Here's Exactly What Andrew Zimmern Puts In His Award-Winning Crab Cakes

It's hard to pin down a single recipe Andrew Zimmern is best known for, but if you're going to make only one of his classics it would probably be the crab cakes. Both his award-winning restaurant career and long list of popular food travel shows like "Bizarre Foods" have taken him all over the world, so when a specific style of cooking stands out to him, you pay attention. Crab cakes are somewhat notorious for a huge variation in quality, especially when you get far from their coastal origins, and we wanted to know just what his secret is. So, when Tasting Table caught up with Zimmern at Food Network's NYC Wine & Food Fest, we asked him about his best tips for making crab cakes, and he brought up a recipe of his that appeared on the cover of Food & Wine almost 20 years ago.

Zimmern told us that despite being two decades old, his Maryland-style crab cakes are still the top downloaded recipe on Food & Wine's website, joking, "My crab cake recipe is probably gonna be on the back of my gravestone. Not the front, but on the back." His ingredient list is rather sparse, and that is the point. "It's the barest amount of egg, mayonnaise, Worcestershire, and mustard and cracker crumb, just to hold the jumbo lumps together," he said. It turns out that the key to great crab cakes is (surprise!) keeping them all about the crab.

Andrew Zimmern pointed us to his website, which explains that the one way to ruin a good crab cake is adding too much filler. This pared-down approach is steeped in the traditions of the Chesapeake Bay area. "It was a recipe that came from my friend's grandmother. So over 100 years old. It comes from a country club in Baltimore that doesn't exist anymore," he explained. Beyond the specifics of Zimmern's recipe, he told us that the best crab cakes you will ever have come from "the tiniest little places where the oystermen and crab fishers" work. "Go where they eat," he added, "as far out on the eastern part of the Chesapeake Bay shores as you can get. You will find the exact same crab cake."

Never a pure traditionalist, even with this, Zimmern has some unconventional crab cake toppings that he swears by, including eating them cold on toast with tomato. But no matter how you plan to eat yours, keeping those big pieces of crab front and center is key. Even if you don't have access to fresh crab, or it isn't affordable enough, provided you know what to look for, you can find perfectly good canned crab meat to fill out your cakes with no need to alter the chef's famous recipe. While we love creativity, this is one place where classic is best.