TO GRILL or not to grill a crab cake, that was the question.
Would the flavor of crab meat improve if it were cooked over a hot open fire? Would crab cakes hold together on a grill? When it came time to turn them, would they suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous backyard barbecue fortune? By flipping would I end them?
I pressed ahead, lured by a strong fire, a hinged metal cooking basket and a belief that everything tastes better grilled.
Having been hit by the sea of troubles that engulf you when you grill crab cakes, I would now say almost everything tastes better grilled. Crab cakes might not.
The first clue that grilling crab cakes might not be a good idea came when I scoured stacks of well-stained cookbooks looking for a recipe. Scholars of smoke and fire, such as Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby, Steven Raichlen, made nary a mention in their numerous cookbooks of grilling crab cakes. Neither did Mark Bittman, whose 1994 cookbook, Fish, has served me well over the years whenever I needed a good way to cook things that swim.
There were a couple of recipes, in other cookbooks, that pretended to grill crab cakes. These either called for cooking crab cakes in a skillet placed on a grill or advocated cooking them on a piece of oiled foil stretched over the grate of a kettle cooker with the cooker lid closed.
"That isn't really grilling, that is baking," said Mark Henry, chef of the Oregon Grille in Hunt Valley, who admits that he has prepared crab cakes that way, but only when he was stuck at a campground with no other cooking technique available.
I talked with Henry after I attempted to grill crab cakes. Had I spoken with him before I began, he would have recommended against the idea. "There is a problem with the crab cakes holding together," he said. "Since you are cooking over a hot fire, what passes for `crunch' on the outside of the crab cake is very close to crab jerky."
Nancy Longo, chef at Pierpoint Restaurant in Fells Point, also would have tried to stop me from placing a crab cake over an open fire.
"I tried it once," Longo told me in a dismissive tone. "To keep the crab cake together, you have to put in a lot of breading ... and the breading tends to burn."
Another problem, she said, is lump drop. A proper crab cake, she said, is made with lump meat. Chunks of this meat tend to protrude from a well-made crab cake, and could easily fall through the opening on the grill grates.
You could avoid the lump-drop problem by using lesser, almost pulverized grades of crab meat, Longo said. But Longo, a native of Baltimore, doubted whether such a low-rent creation would be regarded by local eaters as a legitimate crab cake. She prefers to smoke crab cakes over apple wood, a slower, more gentle cooking process.
Also weighing in against grilling crab cakes was Rob Cernak of Obrycki's, the venerable East Baltimore seafood restaurant. "Crab meat has a delicate flavor and texture," he said. "Grilling would kill both."
The fellow who talked me into grilling crab cakes was Gunner Roe. Roe, who runs Grill Meister Inc., a catering operation out of Galena, wheeled his 7,000-pound cooking rig into the WBAL parking lot last week in Baltimore to feed barbecued ribs and pulled pork to the folks who work there. I was in the neighborhood and dropped by to polish off a few ribs and pick up a few bits of barbecue wisdom.
Roe told me he had recently returned from a barbecue contest in Tyron, N.C., where, in his idle hours, he had wowed other contestants from around the country by feeding them grilled crab cakes.
The trick, Roe said, is to make the crab cakes with meat that has plenty of crab fat and mustard in it. Then he cooks them in a device called a grilling basket, a stainless-steel contraption with a hinged top that allows him to flip all the crab cakes at once.
Fueled by the dream of making a dish that had made the barons of barbecue weep with joy, I went to the supermarket to buy crab meat. I almost wept when I saw the price for fresh local (Virginia) crab meat - $18 for an 8-ounce container - but I bought it anyway.
Using a conventional recipe - mustard, mayonnaise, egg, bread crumbs, seafood seasoning - I formed the crab cakes and let them cool in the refrigerator for an hour.
Then using a fish basket, a hinged metal device used to grill fish, I put them over a hot charcoal fire. After four minutes, I turned the basket over. Even though I had lubricated the fish basket with olive oil, the top of the crab cakes stuck to the basket when I flipped them.
Gingerly, I poked the stuck piece of meat loose with a wooden spoon. I figured each piece of stuck meat had cost about 50 cents, and I didn't want to lose any.
After they had spent three more minutes over the fire, I brought the grilled crab cakes, seven of them, to the table. Some looked golden-brown. Some looked like crab hash. The flavor of the crab meat was good, but nothing remarkable.
When the price of crab meat drops, I might try this again. On the other hand, I think of what Henry said. "I think crab cakes are like asparagus. You can cook them on the grill. But when you taste them, you think this would have done better in a saute pan."
