Surimi or imitation crab: What is surimi really made of? (Full Documentary, 2020)

It has become the essential for aperitifs and picnics. Grated in salads, mixed with mayonnaise, surimi is the easy food. The ocean that you can enjoy with friends, without the smell of fried food. In supermarket fresh foods departments, its color is very recognizable. Imported from Japan in the 1980s, where it is called kamaboko, consumed everywhere in the street. It even has its own museum. It's believed that kamaboko is an ancient recipe for preserving fish, dating back to the Heian area over 900 years ago. The French are now the second largest consumers of surimi in the world, after the Japanese. But nobody really knows what's in this little orange stick. It looks like crab. It has the texture and even taste. They say it's crab, but it's not just crab, right? There's a crab flavor, but not just crab. It's reconstituted fish, without fish. I don't really want to know, that suits me. There may be crab in surimi. There's definitely fish. But what else? We wanted to know more about this little orange stick that came from far away. To begin, there is a first mystery, a first secret. Nobody imagines when biting into surimi, that its journey began in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Because there is real fish in surimi, which real sailors fished, in a real sea. Having left several weeks ago, Captain Fred Kinieu sees a spot on his radar screen. A school of fish. On board the boat, they jump into action. When I see the fish, I have to get aligned with them. To get aligned, is to position the net correctly on the target. The target is blue whiting. A fish that lives between 500 and 3000 feet deep, around the British Isles, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and as far as Iceland. You have to follow the fish all the time. All the time. Watch how they move. Success is never a given. Fishing is so random, that everything must be done very quickly. As soon as you see the fish, you have to capture them. At each haul, 160 tons of blue whiting are caught. To prevent the fish from getting damaged, a pump is immersed, which sucks the fish directly into the net and transfers them to the holds. The Joseph Roti II is a fishing boat, but also a factory vessel. The largest French factory vessel, where the fish are processed directly as the net is taken up. The fish are not frozen whole. They are processed on board, amid the deafening noise of the machines. We're in the factory bridge, just under the fishing bridge. This part of the boat is dedicated to surimi production. We have 25 people working six-hour shifts around the clock to produce the surimi base from whole blue whiting. In the flanks of the ship, the men, both workers and sailors, remove the skin, entrails, head and bones of each fish. From this fish, we obtain a fillet. We only keep this part. The head is rejected, the tail is rejected, and the viscera are rejected. Only the fillets are kept, the raw material for surimi. The fillet comes through here and goes into the mincing unit. The mincing unit crushes the protein part so that it passes through the pumps and then on to the rest of the process. Here you have the pure protein, the surimi base. That's the raw material to make the surimi. After that, we'll inject it with sugar, around 8 to 8.2 percent, which will allow a conservation on the order of two years. Without this sugar, it can't be conserved. We have a very nice product here. The sugar crystals are well mixed. There's no impurity. The production manager tells me that we can make two tons per hour. That makes 40 tons per day. So we're good. To make 40 tons of surimi per day, they need to take a daily fish haul of 150 tons. And the boat will remain at sea as long as the holds are not full. To resume, 900 tons of surimi base need to be produced with blue whiting. Because to make the surimi base, you need a fish with white flesh, without too much flavor, and easily transformable. Other fish can be used. Alaska Pollock, Argentinian Hokie, Hake, Anchovy, Itoiuri in Asia. All are white-fleshed. A global fishing market, supplying the major brands that manufacture surimi. In France, four companies occupy the market. Fleury-Michon in Vendée, Captain Cook, a subsidiary of Intermarché in Brittany, Coraya in Carentan, and the Compagnie des Pêches de Saint-Malo, which owns the Joseph Rotitu, the only factory vessel that fishes and manufactures its own surimi base on board. With its appearance of the prow of a ship facing the ocean, the town of Saint-Malo, homeport of the Joseph Rotitu, draws its wealth and glory from its maritime history since the 16th century. After three months at sea, the factory ship docks with its belly full of Atlantic white