A Taste Test With Flounder And Crab

Decided it was time for a food header.

After a day between so Bev could get her pizza fix, it was time to eat the second flounder filet and the other half of the crab left from the pseudo stuffed crab meal. I decided to use this as a taste testing opportunity for both the fish and the crab and made everything appetizer size.

I’ve seen several recipes on the blogs I read where potato chips of some form are used as the final breading material and I’ve wanted to give it a try using crushed Lay’s Stax (like Pringles) and for comparison I used Panko. For the flounder, I seasoned the filets with salt, pepper and Emeril’s Essence (after breading cause I forgot - what a DA), dunked into an egg wash, then into the final breading.

To fry, rather than using a none stick skillet, I decided to go with stainless and use the proper heating technique I’d learned in my online Rouxbe cooking school  – I learned how to boil an egg recently, so I’m past boiling water and on my way to chefdom :-). If you haven’t watched the pan heating video that is their demo, you really should as it’s amazing how well it works.  I got the pan hot, added Canola oil, then the fish and reduced the heat some and they slid around just like in the video.

I flipped and finished to a golden brown - the school said cook the presentation side first as it usually looks the best - then served with some simple tartar sauce that we already had.

Since I wanted to have the best chance of success, I cooked the flounder and we ate it, then I cooked the crab, for which I made another batch of crab cakes using a modified recipe from Judy at Free Crab Recipes. Hers is for Maryland crab cakes using a pound of crab, but since I was using a Cajun remoulade, I added some Old Bay and Creole seasoning and halved her recipe to get this:

Crab Cakes:

1/2 lb. crab meat
3/4 tbsp. dry bread crumbs
1 tsp chopped fresh parsley
¼ tsp Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning
¼ tsp Old Bay
1/8 tsp black pepper (changed from the original)
1/2 beaten egg (this was hard to do)
3/4 tsp ground dry mustard
1/8 tsp hot pepper sauce (I used Sriracha)

After cooling, I cleaned and reheated the stainless pan and fried some cakes naked, some with panko, and some with Stax. I didn’t give them an egg wash as they were moist enough to hold the breading.

Here’s they are out of the pan with the remoulade sauce left from the previous seafood meal and my plate.

I’d suggested a salad but Bev wanted sautéed spinach so we used it as part of the presentation. The flounder was on raw spinach which then went into the sauté.

Conclusions:

The darker brown flounder is the Panko so it obviously must be watched or the temp lowered further. My taster isn’t very sophisticated so I rely on Pat and Bev for this and they both preferred the Panko as they didn’t care for the Stax taste. Next time it will be regular potato chips vs. corn flakes, which we get on the extra crispy grouper at our favorite place on Marco Island, Fl.

We really liked the crab cake recipe and Bev said it was like eating sweet crab meat. With the more flavors in the crab mixture, we couldn’t tell any flavor difference in the two breadings, but we preferred the breaded ones as the outside of the naked ones were kind of tough. The sautéed spinach with a little shredded Romano made for a nice presentation and both it and the remoulade were a great compliment to the crab.

There was a small piece of the chocolate truffle cake left and Bev fixed it up for me.

All in all a delicious dinner and we learned a few things – what could be better – and I’d serve both of these dishes to company.

All we have left from our seafood shop-a-thon is a nice piece of salmon and another pound of crab – I can hardly wait and now that I’ve found Judy’s site for crab recipes, I’ll be looking at it hard.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by on such a dreary day – this is Wednesday, the storms are moving through, and the power was out for a while during the afternoon, as usual – I love county living.

Larry