Pink Peppercorn Crab Cakes

I started out thinking about pink peppercorns.  As you may know, pink peppercorns are actually a berry.  After toasting them in a dry pan for a two minutes and grinding them to a fine dust, the pink peppercorns unleash a deep, floral aroma and taste that is pretty spectacular.  As a result, you can be rest assured you'll be seeing lots of pink peppercorn dishes on this site in the upcoming weeks.

So how would I use the pink peppercorn 'dust'? I started to go toward a pink peppercorn au poivre, but quickly realized that steak wasn't a good pairing.  I gravitated toward crab cakes.  I would make relatively traditional crab cakes (lots of lump crab, some herbs, finely chopped bell pepper, panko bread crumbs, a touch of mustard and mayo to bind), add a few pinches of the pepper corn dust to the crab cake mixture before forming, then crust them with more of the dust before searing.  But the pink peppercorn can only handle minimal searing without burning, so these crab cakes were seared in oil for only for a few minutes on each side before finishing in the oven.

The pink peppercorn and crab are an excellent combination.  I thought about serving this with a creamy dipping type sauce, but since I wanted to appreciate the pure crab and peppercorn combination on their own, I just went with a drizzle of an excellent olive oil to finish.

Comments

[Kat & Satoshi]

Very nice. The photo is great too. :)

[joe]

hi kat, thank you! i found your post about ichigo daifuku very interesting...makes me want to experiment with that technique in the future.