If you don't like seeing animals, Sea Urchins in this case, getting turned inside out then please do not scroll down. This recipe involves harvesting fresh animal ingredients. Some images may be intense!
(Scroll down to see the blog entry.)
In Italian, a riccio is a hedgehog. Riccio de Mare, then, is a "sea hedgehog": a sea urchin. I had my first taste of urchin in a distinctive uni sushi. Uni is the reproductive organs of the female urchin. They look like diarrhea, have the consistency of a raw egg, and taste... interesting. The Italians and the Japanese in particular consider it a delicacy.
Urchin is an extremely time-sensitive product. Leaving it to sit for even a few minutes can make it taste sour with a strong flavour of the ocean. Absolutely fresh, urchin has a very sweet, light taste with many underlying complexities. I have come to think that it tastes a little bit of everything all at once. Yes, everything.
I finally got to taste fresh urchin at the Steveston Fish Market. Please click here to see the market.
Please read this JSVB entry to find out more about uni sushi: click here.
RICCI DE MARE RECIPE:
For $10, I purchased three fresh red urchins from the market. Each urchin produces 5 "roe", so that's 15 pieces altogether. That's quite a bit for my purposes. You can eat the roe raw or on sushi rice, although it tastes amazing on white toast with a squeeze of lemon juice.
Since I had a lot of roe, I decided to make it into pasta sauce and eat it Italian-style.
"That's a nice pet you've got there, Bishop!" ("Aliens" movie quote)
A female red sea urchin. You can keep them fresh for a while by covering them with a damp moist cloth. The underside is considerably less spiny than the top. We have to dig into the bottom to get at the stuff.
I used a sharp kitchen knife to puncture a hole in the shell near the underside beak. The shell is stiff, but it gives easily, so wield the knife carefully. You don't want to damage the roe. It's not difficult to cut a hole all the way around the beak.
I used tongs to remove the beak and discard it. Inside, the urchin is filled with liquid. Mostly it's semi-digested kelp. The smell is strong of the ocean and of seaweed. It's a good idea to pour out the liquid. Also, you will find an amount of brown goo. It looks a lot like chocolate pudding, and it helped me a lot to think of the stuff that way. Didn't smell chocolatey, though. 
It's easy enough to break apart the shell, either by twisting the knife or using your hands. The yellow masses are easy to spot as well. These are the roe. You can scoop them out with a spoon. Place them in a bowl with salted water. Rinse all of the brown stuff away, as it is bitter. 
The roe can now be eaten raw, if you prefer. I decided to make a simple sauce: melted butter, chopped garlic, a little tomato sauce, lemon, parsley, a pinch of saffron, and salt and pepper. Heat all of the ingedients in a pan, then stir in the urchin, which I cooked very lightly. I also started a pot of capellini, angel hair pasta. 
Here is the final presentation, with lemon and a summer salad. Shaved parmigiano -reggiano cheese tops the dish. Serve immediately! It's my experience that the more time the urchin roe spends out in the open, the sooner it will lose its sweetness.
The flavour of this dish is very Mediterranean. The lemon and tomato pair with the fresh oceanic tones of the urchin to produce an extremely complex palette of flavours, most of them tasting either very sunny or aquatic. Some bitterness comes through, giving each bite its own signature flavour. I paired this dish with a very dry Sicilian white wine, served chilled.
And that's it. Do I expect anybody to follow this recipe? There are already several local blogs where cooks prepare the sweet roe from Vancouver-area urchins. Now, JSVB joins that rare membership. It's an impressive recipe, but it's not one I want to make again for a while.
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