In Praise of Uni

I love sea urchin (uni in Japanese) but it's the kind of thing that when it's good, it's reeeally good but when it's bad, it's awful. Some folks don't like sea urchin and I bet that when they tried it wasn't fresh.

We had uni last night and it was bad but it got me thinking about an article on sea urchins that was in the May edition of the Wall Street Journal Magazine...

Hidden inside the well-armored exterior is the bright orange roe of the urchin, a creamy extravagance and one of the richest flavors to emerge from a shelled creature, which is why it’s in high demand. That lauded texture is only a touch firmer than pudding, and the deep sweetness comes from the creature’s diet of ocean vegetation (kelp and seaweed).

Although it’s called “roe,” since the orange blobs do resemble fish egg sacs, diners are actually feasting on the urchin’s five sex organs, the gonads—­one of the reasons this seafood is considered an aphrodisiac.

Twenty years ago, Maine’s urchins were the scourge of fisheries, their value unknown until sushi chef Atchan Tamaki, a Japanese native, arrived in Portland. “The lobstermen would fill oil drums with the urchins and burn them,” he says. But Tamaki hired them to bring him the spiky balls, and he started shipping them to sushi contacts in Japan. Now his market is 80 percent domestic, and urchins are one of Maine’s aquatic cash crops.

Have a look at the vid (you may have to start and stop the video twice to get it going)...