gold. Boxed and frozen surimi base is transferred to the group's factory, situated only a few hundred feet from the docks. A grouping of several French, Dutch, and Icelandic. The Compagnie des Pêches de Saint-Malo factory is the only one that opened its doors to us. All the others refused. Like a chef who is preparing his crepe dough or bread dough, you have the different ingredients that go into the recipe. We have the fish, the main base, which makes up about 40% of the product. After, we have egg white and salt. The egg white has an important role. Blended with the fish, it allows the protein to gel. It really allows the dough to gel, a bit like bread dough. The salt will bring the salty taste to the product. The sugar is to reduce the sharpness of the salt and give a roundness to the recipe. And finally, potato flakes and wheat starch, very important in the following process and which give crunchiness to the finished product. If we have understood Antoine's recipe correctly, in surimi, there must be at least 30% of fish flesh to benefit in France from the surimi appellation. Here, there are 38%. Once the surimi comes through the mill, it's crumbled, so we still have our fish, which will be the major ingredient in the surimi stick. Gradually, the surimi base thaws in large pots. It will soon be blended with potato starch, cassava, salted egg white and sugar. This is also when water is added, almost as much as the fish meat. At this stage, the fish only represents the preparation. Once the gelling temperature of the protein is reached, the texture of the dough resembles the texture of bread dough or a pancake batter. The protein base of fish no longer tastes like fish. We could just as well make surimi with pistachio, Nutella, if people were ready. You just need to add the necessary flavor. But this white dough no longer has a flavor or a smell. It's a mass of tasteless protein that will have to be flavored with a little bit of crab flavoring. Just a touch, one small bucket for 220 pounds of dough. This is secret number two of surimi. Thanks to the crab aroma, it will only taste like it. Aromas are generally not welcome. The manufacture of aromas. Behind yogurt, soft drinks, syrups for children, toothpaste or animal feed, there are flavors everywhere. In a Parisian suburb, the Fonterome company kindly opened its stores to us. The surimi base is fish. If you take this product without adding any flavor, you'll have an extremely tasteless product. It won't be any good. You won't get any pleasure from eating it. Providing an aroma will therefore give this taste to the surimi, which will make this product good and give people pleasure in eating it. Thanks to today's techniques, we can develop aromas and tastes that you will never forget. Talking about surimi, you have a surimi taste today, and this surimi taste never existed in nature. It was created from scratch by mixing crab with other flavors. So we created a new aroma. Forgotten on a shelf, a synthetic crab flavoring made by another company gives an idea of what was put in surimi in the past. It's very chemical, so it became a cooking flavor, which undoubtedly contributed to surimi's bad reputation. The director of the laboratory was kind enough to help us decipher the ingredients. We have dimethyl sulfide with a top note, which is a little like gas. Then we have the pyrazine family, which gives the slightly toasted side. Then we'll have cooked and smoked notes through the maltol and smoked through the guaiacol, which is a molecule that gives a smoky note that's very pharmaceutical. This is relayed by two other molecules, xenol and methyl anthralanate, and salicylate of methyl as well, which gives a very heavy medical note in the background. So it will be strong in the back of the mouth, a natural flavor. There's no crab there at all? Not at all. There are only chemical molecules. There is no crab in it at all. We still find these flavors in some low-end surimi from Asia sold at discount stores. Today the flavors are more and more natural, and therefore to make a lobster or crab flavor, you need lobster or crab. Green crab, for example, a species that is found in abundance in the waters of northern Europe, is crushed, cooked, and then reduced to an extract, which raises other questions. Founded in 2004, the Bloom Association works for marine conservation by denouncing what it considers an absurd system. We've arrived at an absurd process. We catch fish and remove its taste to simply keep the protein, the protein mass, and then we add a flavor that comes from other marine species. It's completely crazy. And we've come to this, unfortunately, because we have consumption on a global level, which is harmonized, formatted by mass distribution, by the large industrial