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Faux Real

The document summarizes the origins and history of surimi, a paste made from fish protein that is used to make imitation crab and other fish products. It originated in Japan where fishermen would preserve fish by removing bones and squeezing out the flesh to make a paste. Researchers later discovered adding sugar prevented spoilage when frozen. During WWII, many Japanese-American surimi producers had to close down after being sent to internment camps. After the war, two companies resumed production and helped popularize imitation crab in the US, leading to widespread production and a fight to change its labeling from "imitation" crab.

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Brendan Borrell
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70 views1 page

Faux Real

The document summarizes the origins and history of surimi, a paste made from fish protein that is used to make imitation crab and other fish products. It originated in Japan where fishermen would preserve fish by removing bones and squeezing out the flesh to make a paste. Researchers later discovered adding sugar prevented spoilage when frozen. During WWII, many Japanese-American surimi producers had to close down after being sent to internment camps. After the war, two companies resumed production and helped popularize imitation crab in the US, leading to widespread production and a fight to change its labeling from "imitation" crab.

Uploaded by

Brendan Borrell
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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FEAT U R E S

Saturday 1:08AM

@Alex_Carlton: There's not enough turnaround time to employ my

Saturday 3:30AM

The edit team settles in on couches

usual "write drunk, edit sober" writing method.


Friday

and air mattresses at GOOD. Lights out.

8/27/10 3:29AM

Several years ago, I became intrigued by the origins of surimi while working as a reporter for The Oregonian. I traveled to a

explains. Therefore, anything that shermen caught had to be consumed within a couple of days." The Japanese soon discovered that they could prevent spoilage by separating the esh of the sh from the parts where bacteria originate. "Then they washed the esh and squeezed it out, adding salt and mixing it to make a paste. The story goes that they cut a bamboo stalk, wrapped this paste around the stalk, and broiled it. That is today's chikuwa." Surimi production was restricted to the coast of Japan until two innovations brought it to the global marketplace in the last half century. The rst was scientic: In 1960, researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan discovered that adding a small amount of sugar to the paste would protect the delicate proteins that give crab sticks their chewy textureeven if they were frozen. The second was cultural: International demand for the products didn't spike until imitation crab was rst introduced to the United States. In 1978, Kawana saw the rst sample of imported frozen crab sticks at a port in Alabama, Thats when the lightbulb went o, he says. At the time, Yamasa was producing only traditional Japanese products for Japanese Americans, but Kawana saw an opportunity for a product with broad appeal: Krab. The process begins by avoring the surimi paste with extract from crushed crab shells. The paste is baked into thin sheets, which are rolled into tubes and scored in order to simulate the aky texture of crab. The orange coloring that completes the illusion is called carmine, prepared by boiling the dried bodies of insects in carminic acid and chemically isolating the coloring agent. (It sounds gruesome, but this same coloring is used in everything from lipstick to yogurt.) Three years later, the rst crab sticks were rolling o Kawanas factory oor. Within a couple years, Kawana says, 15 manufacturers had popped up around the country. In 2006, the U.S. was producing 185 million pounds of surimi annuallymost of it imitation crab worth $300 million on the wholesale market. That same year, after a 13-year battle, surimi manufacturers succeeded in convincing the Food and Drug Administration to allow them to drop the word imitation from their crab stick products. Instead, they have started usingin their viewa less oensive moniker: crab-avored seafood, made with surimi, a fully cooked sh protein.

FAUX REAL
JAPANESE SURIMI FINDS A SECOND LIFE IN THE U.S.
words BRENDAN

laboratory in Astoria, where I met a food scientist named Jae Park who had spent his life trying to perfect surimi and had a brick-sized book full of culinary physics to prove it. He took me out to a factory where raw sh paste was ash-frozen on gleaming metal racks. But where do they cook it? I asked. Los Angeles, he said.

