crab meat
Also known as: backfin blue crab meat, Blue Crab Meat
The cooked, picked meat from crab, sold fresh, pasteurized in a can or tub, or frozen, in graded qualities. Used in crab cakes, salads, and other seafood dishes where it's the star ingredient rather than something cooked for long.
Buying guidance
Match the grade to the job: jumbo lump or lump for dishes where whole crab pieces show, backfin for crab cakes and anything mixed and formed, claw meat for a stronger flavor at a lower price. Even picked meat can hide small shell or cartilage fragments, so run your fingers through it before using it regardless of grade.
Substitutions
- Backfin crab meat in place of a specified lump grade -- fine for anything mixed and formed, like a crab cake, where whole visible lumps don't matter.
- Cooked, flaked white fish such as cod or tilapia, seasoned with a little Old Bay -- not a true crab flavor, but a workable stand-in for texture in a mixed dish.
Tips & common mistakes
Crab meat is already fully cooked when sold, so any further cooking is really just reheating -- more than a few minutes over direct heat breaks the delicate lumps into shreds and toughens the texture, so fold it in gently at the very end rather than cooking it alongside everything else.
Storage
Fresh, never-frozen crab meat is highly perishable and best used within a day or two, kept in the coldest part of the fridge; pasteurized tubs last considerably longer unopened but turn quickly once opened, generally within a few days. It doesn't freeze well raw -- the lumps turn watery and stringy on thawing -- so freezing only makes sense once it's already part of a cooked dish.