We promised to get back to you with an update when somebody turned promising, high-protein Spirulina into a commercial product. Now, against all odds, this deep green algae has been re-imagined as a luscious, peachy-pink plant-based Smoked Salmon!
AlgaeCore’s new ‘high-def’ Smoked Salmon ‘analogue’ is
the closest-to-real plant-based protein product I’ve yet seen!
It took a while, but superfood Spirulina – a plentiful, underappreciated algae you can just pick up off the beach at low tide – has finally been commercialized. And it’s been turned into a product that could be super successful: plant-based faux Smoked Salmon…
Checks the boxes…
I can’t think of any greater challenge you could set for a faux-food engineer. But researchers have taken deep green, chlorophyll-loaded Spirulina and turned it into something as far from it’s original form as you could imagine. And independent taste testers say the new product checks all the boxes: flavour, texture, colour and overall satisfaction.
What they had to do
Among the challenges the product’s developers faced was yo somehow mutate the colour of spirulina into something completely different. They hit some luck when it turned out that, stripped of its blue-green chlorophyll, the stuff was naturally a luscious, peachy-pink, all-too-authentic-looking smoked-salmon colour. “The replica salmon’s pale pink hue is expressed through the remaining carotenoid pigment naturally present in spirulina,” product developers explain.
Texture was another 180-degrees opposite proposition. Transforming the naked spirulina protein from dry and powdery to moist and mildly fibrous would seem an impossible task. But when the algae has been de-colourized and remains in its natural form, it’s moist and mutable.
The developers came up with a process to, “consolidate the remainder of the spirulina’s mass into a ‘high-moisture texturized vegetable protein. The result is a silky yet fibrous structure […] presenting the same natural glossy finish as smoked salmon.”
Behind the word ‘consolidate’ lies the entire, proprietary process that makes the product possible.
Then, “[o]ur fresh, undried spirulina and a few natural [flavouring] ingredients are combined and passed through a machine that resembles a pasta roller to produce our spirulina-based smoked salmon in a simple process,” Baruch Dach, the CTO and co-founder of manufacturer AlgaeCore explains.
Three times the protein
The ‘salmonizing’ process produces a product that contains a little less than three times the protein of firm Tofu. For comparison, 100 g of firm Tofu will yield about 17.3 g of protein. The same amount of dried spirulina will yield 57.5 g of protein.
My take
As magical as it may seem, the transformation of algae to faux Smoked Salmon is nothing short of a technical miracle which takes advantage of a string of ‘natural’ processes that perform the ‘heavy lifting’. The process creates a finished product that multiplies the value of the base feedstock several times over.
If the SimpliiGood Plant-based Smoked Salmon tastes as good a it looks, its a real winner for all involved. Not the least of whom is the end-consumer!
The only angle the source story for this post doesn’t cover is, how much will AlgaeCore’s Smoked Salmon ‘analogue’ cost? All other factors being as advertised… The retail price compared to real Salmon is what will make or break the whole concept…
~ Maggie J.