Debating the merits of fake crab
Fake crab meat has a bad name, and you can kind of see why. Any time you're selling one kind of food which has been colored, flavored and re-textured to seem like another, you're on shaky ground. (I'm thinking of those cracker snack packs, with the salty orange substance in the little tub, and the red plastic stick for spreading it. The package euphemistically describes it as "Cheez.")
But hey, have you seen the price of crab lately?
It was in the spirit of inquiry that I purchased a package of the stuff last weekend. It was an eight ounce pack of Alaskan Pollock doctored to look like crab flakes, on sale for only $2.99.
The first thing I noticed, upon opening the package, was that it came with a zip seal so that you could easily re-use it. That's a nice feature, but it made me suspicious that the packaging was adding to the cost.
(One thing I failed to do was check the ingredients list. Why would I? It's just fish, right? Well no. It turns out that most artificial crab meat contains wheat ingredients. Too bad I didn't discover this until after I had eaten it all, because I have a gluten intolerance. If you have food allergies, be sure to check the label: It also contained soy and egg ingredients. Crazy.)
Tasting a piece of it fresh out of the package, the "crab" taste is a little bit too fake. A little too strong, a little too perfect. It's not exactly bad, and I might not pick it out a line-up. But it was definitely a bit much.
Next I mushed it all up, added some mayonnaise plus a splash of lemon juice and a dash of hot sauce, and mixed it into "crab" salad. I dolloped this on a spread of lettuce and dang if it wasn't downright delicious. The other ingredients helped soften the overly-powerful "crab" flavor and resulted in a tasty, zingy lunchtime treat.
Image courtesy Flickr/ilovebutter