groups. The taste is formatted, we have food that tastes the same all year round, all over the world. Could surimi be summed up as a matter of tastes or colors? That's secret number three, its famous orange color, which almost assaults the eye. And separable from surimi, it is supposed to imitate the color of a crab claw. An original color, but also a constraint, because consumers only want orange surimi. Return to the San Mello factory, where we meet Antoine Sayard, the production manager. To get the crab meat dough appearance with the orange color that reminds us of crab, we add a little paprika extract. It's natural paprika, it's a concentrated spice. You need 7 ounces for 33 pounds of white dough. We blend it all and obtain the colored dough, the red dough that will be used next. But what exactly is paprika? To know the history of this spice, we leave Brittany and travel to Uttar Pradesh, a state in southern India, where peasants cultivate and harvest red pepper over huge areas. This sweet pepper culture is also found in Spain, Hungary, and Africa, but the food industry mainly sources it in India. Picked when ripe, parboiled, dried, then crushed, the pepper becomes paprika during this industrial process. In the form of powder or concentrated in resin, paprika is sent in a container to importers, who will adapt it to each request. Like here, in a suburb of Lyon, where the Coloré company kindly shows us behind the scenes in the color industry. This is the Coloré laboratory, which is a laboratory at the service of our customers. This R&D laboratory will allow us to answer the questions our customers have on color formulations. We have different industries, maybe paint or textiles. We have this dye that was made famous by the yellow vests. This blue is a spirulina blue, which is used in M&M's. This red is extracted from a radish. We squeeze the radish to make a juice, which gives a very bright red tone. Very popular, we're coloring sausages. A white sausage does not sell very well. A red sausage sells much better. Color is everywhere. Color surrounds us, and color will favor better sales. Paprika is a natural red pepper, and therefore surimi is surrounded by a natural paprika resin. Oleoresin is an extremely concentrated product, so much so that if we take a sample of oleoresin and put it in this bowl, we get a very black oily tint. On the other hand, if we use a very low dose and put it in an oily base liquid, we obtain a very rapid solubilization of the paprika, and we obtain the typical orange color of industrial surimi. But there is another little secret hidden inside secret number three, a kind of detail that you don't immediately think of. The orange color only coats the exterior of the stick, staying on the outside natural-based paprika from mixing with naturally water-based fish flesh. The mastery of the industrial process has achieved a surimi stick that is very distinct between the outside, the crab claw, and the inside, the crab meat, Direction Marseille. Dr. Olivia Petit is a teacher-researcher in neuroscience at Kedge Business School. She studies the consumer's brain and more specifically the role of mental imagery and sensory interactions in the consumer experience. For her, surimi is a textbook case. For example, then the smell that arrives right away, which really makes one think of crab. There is something very marine. In terms of presentation, you see here, we have this orange side which recalls the color of the crab shell. We have the white side which recalls the flesh. And all these elements associated with the smell the brain is already activated in these parts. I've created taste inferences about the taste of the product. Finally, the taste is barely from the tongue. It's a fairly minimal part. In terms of taste, it is simply sweet, salty, sour, etc. What creates the aroma, the flavor of the product, is the information that comes first from our sight to the first flesh side. And finally, when I eat the product, all these elements, the visual, auditory, and olfactory experiences make it possible to reinforce the taste of the crab and to really think that I am eating crab. Yet there isn't any. There is none. OK, so what do we have? At this point in the surimi production, there is the crab taste, the flavor. We meet Antoine again at the Saint Malo factory. The surimi as we know it is starting to take shape. Here we arrive in the production room. It's hot and humid here. The white dough arrives here. And here we have the orange dough, which also arrives here. And here is a pump that allows the dough to be extruded about a third to three quarters of an inch on the baking drum, a stainless steel drum that heats up to approximately 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Once