From plague to delicacy — reconsidering the purple sea urchin - Los Angeles Times

Originally published in the Los Angeles Times

Photo by Ricardo DeAratanha of the Los Angeles Times

By Aliza Abarbanel

GOLETA, Calif. — Draped atop pillows of sushi rice or displayed in its forebodingly spiny seven-inch shell, the ubiquity of red sea urchin at high-end sushi restaurants and raw bars is a symbol of California’s coastal bounty.

But while seafood lovers might debate the merits of Kumamoto and Kusshi oysters over happy hour, considerably less attention is paid to uni varieties — unless you make a living from the ocean. Anyone who falls into that category likely knows the purple urchin too: as a ravenous source of dramatic kelp-forest devastation.

Kelp forests collect in dense patches on rocky reefs that resemble towering underwater sequoias. They can stretch for miles, providing essential food and shelter for marine life around the world. But only 5% of Northern California’s kelp forests remain today, replaced by vast “urchin barrens” where spiny purple urchins alone cover the sea floor off the coast of places like Mendocino and Sonoma counties.

“In a healthy ecosystem, the threshold for purple urchins is two per square meter,” says Norah Eddy, associate director of the Nature Conservancy’s California Oceans Program, which works with scientists and conservationists to improve fisheries and ocean health. “What we are seeing in practice on the North Coast is 60 to 100 times that.”

Marine biologists attribute this grim phenomenon to a “perfect storm” of events.

In 2014, a warm water event called “the Blob” descended over the Pacific Ocean, from Mexico to Alaska, creating high temperatures that restricted the growth of kelp. Then came the breakout of sea star wasting disease, which devastated the sunflower sea star, a primary predator of purple urchins. Left unchecked, the purple urchins devoured kelp forests in Northern California, and have begun moving southward toward the Channel Islands and Los Angeles.

The biological and financial effects on marine ecosystems have been devastating; in 2019, California closed its red abalone fishery, which was estimated to contribute $44 million to the coastal economy each year.

Nicknamed “zombie urchins” for their ability to live dormant for years without food, these purple urchins contain very little roe — which is eaten as uni — and are thought to be commercially and culinarily worthless. Desperate to keep their population in check, some conservationists have resorted to hiring divers to smash purple urchins with hammers.

But there’s another solution: Eat them.

While aquaculture and capture fisheries (a.k.a. wild fishers) are often thought of as opposing forces by consumers and the media, both entities are necessary to transform zombie urchins into buttery uni. In Goleta, the Cultured Abalone Farm partners with local divers Stephanie Mutz and Harry Liquornik to pluck nutrient-starved purple urchins from the barrens.

Biologist Doug Bush, a partner-owner in the farm, grows an array of umami-rich seaweeds to fatten the urchins up in a process called “ranching.” After 10 weeks, the zombie urchins are transformed into delicately sweet uni and delivered to restaurants like the Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant n/naka and Malibu’s Broad Street Oyster Co.

“What we’re trying to do is acknowledge that purple urchins are an underutilized or underappreciated member of the California marine community,” Bush says. “Their roe is spectacularly good and flavorful.”

Bush first had a short stint ranching purple urchin in 2008 for the academic embryology research market, shipping small quantities to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Brown University. It wasn’t worth the effort. Then the marine community began raising the urchin barren alarm.

“We thought, ‘What if we brought in urchins from the barrens where there’s nothing in them and just fed them to fill them up like little cream puffs of briny deliciousness?’” says Bush. “Our work farming abalone and seaweed taught us which flavors come from eating different seaweed, so we’re able to create not just urchins that are full of roe but urchins that are full of really delicious roe.”

It all starts at sunrise. Mutz and Liquornik head out to the Channel Islands to dive for red urchin, spiny lobster and the other seafood they provide to top restaurants across the state before heading to urchin barrens spotted on previous trips. Hooked up to a hookah air compressor that delivers air through a long hose, they plunge down 30 or 40 feet to pluck the purple urchin with gloved hands.

Mutz and Liquornik bring Bush batches of 200 to 1,000 purple urchins at a time from the barrens; they’re fed in tanks that pipe in seawater from 40 feet offshore.

While wild urchin of all colors are something of a gamble — those thick spiny shells could be overflowing with buttery roe or they could be close to empty, and even judging by weight is difficult — feeding urchin from the barrens is close to a sure bet. The first lines of roe development appear in two weeks, which turn into five plump tongue-like “lobes” after 10 to 12 weeks.

