How to identify whether a sea cucumber is adulterated or not?
Whether you buy a southern Fujian ginseng! Or Dalian farmed ginseng, or Dalian bottom-seeded ginseng! You have to judge whether this dried sea cucumber is adulterated or not? A lot of families want to buy wild bottom-seeded dried sea cucumber, the result is often to buy the southern Fujian sea cucumber or Dalian farmed cucumber! And it is also adulterated and spiked, there are too many such things! How to identify it? If you really want to make this issue clear, I guess I have to say on a long, long time, I just simply introduce a few identification methods!
1. Identification of soaking rate
First of all, there are two meanings of soaking rate
The first one is: "Dry sea cucumber has the best flavor when it is soaked up to 10 to 15 times". When soaking sea cucumber, you have to cook sea cucumber, in the process of cooking, you can adjust the length of cooking time to get different taste, such as some people like to eat firm and chewy taste, then you can cook for a shorter period of time, and some people like to have soft and soft taste can be appropriately lengthened the cooking time. The longer the cooking time, the softer the texture, the greater the soaking rate, and the good sea cucumber is resistant to cooking. In other words, the soaking rate of dried sea cucumber is directly related to the cooking time. Many sellers like to talk about the soaking rate and put it to the limit! Put a dry sea cucumber, then put a soaked sea cucumber, compare it, it looks like the soaking rate is very big, in fact, it is directly related to the cooking time, the longer the cooking time, the greater the soaking rate! There are a lot of false heads in this.
(The following picture: two soaked sea cucumbers) The same batch of pure light dried sea cucumbers processed in a growing sea area, are deep sea wild bottom seeding, the same size. The length of the cooking time is not the same, so the soaking rate is different!
The second layer of meaning of the soaking rate: dry sea cucumber has no adulteration and additives. What should be the soaking rate of pure dried sea cucumber?
1. The soaking rate of light-dried sea cucumber from Fujian in the south: between 13 and 14 times
2. The soaking rate of light-dried sea cucumber from Dalian farm: about 15 times
3. The soaking rate of light-dried sea cucumber from Dalian bottom-seeded: about 16 times
Perhaps the soaking rate of high-quality pure light-dried sea cucumber from Dalian is about 15 to 16 times, so does the soaking rate detect whether there is any adulteration or no material added to the dried sea cucumber? The answer is: not necessarily, why? If the sea cucumber has participated in the material between 10% and 25%, it is almost impossible to see the foaming rate, which involves the processing technology, that is to say, if you add a small amount of material plus the special processing technology is not visible in the foaming rate, this kind of addition? This kind of added micro material is not visible. This kind of dried sea cucumber can be soaked up to 12 or 13 times if it is soaked up normally, but the difference between 12 or 13 times and 15 or 16 times is not too big, and this kind of difference can hardly be seen by naked eyes, so you have to resort to electronic scales! In addition, if you soak the sea cucumber and cook it for a long enough time, this kind of dried sea cucumber with a small amount of ingredients can also be soaked up to 15 or 16 times. This kind of dried sea cucumber with a small amount of material is abound in the market.
But if you have added a lot of ingredients, you will be able to get a lot more out of the sea cucumber. The dried sea cucumbers with a lot of ingredients are very easy to be soaked up in terms of soaking rate. It is easy to tell from the soaking rate, which is not big and may be around seven or eight times or less.
The real Dalian wild bottom-seeded dried sea cucumber is actually not easy to soak well, there are a lot of need to pay attention to the place, because the meat is too thick and too firm, it is not easy to soak well! If you cook it for a short time, the meat will be very hard, and you can't soak it at all! If you cook it for a long time, the outside of the sea cucumber is cooked through, but the inside is not yet cooked! The main reason is that the meat of wild bottom-seeded sea cucumbers is too thick and solid, while Dalian captive sea cucumbers and southern sea cucumbers are easy to soak up after a little bit of cooking for 30 to 40 minutes.
I've hardly ever seen a customer soak a wild sea cucumber so well. Theoretically speaking, wild sea cucumbers can be soaked up to 15 or 16 times, but in fact, if it is a real wild sea cucumber processed with the best traditional technology, it is basically not easy to soak up to 10 times, why? Why? The growth cycle is long, the meat is too firm, the density is big, you want to cook through the wild sea cucumber that grows more than four or five years easily, soak well, how can it be, just like a bamboo that grows for five or six years, you want to cut it off with a knife, how can it be? Many people are obsessed with pursuing the soaking rate, and sellers go to the limit. Quietly the opposite is farmed sea cucumbers because the growth cycle is short, the density is small, the meat is not so tight, a little cooking is very easy to soak up.