How We Make Our Crab Cakes

We have been selling seafood online since 1996, which makes us the first company that ever did it. Most of what goes in the box we buy, grade and pack. The crab cakes are different. Those we make ourselves, by hand, in our own kitchen in Crisfield, Maryland, off a recipe we have not changed in more than twenty years.

People ask what is in them often enough, and this fall a writer at Eat This, Not That! called them some of the best they had ever had, so it seemed worth just showing you.

Eighty six percent crab meat. The other fourteen is what keeps it in one piece.

What is actually in a Crab Place crab cake

A crab cake is mostly an argument about ratio. Ours is 86% crab meat. The remaining 14% is seasoning and binder, and that is not a rounding error we are apologizing for, it is the part that lets you pick the thing up and cook it without watching it come apart in the pan.

The binder is breadcrumb, egg, mayonnaise, mustard, Worcestershire, Old Bay and a few other seasonings. No added water. No chemicals. Nothing in there to make it weigh more than it should.

Compare that to what a grocery store crab cake usually is. Blue swimming crab from overseas, heavy breading, a lot of filler and some crab flavoring doing the work the crab should be doing. There is a reason those are cheap.

It gets mixed in small batches

We mix in tubs, not in a vat. One tub makes about six dozen four ounce cakes. Small batches mean somebody has eyes on every ingredient going in, and if a batch is not right it is six dozen cakes, not a day's production.

The lump goes in last, and that is the whole trick

This is the part that separates a good crab cake from an expensive one. Jumbo lump is the big, whole muscle out of the crab, and it is delicate. Stir it in at the start with everything else and by the time the batch is mixed you have turned all of it into shreds. It will still taste fine. It will not look like anything.

So the seasoning and the binder go together first, then the back fin, and the lump goes in at the very end, folded through by hand, as few passes as we can get away with.

That is why, when you cut one open, you are looking at pieces of crab instead of paste. It is also why we cannot make them much faster than we do.

Formed by hand, weighed one at a time

Nothing about this part is automated. Each cake is scooped, weighed, patted into shape and wrapped individually. Then it is quick frozen at twenty degrees below zero, which locks it in the state it left the table in.

Two blends

Same recipe, same ratio, different grade of meat in it.

Original. Jumbo lump with back fin. The back fin gives you body and a sweeter, more traditional Maryland crab cake flavor, and the jumbo lump gives you the pieces. This is the one most people mean when they say crab cake.

All-Jumbo. Nothing but jumbo lump. It is the most expensive grade of crab meat there is and there is no back fin in it at all. Bigger pieces, cleaner look, and it costs more because the meat costs more.

Three sizes

The recipe does not change between them. Only the weight and what you are going to do with it.

Size	What we call it	What it is for
2 oz	Crab balls	Fried, on a toothpick, handed round before dinner
4 oz	Sandwich size	On a bun with lettuce, tomato and tartar sauce
6 oz	Entree size	On a plate, as the meal

Real blue crab, and nothing else

Every crab cake we make starts with authentic blue crab, Callinectes sapidus. It is the crab you find along our own coast, the one Marylanders have been proud of for generations: sweet, delicate, and nothing like the substitutes.

The substitute is blue swimming crab. The name sounds close, but it is a different animal from the other side of the world, and it is what goes into most cheap crab cakes. You can often spot it by the red tips on the ends of the meat. By the time it has been processed hard enough to survive the trip across the ocean in a freight container, a lot of what made it crab is gone.

We do not use it, not in our crab cakes and not in our crab balls.

The people who make them

There are not many of them and most have been here between five and eight years. They are good at it because they have done it about a million times, and because a crab cake that comes apart is a crab cake somebody is going to hear about.

Our slogan is that our boxes make people happy. It is not the kind of thing you put on a wall unless somebody is willing to stand behind it, and these are the people standing behind it.

Getting them to you still frozen

Crab cakes ship frozen, so they travel on dry ice inside an insulated box, and they are meant to still be hard when you open it. Thaw them overnight in the refrigerator, never under hot water or in the microwave, and cook them within a couple of days. In the freezer they keep for up to about six months from the day you get them.

The press keeps finding them

The newest one arrived this fall. Eat This, Not That! asked shoppers for the best frozen fish fillets and ranked The Crab Place number one of five, for our Chesapeake striped bass. Then the writer went off topic, in the best way.

Eat This, Not That! · September 2026 Ranked #1 of the 5 Best Frozen Fish Fillets, According to Shoppers Read the article Kiplinger's Personal Finance Picked The Crab Place for Best Crab Cakes See the clipping, and the rest of the press

Kiplinger's goes back a while, and Eat This came out this week. The two are years apart and they are writing about the same recipe, which is the point. We have not changed it.

What people say about them

We have over 58,000 customer reviews. These are a few about the crab cakes specifically.