Urchin ranching allows for greater control over flavor too. As with grass-fed beef or acorn-fed Iberico ham, uni’s flavor stems from its diet.

Omnivorous urchins feast on everything from seaweed to plankton in the wild, so starting with empty urchins plucked straight from the barrens provides a clean slate of flavor.

Bush grows two types of seaweed to feed his crop an all-you-can-eat buffet: dulse and ogo, two umami-rich species of red seaweed often used for furikake and poke. He supplements that with brown Macrocystis (the giant kelp often seen washed up on the beach), sustainably harvested from kelp beds. The resulting roe is a vibrant reddish orange and uncommonly sweet.

Today, Mutz offers both kinds of urchins to chefs and her pop-up market customers, branded in partnership with Bush as Purple Hotchi after hotchi-witchi, the Roma word for hedgehog. Bold home cooks can purchase live urchins through the Cultured Abalone’s website. When bad weather keeps Mutz and Liquornik on land and unable to dive for red urchin, like over New Year’s, the ranched Purple Hotchis are unaffected.

“That pleases a lot of restaurants because they don’t have to take urchin off the menu,” Mutz says. “It gives us this great opportunity to educate the public on this other species using chefs, which we’ve done since day one.”

Many restaurants prefer to work with packaged uni, which is processed at coastal facilities and arrives in a neat tray. Live urchin has a fresher, more vibrant flavor but requires delicate handling.

First, there’s the matter of breaking into that spiny shell and scooping out the lobes intact. These must be rinsed, but urchins have no osmotic control to restrict water from entering cell membranes, so even a few splashes of tap water will blow apart the delicate uni into wispy confetti. Instead, chefs use a saltwater solution — 32 grams of salt per liter — that mimics the salinity of the ocean.

Mutz says that most chefs still prefer the red urchin, which is the largest species of urchin in the world and has a higher individual yield.

“It’s taken us a long time to get chefs to even consider using urchin out of the shell instead of processed urchin from a tray,” Mutz says. “Now there’s a little adjustment with the purple urchin, and restaurants are just trying to keep open in general.”

Christopher Tompkins has been using the Cultured Abalone’s purple urchin since Broad Street Oyster Co.’s early pop-up days five years ago. “I find the purple urchin to be very sweet and plump, and while the reds can be hit or miss, their consistency is on point urchin after urchin,” Tompkins says. “They come in a smaller package so we like to use them as an add-on.”

He offers uni as a topping to imbue buttery lobster rolls or rich uni pasta with an extra hit of briny richness. It also often appears on Broad Street Oyster Co.’s statuesque seafood tower.

At n/naka in Los Angeles, urchin is sometimes draped atop raw oysters on the half shell, or steamed as a mushimono with sweet horsehair crab and starchy toro.

“We used purple urchin a lot in our takeout days because we wanted a specific size uni for the box. Now we prefer the bigger red ones because we process our urchin by hand, but anytime Stephanie is unable to get a red urchin, I’m happy to take the purple ones,” says chef Niki Nakayama of n/naka.

“The sweetness, texture and even sizing is all delicious. Especially when you find a really great one, there’s nothing like it,” Nakayama says.

The Cultured Abalone isn’t the only aquaculture farm getting into urchin ranching. Urchinomics, a company founded by Brian Tsuyoshi Takeda with a global approach, currently operates two commercial urchin ranching sites in Japan. A pilot-scale ranch is underway near Port Hueneme in partnership with the Bay Foundation, and additional trials are ongoing in Norway, Australia and Mexico, targeting barrens caused by overfishing predatory species and climate change.

There’s some good news: Bull kelp grows incredibly fast. The annual seaweed grows from a spore into maturity in just a year, sometimes 10 inches in a day. We can’t eat our way to a revitalized kelp forest alone, but as the appetite for uni grows in Los Angeles and worldwide, stepping in on behalf of the sunflower sea star to allow kelp the opportunity to grow can make eating urchin even more tempting.

“Conducting marine restoration is incredibly logistically challenging, and therefore it’s incredibly expensive,” says Eddy, of the Nature Conservancy. “These market-based solutions to reducing the purple urchin population can reduce the cost of restoration and make it more feasible to actually conduct restoration at the scale we need to see it occur.”

Last year, the Nature Conservancy performed an analysis that found that urchin ranching has the potential to offset the cost of removal by 30% if conducted at scale.

