Super Easy Crab Puffs Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What are crab puffs made of? ›

Crab puffs, aka crab rangoons, are a staple at most casual Chinese restaurants. They are made of crispy wonton wrappers stuffed with juicy crab meat and cream cheese.

It consists of cream cheese, sometimes sweetened, plus, usually, very small bits of imitation crab, stuffed into a wonton wrapper and deep-fried, served with a syrupy, neon sweet-and-sour dipping sauce. It is, essentially, deep-fried cheesecake with fake crab in it—as sweet as any dessert, but served as an appetizer.

Imitation crab is a highly processed food made by combining minced fish with starch, egg whites, sugar, salt, and additives to mimic the flavor, color, and texture of real crab meat. While it's significantly less expensive than real crab, it's also less nutritious.

Preparation. The filling is made with a combination of cream cheese, crab meat or imitation crab meat, scallions or onion, garlic, and other flavorings. A small amount of the filling is wrapped in each wonton wrapper.

Worst: Crab Rangoon

It's mostly cream cheese, wrapped in dough and deep-fried to create bite-sized calorie bombs. Because they're small, it's easy to eat more than one. Finish an order of 4, and you're likely to get more than half the calories and fat you should have in an entire meal.

Being a highly-processed, additive-rich, and less nutritious alternative to real crab, imitation crab has some of these drawbacks: Health concerns. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has assigned a "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) status to many of the additives that are used in imitation crabs.

Although imitation crab is low in both fat and calories, Mercree says that real crab has much more protein, fewer carbs and less sodium and sugar than the imitation. “It also lacks many of the nutritional benefits found in real crab, including trace minerals, zinc, selenium and B vitamins,” Mercree said.

Just like the name implies, imitation crab contains no crabmeat. Fish is, however, one of the main ingredients. It is made using surimi, which is a paste made of fish and a few other ingredients. Surimi is often made with pollock, which is also used to make fish sticks and breaded fish products.

Crisp and bubbly with a molten center of oozy, tangy cream cheese, scallions and crab. Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site.

The main ingredient of crab sticks is surimi – finely pulverised white fish – most commonly Alaska pollock. They also include fillers such as wheat and potato starch, and egg white, along with crab flavouring and food dyes to give them their crab-like red and white colour.

Is a crab puff a Crab Rangoon? ›

Kenji's Crab Rangoons (Crab Puffs).