The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.
Bloomberg
The meat-free movement is finding its way into strange and exotic dishes.
The latest example: imitation uni. Usually, the orange innards of sea urchins served in sushi restaurants are harvested from spiky creatures that live on seabeds. The delicacy requires much labour to collect and keep fresh. That makes it one of the most expensive items on menus; a 100-gram box of top-grade uni from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido can easily fetch 5,000 yen ($47).
Although Beyond Meat Inc and Impossible Foods Inc are grabbing headlines these days, vegan seafood is considered the next frontier in
plant-based foods due to sustainability concerns. Good Catch, based in Newton, Pennsylvania, sells crab-free crabcakes and fish-free tuna.
San Francisco-based Wild Type is developing lab-grown salmon. At stake is a piece of a vegan market that’s projected to exceed $24 billion by 2026.
Japan already consumes 80 percent of the world’s uni supply, and demand will only climb thanks to sushi’s growing global popularity. That’s why Fuji Oil Holdings Inc, maker of processed foods such as chocolate and soy products, developed the world’s first imitation uni, using flavoured vegetable oils and soy-based ingredients.
Uni is an acquired taste. Connoisseurs seek out uni for its fresh-from-the-sea aroma; the best uni is firm until it’s eaten, and dissolves into a creamy texture on the tongue. It’s typically dolloped atop sushi rice, then wrapped with seaweed. Uni can also be mixed in with pasta, or spread over small pieces of toast, like caviar.
Fuji Oil’s version of uni is treated more like an ingredient meant to be used in a variety of dishes. Even so, one Tokyo sushi restaurant expressed an interest in trying it out. “We’d have to taste it first, but yes, we’d consider it,†said Yuki Haga, a sushi chef at Gonpachi.
Restaurants may have little choice but to add plant-based seafood to their menus.