SMOKED UNI(Sea Urchin) I Was Not Expecting That | Coastal Foraging

What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of the life of the outdoor chef. I'm Taku and today we're going to look for some food on the coast and we're going to look for some college, so this would be the first time I'm going to look for sea

urchin

s, uh, this season. I guess I say this season, although sea

urchin

s can be harvested all year round at any time of the year, there are no limitations, but I say it is the season because usually in the spring, early summer, the yield within the urchin does not It's so good.

I don't expect the yield to be amazing, but I think we can get a good enough yield that I can eat some of them, right under me, there are a ton of sea urchins here, as you can see here, there are some good ones there . some good ones here look at that one that's pretty so the areas where you absolutely want to look for the sea urchin are these flat, rocky areas and that's where you're going to find the sea urchin is the rocky area. area during a negative tide again, today's negative tide is negative 1.0. I'll leave a link in the description below for the link graph I use.

It's a really good graph. It's very easy to read, so check it out and you can look at it all year round to know when the bright tides rise. Well, in California we mainly have two species of sea urchins, the purple urchin and the red urchin, so the red urchin simply watches the waves. Here are the red hedgehogs. is not the problem, it is the purple hedgehog that is the problem, in fact the red hedgehog is also suffering because of the purple hedgehog and if you want to compare differences, the red hedgehog is what you get if you order santa barbara uni or things like that in a restaurant, so if you order santa barbara uni or medicine uni or things like that, if you see loco uni in a restaurant that's what you get, you will get the red hedgehog and not the purple hedgehog, you would expect uni to be really cheap in a restaurant because there are so many We have so many on the coast like I said but it's because the red urchins are the ones that are marketed the most the purple urchins for some reason they haven't been marketed eh I don't know why I think it's mainly due to the fact that they are smaller, the purple urchins They are much smaller than red hedgehogs, so it is a lot more work to process purple hedgehogs.

I don't know, that might be part of the reason once purple hedgehogs become commercially available I think. that college will be a lot cheaper if the restaurants sell local purple urchins so we'll see what happens one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, okay, ten, so I'll buy ten for now , since they are not The performance is not that good yet. I'll be back later in the year and then harvest some more when the yield is much better, but we'll be cleaning them and smoking them today so that should. It's going to be very, very interesting, I've never

smoked

them before, but I heard something about them, so let's go back and cook these guys or smoke them, so today we're going to try something I've never done with sea urchins.

I'm going to try smoking it because I heard I was talking to a guy from New Zealand named Dion and he told me that he smokes sea urchins and says they're really good, so I'm really curious to see how it tastes and he. In fact, there is a television program that dives for kinah. Kinna is a sea urchin in New Zealand so he says the way he prepares them is he smokes them in their shell after cleaning it so I'm going to try it today and I'm going to smoke these sea urchins and see how they taste .

Really curious. I had never done it. I had never heard of it before talking to him. So yeah, okay, Dion, this one's for you. Let's try this and this is the purple hedgehog variety, as he said. before and this is the smallest variety we have in California. This is big for the purple hedgehog and about the size of my palm, that's all, but a red hedgehog can be this big. The way I start is by sticking my mouth out. This is the mouth. of the sea urchin and you can see those uh those little teeth there and it's actually pretty, they look pretty crazy from the inside once you pull them out, look that's the whole structure of the teeth, that's how they can dig into those rocks because they have teeth like that and there's a lot of liquid in there so I'm just going to throw it in and start breaking up the sides like this this one looks really cool actually the colors on this are great and we're going to do it like this because we're going to smoke it with shell , so summer is usually when I started harvesting sea urchins last year.

You know, the summer was not so good, I guess this The year before is not going to be so good either, the year before in the summer was really good, the university was full, but as the years go by it seems like it is less and less and that could be because. a um because the sea urchins are eating all the algae and they're not even leaving enough to eat on their own so I'm just scraping off the algae this is like the digestive algae or the algae that they're eating and some membrane too so that I'm just scraping it off and it will come off like this, once it gets to this stage I'll rinse it in salt water to collect some.

