Baked Red Sea Urchin on Toast

eat it

I've been wanting to try out red sea urchin recipes and I've tried them raw and didn't really care for it. I've heard they are excellent in soup but I'm pretty lazy and most of the recipes are soups involving cream and milk or mixed with other ingredients I didn't happen to have at home and it looked like a big process. This past weekend I grabbed a couple of red urchins to experiment with. I broke them open on the boat and removed the roe and stored it in tupperware on ice.

I finally remembered to try them when I was pulling out some bass collars that I was grilling today. The recipe I adapted and tried is as follows:

2 large RED sea urchin roe
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tablespoon onions
1/4 tablespoon chopped garlic
salt and pepper to taste
splash of sriracha (red rooster sauce)
2 pieces of bread toasted (sourdough would probably work out great)

I mixed up all the ingredients and then put the roe in there to marinate until I was done grilling the fish. After the bread is toasted put the marinated roe on the toast and put into the oven at 400 degrees for 8 minutes. Remove and serve.

The roe has a creamy taste and the bread gives it the firmness I was looking for. Baking the roe took away some of the slimy characteristics and the spices really work well with the flavor, while it's not particularly pleasing to the eye, I scarfed down the two pieces of bread in record time. I'll definitely be trying this one again.

I got them on friday, I'm not sure if the roe will keep well frozen, a lot of times eggs rupture during the freezing process.

fat and red, about the size of a softball, here's a pix

Quote from Dan

Those needles look more robust than our urchins.

Yah we have a couple of varieties down here Dan. The local reds have pretty fat spines, not as fat as pencil urchins by a longshot. We also have longspined urchins that are probably close to what you folks have, although if I remember correctly yours have venomous spines? The real common smaller purple urchins down here look like minature reds, but from what I heard they taste like crap. There's a big commercial red sea urchin fishery in southern california, most of the stuff is shipped to asia.

sure Dan feel free to move this to the recipe section, I figured the california guys might not see it there and might try the red urchins.

Daniel I guess it's just habit, I always don't post the first post, I did that without thinking.