Surimi is a food that is prepared with ingredients that taste like crab, shrimp, lobster and other seafood. Crab sticks are made from fish protein that has been pre-processed, washed, dehydrated and then frozen.
Ground fish meat
Surimi is translated from Japanese as "ground meat". To prepare it, lean fish meat is crushed to a dense paste. The jelly-like paste is combined with food additives and turns into artificial crab, lobster or other "seafood".
Supplements can consist of other seafood, but typically include egg white, vegetable oil, salt, starch, and spices.
Good quality surimi is odorless and white in color. The largest producer of surimi is the United States, and pollock meat and whiting are most often used in the production of the product.
Surimi has a jelly-like shape and it is easy to sculpt different shapes from it. To give the characteristic taste of surimi, food additives resembling seafood are added to its composition.
The product is vacuum packed and pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. It is then frozen at -20 degrees Celsius.
Approximately 2% of all fish caught in the world is processed into surimi.
Surimi and crab sticks
Surimi foods owe their popularity to the Japanese crab sticks that conquered the world.
Surimi is called "crab sticks" with the light hand of the Japanese. The homeland of this product is Japan, where it began to be extensively produced in 1974-1975. But crab sticks are just one of the foods, albeit the most popular, that contain surimi.
In addition to crab sticks, artificial shrimp, lobster, scallops are made from surimi.
What are Surimi foods made of?
Trans Ocean Crab Classic is a surimi product, imitation of a crab. Its ingredients are pollock, water, egg whites, wheat starch, sugar, corn starch, sorbitol, and no more than 2% king crab meat, natural and artificial food additives, extracts of crab, oysters, scallops, lobster and fish, refined fish oil, rice wine, sea salt, soy sauce, corn, wheat proteins, potassium chloride, sodium inosinate, sodium pyrophosphate, carmine, paprika.
In terms of nutritional value, surimi is a low-fat food, but high in sodium.
Surimi contains a small amount of protein, thanks to the fish and eggs it contains. But in terms of protein content, the product is much inferior to tuna, lentils or cheese.
Surimi is a low-calorie product. Typically, surimi products contain almost no fat and cholesterol. Often they are supplemented with healthy food supplements that contain Omega-3s.