JUST BEFORE DAWN , as the cops were clearing the homeless o


L.A.s Skid Row, Jay Kato, who runs Marutama Fish Cake Factory in Little Tokyo, shows me a sepia-tinted photograph of his grandmother Shizu Yoshiwa, who began making sh cakes with her husband in the back of their Fresno market in 1932. "When they were doing this 50 years ago," Kato says, "they would actually get the shbig old shcut it, take out the bones, and scrape out the meat with these big spoons." Every town in Japan once had its own style of sh cake depending on the local catch and recipe. If you traveled from Hokkaido at Japan's northern tip down to the subtropical island of Kyushu, you could sample the oerings of hundreds of shops. With Japanese immigration booming in the early 1900s, our West Coast became a microcosm of that diversity. Los Angeles factories plucked barracuda and sea bass straight from shing boats on San Pedro harbor, while plants farther north took advantage of rock cod, lingcod, and snapper. About

BORRELL

15 companies dotted the coast from Vancouver to Los Angeles. But when World War II broke out, the edgling industry collapsed. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent relocation of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, and Washington, Kato's grandmother boarded up

LIKE MOST AMERICANS , the rst time I ate surimi I thought I


was eating crab. That initial discoverythat the quadrangle of protein in my California roll was hewn from a white-eshed Alaskan sh and not a crustaceanwhetted my curiosity more than my appetite. Food writer Regina Schrambling once declared imitation crab "a crime against nature," but in truth the starch-laden crabsticks we are accustomed to pale in comparison to the tender sh cakes, derived from the same sources, that are treasured in Japan. And while scattered reports of glowing surimi surfaced in the 1990s, crab sticks are not a futuristic Frankenfood but the latest incarnation of a culinary innovation dating back centuries. Surimi, pronounced soo-ree-mee, is a mixture of pured sh protein, sugar, sorbitol, and a dash of salt. Odorless, colorless, and tasteless, surimi is a staple of Japanese cuisine that in recent years has seen an explosion in the global market. While supermarkets in the United States may carry a couple varieties of sea legs, in France entire shelves are stocked with bite-size surimi snacks. In Mexico, it's served with a distinctly Latin twist: a Tortita de Surimi, a quichelike treat spiced with garlic, onion, and freshly chopped cilantro. Surimi may be everywhere, but hardly anyone in the U.S. knows where it came fromor how World War II almost killed it.

her store and traveled to an internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas. Frank Kawana of Yamasa Enterprisesalso in Little Tokyowas 5 years old at the time, but he still remembers the six months he spent huddled at the Santa Anita racetrack before his family took a train bound for another camp in Arkansas. When the war ended, the Kawanas and Katos trickled back to California in rags. Little Tokyo, once a hub for 30,000 JapaneseAmericans, lay empty. Of the nine sh cake companies formerly in Los Angeles, only Yamasa and Marutama resumed production.

THE KAMABOKO BOARDS GO clickety-clack as they are fed onto


the assembly line. They emerge from the extruder topped with a half cylinder of sh paste, 2 inches tall, cotton white in the middle and hot pink on the outside. One worker separates each loaf from the next with the slice of a butcher knife before placing it onto the conveyer leading to the wide mouth of the steamer. A second worker plucks stray sh scales and other blemishes from the glistening loaves. As they appear in a cloud of steam on the other side, they smell of freshly baked bread and look like a Quonset hut made of Bazooka bubble gum. A thousand years ago there was no refrigeration, Kawana

IM PROBABLY THE ONLY PERSON IN LOS ANGELES WHO STILL KNOWS HOW TO MAKE KAMABOKO BY HAND.

"I'M PROBABLY the only person in Los Angeles who still knows
how to make kamaboko by hand," Kawana tells me as he pantomimes the procedure in his business suit. He places an imaginary mound of sh paste on the board in front of him. Holding the board with his left hand, he gently presses the paste into a triangle with the at of a knife hes saved for 50 years. Then he tops it with colored paste. Using the blade, he precisely rounds the corners, and I can almost see the perfect kamaboko loaf take shape in front of him, hovering above the coee table.

COMEBACK

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LO N G S H OTM AG .C OM

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