If you took a look in your kitchen cupboards right now, it’s a good bet there would be cans or packets of tuna in there. But we often forget about canned crab, which you should really have in our pantry, too. Crab is flavorful and popular, and the canned version is much more affordable than fresh. However, not all options are created equal. Chowhound’s reviewer found one brand in particular to be the least enjoyable and should probably be avoided: Geisha Fancy White Crab Meat.
Our taste tester sampled six brands of canned crab, ranking them worst to best. The test compared products that were relatively similar across price and style, excluding distinctive crab legs, refrigerated crab in plastic tubs, and very expensive colossal lump meat. After smelling and blind tasting each sample and analyzing appearance and overall quality, the tester ranked everything. As it turned out, the Geisha brand option simply didn’t measure up. It wasn’t that the crab was bad or overly fishy, but rather that it lacked enough character (and product) to make it worth your hard earned dollars, especially when grocery prices keep going up. To be clear, you may disagree. That’s fine: Tastes differ, and if you grew up eating Geisha, it may evoke fond food memories.
Why Geisha Fancy White Crab Meat is worth avoiding
If you’re familiar with crab meat, then you know it’s tricky. When raw and refrigerated, it turns bad in three to five days. Even canning is a challenge: The meat can turn blue due to naturally occurring copper in the flesh or gray if processing temperatures are too high. And of course different species and different parts of the crab have their own appeal, so it’s no wonder canned products vary significantly in terms of quality.
With Geisha Fancy White Crab Meat, there are two primary issues: the unimpressive nature of the meat itself and the high proportion of liquid in the can. The product is made using blue swimming crabs and comes in 6-ounce cans stored in water, kept fresh with a variety of preservatives and salt. But according to our reviewer, it is conspicuously aroma free (it should smell slightly sweet and crabby, but not fishy). The pieces of meat were very small compared with other brands, over-mild in flavor, and mushier than its competitors. Despite being the second least expensive product tested, the value just isn’t there. In part this is because once the liquid was drained, the final crab yield was about 4.25 ounces. While our No. 1 pick — Bumble Bee Lump Crabmeat — yielded about the same quantity of meat, by comparison it tasted great and the pieces were moist and large, all at a good price.
