In January 2022, I stood outside Toronto Metropolitan University’s Digital Media Zone building, where the university’s startups are incubated, in the bitter Canadian winter waiting for Chris Bryson, CEO of New School Foods, to let me into his lab. A bunch of other visitors met up with another startup and entered the building—I waited. By the time he got the one elevator to bring him down to unlock the main door, I could barely feel my fingers.
Chris showed me around his lab where there were little petri dishes of white powder sitting on his team’s desks. Turns out, some of it was flavouring and some of it was pure caffeine. He showed me his pink prototype block of plant-based protein and let me learn it apart to confirm that it had meat-like muscle fibres. It did. But at the time, it looked and felt a little more like a homogenous chunk of luncheon meat and less like salmon.
At the time, the sample didn’t have any flavouring yet, so it just smelled like lake water. The individual strands of fibre in what turned out to be a scaffold seaweed polysaccharide formed by directional freezing plates used for flash freezing freshly caught fish that shot ice crystals into the protein hunk like impaling it with thousands of mini stalagmites. The process is less energy intensive than traditional extruding like with plant-based sausages and hamburgers that don’t have any texture.
The flaky texture of salmon comes from layers of collagen (the white stuff) melting in the heat. New School Foods has replicated that with a plant-based process. It’s worth noting that another company in Israel, Plantish, also developed flaky plant-based whole-cut salmon, but they use 3D printing so the protein has to be fully cooked and can’t turn from translucent to opaque. The change in natural salmon’s opacity is caused by the denaturation of meat proteins at 63 C degrees and the plant-based salmon’s proteins denatures at a very close 65 C degrees.
The goal isn’t just to be as close to how wild-caught salmon feels, Chris also wants his product to be a nutritional replacement for fish by including nutrients like Omega-3 in the plant-based version. Due to the initial costs of development and production, he’s aiming for the upscale market when the vegetarian salmon launches in 2024 exclusively in a handful of restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.
How is it able to launch in two jurisdictions at once? Usually, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency would require more nutritional content in meat replacement products than the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so plant-based meat companies need to stock two types of product. However, plant-based seafood is classified differently to above-sea-level meat replacements so there’s no need to stock two products. Since there is a lack of plant-based seafood products on the market, there is also no Canadian regulation on the labeling of plant-based seafood, which means the seaweed-based salmon can still claim to be seafood.
Although it doesn’t launch until next year, I didn’t have to wait to try the salmon replacement. New School Foods hosted its first ever tasting event in June with a small group of ten journalists, investors, and scientists. It was the first time anyone outside of New School Foods had the opportunity to taste the plant-based salmon.
I sat to the left of Chris and learned that the salmon steak was flavoured with algae, something wild salmon eats. On the six-course private tasting menu was salmon ceviche in yuzu sauce, pan-seared salmon, roasted salmon and another pan-seared salmon over polenta.
The salmon ceviche cooked like real salmon when doused in acetic acid from lime juice, behaving just like real salmon. Chris told the table that the world’s first true plant-based ceviche was an unintended outcome, the team did not expect it to behave this way until they tried it out. The texture was on point, but it was a little firm with only very light hints of algae flavouring, a stronger taste would’ve served it well.
The pan-seared salmon was served naked with a dollop of what looked to be hollandaise sauce on the side. While other plant-based meat alternatives hide behind a layer of breading (think vegetarian schnitzels) or other heavy flavouring (think Italian-style vegetarian sausages), the algae-based salmon flavouring really came out when I turned it upside down. It was still a beta product, so while the salmon flaked, the imitation muscle fibres felt a little foamy. Turning it back right-side up, the faux salmon skin was crispy and I was told there is a better prototype coming soon.
The oven-baked roasted salmon was served with soy sauce marinade. It was a little drier and softer than other cooking methods leaving it with more structural integrity. Just like the pan-seared variant, a lot of the flavour was absorbed at the bottom where the sauce lived making the top taste a lot lighter.
(All photographs by New School Foods.)
