be careful that you don't get too much dough around them, but they shouldn't be like egg rolls either.  It's all about the juxtaposition of breading and filling and hot sauce.

Click here for the recipe!

Intro

OK, here it goes; I guess I'm doing this.

Quick background: I'm a musician and a cook and I work in the art world.  I took piano lessons as a kid, but taught myself (for the most part) to play guitar and to sing.  My parents taught me a ton about cooking and I took a few culinary courses, but that's it.  I work directly with artists at my "day job" and art direct regularly.  I've been a "student" of animation, cartoons and art for my whole life.

I'm not holding myself to any real definition of what this blog will be, but I am passionate about all of these topics, so I figured it's a good place to start.  I devour whatever information I can find on all of them, so what I post here will come from all of that and more.

To give you a quick idea of where I'm coming from, I like this:

This, not so much:

I like this:

This is not really for me:

I like this:

I can do without this:

And I almost forgot, but this:

Not this:

If you opt to stick around and see what else goes up here, you'll get an even better idea about me and what I'm comprised of.  Take what I'm giving you, claim it as your own discovery and greatly impress your significant other.  You're welcome.

P.S. - Complaints Dept: