NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN SURIMI TECHNOLOGY

Surimi - minced and washed fish meat - has primarily been produced from white-muscled fish species, since the desirable odor, light color and gel-forming characteristics of the resultant surimi are very important to enable further processing to heat-induced gel products such as crab leg analog. The production of lowfat surimi with desirable gel-forming characteristics from sardine and mackerel by conventional processing methods has had only limited success; however, recent developments have opened the way to the utilization of red-meat fish for surimi production. During surimi processing, the loss of water-soluble proteins into the wash water leads not only to the waste of certain valuable nutrients but also to pollution of the water; new methods for the recovery of water-soluble proteins from the wash water are described. The role of cryoprotectants in improving frozen surimi storage is explained by the glass transition concept.