Eddy’s team is now partnering with California Sea Grant and Bush to explore ways to replicate this urchin ranching model across the state. They hope to target specific areas that have a high likelihood of seeing kelp recover if urchins are removed and kelp spores are released, starting off the north coast that stretches from San Francisco Bay to the Oregon border.

“A purple urchin that is landed, fed and sold in a restaurant creates economic benefit for everyone involved in that chain and displaces the need for seafood resources to be imported into California,” says Bush. “It’s a cherry on top that it is also a delicacy of the highest order.”

The Purple Urchins Don't Die - NPR

Originally published on NPR

By Lauren Sommer, Madeline K. Sofia, Rebecca Ramirez

Hoards of purple sea urchins have decimated kelp forests off the coast of northern California. The kelp here normally grows 30 to 60 feet tall, and is a key ecosystem for other plants and animals.

These sea urchins have always eaten some kelp — but usually not enough to hurt the entire forest. In the past they were kept in check by predators like the sunflower sea star. But there have been some big ecological shifts, exacerbated by climate change, that have led to an urchin explosion.

Scientists are tackling the problem on multiple fronts:

1. Manually removing sea urchins near healthy kelp and sending them to the compost heap.

2. Reintroducing natural urchin predators, like sea otters, in the hopes that they eat the urchins.

3. Putting them on the dinner table — getting people to eat the purple urchins.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Geoff Brumfiel and fact-checked by Rasha Aridi.

Purple Urchin Possibilities - Santa Barbara Independent

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Originally published in the Santa Barbara Independent

Story by Matt Kettmann
Photos by Daniel Dreifuss

For a spiny creature that was quite alien to most California seafood lovers just a few years ago, the orange-fleshed gonads of urchin were being slurped at superspeed outside of the Sea Stephanie Fish booth on a sunny Saturday morning in October 2019. As thousands meandered around the docks, tasting through the Santa Barbara Harbor Festival, we could barely keep up with the fierce carapace cracking and delicate extraction of the soft, slippery meat to satisfy the wide demographic of uni fanatics.

Sea Stephanie Fish is the commercial fishing company owned by Harry Liquornik and Stephanie Mutz, the celebrated Santa Barbara urchin diver and global uni ambassador. I’ve known Mutz for years, and she’d invited my then-9-year-old son to shuck uni at that year’s fest, qualifying as his first paid gig ever. Given the apparent need for extra hands, I joined in as well, volunteering my amateur urchin-unleashing services to keep up with the constant demand. (It’s not difficult work, but prepare for a couple of days of red-stained hands.)

As far as I knew, the only items on the menu were the red urchins that thrive on the rocky edges of the Santa Barbara Channel, considered the best source for uni on the planet. But every so often, someone would sneak up toward the front of the line and inquire in hushed tones whether there were any purple urchins left. The “hotchis” had already sold out, Mutz would reply to their frowns, speaking in some secret seafood code.

I’m pretty good about staying on top of culinary curiosities, especially in my own backyard, but I’d never heard of hotchis, and didn’t know that California’s purple urchins could be eaten like the reds. As Mutz quickly educated me in her matter-of-fact manner, this smaller urchin species — only about two inches wide compared to the reds’ five-inch breadth — had only recently become an available uni option. And that was all due to a groundbreaking commercial-fishing-meets-aquaculture partnership that she and Liquornik launched with Doug Bush of The Cultured Abalone, an onshore shellfish farm on the Gaviota Coast.

Unlike most commercially caught seafood, which goes straight from the boat to the market, Mutz and Liquornik were harvesting purple urchins and delivering them to Bush to fatten in the same tanks — and on the same fresh seaweed — that he feeds his abalone. It wasn’t the first time someone thought about fattening purples or any of the other common urchin species around the world, whose smaller frames lack the consistently plump gonads as the reds. But as far as anyone can tell, this is the first time that the idea is actually creating a viable market — even through the pandemic, the supply can’t quite keep up with the demand.

If the project continues to prosper, the benefits are bountiful. For uni lovers, the purples, once properly fattened, are considered even sweeter and creamier than the reds.

For the traditionally competitive commercial fishing and aquaculture industries — where creative partnerships could be fighting food insecurity and ecological imbalance in the face of overpopulation and climate change — it’s a strong symbol of hope. “This idea that fishing and aquaculture are somehow adversarial is absolute nonsense,” Bush explained to me during a phone call last week. “This project highlights that fishing and aquaculture should be a collaborative part of the local seafood economy.”

