Thanks, I did notice this. Though I didn’t intend to go too deep here I also found info about the various grades of crab that Handy Seafood offers in canned form. Year-round production is the reason they cite for that sourcing. Domestic blue crab would only be available seasonally, as I understand it.
They do sell a small amount of domestically harvested product but the overwhelming amount of their Products are now imported.
In 2015 “Now, 90 percent of our sales are for products sourced from Asia.”
https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/supply-trade/how-a-large-u-s-crab-processor-grew-overseas
I am not saying that their Products are not good I have used their Meat and it is fine and reasonably priced.
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Oh the woe of a short season for Dungeness!!
There are definite ‘camps’ for the type of crab one likes. I’m originally from the west coast where during season, we’d buy fresh off the boat Dungeness for LESS THAN $1.50 a pound and they were 2+ pounders. Now you are lucky if you can buy a 1-1/2 pounder for $7+. Ah, the memories of fundraising crab feeds. Bring your own lemons and Best Foods mayo.
I hardly had any to freeze and put away for later this year. I saved claws and some bodies from 4 crabs for cioppino and crab quiche for this summer.
I have bought Phillips, it isn’t Dungeness, but ‘southeastern crab’. When it was realitively inexpensive (this was years ago at Costco). I bought it as backup for when I needed crab for a dish, out of season. It did what I needed it to do, but barely. I had two containers that I froze. One is still in there, frozen.
Giovanni’s in Morro Bay, CA has crabs, crab meat and other delicacies, but you pay a premium price and an even bigger premium shipping cost. I bought freshly frozen some abalone one Christmas from them. Oh my! It was a Christmas present to the former ab diver who who lives in the rockies. Giovanni’s did an excellent job of getting the ab to me in 24 hours, pre-pandemic.
I have seen ’ mock crab’ dishes made from celeriac and even one that washed canned tuna in water and soaked that mess in clam juice and then drained it. Saw the recipe, but never made it.
Best wishes for your quest.
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Definitely refined gourmand!
I use canned crab exclusively for crab cakes because there are enough additives in the recipe to make it flavourful.
In quiches and bisques, I would want to use fresh crab when in season otherwise frozen.
Frankly, I’m afraid to try fresh crab in crab cakes because once I do that there is no going back.
That happened to me with several other items where I became a coffee, tea, wine snob.
Thank God I’m not an avid Scotch drinker otherwise we would have to re-mortgage the house !
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Already down this rabbit hole. I only use fresh crab for my crab cakes and just enough other ingredients to bind it together so that its a crab cake, not a crab flavored breadcrumb cake. Its so good. The benefit is that most people can eat only one as its so flavorful.
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Well that’s not so bad. My boys can eat at least 4 each so that was my worry.
I may give it a go.
The way I bulk the cakes up is to use fresh corn kernels. I think crab and corn go well together. I mix the crab with corn kernels, a bunch of herbs, an egg and just enough bread crumbs to hold everything together. I mold the cakes and let them rest in the fridge to firm up. You need to be gentle when you flip them as they make break with so much crab. Using a griddle makes it easier. A bit of a wine butter sauce to finish it off.
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I have seen a crab cake recipe that uses a mousse made from scallops that acts as a binder. Somewhere in the great mess of collected recipes, it should be there. The pandemic has been helpful in gleaning the mess. When I find it, I’ll put it out there. And of course, it is made with fresh Dungeness.
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I have seen similar recipes using pollock (which I really like - especially for fish and chips). Looking forward to your recipe(s), where I would replace the scallops with pollock.
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I have done this with both shrimp and scallops and it works very well to keep crabcakes together, but IMO the other shellfish disguise the delicate flavor and texture of crab. Even as a dedicated low-carber, I prefer to use breadcrumbs or cracker meal in crab cakes to make sure the crab flavor dominates. I made a fantastic batch over the holidays last year - one ounce of crushed oyster crackers to a pound of crab (plus an egg and some mayo) provided plenty of binding power.
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Yeah, there’s no getting around the fact that crab is expensive, so things made with it tend to be a treat. Better to wait for a special occasion than try to make do with lousy canned crab. However, for rangoons there’s no reason to even use crab 
. Just use surimi. It really makes very little difference.
You need crab bodies for a decent bisque.
Crab cakes are much better with premium stuff, particularly for people like me who don’t tend to love crab cakes because they taste very little of crab due to all the seasonings. Even if you like the standard crab cake with filler and Old Bay, the canned stuff is just really bad.
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for all things good, this is where you start for crab dishes:
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Hmmm. Doesn’t look like a dungie.
Not about canned crab!
They don’t look great but they taste amazing.
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Definitely keeping the crab flavor front and center is key. IMO, Dungeness is perfect for hot crab sandwiches, cocktails and MY quiche, but I can see where the other types might hold up in crab cakes. Gosh, I wish I had some right now, as I recover from surgery. 
I am fortunate to be able to splurge on peekytoe crab, which is handpicked and freezes well. It is not pasteurized. I think the biggest thing I realized after I found this product is how much pasteurizing really takes away from the flavor of crab, even in the better canned varieties. So I buy a few pounds when it is in stock and then use it sparingly. It does make superlative crab cakes.
if you catch a live crab, and steam it, it’s “pasteurized”
crab in a can suffers not from being ‘pasteurized’ - but from being in a can for months and months…
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^ Amazing stuff, that. How long does it keep well for you in the freezer?
