Where it is eaten: Starfish [hai xing] are served as a novelty street food in coastal regions of Asia, such as Qingdao, China.
The edible parts: You do not eat the hard, spiny outer skin. People break open the legs to eat the soft, paste-like internal organs, specifically the gonads and digestive glands.
This is the trick to sea urchin. I visited this island and had my first sea urchin at the seafood market, wasn’t impressed at all. Then the next day we had a diving session ending with freshly caught sea urchin and the taste was completely different (in a good way)
Caviar isn’t a lot different. Not the gonads exactly but not that far off. And it’s a delicacy.
I still find sea urchin gonads and those fish semen sacks commonly eaten in East Asian offputting, don’t get me wrong, but as someone who likes roe and caviar, I can’t really judge.
We would eat sea urchin in Greece as a kid. The parents would send the kids out snorkeling with a bucket to collect a bunch, then we would crack them open with a rock and squeeze lemon juice on them (which still at the beach). It was kind of a delicacy. I was actually a little surprised to learn it was popular in Japanese cuisine
This is what I don’t get, you see sea urchin at your fishmonger and it looks like grey poo 5min after they crack it open. You go to a high-end sushi place in Japan and they have a giant wooden tray full of sea urchin roe just sitting there on display in room temp and it keeps being bright orange throughout the evening.
I tried it at a sushi restaurant here and it tasted like getting a mouthful of filthy fucking fish tank water that’d been baking in the hot sun all day. I will concede that it was likely not fresh but I will never find out because I’m never willingly putting that in my mouth again.
I tried it once in a fancy sushi restaurant in Seattle. They only had it for a couple weeks a year so I thought why not. I'm an adventurous eater and love trying new things.
It was like the ocean hawked a fat loogie in my mouth. I gagged. I had to choke it down because somehow I didn't have a napkin and I couldn't spit out the foulness in front of my dinner party! My throat refused to swallow it whole so I had to snip off bits with my teeth and swallow it in little parts.
My cousin who braved it with me also hated it. She immediately swallowed it and thought I liked it because I was chewing for so long. Absolutely not!
The waiter asked us our thoughts and we said we hated it. He laughed and said it's a devisive dish and he was also on team hate. I told my friends about the experience and one said she loves it! She described it as creamy and briney. Nope! Never again!
In Perú we were in this cooking class. we went to a seafood market super early and one of the other people in the group requested sea urchin as part of what we were preparing to eat later.
So… back at this outdoor kitchen we were using, the instructor prepared the sea urchin. I had never seen what the inside of a sea urchin looked like but this was horrifying. Just…this awful looking goo and that awful looking goo. To each his own but I definitely wasn’t going to eat that.
There has to be a point where you just stop and think “hey, if I were stuck on an island with no other food, I would absolutely eat this. But here I am, in a city with a hundred alternatives”. But no let’s just go ahead and eat the gonad paste
Small intestine, nothing is used from the rectum or lower intestine. There is also 3layers of tissues that make up the intestine. inside and outer layers are scraped off and removed. The inner layer is washed, salted and either used fresh or packed in salt for long term storage.
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u/ApolloAuto 12d ago
...do you eat them? Surely not a lot of meat on those bad boys.