Grab A Fork The Next Time You Need To Shred Imitation Crab

Shredding imitation crab isn't the hardest task in the world. Still, it can be tedious if you have a tall mountain of pinkish tube meat to get through. The uninitiated (not naming any names) may even take to painstakingly peeling each noodle-like crab piece off one by one as if it were some weird, fishy mozzarella stick. Throughout the years, there have been other imitation crab shredding hacks, but none as satisfyingly simple as using a fork.

Once you see how easy it is to use a fork to shred your imitation crab, there's no going back to the squeezing, smashing, plugging-in-a-mixer ways. This method works best with the log-like imitation crab, aka the crab sticks, not the flake-style kind. To start, hold the crab stick on one end, jam the fork into the meat (of the crab stick, not your fingers), and drag it down to the other end. Voila! You should have easily and evenly shredded pieces of imitation crab with very little clean-up to boot.

Imitation crab is a relatively new culinary creation, invented by enterprising Japan's Sugiyo Co. in the 1970s. This imitation meat offered a way to use up leftover fish scraps. And so, like hotdogs and gefilte fish before it, imitation crab was born out of a resourceful need to use the whole "hog."

There's a reason imitation crab is delightfully shreddable, and that's due to its production process. To start, imitation crab is made out of something called "surimi," which is ground meat comprised of a variety of fish species. While imitation crab is relatively new, surimi has been around for centuries. Each production facility uses different raw materials for surimi and, as you can imagine, the quality of the fish increases with the price. Once the surimi is processed, seasoned, and ground into a paste, it's rolled into thin, elastic sheets, which are then shredded into strings and re-rolled for packaging. That's why it's so easily shreddable — it comes pre-shredded. All you need is a fork to loosen up the pieces.

Imitation crab varies in quality and nutrients, so be sure to do your homework before adding it to your culinary roundup. For those who can't get enough of the fishy snack, there are endlessly delicious ways to use crab sticks in your cooking. Plus, imitation crab is easily frozen, so you can always have some on hand for when that crab craving hits.