And for those concerned about the health of oceans, eating purple urchins offers the opportunity to play a role — however minuscule — in culling the species’ currently problematic population densities and restoring kelp along the California coastline. As ocean waters warmed in recent years and urchin-grubbing sea stars were taken to near-extinction by disease, the purples have expanded their range and voracity, eating kelp forests clean and creating lifeless barrens like no one has ever seen.

“People want to feel like their seafood is engaged with a larger context, and the hotchis represent that,” said Bush. “You’d have to eat a lot, a lot, a lot of purple urchins to create a positive impact on the impact that the urchin barrens are having on the kelp biomass. On the other hand, these are natural cycles that get out of balance, and harvesting these purple urchins and commodifying them is just another tool in the toolbox.”

For Mutz, the project goes beyond anything she’s done in an already illustrious career to popularize uni and uplift the Santa Barbara fishing community. “Let’s make this a win-win-win,” she said. “Economically, ecologically, and socially — a triple bottom line.”

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Some of California’s hardest-to-find seafood is arriving in the Bay Area. Here’s how to get it - San Francisco Chronicle

Photo by Paul Chinn of the San Francisco Chronicle

By Georgia Freedman via San Francisco Chronicle

This holiday season, Bay Area cooks can turn to a new kind of fishmonger for access to some of California’s best seafood, including abalone, spiny lobster and live sea urchin.

Stephanie Mutz and Harry Liquornik, sea urchin divers from Santa Barbara County, have provided seafood to Michelin-starred restaurants like N/naka in Los Angeles and Single Thread in Healdsburg for years. But when the pandemic shut down many of their customers, they turned their business, Sea Stephanie Fish, into a kind of pop-up shop.

Andrew Bouton (right) assists customers picking up orders at the Sea Stephanie Fish pop-up in front of The Morris restaurant in San Francisco, Calif. on Saturday, Dec. 5, 2020. Photo by Paul Chinn of the San Francisco Chronicle

The pair partnered with other area fishermen and women who were also looking for ways to keep their businesses afloat, and the group began selling each other portions of their catches. After starting out in her area and Southern California, Mutz now brings seafood to Bay Area customers during monthly and bimonthly pop-ups in Cupertino, Emeryville, San Francisco and Napa. Customers follow the company’s Instagram to see what’s available, then order online a couple days in advance. The next will be Dec. 23.

“We bring what we sell, so nothing goes to waste,” says Mutz. “That’s a huge reason to do direct marketing: so we know our products are appreciated and not wasted.”

Mutz and Liquornik aren’t the only seafood purveyors who have started offering home cooks items that were previously reserved for chefs during the pandemic. San Francisco company Water2Table opened a retail operation to sell the local salmon, halibut and other fish they used to send to restaurants. Four Star Seafood, also in San Francisco, has begun delivering and shipping chef-approved fish directly to customers and opened an oyster bar and store, Billingsgate, in Noe Valley this week.

What makes Sea Stephanie Fish unique is its focus on seafood from the Central Coast and the access to hard-to-find specialty ingredients like Santa Barbara spiny lobster, rock crab, farmed abalone, red and purple urchin, whelks and keyhole limpets. Offering their catch directly to consumers also allows Mutz and the other fishermen she works with the ability to be more discriminating in how and what they catch than they can be if they’re selling to distributors.

“We treat our seafood a little more gently because it’s got to last and be fresh when it reaches the consumer,” Mutz says. “We’re less aggressive when we’re picking the (red) urchin; we don’t stuff our bags as much. We call them ‘princesses.’”

Keisuke Akabori, the chef behind the Oakland pop-up Casa de Kei, started buying the company’s seafood at the beginning of the pandemic and appreciates that it’s unique and from independent fishermen and women.

“It’s fresh, just straight out of the ocean. You can tell the difference by the texture and how much you can really taste the seawater,” he says.

Sea Stephanie Fish’s focus on quality goes hand-in-hand with another goal: maintaining the sustainability of local fisheries. Mutz and Liquornik hope that focusing on catching and selling fewer, higher-quality fish and crustaceans will help ensure they can have long careers as divers and pass on a healthy fishery to the next generation.

