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.

Boiling imitation crab is the most common and straightforward method. Here's how you can do it: Fill a large pot with water and bring it to a rolling boil. Add the imitation crab to the boiling water and let it cook for 3-5 minutes.

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.

Also known as Crab Puffs, Crab Pillows, and Cheese Wontons, these are essentially fried wontons stuffed with cream cheese and imitation crab (or sometimes real crab).

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.

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.

Imitation crab may be more affordable than regular crab, and can also offer a quick, convenient, snack-size alternative to crab. However, it also usually contains a variety of additives, such as MSG and phosphorous, which may have harmful side effects for some people.

Can Dogs Eat Imitation Crab? Fake crabmeat is generally made of white fish, artificial food colorings, and other additives and preservatives. There are unknown ingredients in imitation crabmeat products—including imitation crabmeat sticks made out of fish paste—that can be unhealthy for dogs.

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.

Do Chinese restaurants use real crab in crab rangoon? ›

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.

Although crab Rangoon can be found in almost all the Chinese restaurant in the United States, again, this dish has nothing to do with Chinese food. The word “Rangoon” in the name “crab Rangoon” is really an old name of Yangon, the largest in Myanmar.

In fact, the majority of the most famous Chinese food dishes in the west don't exist in China, including the famous Chinese takeout box, mainly because of the kind of ingredients available, for example, the cream cheese, an ingredient so uncommon in China that makes the crab rangoon almost impossible to find.

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.

Crab sticks, krab sticks, snow legs, imitation crab (meat), or seafood sticks are a type of seafood made of starch and finely pulverized white fish (surimi) that has been shaped and cured to resemble the leg meat of snow crab or Japanese spider crab.

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.

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.