Have you ever cut open a sea urchin before? I have – twice. It’s a very messy, ugly thing. The green spines are a little prickley, but that’s not the worst of it. You take a pair of scissors and cut from the top halfway down the body vertically, then you cut horizontally all the way around the thing. Pull of the top half and scoop out the orange innards. Avoid the purple/black stuff. You want the gonads, not the intestines, after all. It’s slime-y and takes a bit of time to isolate the orange stuff, but when you put a few teaspoons of it on top of a little balls of sushi rice wrapped with a piece of nori, add a drop of soy sauce, and toss the whole thing in your mouth, it’s heaven.
So that’s what I did.
Then I took the pre-cooked sea snails (“bourgeots”. They take 50 minutes of boiling and apparently make the whole house smell like a fish plant, so I bought the pre-cooked ones from the stall at the Atwater Market that’s now closed for the season), and I ate those with a salad between pieces of uni sushi.
They’re a little chewier and a lot less slimey, and you pull them out of the snails in which they’re boiled when you’re done admiring them and decide it’s time to eat. I’ve actually never even regular snails, but this felt more Quebecois than French. More like me, I guess.
Uni at sushi restaurants is usually frozen and pre-packaged in individual nigiri-sized portions. It’s then thawed and placed on top of sushi rice. It often has an off-flavour from not being fresh. The fresh stuff is an acquired taste, yes, but it’s fresh. It’s a little sweet, and a little iron-y, but not in a chicken kidney and heart kind of way.
Oh, and these are sustainable. The packaging in sushi restaurants is a waste. I want to see more sushi restaurants stained blue and black with urchin innards. Well, maybe not actually SEE it, but definitely know that when urchin is in season, they’re getting out their scissors just like the rest of us…er…or maybe just like me.
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