One of their most popular items, for instance, is their “purple hachi” urchin, which Mutz dives for off the Santa Barbara coast. Purple urchins are decimating California’s native kelp forests because of the recent die-off of most of their natural predators, the sunflower sea stars. There hasn’t been a commercial incentive to fish for these urchins because they’re often empty in the wild. Mutz solves this problem by partnering with the Cultured Abalone Farm on Dos Pueblos Ranch outside of Santa Barbara: She brings up healthy, but mostly empty, urchins and owner Doug Bush and his staff feed them until they’re full, buttery and sweet.

Sea Stephanie Fish also sells Bush’s abalone, which he grows by pumping in water from just offshore and feeding them giant kelp and red seaweeds. He sells them when they reach about 3¼ inches long.

“People who have gotten big ones will remember them being really tough,” says Bush, who recalls seeing people tenderize wild abalone with cricket bats. “You don’t have to do that with ours. They’re smaller and a lot easier to work with.” He suggests just wiping the abalone down, putting some butter on them, and grilling them in their shells.

Mutz and Liquornik offer cooking tips on Instagram and videos on IGTV to show customers how to cook the abalone and other less-common products like limpets, which can be eaten raw or cooked sous vide until they have a texture and flavor that reminds Mutz of foie gras. Some of their regular customers also contribute videos, like Brenda Ton of San Pablo, who demonstrated how to cook whelks, which are boiled or blanched and can then be stewed in their shells or removed and sauteed or fried like popcorn shrimp.

The partners round out their offerings with seafood from fishermen up and down the coast, like Pacific Gold oysters from Morro Bay in San Luis Obispo County. They are sometimes willing to pay above market rate to ensure they’re getting the best quality available — and to ensure that fishermen and women are being paid fairly for their work. For rock crab, for instance, (which are a bit smaller than Dungeness crabs but have larger claws relative to their size and can be sweeter), Mutz pays 25% to 30% more than other buyers. For that price, she asks her supplier to provide specimens that are heavy and full of meat and don’t have any barnacles on them.

This can result in slightly higher prices for her customers, though for some items cutting out the middleman keeps her prices down. Prices can change from week to week, but at the time of publication her red urchins cost $12 each and the purple are $8; the rock crab are $7.50 to $10.50, depending on size; and spiney lobster start at $52 for a small lobster due to extremely high demand from the Chinese market.

“What she catches, the quality of the product is so special,” says Paul Einbund, founder of the restaurant the Morris in San Francisco. “Also, it’s not coming from a nameless distributor or importer, it’s coming from Stephanie. And I think that’s a big deal in this day and age, that we can put faces to the suppliers.”

So far the pop-ups have proved wildly popular. Customers who have pre-ordered line up for their boxes at the appointed times or have them placed directly in their cars for contactless pickup. In November, the Bay Area pop-ups sold out less than an hour after the online ordering form was opened.

“It’s amazing that we get to have this. California has such a bounty, and when you’re hunkered down like this, there’s a lot that you miss,” says Kato Banks, a regular customer in San Francisco. “It’s an explosion of California seafood on your plate.”

Sea Stephanie Fish’s next Bay Area pop-ups are Dec. 23 in Cupertino, Emeryville, San Francisco and Napa. Online ordering will open at 3:30 p.m. Dec. 21 with locations for pickup. Visit www.seastephaniefish.com/store and sign up for their email list to be notified when ordering opens; supplies sell out fast.

Santa Barbara Sea Urchins, Prized By High-End Restaurants, Are Being Sold To Home Cooks - LAist

The briny, creamy gonads inside a red sea urchin harvested from Santa Barbara. (Courtesy of Brenda Ton)

By Jacob Margolis via LAist

Some of the best sea urchin in the world comes from Santa Barbara, but with high-end restaurants shut down, the fishermen who harvest and rely on them for income have had to find new markets for the delicacy — and do it overnight.

"I have two holy crap moments," said Stephanie Mutz, who's been diving for urchin for the past 13 years.

One was when the Chinese market — the largest buyer of live spiny lobster — shut down in February and Mutz and her friends had to figure out how to offload hundreds of pounds of the crustaceans locally.

And the other was when restaurants across the U.S. closed and she was left with over 1,000 live sea urchin typically destined for high-end seafood establishments.

"Life turned upside down," she said.

She spent weeks driving from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to Orange County, trying to offload her catch.

She specializes in selling live urchins, which have a shelf life of a few days once they're pulled from the water. Wholesale processors up and down the coast are also usually an option. They crack the urchins open, cover them in preservatives, and ship the briny yellow gonads around the world in those wooden boxes you see piled up behind the frosty glass at sushi bars.

