What Makes Vegan Shrimp Bounce? The Science Behind The Food

In a plate in front of me are three shrimps: one is wild, one is cultivated and the last is not at all a shrimp.

It is a vegan “shrimp”, one of the many brands that are about to market in the past decade. It looks like a shrimp. When I pick it up and flex its tail backwards, it takes up the shape of the shape of the “shape” of the real shape to swim back through the water column. When I squeeze it between my fingers, it gives just enough. If I had a headband, I’m not sure my fingers can feel the difference.

The shrimps are the most consumed seafood in this country, with the average American scarf of about four pounds each year – almost equivalent to the second (salmon) and third choice (tuna) combined. This is a problem. In their wild shape, shrimps are a disaster. The mesh chalt used to catch them cause the pricing of several books from other sea lives for each shrimp book on the plate. Crevettes agriculture, on the other hand, wiped millions of acres of mangroves in carbon sequences and welcomed some of the worst types of labor abuse.

The false community of meat is very aware of all this. As impossible meat and food increased production that would possibly lead to massive investments and stock market gains, some companies worked on the boost underwater that is shrimp.

One of the first modern successes occurred in 2013, when Eugene Wang launched a range of false shrimp, under the brand of the brand now disappeared Sophie’s, using an ingredient in the Chinese culinary tradition called Konjac. I say that the first false “modern” shrimps because in Asian traditions Ersatz Land and Sea Proteins have been around for some time. “Chinese vegetarians, especially Buddhists, eat false meats and seafood for centuries,” said Andrew Coe, the author of Chop Suey: A cultural history of Chinese food in the United Statesrecently wrote to me in an email. “The main ingredient in the shape of meat in their dishes is generally a kind of transformed soy (tofu in a hurry, etc.) or wheat gluten, that is to say Seitan.”

Konjac, when he was brought to Buddhist cuisine in the sixth century, allowed the first meat replaceers to carry their art to a new level. Known under various alias (Yam of Elephant, Tongue du Diable, Lys Voodoo), he presents an underground “corn” which is raised in a fiber called glucomannan. The Japanese were particularly good at working with him, developing a substance similar to a jelly they have named konnyaku which can be poured into a mold and frozen.

Konjac works as a shrimp replacement because, according to a 2022 study in the journal FoodIt has “viscoelastic” and “rheological” properties – a viscoelastic sense which, to a certain extent, behaves both as a liquid and a solid and rheological in that it is a “soft solid”, therefore in response to the applied force, it tends towards a plastic flow rather than deformation.

In more plainspoken terms, it just gives enough when you bite it.

The Konjac key has proven to unlock many boxes for many entrepreneurs, and in the early 2020s, you could find a range of products in more politically correct supermarkets. The shock and good2go veggie shrimp gave you fried and ocean experience. The line blown from the mind, the Seafood Co. plant, provided your simulacrum beaten with coconut. And Shrimpish®, of a company called ISH, filled your plate with a naked product which, at least remotely, looked very much like shrimp. I could register a few dozen additional products on the market in the 2020s, but I suspect that the reader is already exhausted by vegan jargon and plant puns. In my opinion, I understand.

Many of these brands use Konjac, although in the scalable race towards the perfect rebound, there were modern industrial adjustments. “There are other thickened gums and gels that create this muscle with a spring and a rebound,” said Shelly Van Cleve, co -founder and developer of products from the Seafood plant Co. The Van Cleve vegan scallop begins from the same set of Konjac

and other ingredients as its vegan shrimp. Very handled and cooked differently, they become different animals, so to speak. It just depends on how you want it to be viscoelastic.

If Konjac and the other gums and gels are the common structural jump point from which most of the false shrimps leave the port, it is in the aroma where they can navigate in different directions. Many manufacturers seek to impregnate their products with ocean essence derived from various marine additives. In a way, this simulates how aromas are transmitted in the food chain in nature. In wild ecosystems, microalgae, alias phytoplankton, are generally consumed by zooplankton, which in turn transmit their nutrients, their tastes and their pigments higher in the food chain to crustaceans and fish. Salmon and shrimp have pink colors in their flesh because of reddish phytoplankton at the base of their particular food chains.

The false shrimps, like another recently disappeared seafood company, New Wave Foods, brought ingredients such as algae and algae in their “flesh” with plants for structure as well as for flavor and omega-3 content. A parchment through the aromas in other shrimp things brings you the usual vegan suspects, such as paprika, sea salt and brown sugar, as well as all the claims and promises of Umami that you can find on any vegan label.

But how does it feel in the mouth? I wonder with apprehension while I drop my teeth in the “flesh” of false shrimps.

During my two decades covering the seafood industry, I ate a shrimp cloth next to the farms of Cà Mau, in Vietnam and bolted raw wild shrimp directly from the bridge of a louisiana trawler in the sticky heat of a night of the Mexico Gulf. Like Bubba in Forrest GumpI had “the fried, fried, sautéed pan, there are pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp hamburger, shrimp sandwich.” With all this in my memory when I start to chew, what I eat feels in my mouth more like an analogy with the shrimp than the shrimp itself. Almost as if I had turned it according to an invite in the same way as the chatpt could write a poem on your lover if you told her that she had brown eyes and a clear smile.

Yes, Konjac and the other viscoelastic gums in the ultraprorocered arsenal have properties that transmit an impression of the body qualities that a creature must have to keep neutral buoyancy. But life is not made by pouring stuff in a mold. Like the rings in a tree, the shrimp fabric grows in adjustment and starts, locked up here and there with collagen which give the living animal functional structure. All of this gives a feeling of resistance not predictable when you bite it. Even if the entrepreneurs try to introduce a feeling of natural random by varying the size and shape of the false individual shrimps, the vegetable flesh itself is uniform everywhere. In bad context, you could confuse it with Bologna.

I don’t want to abandon the idea of ​​replacing shrimp. Food scientists are on something,, And maybe with a little more R&D, they could get there. But the level of investment in alt meats in the past is not a guarantee of future success. After the Beyond and Impossible brands soaked in the late 2010s, false earthly meat complained in the 2020s while false seafood saw only a modest growth. And while before, the developers felt a little free to experiment with Konjac and his parents, the threat of “ultra -to -resident” label let them scratch their heads. “I go for an exact replication before looking at the railing and the labels,” said Van Cleve. “To reproduce an entire animal, it is a difficult thing to accomplish. So, if you do this, you sometimes have to put stones. Otherwise, you would have nothing in your toolbox. “”

I will wait to see what emerges from the toolbox then. But if I had to choose between wild shrimps, breeding shrimps and false shrimp, I could, for the moment, choose no shrimp at all.