You already knew that the crab in your lunch roll wasn’t really crab — but you probably didn’t know about all the other kinds of imitation foods you eat all the time. From faux wasabi to milk and olive oil that’s partly made up of additives, these are the weird ingredients in the fake foods you eat.
Do you think your favorite sushi restaurant uses real wasabi? Nope. It’s only a combination of horseradish and mustard, mixed with green food coloring. Real wasabi is freshly grated, because it can’t preserve its spiciness for weeks, and it could cost up to $100 per pound
Transglutaminase (or meat glue), helps to create lots of fake foods: crab sticks, fake steak and fish balls. It’s used to bond proteins together, so a rib-eye-like texture can be made from scraps, or crab sticks from pulverized white fish flesh. Meat glue is extracted from animal blood.
Most “pomegranate juice” is made of grape skins and grape juice. In June 2014 it turned out that Minute Maid “100 percent pomegranate juice” contained 99.4% apple and grape juice, 0.2 percent blueberry juice and 0.1 percent raspberry juice, so only 0.3 percent came from a real pomegranate.
Red Velvet cakes are just artificially colored chocolate cakes
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Coffee isn’t just coffee: you can find ground roasted barley, roasted corn or even roasted ground parchment in the box. Instant coffee is worse, because it includes cereals, caramel, starch, malt, figs or chicory.
White chocolate is technically not chocolate — because it doesn’t contain cocoa solids or chocolate liquor.
Bottles sold with labels that read “olive oil” only contain a few percent actual olive oil. Widely used imposter ingredients include oils obtained from walnut, corn, palm, sunflower, soybean, peanut or vegetables.
Does your milk come from dairy cows? Not entirely. Milk can be adulterated with a mix of urea, detergent, caustic soda, salt, sugar, oil and milk powder.
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Top GIF has been cut from this video, uploaded by How To Make Sushi.
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