With no wholesale market, the processors were shut down too.

Over time she was able to get rid of the batch she'd harvested, but with 80% of her market gone she had no choice other than to turn primarily into a direct-to-consumer operation.

DIRECT TO CONSUMER

At first she coordinated all of the sales via text message, but there was so much demand she shifted to an online store.

"People are still wanting it," she said. "I think it has to do with they want some sort of normalcy."

"I'm used to pleasing 50 chefs a week. Now I'm trying to please 300 people," she said.

It's questionable whether most people can filet and cook a whole fish. Cracking open and scooping out the insides of a live urchin can be even more intimidating, and something Mutz got a lot of questions about.

So she created a video to show people how to do it.

She's had enough interest from home cooks to make up the money lost in restaurant sales, which means she can keep her few employees working, she said. Other fishermen in Santa Barbara haven't been as successful, and she's skeptical about long-term stability.

"A lot of people are still buying with their heart," said Mutz. "It'll be interesting to see if that support continues."

The dangers and delicacy of Santa Barbara sea urchins - KCRW

Sea urchin on the boat. Photo courtesy of Jason Wise

Originally featured on KCRW

Hosted by Jonathan Bastian

The Channel Islands are famous for world-class diving, stunning views, and an aquatic creature that has become a foodie delight: sea urchin.

“The Delicacy,” a new documentary premiering at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, follows sea urchin divers off the coast of Santa Barbara, and explores the impact that these unusual creatures have on the environment and those who eat them.

“Sea urchin is a strange thing that we eat, but it's also a strange animal. It's also a very strange industry, and collecting it's very odd. And so I started to see a prism around a very odd animal that led to a lot of very beautiful stories,” says filmmaker Jason Wise, who’s known best for his film on wine sommeliers called “Somm.”

Santa Barbara exports thousands of pounds of uni (Japanese term for the edible part of sea urchin) each year to places like Japan and Canada.

But catching sea urchin is hazardous, as divers deal with unpredictable forces of nature.

“The thing I'm mostly scared of is the current,” says Stephanie Mutz, a sea urchin diver in Santa Barbara who stars in the film. “There are sharks, there's wind, you can get stranded with boats breaking down, you're relying on breathing apparatuses, and it's freezing cold.”

All that work translates to an expensive and highly sought after product, especially at high-end sushi restaurants.

“It's often described as umami. If you've had a very earthy, mushroomy, salty, briny kind of a thing before, and you add that to a creaminess and a sweetness, that's what it tastes like. And that's why it's so hard to describe,” says Wise. “Urchin in your mouth takes on different flavors for every moment it's in there. It has an evolution, where a lot of food does not.”

"The Delicacy" premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Friday, January 24th at Metro Theatre 3.
Credits

Guests:
Jason Wise - Filmmaker, “The Delicacy”
Stephanie Mutz - Sea urchin diver

Host:
Jonathan Bastian

Producer:
Kathryn Barnes

Uni's Big Screen Debut - Santa Barbara Independent

Jason Wise filmed The Delicacy all on film over the course of six years.

Jason Wise’s Documentary ‘The Delicacy’ Points Lens at Santa Barbara’s Sea Urchin

Originally published in the Santa Barbara Independent

By Matt Kettmann

In film school, when all of his peers wanted to be the next Quentin Tarantino, Jason Wise was more keen on David Attenborough, inspired by the legendary documentarian’s oeuvre of nature films. But he couldn’t figure out how to make one himself. “I’d start following animals, and then I became obsessed with the people around them,” said Wise.

The director instead built his career on the Somm series of documentaries about sommeliers and wine culture, but he never gave up on the nature flick idea. “Most successful nature films are about animals who behave like people,” he said. “I’ve always had this very strange, quiet obsession: Could you make a film about an animal that’s nothing like people?”

As he explored the world of wine, Wise came to love sea urchin, also known as uni. “Sea urchin was a life-changing food for me. I try to seek it out everywhere I go,” he said. “It’s the absolute top expression of terroir on earth. It’s a mile above grapes. I’m so endlessly fascinated by this creature that has no memory and no awareness.”

When the Los Angeles resident learned that one of the best sources was the Santa Barbara Channel, he began working on The Delicacy, a doc about uni, fishermen, human behavior, culinary history, and much more. The film’s world premiere is this weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, but Wise’s work began more than six years ago, when he fell deep down the rabbit hole of exploring how humankind treats urchin, oysters, abalone, and similar delicacies.

