Imitation Crabs Are Delicious And Nutritious

Since sushi has become so wildly well-known in the United States, most people have become quite familiar with what is possibly the dishes most famous form in this country: the California roll, typically comprised of rice, nori or cucumber, imitation crab meat, and avocado or mango. Though the exact composition of sushi has many complicated factors to western audiences, “imitation crab” is maybe the chief among them. Imitation crab meat, more colloquially known as “crab sticks” or “krab”, is merely pulverized and ground white fish meat – called “surimi” – that has been cured and shaped to purposely resemble the legs of the snow crab or king crab.

The use of imitation crab over genuine crab meat is simply due to the expense of the real thing. Crab fishing is an incredibly difficult and dangerous business. In fact, fisherman is statistically the most risky occupation in the world, by a wide margin resulting in some 112 deaths in every hundred thousand – a lot more than police officers, firefighters and military personnel combined. Due to the fact acquiring genuine crab is such a risky and expensive endeavor, using it in wildly popular and fiscally unpretentious dishes like sushi is simply unfeasible, necessitating the typical use of imitation crab.

Imitation crab meat is most frequently manufactured from Alaskan pollock. It is finely ground and mixed with egg whites or another binding agent so it can be formed into the eponymous sticks. Afterwards, crab flavoring – either artificial or genuinely extracted from actual crab – and red food coloring is included to give the final product a more authentic look and taste. However, given that the base ingredient is fish, and no actual crab is essential to their production, imitation crab meat can be made to be 100% kosher. The curing process involved also sufficiently cooks the fish, so imitation crab can be securely eaten right out of the package.

California rolls were originally introduced sometime during the 1960’s, in California as their name might suggest. After the end of the Second World War, many Japanese came to the United States in search of a more productive life like most immigrants before them, and also to escape the strenuous environment of their home country as it struggled to rebuild after being almost entirely devastated by four years of constant bombing (including two atomic blasts) during the war.

Whereas most European immigrants several decades earlier generally entered the country though New York, Japanese immigrants landed in Los Angeles, and they brought with them Sushi, sowing the seeds of its recognition in the US. Being freshly arrived immigrants in the United States, many of them unable to even speak English, it goes without saying that they were not horribly well-to-do in terms of money. As they further developed their cuisine in their new country, again, financial limitations necessitated the use of imitation crab in what rapidly became their signature dish.