passed through the cooking drum, we have the cooked protein and the starch which start to react together, creating a malleable, elastic dough which will be transformable after. The famous sensation of eating crab, this is a purely industrial creation, a brilliant, irresistible, almost Machiavellian detail. Here is a very important step for the process and the final product, the scarification. How is it done? With crossed blades. The dough rolls over them and the blades lacerate the dough. If you eat a surimi stick before the scarification, it will be mushy and soft. Once it's been lacerated, it's going to be really crunchy and you'll have the texture of crab meat in your mouth. The texture of crab meat but without crab is a miracle of food engineering. One last small detail where we see the pre-cooked dough rolling up on itself to become a stick. We can produce surimi miles and miles long which can then be cut into small pieces Once the product is in its final packaging, we will cook it and pasteurize it at 175 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. The product cooked inside is cleansed of all microbes, in particular all pathogens, listeria, salmonella, which could cause concern for consumers. It's a very healthy product. It's cooked at high temperature for a long time. It is the succession of steps and cooking processes that will produce a product sold in the fresh food section to be consumed on the go which can be conserved for a long time. In the offices of the San Mello Fisheries Company, new flavors and new products are regularly tested in the presence of Florian Soisson, the owner and boss. It's true I have Japanese origins in Japan. In Japan, surimi dates from 900 years ago. It's really cultural. It was a way to conserve fish. In France, we had milk protein. In Japan, they had fish protein since it's an island. And they worked with this fish protein. Today, we export camembert to them and here we try to copy them by making surimi sticks. For the record, Florian, after a trip to Japan, had the idea of transforming his fishing business into a surimi factory. It was on this occasion that he met his wife who was the descendant of a long line of Japanese surimi makers. A real family affair. In the land of the rising sun, it can be cooked and served in a thousand ways. Boiled, spit-roasted, sweet, Here, surimi is called kamaboko and the city of Odawara, a fishing port south of Tokyo, is its capital. During the lunch break, kamaboko is eaten everywhere in the streets. This mixture is called oden. There are different balls of kamaboko boiled in soup. There is also age kamaboko, fried kamaboko with pieces of vegetable in it. It's delicious. I love this. Its slightly elastic texture with the pieces of octopus inside is unique. It's very special. It's very soft. You can tell the fish is very fresh. Mine is with crab. And mine with onions. In the streets of Odawara, restaurants, popular stands, terraces, all serve kamaboko of all shapes and colors. There are even vending machines at every intersection. Ketsuhiro Doi is a food historian. The strict definition of kamaboko is a paste made from fish meat. In France, you call it surimi, but you only have one appellation. Here we have satsumage, agemono, shikuwa, satsa kamaboko, tsumire, hanpen, ita kamaboko, etc., which are all different types of preparation and cooking. But they are all kamabokos. Kamaboko is believed to be an ancient recipe for preserving fish, which dates back to the Heian era over 900 years ago. Until the 19th century, it was only consumed by the nobility, in particular at the time of the Feast of the Dead or the New Year. Then the preparation technique was automated, the price came down, and the price went down. In Odawara, several companies manufacture kamaboko using traditional methods, such as the Yamaju Workshop, which has supplied the emperor's table since 1870. Here the machines have evolved, but the techniques remain the same. When the fish caught the day before arrive in the factory, they are cut up and only the fillets are kept. Then comes the washing step, one of the most technical, which uses a very special water drawn from more than 200 meters deep in the earth. It's high in calcium and magnesium. It will allow the proteins in the fish flesh to bind better. The fish flesh goes into the water. This is the first step in blanching. The fish separates the fat from the flesh. What is floating here is the fat which rises to the surface. Here is the final phase of the blanching. The flesh was initially a little pink, with the blood and the connective tissues, and this operation makes it very white. At this stage, there is still a lot of water in it, so it must be removed to make the kamaboko. So, next, we do the spin