Cooking Urchin and Abalone

(waves rippling) - Gearing up.

Searching for urchin.

- Searching for urchin.

(water splashing) - Okay.

Have fun down there.

(gentle bright music) - Imagine a rock that's this big that looks like one urchin.

You can't see any rock whatsoever.

It's just this very spiky, massive, massive mound.

- The theory on it is, hopefully, we can start collecting enough purples that it thins back the population, enough to allow the kelp to start growing again.

- [Shailene] By the end of them collecting, you see there's still lots of urchins, but now there's at least some pieces of the rock that is visible.

- As you can see, we're not like putting a big, huge dent in the population- - Yeah.

At all.

- But they need to be thinned down.

- Yeah.

There's just too many of 'em.

- Too many of 'em.

They're eating too much kelp.

They're competing with other organisms on the bottom for space and food.

Individually, they don't outcompete other organisms, but in numbers, they do.

- Yeah.

- So, we'll just crack a couple open.

And they are all mostly empty.

You can see there's barely any roe.

- Cracking open the urchin, it's kind of just a bowl of guts, but even the guts themselves are quite small.

And if there's any uni at all, it's no bigger than, like, a sliver of your pinky.

- They're alive and well.

They can survive like this for a few years.

- They're able to take a little bit of food and then survive a really long time off of that food and kind of put everything on hold until their next ability to feed comes in.

And that's why they call them zombie urchins.

(birds tweeting) (bright music) - We've become, you know, really familiar with feeding seaweeds to abalone.

That's also what urchins eat.

And if we just bring those in, and feed them kelp the same way that we're doing with our abalone, we should be able to develop that row and make them into a premium seafood product really, really quickly.

And, spoiler alert, turns out it works really well.

- What Doug is doing is basically coming up with a really, really good product that can benefit a lot of restaurants and a lot of the industry around here.

- How long have you been cooking with, like, these types of foods?

- Since I met Doug, last year.

- Wow.

I cook the abalone on the grill just to kind of loosen them up and take 'em off the shell.

- You do 'em shell side down like that and they kind of, they kind of poach in their own shell.

Right?

So they're, it's on really high heat, but they're kind of like, the shell's kind of protecting 'em a little bit and they're not gonna burn.

- Yeah.

This looks amazing.

You can put butter on anything.

Wow, I am so excited.

- So, the sauce is just a good butter with just fresh garlic, a black bean paste in a little marin.

You're just letting the product shine.

It's just very simply prepared.

And then, we just squeezed over the lime on the abalone.

- Are you putting it in there to clean it?

- Yeah.

So, Doug got me some sea water, so I always like to either use something natural, like a seaweed or something.

This is the best way to eat them.

Would you like to try one?

- Yeah.

Mm.

They're so good.

Yeah.

(bright music continues) - Should we dive in?

- Go for it.

- Alright, you just grab a piece and are you grabbing a whole one?

- Just grab a whole shell.

- It's all yours.

- I like that.

- Oh my God.

- There's this idea that abalone has to have this, like, enormously elaborate, you know, prep involved with it, preparation, and it doesn't.

People have been grabbing abalone and like putting him on the fire on the beach.

That's pretty much the original way.

- Yeah.

- Grab abalone, put over a beach bonfire.

Eat.

- And you were saying that this, they have every essential amino acid?

- It's one of the cleanest burning meats that you can eat.

It's like one of the most balanced proteins that there is.

Rhoda, thanks.

This is delicious.

- This is insane.

- Nice little accompaniment.

- [Rhoda] So, this is the farmed purple urchin with some edible seaweed.

There you go.

- Mmm, so good.

- [Doug] It's good with the kelp.

- [Rhoda] Greatest thing about the flavors like the urchin is, like, it evolves in your mouth, as you can tell.

- Yeah, it definitely gets sweeter every time.

- Yeah, it does get sweeter.

Sweeter then saltier, then umami, and then sweet again, maybe.

- It was so good.

- That was an eggy delight.

- Eggy delight.

(group laughing) Do you always eat it raw?

Do people ever prepare it any other way?

- Absolutely.

(bright music) - You know, you can relate to the tostada, and so, we decided to put blue corn tortilla with spot prawns, and then, you pair that with the uni.

You got, kind of, a winner.

I love making rice.

Why not make, kind of, like a uni rice in the style of a paella?

And we made butter out of uni and it still, kind of, like, lends its creamy character to the dish and then just top it with some fresh uni.

It just takes it to another level.

I've never had someone try uni for the first time and not like it, and it's just, I think it's delicious.

- After tasting the uni that came outta that farm today and those zombie urchins, I think it's a really smart model and I hope that more people actually, kind of, look into replicating it.

There's no reason why more people shouldn't have access to urchins.

Wow.

What a treat.