page_title: Bakso
section_title: Health issue
hierarchical_section_title: Bakso / Health issue
caption_attribution_description: English: Various bak so in a shop on Jakarta
context_page_description: Bakso or baso is an Indonesian meatball, or a meat paste made from beef surimi. Its texture is similar to the Chinese beef ball, fish ball, or pork ball. The word bakso may refer to a single meatball or the complete dish of meatball soup. Mie bakso refers to bakso served with yellow noodles and rice vermicelli, while bakso kuah refers to bakso soup served without noodles.
  Bakso can be found all across Indonesia, from street vendors to high-class restaurants. Along with soto, satay, and siomay, bakso is one of the most popular street foods in Indonesia. Today, various types of ready-to-cook bakso are also available as frozen foods sold in supermarkets in Indonesia.
context_section_description: In the past, borax and formalin is often added into beef surimi mixture in order to preserve the produced bakso, also to make bakso more chewy (from borax induced myosin cross-linking) with less usage of meat. As a result, bakso is often listed by Indonesian Food and Drug Administration as an unhealthy foodstuff. The country's Directorate of Consumer Protection warns of the risk of liver cancer caused by high consumption over a period of 5–10 years. The government issued Sodium tripolyphosphate as borax substitute. Today's bakso, frozen bakso being sold at supermarkets and traditional markets in Indonesia are borax free.
caption: Bunch of pre-cooked bakso offered in supermarket refrigerator.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "102", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "286", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "14605", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1280", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "960", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}