Sea urchin increasingly found on Sonoma County restaurant menus

A sea urchin is a study in contradictions: tenacious and spiky on the outside, vulnerable and velvety on the inside. With a beauty both fragile and fierce, it can burrow for decades into rock, but die from the tiniest crack in its brittle shell.

As an ingredient, sea urchin is a flavor bomb that’s sweet and briny, custardy and ambrosial, summoning the taste of both earth and sea in every bite. The name “urchin” comes from the medieval name for “hedgehog.”

If you’re like many people, one glance at a jiggly orange blob of sea urchin roe, or uni, might be enough to prompt a hasty “no thanks.” But fresh, local sea urchin, abundant in the ocean of the North Coast, has captured the fancy of coastal chefs and is increasingly finding its way onto menus. Local uni is an umami delicacy on par with caviar — with an environmental backstory people can feel good about.

Jason Azevedo, chef de cuisine at the Little River Inn on the Mendocino Coast, remembers his first taste of uni in his 20s.

“It was at a sushi restaurant, and I got the big combo platter to try anything,” he recalled. “It reminded me of foie gras in the rich sweetness, and then that melty, briny flavor — I fell in love with it.”

He started adding the tender lobes to his tapas dishes and garnishing paella with it. He pureed it to make a savory flan: a silken uni custard, with a layer of miso in place of the caramel base.

These days, Azevedo uses the luxurious umami flavor of uni to elevate a pasta dish, with black squid ink pasta draped in a golden cream sauce. He forages for urchin in the coves below the inn when he gets the chance or, he adds with a smile, “When I’m having a really bad fishing day.”

Urchins along the West Coast come in two main varieties for eating: the red urchin and the purple. Red urchin has long been favored by chefs because of year-round availability and bigger “tongues” — the five spears of roe that form the edible part of the sea urchin. These lobes can be a couple of inches long and an inch or more wide, with a color ranging from deep gold to vibrant orange.

The smaller, scrappier, and more populous purple urchin has snagged the spotlight in recent years as a tasty way for humans to literally take a bite out of an ecological disaster that began a decade ago, when warming seas triggered an alarmingly large algal bloom, followed by a disease called “sea star wasting syndrome” that killed an estimated 80% of the sea stars that feed on urchins and normally keep the populations in check.

Like abalone, sea urchins feed on bull kelp that grows in undersea forests supporting a range of sea life. However, in 2014-2016, warmer sea waters that scientists nicknamed the “Pacific warm blob” inhibited regrowth of that forest. As luck would have it, purple urchins can survive on nothing but rock and algae for decades, earning them the nickname “zombie urchins.”

Within a few years of the purple urchins’ population explosion, not only were abalone starving to death, but many of the West Coast’s once-lush underwater bull kelp forests had been reduced to “urchin barrens” — spiky carpets of purple urchins covering miles of ocean floor.

Restoring the balance

On a drizzly Saturday morning at Caspar’s Cove in Fort Bragg, Josh Russo has already been in and out of the ocean to cull as many purple urchins as he could find in a targeted section of the cove.

“It’s perfect out there,” he said of the day’s dive, noting some promising areas of regrowing bull kelp, visible from shore as dark floating orbs. As the lead organizer for the North Bay chapter of the Watermen’s Alliance, Russo rallies groups of diving volunteers to harvest overpopulated purple urchins from selected areas, giving the bull kelp a chance to thrive again.

Russo serves on the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marine Protected Areas group, where he successfully lobbied for bigger limits on individual harvests of purple urchin — up to 40 gallons per person — and more aggressive culling methods at Caspar’s Cove.

Russo showed a bag of urchins he collected on the morning’s dive, their spikes moving slightly. They were headed for the kitchen at Little River Inn.

“We also have to remember the purple urchin are not an invasive species; they’re a native species,” he said. “They’re not the enemy; they’re just overpopulated right now. Our effort is to restore the balance.”

Cally Dym, fifth-generation owner of the Little River Inn and restaurant, has been foraging from the beach her family once owned, now known as Van Damme State Park, as long as she can remember. At one time, abalone was the prize, part of a thriving ecosystem that brought thousands of tourists to the Mendocino Coast each year to dive and dine.

While Dym, like others on the North Coast, longs for the day when the abalone fishing returns (Fish and Wildlife has set 2026 as the date for releasing its plans for the fishery), uni has been an interesting side trip.

While she calls urchin an “acquired taste,” it’s one her husband Marc likes, and she’ll grab him some when she’s out “rock-picking” the tidepools at a very low tide.

Foraging for urchin

Down Highway 1 from Little River, in the town of Elk, the back dining terrace of Harbor House overlooks a sunny cove, a view that tempts Executive Chef Matthew Kammerer out of the kitchen.

“Honestly, I like any excuse to get outside,” the Michelin-starred chef said, and fetching purple urchin at a low tide is as good a reason as any. “This is a rare place,” he said. “That’s why I chose it. It still feels raw and untouched.”

“A lot of our guests have their first uni experience here,” he said. “In a restaurant like this, it’s about language and the mindset you put guests in before they eat something. So, if you’re excited about it, they’re excited about it.”

Kammerer’s urchin-based creations include a savory Japanese-style uni custard or chawan-mushi and a dish of warm celery root and cool uni that has guests raving. The backstory of the sea urchin takes some time to explain at the table, but Kammerer believes it’s worth it.

“We see it as our job to get people asking more questions about where their food comes from and about the need to go local to sustain economies and the natural world,” he said.

Depending on the season, he sometimes uses red urchin purchased from local fishermen, but he admits the purples are more desirable from a local and sustainability standpoint.

“You can find like 50 in five minutes,” he said of gathering the plentiful purples from tidepools in the cove below the restaurant. The meatier ones, he said, will be those feeding near the seaweed.

Both chefs Kammerer and Azevedo said the key to good uni is freshness and proper handling. Cleaning an urchin is a matter of cutting a circle around the bony plates on the bottom of the urchin that form its mouth (kitchen shears work nicely). Once the mouth is removed, the urchin can be gently rinsed out with sea water. This will reveal the five points of roe that sit like the petals of a flower on the inside of the urchin’s shell.

In Europe and Japan urchin is often served this way, on the half shell, so diners can scoop it out with a spoon. Live, whole urchin can keep in the refrigerator in sea water for 24 hours, but not much longer. Cleaned and in the half-shell, it can keep for a couple of days on ice, resting on layers of paper towels.

If you forage at a minus tide, or attend one of the Watermen’s Alliance urchin dives, the chefs said to expect that only 5-10% of your purple urchins will yield a decent amount of the sought-after roe, so take more urchin than you need, keep them in seawater and be prepared to smash the ones you don’t use and put them in your compost bin. You also can order urchin online from purveyors or a favorite fishmonger or market.

Last year, cooler summer temperatures and windier days drew an upwelling of kelp-friendly cold water into the urchin-dotted bays, with promising stands of bull kelp visible right off shore.

Dym, who said she goes to a place she calls “my beach” whenever she can, saw a good amount of young abalone among the colorful tidepool life on a recent excursion. She shared a photo of a bright and perfectly formed young sea star, a key urchin predator, that she found on the rocks at low ride.

“We still have a long way to go,” she said of the once-vibrant fishery with an uncertain future. “But seeing this, it made my day.”