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!