phase. The water must be removed to obtain a paste containing 95% fish flesh in a perfect texture with very little water and fat, unlike the French surimi. As I spread the dough with the knife, I feel its firmness. With only the hand, it's less precise. With a knife, you can clearly feel the resistance of the flesh. This is the purpose of this step. Before starting the production, we first prepare a small kamaboko that we steam. We taste it to check the texture. We test its firmness, and if it is validated, we go on to the next step. Once the kamaboko test is validated, they can start production, coloring and cooking. Most of these kamaboko are eaten during ceremonies or important events. They are very often red, pink and white, festive colors. Red is supposed to drive away evil spirits. Pink is romantic. White symbolizes purity. In a neighboring building, the kamaboko even has its museum where its history is exhibited. Kamaboko making classes are even organized for children. A teacher's actions are filmed and broadcast on a big screen, perpetuating this thousand-year-old tradition. Each child leaves with their kamaboko, cooked and made according to ancient precepts. Further on in the museum's shops, tradition matches perfectly with the products that our modern world is capable of producing. Cars, barbies, Darth Vader's the hajime, a luxury kamaboko is made. It's what they do best in Japan. It is made by workers who purify themselves before working it. A sacred kamaboko in a way, made entirely by hand. Sayuku Sakai cuts and shapes lucky charms from the Japanese tradition as if they were real jewels. Most of the time we use traditional patterns. Like the iris flower or the crown. To create a pattern, we cut and arrange pieces of different colors. Joining or braiding the elements has a positive meaning. With the kamaboko, we try to reproduce the classic lucky symbols of Japan. The patterns have evolved to adapt to our times. Lacquered boxes of hajime supposed to bring good luck that are offered for the end-of-year celebrations. Sold for $150 each, it is the most expensive surimi in the world. Back in France, the prices are far from that. Very far. It's $10 for a box of 30 sticks of surimi sold only in supermarkets. Not expensive for crab, even if it is fake, or for fish, which is real. A strategic position in the fresh food section next to the fishmonger. We are not in the chips department or in the peanuts department or even cold cuts. We are in the fresh fish department. The products next to surimi are high-end, etc., products that are higher priced, from $20 to $30 per pound, unlike $3 a pound for the surimi. So it's a very accessible product that you put on your shopping list. It's an impulse purchase, a product that you will take for the aperitif. We can see the way it is marketed. It is often associated with mayonnaise or cocktail sauces. It is linked to a mode of consumption similar to chips or cold cuts, for example. Today, we see the manufacturers are trying to reposition surimi, but its price, that very low price, definitely associates it with low-end products, symbolizing junk food and ultra-processed food. This is the type of subject that fascinates the historian and political scientist Paul Harrier, author of A Political History of Food. Surimi is not at all the worst food we make in terms of ultra-processed food, and yet surimi gets bad press and a bad image. We often find surimi in school cafeterias and in company cafeterias where, sadly enough, these collective cafeterias are considered to serve junk food. This fish is without tail or head, and that's its strength. I find it quite tasteless, and that's also its strength. It's a ready-to-eat product, available for any culinary preparation and also for all mental projections. Everyone can invent the fish they want. On the one hand, what exactly is in there? What exactly is this? They say it's crab, but it's not just crab, right? There's a crab flavor, but not just crab. I think they blend different fish. There's crab inside because you have the orange color. That's what I've thought. For me, it's crab meat. No, hake, Alaskan pollock, seith, but no crab. They are pieces of crab, right? They compact it and put it in surimi. It's fish flesh. Ah, there's no crab in it. The composition of the surimi is what makes the difference between each brand, between each price range. And this is why the labels must be red. This is the work of the Food Watch Association. What I noticed right away in this product is its Nutri-Score. I think this rehabilitates it because a Nutri-Score of B is a rather healthy and balanced product. If we turn over the label, we have a list of ingredients here. 40% fish. It's always interesting to note that there is indeed fish. And