The standard of good sea cucumber: Stichopus japonicus+.Wild (bottom sowing)+light drying+enough years, complete head and horns and normal color.
1. sea cucumber. Stichopus japonicus is one of the most famous sea cucumbers, with the highest grade among more than 20 kinds of edible sea cucumbers in China. Stichopus japonicus, as a precious seafood, is listed as one of the "eight treasures" and is known as the "crown of ginseng". In the sea cucumber family, the sea cucumbers from Shandong Peninsula and Liaodong Peninsula are of better quality.
Image characteristics: the meat is thick and prickly, and there are 4-6 rows of irregular conical prickles (called wart feet) on the back. The ventral surface is flat, and the tube feet are dense, which are arranged in three irregular longitudinal bands.
2. Wild sea cucumber: I have published a blog post about wild sea cucumber before. Let's look back: the difference between pure wild sea cucumber and wild sea cucumber.
Simply put, wild ginseng is like walking chicken, and cultivated ginseng is like instant chicken. There is a big gap in taste and nutrition. If you eat sea cucumber purely for your stomach, it doesn't matter, but if you want to nourish it, you have to be wild. The price of sea cucumber is not cheap, so it's boring to spend money to buy the poor one. Especially when giving gifts, you must buy wild ginseng, because people who often eat it will eat differently at once.
3. Pale dry sea cucumber: There are two kinds of sea cucumbers in the market: instant sea cucumbers and dried sea cucumbers. According to the processing method, the dried sea cucumber is divided into dry sea cucumber, salted dry sea cucumber, salted sea cucumber and sugar dry sea cucumber (fake sea cucumber).
Their status is different. In a word, dried food is A, dried salt is B, and dried sugar is C (fake).
If you eat it yourself, you'd better buy light dry sea cucumber. The best processing method of sea cucumber is to let it dry slowly without adding any chemical components. The truly dried sea cucumber is small in size, and the ginseng is completely dry, so it is light in weight, easy to store, and absorbent when it is made, which can reach 15- 18 times, with high cost performance.
Salt dry sea cucumber: sea cucumber is boiled, salted, baked, dried, and naturally dried. Good quality salt dry sea cucumber can be distributed five times. Salt dry sea cucumber has obvious shortcomings, high salt content and weighing. During the processing, more than 90% of nutrients are lost, and the remaining nutrients are difficult to absorb. The foaming process is complicated, and some unscrupulous vendors will salt for many times to gain weight.
Salted sea cucumber: between light and dry salt. The ginseng is boiled in 30% salt water at high temperature, that is, salted and dehydrated. The sea cucumber made in this way is semi-wet, semi-dry, heavier, and has good nutrition. However, this method has a big loophole. Many domestic merchants take advantage of it to reduce the salt water concentration and temperature, so that the sea cucumber is dehydrated less, and its weight and body shape are all large, which makes it worse at once.
Ready-to-eat sea cucumber: It is a sea cucumber processed by a processing factory. Although it looks very convenient, some unscrupulous merchants will push the sea cucumber to the limit. When it looks big, it is actually water, which not only has a bad taste, but also has a very severe nutrient loss after repeated soaking. This kind of sea cucumber tastes soft and breaks when touched.
Sugar dry sea cucumber: Sea cucumbers are soaked in sugar in the same way as dried salt, except that the salt is changed into sugar, which is a fake sea cucumber that is not allowed to be sold by the state.
4. The age of sea cucumber is enough: the growth of sea cucumber is slow, and the nutritional value is directly proportional to the growth period within 5 years. If the sea cucumber is over 5 years old, its nutrition may not be good. The nutritional value here refers to the nutritional structure and nutritional components of sea cucumber. Wild ginseng grows slowly, and cultured ginseng grows fast when eating feed, and some of them lose their summer sleep. Wild ginseng that is 3 years old may not be as big as cultivated ginseng 1.2 years old, but its nutrition is not the same. Eating sea cucumbers at home generally chooses wild 3-5 years, with 60.70 heads (the head refers to the number of dried sea cucumbers in a catty, which means that there are 60.70 light dry sea cucumber in a catty).
So how to identify a good sea cucumber?
1. Don't be greedy and cheap when choosing sea cucumbers. Don't buy sea cucumbers that are too cheap (the price is less than 2,000 yuan per catty). 2. In addition to considering the price, we should also carefully check the surface of the sea cucumber. A good sea cucumber should have a clean and smooth surface, hard spines, uniform size, no sand in the belly, and a natural grayish brown color. You can tell that there is no additive on the surface directly. 3. If there is white salt flower on the surface of sea cucumber, the whole sea cucumber is white, which is salt, and some salt is so big that the surface is rough that it can't be bought. 4. The shape of sea cucumbers should be complete and correct, the head angle should be clear, and the thorns should be thick. If the thorns are thin, or the sea cucumbers with incomplete ginseng are often left after the vendors remove the corrupt parts. 5. Some sea cucumbers are black and bright. This kind is dry sea cucumber, which is a fake sea cucumber. Never buy it.
The natural color of a good sea cucumber is not all black, because fresh sea cucumber grows in different places in the sea, some in crevices, some in seaweed bushes, and some directly under the water, receiving different sunlight and eating different algae, so the color is different. Gently lick it, only a little salty taste of the faint seafood itself, too salty or too sugary, will not do.
How does dry sea cucumber soak her hair?
Or take my wild dried sea cucumber in Weihai as an example:
Soaking method of sea cucumber:
Raw materials: 4-6 sea cucumbers, proper amount of purified water, and prepare clean and oil-free containers (when sea cucumbers melt in oil, the containers and tools that contact with sea cucumbers should be cleaned during the whole process to ensure that there is no oil, salt and vinegar, and it is best not to have any) to ensure enough room for sea cucumbers to foam.
Production process:
Posted sea cucumber pictures:
Misunderstanding of sending sea cucumbers:
1. Many people think that the bigger the sea cucumber is, the better. This is by no means the case. If the hair is too big, it will make the sea cucumber taste soft and rotten, and there is no taste. The weight of good sea cucumber can be up to 15 times, and the best taste is 13 times. That is to say, a catty of light dried ginseng can emit 15 catty of wet sea cucumber at most.
2. Soaking sea cucumber in thermos bottle is an old-fashioned hair method, which is not recommended. Although it can be made overnight, the sea cucumber tastes bad and has poor elasticity, and it loses more nutrients after being soaked in high-temperature water for a long time, which deviates from the original intention of eating sea cucumber for nourishing. Good goods are still worth waiting for.
The value of sea cucumber:
Sea cucumber is one of the only seafood that gout patients can feast on, and the other is jellyfish.
Sea cucumber is as famous as ginseng, bird's nest and shark's fin, and is one of the eight treasures in the world. In Chinese tradition, sea cucumber is not only a precious food, but also a valuable medicinal material. There are many materials on the Internet about the medicinal nourishing value of sea cucumber, so you can search for them yourself, so I won't repeat them here. Modern medicine believes that sea cucumber is not as unique as traditionally said, but it is still a delicious food with rich nutrition.