What is carrageenan?

Carrageenan is a gum derived from seaweed that helps processed food withstand the rigors of transportation and long waits in warehouses. Learn more about the role that carrageenan plays in food by checking out this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot com,
where smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, what
is kara gen in? If you've read the ingredient labels
on the things we eat each day, you can find

(00:22):
some pretty weird sounding stuff. That's because processed foods have
some amazing things that they have to do. For example,
a cookie might get made in Texas, trucked across the
country in the middle of the summer, sit in a
warehouse for a couple of weeks before it's sold, and
then ride home in the trunk of your car, and
when you open the package, you expect that cookie to

(00:45):
look perfect. That's not an easy thing to do. It
turns out things like liquids and cheese can be even
more problematic because their natural inclination is to separate foam, melt, precipitate,
and so on, especially after they bound down the road
for a thousand miles. That's why many foods contain chemicals
known as gums. Two gums that are pretty familiar are

(01:08):
gelatin and corn starch. If you look at processed food
you see all sorts of other gums, like karagene in
xanthem gums, cellulos gum, locust, bean gum, agar, and so on.
Food scientists the people who make process foods, use these
substances for four main reasons. First, they thicken things. Ice cream,

(01:29):
marshmallow fluff, pancake syrup and so on all benefit from thickening. Second,
they emulsify things. They help liquids to stay mixed together
without separating. Third, they change the texture of things. Generally,
a gum will make something thicker or chewier. Fourth, they
stabilize crystals. A gum might help prevent sugar or ice

(01:52):
from crystallizing. These are all handicapabilities when making food products
that have to look good for several months after or
trucking them across the country. The reason why a normal
cook usually doesn't need to use things like kara gene
in or xanthem gum is because the food and normal
cook makes gets eaten very quickly and it's not mistreated.

(02:14):
A cook can use less expensive things like gelatin, flour
or eggs because the time span between cooking and consumption
is so short. Karagin In, by the way, is a
seaweed product. This particular type of seaweed is common in
the Atlantic Ocean near Britain, Continental Europe, and North America.
You boil the seaweed to extract the karagin in. In

(02:37):
that sense, karagina is completely natural. It's not much different
from tomato paste and its creation. For more on this
and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works.
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