“I became obsessed with the idea that there are things you eat that don’t fill you up,” said Wise of how people seek out foods for cultural and sensory rather than nutritional reasons. “There are people who think, ‘I have to try sea urchin from an island off the coast of Santa Barbara, and I’m gonna travel 1,000 miles to get it the freshest I can.’ When looking at humans as animals, that is bizarre, interesting behavior.”

The result is a compelling, visually rich, conceptually wide-ranging nature film about people, with Santa Barbara sea urchin as the star. To bolster his unlikely and spiky protagonist, Wise enlisted the insight of legendary bon vivants such as Andrew Zimmern and Ray Isle as well as chefs such as Kyle Connaughton from SingleThread in Sonoma and Spencer Bezaire of L&E Oyster Bar in Los Angeles.

There’s plenty of drama, from the 1994 shark attack death of James “Weener” Robinson off San Miguel Island to the fight against letting voracious sea otters return to the Santa Barbara Channel. But characters steal the show, namely commercial fishermen Jim Marshall, Ward Motyer, and, of course, Harry Liquornik and Stephanie Mutz of Sea Stephanie Fish, who together have done more than anyone to bring Santa Barbara urchin into the limelight. “Stephanie was a big ally of mine,” said Wise, who tuned in to Mutz’s unique story long before she became the ever-popular face of Santa Barbara urchin.

What took so long is a complicated story of logistics. The film had no funding for four years, and everyone told Wise that it would be better as a reality series. That’s because, when it comes to culinary films, “it either has to be this beautiful ziggurat pyramid of food made by god, which is total bullshit, or it has to be a social-issue documentary,” said Wise. “It’s been really unfair that food from a story standpoint has to be about one of those two things. It can be about a lot of things.

“I have a hummingbird brain,” he explained. “When I look at sea urchin, I see all that stuff: the fight against sea otters, the great whites, the fact they’re served at SingleThread, one of the best restaurants in the world.”

The subjects were a little trickier than publicity-seeking somms of his past movies. “These fishermen are the first people I’ve ever worked with who don’t want to be filmed,” said Wise, who had to write letters to reach some of them, since they don’t have cell phones or check emails. “Some of these guys buck technology as a principle.”

Then there’s the set itself. “These boats are very small and dangerous and unpleasant,” he explained. “They are terrible places to work, especially with a camera. You’re putting a wetsuit on, trying to stay out of the way of the divers and not slow them down. These people are working. ‘I’m happy for your little movie, but I have a job to do.’”

Complicating matters further, Wise shot the entire movie on real Kodak film rather than digital video. “Film has a depth that video doesn’t have, and it makes the film look like a memory,” explained Wise. “I’ve shot a lot of digital, and I think it’s wonderful, but the image is dead. It’s like a facsimile. When shooting on film, it’s still moving; it’s alive and breathing.”

The real film did present advantages. “You have to be very present — nobody is looking at their iPhones on a film set,” he said. “The minute you say ‘action,’ and they understand film is moving through that camera and can run out, everyone is on point every time.”

That deliberate nature also saved money, particularly in the editing bay, where there weren’t endless streams of video to wade through. “It might be one of the lowest budget films I’ve ever made,” said Wise, “and I have made films for nothing.” (He was also able to land a live score, another dream turned reality.)

he Delicacy is just one of three feature documentaries that Wise is releasing this year. Next up is The Art of Butchery, which covers the culture of meat across seven different countries, and then comes Somm 4: The Cup of Salvation, his fourth wine-focused film, this one focused a contemporary tale of winemaking in the Holy Land, Armenia, and thereabouts. On top of that, Wise will soon officially launch Somm TV, a “full-blown streaming platform” featuring a half-dozen shows that he created alongside other content.

Of course, he’s most excited about this weekend, when The Delicacy will be screened during SBIFF on Friday night and midday Saturday. “I’ve never been more nervous about movie in my life,” he said, “but I have a feeling about right place, right time with this particular film.”

In Search of Local Sea Urchin - Edible Santa Barbara

Click on the magazine cover to read the story

Fishing for an Aphrodisiac - Wine Enthusiast

Originally published on Wine Enthuasiast
By Georgette Moger

Photo by Ben Scorah

The musky perfume of sea urchins (oursins, as they are called in France, or ricci, as they are known in Italy) can arouse a certain culinary provocation. This evocative echinoderm, whose edible parts are essentially its reproductive organs, has a reputation for being an aphrodisiac. Loaded with antioxidants and vitamins, the sweet orange meat of the sea urchin is as healthy as it is delicious.

