(relaxing music)
- All right,
so we're gonna open one of these purple urchin here.
We just start by trimming right around the mouth.
Then we're just gonna crack it.
The customary thing to do when you open one
of these is just to drink the juice. Kinda do a shot.
(slurping)
Amazing.
It's just like total umami blast, that flavor
'cause it's just all kelp and seawater.
So here we are in Port Orford in Nellies Cove.
Today we're gonna be taking a look
at some purple sea urchin.
In the last few years purple sea urchin
have become a really complex issue here
on the coast in California and Oregon.
Not only ecological but also environmental
and an economical issue.
Over the past few years,
surveys have shown a 10,000% increase
in the amount of sea urchin from five years ago.
The reason that we're here even today is to try to put a lot
of emphasis and surrounding awareness around this species
that you can literally buy a shellfish tag
in Oregon and just come down here
and harvest a certain amount of them.
You don't even have to have a wetsuit to do this.
You could just have waders.
Probably gloves too.
I would recommend that just because even these dive gloves,
they just get shredded to pieces pretty quick
by the urchin spines.
You know, we're not trying to keep this a secret.
The goal is to really try to get a market going for them.
This reef is the one that goes all the way down
to California at Fort Bragg.
I mean, this is a very similar terrain
and a habitat for them all the way down.
The commercial laws only allow them to harvest
at a certain distance away from the shore
so that the ones that are are here
in this marine area aren't just wiped out by them.
So you can see the,
when the tide's coming in,
the water gets really murky.
We'll probably have a minute here
where we'll kind of lose visibility.
When it really starts to come in
then we'll really get back to it.
Probably the population and the size
of these have tripled since the last time we were here.
So this is a pretty decent size one.
They're pretty much all over in these areas.
But they go from anywhere from the size
of a little bit smaller than a golf ball
to something about the size of a baseball.
(whimsical music)
So they mainly eat kelp and other types of seaweed,
specifically the bullwhip kelp,
you'll see them.
Those are growing like trees from the bottom.
It's what makes up a kelp forest.
If the sea urchin runs out of a food source,
basically they will just slowly start
to wither away inside until there's nothing left,
and then they'll just essentially clam up
and just sit there until something comes along.
They can live for several years without consuming anything.
So that's what makes them really dangerous.
They don't just die when there's nothing left.
They'll just wait there.
The areas where they're allowed
to harvest them commercially,
which is a little bit further off shore,
those are where the urchin barrens are.
What happens when there's a barren,
there's no kelp for them to eat
and when they have no kelp,
they have no roe.
So they would be completely empty when you open them up.
One of the things that's being done
by several really great people
is that they're harvesting large amounts
of those empty urchins, the purples,
putting them into live tanks,
and then feeding them farmed seaweed to fatten them.
So their urchin flavor varies greatly based
on what they're eating.
What we've noticed about the farmed ones
is that they're actually far superior,
so much more consistently full,
and the flavor of them,
they can control it based on what they're feeding it.
So you're never gonna have a situation
where you open one of these
and it was eating something weird,
maybe something dead that had fallen in there,
or just a weird algae that makes it bitter.
So I mean if they're eating kelp,
you can have a pretty consistently delicious sea urchin.
We're pickin' them out here in the cove
where there's plenty of seaweed,
so there are tongues in these.
It's not the same as the issue out on the reef.
(relaxing music)
Both varieties of sea urchin here.
The bottom one is the giant red sea urchin.
Then we have another red that's a little bit more pale.
You can see it has a lot longer spines.
And then two purple sea urchin` on top here.
Pretty large one and then a more average sized one.
So these are both of the type of urchin
that are native to this reef here.
So the red sea urchin,
in my opinion,
it's gonna be a lot more oystery,
a lot more briny,
a lot more sea flavor.
And then the purple specifically is a lot creamier,
a lot sweeter.
It has almost a citrus note to it.
We're just gonna shuck these.
So first we have a nice clean damp towel
and I like to use a pair of scissors instead
of using an urchin cracker
that can sometimes break the tongues.
We're gonna start here,
just in the mouth here in the center.
So as you can see,
there's a little bit of digestive kelp in here,
these beads,
and then these are the tongues or the gonads,
which are the part
that we're gonna be harvesting for the dish.
Not all the tongues can,
are fully intact or are easy to get out.
Some of them are a little bit softer.
Not of them are totally perfect.
But here, y'know,
we do have some inconsistencies.
We prefer to eat it raw,
but the majority of sea urchin
that's sold in the market is frozen
and that's because these ones that get broken,
they're not good for putting in trays.
But they're beautiful for making it into a butter
or for making it to a pasta sauce.
So now that we have everything shucked
into this first bowl of seawater,
we're gonna get the tongues clean.
Just important that you use seawater for this.
The salt is gonna help keep them firm
and keep them seasoned.
You don't wanna wash any of that natural like,
umami ocean flavor off of them by using fresh water.
So the reason for doing two washes is because there is a lot
of stuff that gets stuck to them. You get a nice clean on it
so that by the time we take it out
and put it on our towel here to dry,
it's completely perfectly clean.
One thing you never wanna do with this
is leave this soaking in the water for too long.
Even though it is seawater,
has the brine,
not gonna dilute the flavor,
it will break down really quickly
if just left alone in the solution,
which means that you're gonna lose all
that wonderful texture that we worked so hard to maintain.
So let's go ahead and get these outta here pretty quickly.
(relaxing music)
All of our broken tongues are going off to the side here
and I'll show you how we still utilize all of them.
(relaxing music)
We're gonna start here.
We have our piece of sourdough boule
that has just been grilled with a little bit
of olive oil on it over some open flame.
We're gonna take our broken tongues here
and we're gonna kina scatter 'em out.
I just like to mash these into the bread
with the back of the spoon,
just to kinda give us a base layer here.
Then we're gonna go take our beautiful tongues,
kind of one by one,
and start to layer 'em on here.
We're just gonna pile this high.
Just like that.
The way that we're gonna finish this,
really simple,
we're gonna take some of this.
This is called moshio.
It's a type of salt that we make in the restaurant.
It's seawater that's been reduced with all kinds
of kelp-infused into the water as it's reducing.
Then the last part that we're gonna finish
is with the sauce.
This is a sauce made of egg yolk.
So it's egg yolks that are thickened
with a little bit of tamari from miso
that we make at the restaurant.
You can just be as generous as you want with this.
And then we're just gonna finish it
with some of these sea grapes that the sea urchin feeds on.
(whimsical music)
- [Off-camera] How is it?
- F****** good.
Really good with the bread.
You can try it, man.
The sea urchin population has exploded.
A lot of the theories surrounding the reason why
that happens have to do with ocean temperatures rising
and a lack of natural predators.
I think in turn a certain amount of human intervention
in order to remove them and find a way
to use them is necessary.