Crab Cake Girella Pasta with Peperoncini Remoulade

This blooming pasta shape is filled with a crab-cake-inspired filling and served in a pool of Peperoncini Remoulade

When I launched Hardcore Supper Club mid-spring, the summer scared me. Why? Well, effortless meals reign supreme at this time of year. We have peak produce that wants for nothing, brilliant sunshine that needs to be basked in, and oppressive humidity that makes turning the oven on impossible. Not exactly good news for a publication that celebrates culinary fussiness. But today’s Crab Cake Girella Pasta? Well, this is how you do elaborate in the summer. This dish requires only 15 minutes of cooking, and the prep is fun in an arts and crafts sort of way. Nothing is particularly time sensitive, so you can pick away at it over a few days if you want to. Or you can easily make it, tip to tail, in one. While it may not present as a low-lift, this is a fairly chill recipe by Hardcore Supper Club standards. So let’s break this dish down, starting with the bottom and working our way to the top.

Peperoncini Remoulade

On the base of the plate is a pool of Peperoncino Remoulade. I’m only going to mention this sauce briefly because it’s the focus of tomorrow’s Support Saturday. This sauce has a fascinating but fuzzy history and a well-stamped passport. Its story alone warrants a solo article. But this condiment also supplies a helpful lesson in forming emulsions, a technique that will serve you well when making everything from Hollandaise to Toum to Mayonnaise. But I will save that nerdiness for tomorrow.

All you need to know at this point is we’re leaning into the Creole version of remoulade - a sauce that adorns the city’s most famous sandwich, the po’boy, among other things. Creole remoulade differs from the French version because it is generally more piquant and, well, pink. But we’re leaving the ketchup and sweet paprika behind, the two ingredients that give the sauce its signature pink hue. Today, we’re making a White Remoulade, a version of the sauce made famous by one of New Orleans’ oldest restaurants, Galatoire’s. The addition of the peperoncini peppers is not traditional, but it is the tiniest of nods to New Orleans’ other iconic sandwich: The Muffaletta.

Fresh Egg Pasta

Okay, let’s move on to the pasta. You will recognize this recipe if you read/made the Split Pea Tortellini that launched this crazy club. Girella is a stuffed pasta after all, so it only made sense to trot out the dough I developed for that specific purpose. I’m only making a half batch of the pasta because I only want 4 finished Crab Cake Girella nests. My partner isn’t a crab lover (I promise he’s wonderful aside from that), so I didn’t want to be saddled with a small army of crab pasta crowns that only I want to eat. If you have dinner party aspirations, by all means, make the full batch. You’ll have 8 finished nests if you double the filling and make the full run of pasta.

If you would like a more detailed tutorial on how to make the pasta dough, check out the Support Saturday I did for the tortellini. You’ll also find a full run-down on the flour I used in the dough, as well as instructions on how to roll your pasta out into sheets. You can ignore the bit where I give up a good chunk of my life forming tortellini. Forming girella is much simpler than that. I will be including a brief tutorial on how to form these nests in tomorrow’s Support Saturday as well, so you can move forward with confidence. But just know, if tortellini folding was too extra for you, making girella might be more your speed.