Gordon Ramsay's Crab Cake Salad

Hi everyone, I'm sure many of you have seen the video where Chef Ramsay tries to teach a noob how to cook a crab cake salad.

 

Well, I tried re-creating the dish by extrapolating the ingredient proportions based on what I saw Chef Ramsay do and say. Came out pretty tasty, could've maybe been slightly more seasoned..work in progress but pretty good so far. Here's the recipe. Let me know your feedback/edits so we can perfect it together!

 

Pics: http://ift.tt/2nzzLn9

 

Gordon Ramsay's Crab Cake Salad
(makes 2 crab cakes, about 3.25 inch diameter by 7/8" thick, or 9.2cm diameter by 2cm thick)

 

Ingredients:

• 1 Whole Crab
• 2 Bell Peppers (you can get two bell peppers of different colors for visual effect, but actually you only need 1/4th the portion. So technically you only need 1/2 a single bell pepper's worth of bell pepper)
• Salt
• Pepper (Chef Ramsay used coarse grain pepper for the crab)
• 1 Lemon
• 1 Egg
• 2 heaping teaspoons brown or Dijon mustard
• 1 Tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/3 tsp Cayenne pepper (Chef Ramsay says "a little touch")
• 5 tablespoons Bread crumbs (I used good old Kikkoman Panko bread crumbs)
• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 1.5 heaping tablespoons capers
• 1.5 heaping tablespoons chopped red onion
• 1 Radish
• Lettuce (can't tell what he used, it was fancier than iceberg...can any of you tell?)
• 1 Tarragon
• Cookie Cutter (3.25" inner diameter x 1.5" deep, 9.2cm diameter x 3.0cm deep).

 

Note: Personally, when I measure a teaspoon or tablespoon, I measure it so that the ingredient is flat up to the brim of the spoon. Take a toothpick and run it across a spoon and what's left on the spoon is what I use. However, Chef Ramsay uses heaping spoonfuls, so he used a generous amount of that ingredient. For example, his mustard is sitting like a mountain over the teaspoon, might as well be 1.5 teaspoons of how I measure it. Thus, I specifically mention what is a Chef Ramsay teaspoon or tablespoon by calling it a "heaping teaspoon" or "heaping tablespoon."

 

Crab cakes:

1. Remove all meat from all the crab legs (including little legs and pincers. there should still be meat in the body, so save that to make something else?)
2. Finely dice bell peppers and put into a bowl
3. Pull/flake apart the crab meat as you add it into the bowl of diced bell peppers.
4. Season with 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp pepper (originally I added 1/3 tsp each then later added extra 1/4 tsp salt..so this is still a work in progress. maybe 1/2 tsp of each will be good..)
5. Add 1/2 tsp zest of lemon (about the zest of half a lemon)
6. Take a little slice of a lemon (approx 1/5th of a lemon) and squeeze the juice into the bowl (approximately 1 tsp). Basically, squeeze 1 tsp of lemon juice into the bowl.
7. In a separate bowl, beat an egg and season with a generous sprinkle of salt and a generous sprinkle of pepper (it was definitely less than 1/4 tsp so I couldn't measure exact...perhaps how much you'd normally season an egg?)
8. Whisk the egg, salt, and pepper. Then add it to the main bowl that has crab/bell peppers in it.
9. Add 1 heaping tsp of brown/dijon mustard
10. Add 1 tsp of Worcestershire sauce
11. Add 1/3 tsp ("a little touch") of cayenne pepper.
12. Mix the the bowl. Then smell to make sure it is nice and fragrant. And taste test the seasoning to make sure proportions are okay. It's ok if it's a bit spicy because we will lose a bit of the spice while cooking. Add more salt if needed.
13. Sprinkle bread crumbs (actually Gordon Ramsay very generously sprinkled a lot..I sprinkled in 5 tablespoons of Panko breadcrumbs. Texture was quite nice)
14. Gently mix the bowl. There should be breadcrumbs well dispersed throughout the mixture, as they will bring the crab cake ingredients together.
15. Lay a baking sheet onto a tray. Put a cookie cutter onto the baking sheet and firmly press the crab mixture into the cookie cutter. "The secret here is to press the crab meet into the cutter." Lift the cutter and a circular crab cake should remain nicely shaped on the sheet. Repeat this step to make additional crab cakes.
16. Turn on pan at medium high heat, add olive oil and roll the pan around so the olive oil is spread out somewhat evenly.
17. Using a spatula to assist you, gently lift the crab cakes and put into the pan.
18. Let them get some color (let them get brown), about 3 minutes on each side. (I did 3-4 minutes on each side and they turned out a much darker brown on each side than I would have wanted, so this timing is a work in progress)
19. Done!

 

Remoulade Dressing (Chef Ramsay made about 20x more than you actually need for 2 crab cakes):

1. Add 1 cup mayonnaise into a bowl
2. Add 1.5 heaping tbsp of capers
3. Add 1 heaping tsp of brown/Dijon mustard
4. Add 1.5 heaping tablespoons of finely chopped red onion
5. Mix
6. Squeeze some lemon juice out of the remainder of your lemon into the bowl, about 1 tbsp of lemon juice
7. Add a generous pinch of roughly chopped tarragon (use all 5 of your fingers to grab the roughly chopped tarragon, about 1.5-2 heaping tablespoons, similar to the proportions of the onions)

 

Salad (work in progress. I used floral lettuce and it tasted weird. Either that or I used too much olive oil. Didn't focus on this too much)

1. Add some lettuce to a bowl (maybe like 5 leaves of a big leafy lettuce..still not sure which actual lettuce Chef Ramsay used..it wasn't iceberg and didn't look like Romaine)
2. Add slices of radish to the bowl of lettuce
3. Season the salad with lemon juice (1tsp?) and a little touch of olive oil (drizzle it by eye?)
4. Add salt and lettuce (a pinch of each?)
   
5. Lightly toss the salad

 

Plating:

1. At the 12 o'clock position of the plate, take some leaves of the lettuce/and layer them on top of each other to form a bed/garden for your crab cake. You can take several slices of the radish and sprinkle them on top of the lettuce as well.
2. Gently sprinkle some lemon zest over the salad garden/bed that you have made.
3. At the 6 o'clock position of the plate, add 1 heaping tablespoon of the remoulade. Then take your empty spoon, press down on the heap of remoulade on the plate, and spread the remoulade clockwise until just before it touches any lettuces The idea is to make "a beautiful smear on the plate."
4. Gently lift the crab cakes out and place them a bit underneath the bed of lettuce. The crab cakes will be sitting somewhere between the lettuce and the remoulade, possibly overlapping on top of the lettuce and remoulade a bit.
5. Finish the plate by drizzling just a bit of lemon juice on the crab cakes.

bon appetit