then we find the starch, obviously oil, potato starch, which will be a texturizer and also sweeten the product a little. More sugar and the famous natural aromas that will give the taste of surimi. There are colored dyes but not too many additives. I rate it 4, maybe 5. It could have been worse. We could have expected 10 or 12. A good first impression. But when you go down in price range, the quality doesn't follow. We immediately notice the Nutri-Score is C. They reduce the price and also reduce the product's nutritional quality. The thing that immediately shocks me is this first ingredient, water. They're down to 26% fish. We understand why the price has fallen. The price has also fallen because there are less quality raw materials inside. Earlier, we were at around 40%, so it's a significant drop. I'm always surprised to find sugar in a salty food, in surimi. For someone paying attention to the amount of sugar in their diet, they might think, I didn't realize I was eating sugar in my surimi. Sugar in fish? Julie Massé is a dietitian and enlightens us on carbohydrates unexpected in this product. When you eat three sticks, you eat the equivalent of a sugar cube, which is not nothing. Outside of meals, eating sugar is not ideal. A sugar cube isn't horrible, but if you eat half the package, because it can be eaten relatively quickly, you can take in a quantity of sugar. It's fish. It tastes like fish. It reminds us of fish, and we don't think there is sugar inside. It's all about the proportion. When you eat fish, meat, eggs, there are no carbohydrates in them. This product is similar to an animal product, but with sugar in it, which doesn't normally exist. This is why I'm talking about the bechamel sauce. There are carbohydrates in it, which are not supposed to be in fish. Sugar, but not only. In some surimi, there are many more additives. These are pieces of crab-flavored surimi, which come from Thailand. Water is still the main ingredient, 36% fish and about 10 additives, including glutamate. Here we have the best product. They've pushed it pretty far. It's a product that I would advise against consuming because there are too many additives inside. We have no idea how they interact with each other. From the ocean to the final packaging, we have followed all the stages in surimi production. But what about us amateur cooks? Modest gourmets, could we imagine cooking a surimi at home? For fun, we offered this challenge to a rising star of French cuisine. Imagine what a top chef's surimi would be like, a haute cuisine surimi. The Franco-Colombian chef Juan Abelaz was kind enough to help us. Juan's demand arouses the interest of sellers. How are you, boss? Good, and you? Business is good? We're trying. I'm here because I've taken up a little challenge. We're going to revisit the surimi recipe. Okay. Fish meat flavoured as crab. My idea is to make a real surimi with fish They're in season? Little crabs, that's great. And what sort of fish do you have from small line boats? White fish, not very expensive. A hake? Great. Perfect, I'll send you this. Okay. Juan is the owner of several restaurants in Paris. His credo? Natural products, local if possible, making a homemade surimi is a stimulating challenge, especially since the product is associated with an industrial process. I wanted to reproduce the surimi as we know it, with the very orange outside. I went with a crab bisque because normally surimi is flavoured with the crab aroma. I chose French crabs, which we will work into a bisque. We need aromatics, of course, onion, garlic, thyme, carrots, a little tomato paste for binding and colouring. And I'm going to try to play at the sorcerer, the magician, trying to figure out which spice to add, which will help achieve the perfect colour. I'll use paprika, madras curry and turmeric to try to achieve this colour. We're going to have a business-class surimi. We're travelling first class today with this surimi. I'm going to cut up my fish flesh. I'm just going to spread it out. We're going to roll this filet and steam it. We're going to cut our sticks. The idea is to obtain something powerful. You could call Juan's recipe surimi supreme with mackerel and chard leaf or surimi quenelle à la Juan. Dip it in the mayonnaise. It's great. Works well. It's much better. We're like kids. If you close your eyes, the taste is excellent. But when you open them, the colour is not as bright as an industrial surimi and it's not chewy like the factory surimi. In the end, it's not so easy, even for a top chef, to make a surimi stick. We're not going to be choosy. It was a very good try. Homemade surimi won't be competing with the supermarket sticks. Surimi will remain surimi and maybe it's better that way. For more recipes and tips,