August 25, 2026
Crab mac and cheese
Adding crab to macaroni cheese sounds like gilding, and then you eat it. The trick is restraint on the cheese so the crab still reads. Fold the meat through at the end rather than cooking it into the sauce.
This recipe comes from Seafood & Eat It, the Newlyn crab company whose hand-picked Cornish crab we stock on the deli counter. Their original is here. We have written ours for a counter, so you can use picked meat from a whole crab or one of their pots.
Ingredients
- 100g picked crab meat, or 1 pot of Seafood & Eat It Brown Crab (ask the counter and we pick a cooked crab)
- 200g macaroni pasta
- 60g plain flour, plus a little extra for dusting
- 40g butter
- 500ml milk
- 50g Gruyère, grated
- 50g sharp cheddar, grated
- 20g pecorino cheese, finely grated
- 75g breadcrumbs
- 1 garlic clove, finely sliced
- Zest 2 lemons
- Olive oil
- 1 tsp mustard powder
Method
- Melt the butter in a medium-sized pan over a medium-low heat, add the garlic and sauté for 1 minute, stir in the flour and cook out for 2 minutes. Gradually incorporate the milk, whisking vigorously to avoid any lumps forming. Stir in the mustard powder and continue heating until you have a smooth creamy thickened sauce. Stir in the Gruyère and cheddar cheese, crab and season to taste, remove from the heat.
- Cook the pasta as per packet instruction minus a couple of minutes, reserve 2 ladles full of the cooking water and drain.
- Add the pasta to the cheese sauce along with some of the pasta water to loosen the sauce a little. The sauce doesn’t want to be too thick as it will thicken up again in the oven. Spoon the pasta into a suitable ovenproof dish.
- Mix the breadcrumbs with the pecorino and lemon zest. Sprinkle over the breadcrumbs, drizzle with a little olive oil and bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown and bubbling. Serve with a green salad on the side.
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brown crab, the deli counter and what is on the counter today. Ask us to pick and dress a cooked crab.