Not everyone likes sea urchin, but people who do tend to love it like crazy, like a face with two big hearts for eyes. I know, it’s a gonad, and it can be dank and weird and slightly bitter, but when you eat a good piece, it’s like Poseidon has taken the day off to bake you a cool and freakishly delicious custard. It can smell like a beautiful flower is at bloom in the surf.
In New York, we’ve been eating the stuff fast and hard, high and low — melted into warm rice and strewn across fried rice, crowning so many heaps of spaghetti and bucatini and ramen noodles, lined up on split marrow bones and fried tofu skin, on petals of raw marbled beef, oozing from sandwiches, wrapped in tortillas, glazed in beef tallow, baked into chawanmushi, and pulverized with butter on expensive, diagonally-cut pieces of toast.
RISING POPULARITY
Photo: Reuters/ Philippe Wojazer
In New York’s West Village, I heard about an uni-dedicated tasting, built so diners wouldn’t have to go more than a half hour without a hit. Uni, Japanese for sea urchin, appeared in every course of this menu, from a sauce over white asparagus, to a gently smoked lump. This seemed a little excessive to me. And though I’ve loved sea urchin in many ways, by the time it showed up to dinner riding on a pizza, I was starting to feel less like a human and more like a walking uni receptacle. The thing I’d loved? I was sick of it.
If you are experiencing uni fatigue, a good person to call is Dr Stephen Watts, a Virginia-born scientist who teaches Aquatic and Marine Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “It’s such a neat animal!” He said, when I asked him why he first chose it as a subject. Watts fell for sea urchin as a diver in his 20s, back when he wasn’t really aware that people ate it, and went on to study uni for the next 30 years.
Urchins grow in water all over the world, including the US, but until recently their dinner-table appeal was largely international. Most American fishermen considered urchins kelp-guzzling garbage balls that went around destroying their lobster traps — swiping bait and vacuuming up seaweed with their nasty, highly developed teeth faces. For years, Maine’s urchins were sold only in very small quantities in New York and Boston.
But by the early ’90s, Japan was importing American urchin and paying well for it (their own supply couldn’t keep up with demand), encouraging divers and draggers to harvest and sell like never before. California’s previously under-appreciated red sea urchins were now being sold at auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. Maine’s annual catch jumped from less than a hundred metric tons to well over 12,000 tons in less than a decade.
“Over time, just like with tuna and cod, there were too many people who liked the seafood, and not enough of it to go around,” Watts says. He explained that the urchin population around Maine is at just 10 percent of what it was at its peak 20 years ago, and that thousands of jobs have vanished. Meanwhile, our appetites for the stuff have grown.
ECO-FRIENDLY URCHIN HARVESTING?
Talk to sea urchin experts like Watts right now, no matter where they are in the world, and it seems like they’re all trying to figure out the same thing: What makes an urchin grow big and sweet in the fastest, cheapest, and most ecologically friendly way?
The answer is still unclear, but Watts has been experimenting for years with a commercial feed that could support aquaculture on a large scale — farming urchin has been challenging, but would theoretically take pressure off wild populations. Though his method and feed haven’t been commercialized yet, Watts is optimistic. He says he’s found success culturing the Lytechinus variegatus, or the variegated sea urchin, which comes from Alabama’s warm coastline and matures in only a year.
But the species we eat in New York is not the variegated urchin. It’s usually the short-spined green sea urchin from New England or the dark, longer-spined red sea urchin from California, which take closer to four years to mature into what is essentially a spiky holding cell for delicious, radially symmetrical gonads. That’s the stuff we’re after — protein, mostly, with variations of fatty acids according to what the little buggers are eating. The bright, buttery, intact pieces are most valued at market, soaked very briefly in an astringent to clean them off and expel extra water, then packed by grade in a tray like so many yellow and orange tongues.
IRRESISTIBLE URCHIN
Watts’ idea of a good time does not involve moving through New York City consuming vast quantities of top grade sea urchin so much as growing it “egg to egg,” helping the animal survive on a planet that apparently seems hell bent on killing it off. That said, when the professor eats it — and yes he does eat it occasionally — he does so the very best way I can imagine: He scoops it right out of the shell.
“I used to think food could be good or bad,” Watts said, “but now I know it can be good or great.”
You may feel like a monster when you crack one open — after all, you’re feasting on an animal’s raw gonads right out of its body, with a spoon — but it’s fine way to eat it, astonishing and intense. Fresh uni tastes of earth and sea, but of something more complicated, too. It’s like the urchin compacts all the strange beauty and noise at the edges of our world into just one bite.
But after hanging up with Watts, I decided I could still use an uni break. And so could the uni. I made a pact to stop ordering it at restaurants for a while and pay closer attention to the less flashy, uni-less dishes. Then in the middle of a sushi omakase the other night, there it was on a lump of rice, seasoned with a little soy sauce, shrouded with crisp nori, pale and shining glamorously under the lights. It was way more than necessary, so much that the nori was unraveling. It had been a while. And it looked good. It looked really good. I figured there was nothing to do but eat quickly, before it came undone.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
RSS