To get right to the meat of the article:
New School Foods’ process starts by creating a biopolymer gel. This homogeneous hydrogel is placed in contact with a freezing surface and the gel is directionally frozen, resulting in the formation of thousands of directionally aligned, microscopic ice crystals traveling away from the freezing source.
Once the gel is fully frozen, the ice is removed, leaving behind empty channels. These channels act as a scaffold; the channels are filled with proteins and other ingredients (color, flavors, fats) to form the muscle fibers.
This was pretty close to my guess from looking at the pic of the the raw product. It looked like if you’d flatten out a swirled soft serve ice cream cone. The lattice structure should create a nice flakey texture.
Flavor is always the hard part, but I’m not looking for 1:1 replacement there. Actual recipes can always help shape the flavor to your palette. Salmon is pretty distinct, so maybe a generic white fish may work better.
There are always negative comments about it being processed food, but I still think the ecological benefits will outweigh that. Adapting our cooking can offset the near term nutritional issues. Use less meat, real or synthetic. We might not be able to keep our current habits if we want things to improve. We can start compromising now, or sacrifice later. That’s my feeling about it at least.
I haven’t had the chance to try fake fish yet.
Maybe they should go for something a little more exotic, say ostrich or crocodile. Close to flavors people know, but they’d go into with a more open mind. Maybe too novel though to be a lasting success though. I’ll leave that to the marketing people.