This is all salt water fresh from the ocean, I'm just going to rinse them, take a little patience to do this and this is one of the main reasons why sea urchins are so expensive in a restaurant because the time it takes to clean them . it comes out perfectly so you don't see any of these little bits of algae and shells and things like that, it's that job, so I'm going to say okay, they charge you less if it's not so bright yellow, uh, yeah. so there are uni grades uh they will grade it on color and they will also grade it on firmness so this would probably be a grade and it looks great uh it's firm and it's pretty much perfect.

This would be a rating, but we'll look at another one that will let you know that it probably won't be a rating, so all of these sea urchins are from the same place and the same area. Look at the variety in performance and color. Look this. kind of a pale yellow color, this one is nice and orange, just like this one, very beautiful. Now this one is a darker orange, which is also nice, but the yield is very small. Look at this one, it barely produces and is very brown. That's nice. dark but the performance is good this the performance yes too and the color is also ok I used to say that if you get a rooney from one place and if that one is good then all the uuni will be good from that place but this is evidence that no they will all be good or not all will be bad from one point it really depends on the sea urchin itself so I will consolidate some of these and maybe use only five shells on the grill I like them when they are this orange color very very pretty , this is how many of the uni look like the ones in Hokkaido, we're going to let them burn and I have these wood chips that were soaked in salt water and we're going to put them on top and that should create a nice smoke and I'm going to cover everything with foil, just hot coals, so now I'm going to throw my soaked wood chips right there. and that should create a nice smoke.

Turn on the grill and I'm going to put the sea urchin on this side, a little bit away from the heat, and I know Dion told me that he adds water, a little bit of salt water inside the shell. I think it's so it doesn't dry out, so there you go, we have it nice and smoky. I'm going to cover it. It would be much more ideal if it had a good cover, but I have to make do with what I have there. See, I want all the smoke to come out on this side and that means it's having good circulation, all this smoke right there, so that's where all the uuni is, so it should be fine.

I think I'll leave it for about 30 minutes. 40 minutes something like that, I think it will work, it's been a little over half an hour and I replaced the wood chips when the smoke died down so it kept smoking so now let's check them out, see how they turned out. wait, wait, all the water evaporated may have gotten too hot, well, that should be really smoky, so this one got a little powerful, dried out a little, actually, you know, let me try just one without the bread, here Come on, wait. Wow, that flavor that reminds me of

smoked

salmon and the aftertaste you get, that classic kind of unique flavor, oh tr, jocelyn, try that, try, I think you might like this, you can also have it with the bread, here, give it to me , hmm, you.

You're right, first of all, very salmon right, you get that smoked salmon flavour, that's good, I like it, there you go, oh this is going to be so good on toast, oh actually it's going to be wow, Wow. I literally didn't expect this I didn't expect to taste like this that's so good wow and I think about 30 minutes was perfect hmm wow this is actually very good Dion my man that's amazing incredibly smoky but like that smoked smoked salmon and the the uuni still has that creaminess , it's not cooked, it's just smoked and it still feels nice and melty and then the aftertaste gets that delicious uni sweetness that is amazing.

I would recommend it for sure, if I still worked at the restaurant, man. I would start doing this. I started doing this and serving this to customers because, oh my god, I smoked uni. You can believe that? Can you believe it's that good? In fact, I like it better this way than just raw. I didn't expect him to do it. If it were this good, I would definitely make it again and try to create a dish from it. Wow, wow, I can't express how surprised I am. I'm pretty excited about this one. I'm pretty excited about how it turned out.

Thanks everyone for watching as always if you learned something press that thumbs up if you liked what I did press that thumbs up do it anyway press that thumbs up either way uh guys thanks for watching see you next time foreign peace