What to Serve with Crab Salad? [11 Tasty Pairings]
Crab salad brings together seafood and salad. It is undoubtedly the best of both worlds, and it somehow combines foods you wouldn’t consider having together because they are generally thought to be too different to pair. Since it contains crab meat, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and a voluptuous mayo dressing, crab salad is very versatile and offers a number of pairing possibilities. So what to serve with crab salad?
Caramelized onions, Aglio e olio pasta, mushrooms with cream, grilled vegetables, steamed vegetables, mashed potatoes, fries, roasted vegetables, rice stuffed peppers, vegetable stuffed eggplant, and toasted focaccia with butter are some of the best ideas to pair crab salad with.
Cab salad is in itself a luxurious and satisfying dish. Elegant and creamy, it will be more than what you’ve signed up for. Selecting the right pair for your crab salad will amplify and improve your dining experience and give yourself and your guests a culinary adventure you won’t forget. In the following paragraphs, I will share some ideas on how to pair your crab salad so that you can enjoy it even more.
Caramelized Onions
Since caramelized onions are full of pungent flavor and intense aroma, they pair nicely with crab salad. This combination is for you if you are into experimenting with opposing tastes and like adding edge to elegance.
It’s not that crab salad lacks flavor, but combining it with caramelized onions will increase every ounce of taste the crab salad has. The onions’ intensity will flatter the crab salad’s creaminess, as they are also soft and tender.
Steamed Vegetables
Not only healthy and nutritious, but steamed vegetables are also incredibly delicious. All you need is a pinch of salt and maybe a few drops of olive oil, and you get a rich vegetable dish that is a meal on its own. I recommend pairing your crab salad with steamed cauliflower, carrots, and broccoli.
Add some corn kernels to the steamed vegetable bowl and enjoy the taste and texture of your meal. It is no secret that seafood pairs excellent with steamed vegetables, but even more so with crab salad because it contains fresh vegetables and a creamy dressing.
Mushrooms With Cream
Whenever you need to pair something, you can always count on mushrooms and cream to make even plain bread an elegant culinary experience. Combined with mushrooms and cream, your crab salad will shine in its full glory, as the earthy flavor of the mushrooms will flatter the fresh and buttery dimension of the crab salad.
The fresh creamy vegetables, combined with the authentic and even creamier mushrooms, with the recognizable spongy mushroom texture, will create a genuine flavor bomb you will eagerly want to detonate.
Grilled Vegetables
Grilled vegetables are always there to make your dish special if you lack ideas, inspiration, time, or energy. Requiring nothing more than a grill, you just toss them on the racks and let them sizzle. The results are soft smoky vegetables suitable to pair with just about everything.
Don’t be fooled by their simplicity, as grilled vegetables are a delightful side dish. Paired with grilled vegetables, your elegant crab salad will get a more rustic dimension. The softness of the grilled vegetables pairs perfectly with the creaminess of the crab salad, giving you a healthy and delicious meal.
Mashed Potatoes
The combination of crab salad and mashed potatoes is heavenly and a delight for all your senses. The mashed potatoes’ extreme softness, butteriness, and creaminess is an incredible base for the creamy crab salad. I am a fan of opposing textures, so I’d like some crunch with creamy food, but this pair is so delightfully soft that you will be amazed at how well creamy textures go together.
And let’s not forget that cucumber in the crab salad, which will surprise you very pleasantly when you bite into it and break the creamy whiff of the meal.
Aglio E Olio Pasta
This elegant and refined pasta goes amazingly with crab salad. The delicious garlic and parsley combination smoothened up by the olive oil makes this pasta the perfect pair to any salads, especially crab salad. In general, pasta and seafood mix perfectly, even more so when fresh vegetables are at play.
The creamy Aglio e olio pasta goes incredibly well with the creamy consistency of the crab salad, intertwined with the buttery crab meat that bonds all the flavors together. The garlic and parsley combination will accentuate the rest of the flavors, and the exquisite mayo dressing will round them up perfectly.
Fries
No list of side dishes and pairing options is complete without fries. They are so universal and incredibly versatile that I had to mention them here as well. Seafood and fries are a well-known combination, so it is no wonder that crab salad and fries pair so well as they do.
If you have each separate ingredient from the crab salad with fries, cucumber and fries, crab and fries, and so on, each combination works, so it is only natural for all those ingredients combined to go with fries. The fries will give you a nice crunchiness, which, paired with the creamy salad, gives you the feel of eating fast food while enjoying a refined meal.
Roasted Vegetables
Something about seafood and roasted vegetables makes this combination irresistibly delicious and satisfying. The tasty roasted vegetables, paired with the silky and fresh crab salad, will create an entirely different meal than you would expect.
The roasted vegetables have a rich, almost meaty dimension, which goes perfectly with the fresh vegetables and the buttery crab meat in the crab salad. The meaty flavor goes excellent with seafood; therefore, the surf & turf combination is so popular.
Rice Stuffed Peppers
Rice stuffed peppers are a delicacy on their own, and even more so when served as a side dish to many main courses. The tenderness of the rice infuses the crab salad with different softness and adds a bit of a grainy texture to an otherwise soft consistency.
The smokiness of the baked pepper rounds up the ingredients in one place, allowing each of the ingredients to shine and have its moment. It is a great idea to add mushrooms to the peppers’ stuffing and top them with the same dressing you used for the crab salad once they are done.
Vegetable Stuffed Eggplant
The vegetable-stuffed eggplant is one of those dishes that you either love or hate, and you cannot know until you’ve tried it. If you make it and it turns out you don’t like it, you are not alone and don’t have to make it again. But, on the other hand, if you love it, you will thoroughly enjoy it, so either way, it is worth a try, as you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.
The vegetable-stuffed eggplant has a recognizable slight but noticeable bitterness which gives this dish its character. Combining it with your crab salad is a slam dunk, as the eggplant bitterness will merge with the crab salad tenderness transforming this combination into a meal you will undoubtedly want to repeat.
Toasted Focaccia With Butter
It is a well-known fact that croutons go incredibly well with creamy salads, so instead of croutons, why not enrich your crab salad with toasty buttered focaccia slices? You will love the Mediterranean dimension of this combination, which the focaccia bread infuses.
Rustic but refined, the focaccia bread and crab salad combination will definitely amaze you if you like mixing opposing styles and textures.
What Side Dish Goes With Crab Salad?
As versatile as crab salad, you won’t have trouble finding the perfect side dish to pair it with. Crab salad is best combined with vegetables, creamy sauces, rice, peas, carrots, and onions.
You can also combine your crab salad with meat, as the flavors will combine pretty well together. Roasted pork or roasted chicken are excellent crab salad pairs. I don’t recommend roasted beef for crab salad, but this combination seems to have many fans.
What Crackers Go With Crab Salad?
Crab salad goes great with all salty crackers, be it saltines or salty sticks, or even the tiny pretzels; it will pair up nicely with the dry and crunchy delights.
What Dessert Goes With Crab Salad?
I recommend something light, fruity, and creamy for dessert after a meal containing crab salad. A simple fruit salad would suffice as a dessert after crab salad. You can also make a strawberry and chocolate pudding and top it with a scoop of whipped cream.
Cream pie, buttermilk pie, or lemon meringue pie are all great ideas to make a proper send-off to your crab salad. Blueberry muffins are also an excellent choice for a dessert after your crab salad, but if you feel especially creative, you can make a no-bake chocolate cake with nuts to round up your meal.
