Unlike the last few posts, this one was quite recent. Last weekend, in fact. The San Francisco Fish Company, in the Ferry Building, had some hideous, delicious, fresh, beautiful, terrible, wonderful, live sea urchins.

I was going to buy one more or less regardless of cost, but it ended up being only $5! And that's a good thing because Jeanette doesn't like sea urchin, so me spending a lot on sea urchin would not have been particularly cool. She tolerates my ridiculous kitchen/food purchases because most of them result in deliciousness for her. But when I buy one of the few things she hates (sea urchin, olives, beer, mayonnaise, mustard, ???), she's never particularly excited. Luckily none of those things is very expensive! If I start buying some pricey, esoteric ingredient, she won't be very happy.

Anyway, I paid my $5 and then kept the wriggling beast on ice in the refrigerator until I started working on dinner. The fishmonger claimed it would live another 2 or 3 days. Then he said they lived about 4 days out of water. Using my powers of deduction and mathematical reasoning, I computed that the urchins had therefore been caught 1-2 days prior to my purchase. That's pretty darn fresh. So maybe my little pinface would have lasted another couple days, but I wasn't going to chance it. Life is too short not to eat things while they're still alive.

And I fucking loved this dish. Jeanette, predictably, didn't like it. I think the best she could say was that it wasn't the most offensive sea urchin dish she's tried. Anyway, this was delicious, and I want to keep getting delicious uni and eating it raw and otherwise. Jeanette can deal with it.

This dish consisted of the following components:

• Raw uni - Turn the urchin over so it's hideous mouth is facing upwards. Then stick some scissors into its mouth and cut outward toward the outside of the circle. Then cut around the outside of the circle, being careful not to dig too deep with the scissors, and remove the top. Then dig out the orange gonad "tongues," and remove them to salted ice water. Clean them and reserve in ice water until a few minutes before serving. Then remove to paper towels and dry.
• Sea urchin sabayon - After you've removed the orange tongues, strain all the juices from inside the urchin into a sauce pot. Add two egg yolks, 1/2 cup heavy cream, 3 of the urchin tongues (I would have preferred to have used another couple, but I only brought home one urchin), and some salt, and whisk vigorously over medium heat until the temperature reaches 180F and the sabayon has thickened and lightened. I also added a bit of water to adjust it to the consistency I wanted. If you were doing this in bulk, you could use the scraps from the broken urchin pieces instead of the actual delicious little gonads, but I had to use the actual stuff. The flavor will be subtle, but it will go very well with the creamy, raw uni. As I said, more uni flavor in this would be better.
• Black trumpet mushrooms - Clean, then barely sautee.
• Charred scallions - Scallion sections, from the bottom half of the scallion, 1 1/2 inches each, thoroughly charred on the outside with a blowtorch
• Buddha's hand zest - I used this because I happened to get buddha's hand from the market. I had initially planned on using grated ginger, but in retrospect, the buddha's hand helped brighten the dish. Lemon would have been fine, though.
• Jalapeno - De-seed and remove fins, then julienne.

I spooned some of the warm, frothed sabayon on a plate, then arranged the black trumpets, charred scallion, and jalapeno on top. Then I placed the raw uni on top and served. I also cleaned out the urchin innards and poured boiling water in several times, then dried it out and poured more of the sabayon into the shell. It makes for quite a dramatic serving piece!

Posted by Barzelay on 2008/12/26 @ 2:15 | Comments (2) | Seafood

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