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Weekly reviews of crab cakes around the MD and DC area

Phillips Coastal Cakes

What hasn't been said about the Phillips empire?  We here at the CCR have reviewed many of their products, both at one of their restaurants, as well as their retail offerings.  Love them or hate them, they are a big part of the Maryland seafood scene, and are here to stay.  Locals tend to write them off as being too "touristy".  Those very same tourists have heard nothing but good things about Phillips, and come to our town intent on sampling their offerings.  Either way, you will have had them once in your life, and could use them as a baseline for all things seafood related.  

BUT --  you read the label on the box a little more closely.  Coastal cakes.  What does that mean?  Crab cakes are advertised as such, and often time are described further as 'jumbo lump' or 'lump'.  Just to be clear, the coastal cakes are the "lesser" offering.  Made from flake and claw meat, as opposed to the prized backfin and jumbo lump.  Clearly, based on crab classifications alone, they can't be better.  Can they?  This, dear readers, is what we set to figure out.  Follow along and join us on an eye opening quest.


The box claims "crab in every bite".  This is a crab cake we are looking at, so we should hope so!  In any case, the coastal cake is made of crab meat, sauce (mayonnaise, essentially), and breading.  Most of the ingredients are in the sauce, such as eggs, vinegar, lemon juice, mustard seed, sugar, paprika, molasses, high fructose corn syrup (yum!), and other spices.

The recommended cooking method is to pan sauté from thawed, in 2 tsp of oil on medium, cooking one side for 3 min, then flip for 2-3, or until golden brown.  You can also oven bake from frozen at 400 degrees F for 12 minutes, and then flip and cook for an additional 3-4 minutes.  Quick thaw method is to cook in the microwave for 30 sec on high, then flip for 15 sec.  While we tried this with one cake, after 30 sec in the microwave, the cake was steamy and mushy, so the flip was nixed.  As far as cooking oil goes, we used safflower oil for our purposes.

For scientific reasons alone, we attempted to pan sauté one cake and oven bake the other.  Flipping the cake in the oven was fun as the cake was still very fragile at that point, and started to break apart.  The cake going into the frying pan was fragile coming off of the plate, but was very easy to handle once it started to cook.

The end result of the baked cake was saucy and fragile.  Very mushy in texture.  The flavor of the crab, let alone the cake, wasn't too bad itself, but most of the flaovr was due to the sauce (the crab didn't have too much flavor).  There was more texture than flavor from the crab meat, which was a mix of shreds and lump bits.

The result of the fried cake still had a decent amount of moisture, but didn't turn out to be as saucy as the baked cake.  The crab flavor and texture became a bit more pronounced.  With frying, you don't notice as much of the sauce flavoring as when they were baked.

Either way, not a bad crab cake for the price.  The coastal cakes would make a really good crab cake for a sandwich if you plan to fry them.  Based on quality, they are average, but certainly much better than most of the other frozen offerings out there.

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