Sea Urchin recipes

Try it Korean sashimi style.  Snip the bottom open, remove the lantern.  If it seem as though there's a lot of sand in there, you may want to rinse the urchin out.

Put the urchin in a bowl with the opening up.  Add a little ponzu, then a handful of sushi rice -- preferably just the slightest bit warm. 

Serve.

The diners use a small spoon to mix the rice with the roe themselves, then eat with the same spoon.  

Chase with cucumber/soju cocktail.

BDL

Other than eating it more or less plain, you can try this, which is a bit of a pain but absolutely delicious.

Get a nice thick fillet of sea bass, which should be in season now. Get it with skin on -- this matters. (I think the Pacific bass is what the Japanese call suzuki; in the East we'd use stripers.) Salt it, let rest 30 minutes, then rinse gently and pat very dry. With a very sharp, thin knife, slice the meat thinly without passing through the skin, so it's like little leaves of flesh attached to the skin. Skewer it crosswise and then at an angle with a few thin bamboo or metal skewers so it'll hold together. Baste the skin with very hot oil two or three times, then the flesh side once. Broil on the skin side for 2 minutes to make a very crunchy brown skin. Remove the skewers. Take as much sea urchin as you can and pack it on and between the leaves of the flesh, so it's pretty much totally coated. Broil it on the flesh side until the sea urchin is sizzling and just turning golden. Serve immediately with wedges of citrus, ideally sudachi lime but you could use Key limes or something else very sour and floral that happens to be around.

Then there's always the French approach: rinse it gently if need be, spread it on baguette, sprinkle with fleur de sel if you've rinsed it, and eat at once with a little lemon to bring out the full flavor.

Another very popular option is to mail the live urchins to me in a super-fast overnight thing with some dry ice to keep them alive. I'll make sure they get a good home.

Actually I'm suggesting you use California urchin, but prepare and eat it Korean style.

Yes, you do have to get rid of the "viscera," aka Aristotles's lantern.  It should come out easily.  You cut a circle around the bottom of the animal so you can remove the top of the shell (really the bottom of the urchin as I said), so you can remove that part of the shell and the lantern all in one piece -- cleaning and at the same time opening the shell, so it serves as a bowl.  All you want is the roe -- ideally still attached to the shell walls. 

As an alternative, you may reduce some cream with a clove studded piece of onion (a souboise), strain it, add some urchin puree.  Use it sauce any simply poached or grilled fish or seafood. 

Similarly, you may mash it into mayonnaise and use to dress a lobster, shrimp, crab, or combination salad.

Another Korean style sushi dish (the Korean name escapes me, but sometimes called chiriashi-ko in Japanese) which employs uni is made by putting a handful of sushi rice in a bowl, and covering it with various types of roe -- including at least uni, ikura and tobiko and dressing it (again) with ponz.  What makes it Korean is the style in which it is eaten.  That is, mix it up into the sort of mosh little kids make with their oatmeal.  

The differences between Japanese and Korean style sushi isn't so much in the fish, rice, their preparation or presentation.  Rather it's in the accompaniments and in the eating.  I feel it's fair to say that where Japanese sushi is a church, Korean sush is a party.  

BDL

BDL

what we do with sea urchin is just dip it with vinegar with ginger and garlic.. yummy