crab bisque;
I am definitely becoming the queen of convenience! Okay, not really, because this recipe isn’t exactly as simple as some of my five-ingredient recipes like bbq baby back ribs, but I’ve definitely been reaching for the recipes with a convenience factor (read: cream of potato soup, for this one). Here’s the same plug from my last recipe, spicy cream tomato sauce pasta which uses jarred tomato sauce: convenience isn’t a bad thing. In an ideal world, I’d love to make everything from scratch or nearly scratch (you probably won’t catch me boiling up some seafood to make seafood stock either way). But I’m not a hoity-toity person that turns my nose up at campbell’s soup or kraft mac ‘n cheese. There’s a time and a place, and you can always spruce up jarred or canned ingredients!
My one caveat is to watch out for sodium content with canned and jarred foods. That’s part of the reason why in this recipe I suggest that you start with a 1/2 tsp. of salt and work your way up. There’s nothing worse than a salty soup! The other part about the salt is that Old Bay seasoning typically contains a massive amount of salt, and depending on your spice blend you’ll want to adjust the additional salt. You can always add more, but I’ve had some run-ins with Chicken Pot Pie where I dump in the salt all at once and then taste it and go “ugh”. Typically my over-salting isn’t enough to throw out the dish, but I don’t feel particularly healthy eating the recipe, so it’s better safe than sorry in my opinion.
This crab bisque was really creamy and had a great ratio of crab. You could add a little more meat if you wanted or had it lying around, but I like a balanced soup to crab ratio where there’s only one or two lumps in my spoon at a time. I was pleasantly surprised how seafood-y the soup ended up with just the crab. I looked up a few recipes since I’d not made this before and have only in the past few years even discovered I enjoyed crab, much less bisques. Most of the recipes that made this from scratch used seafood stock, and I thought that this version might be lacking in seafood flavor. It really wasn’t, and it even made me wonder if the other recipes would have been overly seafood-y for me! I ended up starting from Kathy’s recipe over at Just a Pinch, but adapted it into the recipe below, because obviously everything crab demands Old Bay. Can you tell I’ve been living close to Maryland for a while now?
Another great piece to bisques and soup in general is that it helps temper flavors. If you have some leftover crab (no more than a day or even maybe two in the fridge), this is a perfect use-it-up recipe because a touch of that fishy taste dilutes through the soup and actually adds to enhance the flavor rather than detract as it would in something like crab cakes. I think next time I might add a few more vegetables like corn or carrots just to get a little more of a healthy bite into the massive amounts of cream in this recipe. I highly suggest serving with grilled cheese–we made cheddar grilled cheese here–or warm biscuits, yum! The biscuit pictured here is actually left over from brunch at America Eats Tavern this past weekend. If you’re interested in that warm, soft little biscuit, you can read more about it in my review! If you don’t have access to either of those, or are on the convenience train, then crackers are the way to go!
Try out this recipe, and let me know what you think! Be sure to add more or less heat with the hotsauce/cayenne, depending on your preferences. You could also spruce up the crab with some other seafood as well, and make it a party! Don’t be scared to heat this back up. It definitely does get a tiny bit fishier each day, but I’ve heated this up now four days later after being stored in an airtight container near the back of the fridge, and it’s just as good as it was the first time!
025-CrabBisque