It takes a delicate touch from a gloved hand to pull these treasures from the sea. With a slip of a small kitchen knife, the “lid” of the urchin pops off. The reward then reveals itself as a brilliant orange spread, with a texture like custard and an emphatically oceanic taste.

In Santa Barbara, sea urchin can be harvested year-round, though the prime season is November through February. West Coasters commonly savor uni neat as sashimi or sushi, or slather it on toast. It’s also great between strands of pasta, whipped into an omelet, or as part of an elevated guacamole.

One of the most rarefied uni offerings in Southern California comes from Niki Nakayama at her Los Angeles restaurant, n/naka.

“We use uni for both sushi and sashimi, but also as uni tempura, or steamed to create a custard,” she says. “I like to imagine using uni the way I use eggs—in a sauce, soft-poached with egg yolk and a frothy merengue.”

At n/naka, sommelier Jeffry Undiarto suggests pairing uni with Blanc de Blancs Champagne, Chablis or with a rich Junmai Daiginjo saké.

“Uni is such a prized delicacy because the yield from one urchin is so little—it only carries five lobes,” says Undiarto. “It’s something that has to be foraged for and is such a fragile ingredient. We source it from a local uni diver, Stephanie Mutz, who understands so deeply what a precious treasure it is.”

Mutz’s name comes up again at Connie & Ted’s, a West Hollywood restaurant where Sam Baxter, the executive chef, mixes uni into a feathery brunch omelet. Mutz harvests uni for at least two dozen restaurants between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

Photo by Ben Scorah

Mutz came to uni harvesting after she worked for 10 years as a marine biologist.

“I was trying to get my foot in the door teaching full-time,” says Mutz. “I spent half my days fishing, and half teaching. Unfortunately, the recession arrived shortly after I started teaching, and last one hired, first one fired—that was me.”

She took her fishing business full-time, partnering with commercial fisherman Harry Liquornik.

Mutz has urchin ink stains on her hands—an artist wearing the proof of her craft. “Catching and selling sea urchin directly to the consumer, where I know my product is being properly utilized, appreciated and not wasted, is the most honest job I have ever had, alongside teaching,” says Mutz, bedecked in miniature urchin earrings and a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of her urchin harvesting company, Sea Stephanie Fish.

Though touted as an aphrodisiac, Mutz says the sex life of the sea urchin is relatively vanilla.

“Broadcast spawning,” says Mutz, shaking her head glumly. “Completely unromantic. When the urchin are stressed or agitated, or receive a lunar cue, it instigates the male to sneeze sperm and the females spew eggs. The fertilized eggs become urchins after growing a shell out of calcium carbonate. There’s no afterglow, but it gets the job done.”

Uni can be equal parts delicacy and pest, but both humans and otters are doing wonders to control overpopulation. Scientists have observed certain red sea urchins specimens with lifespans in excess of 200 years. You’d likely think a massive urchin would provide a plethora of uni, but you may not find a lick of it inside.

“Unless the water conditions have been cold enough for kelp to grow, and in turn for urchins to feed off it, the lobes of the urchin shrivel up,” Mutz says. “Sometimes it’s just big shell, no cojones.”

On the sea, I sip Sancerre while Mutz descends to the depths to fetch our uni lunch, attached to a breathing hose fed to her by our captain, Liquornik. She is armed with a GoPro, gloved hands and a mesh bag.

“On a perfect day, there is no wind or swell with 100-foot visibility and a lot of 3- to 5- inch urchins that are loaded inside with delicious uni,” she says. “Then there are days of terrifying wind and currents, and I am hanging on to the bottom of the ocean for dear life, trying to keep from getting slammed into rocks with my bag of spiky urchin following.

“If things go wrong and I’m not prepared, it can start to snowball into more dangerous situations.”

We’re a bit limited in how to eat the urchins Mutz catches. There is no pasta, toast points or eggs. So I learn how best to savor sea urchins: straight from the shell, garnished only with a natural luge of seawater.

California Gold - Santa Barbara Magazine

Originally published in Santa Barbara

By Katherine Stewart

Photographs by Brian Hodges

Perched on the side of her boat, Stephanie Mutz fixes her mask over her sun-gold hair and adjusts the oxygen line. With a splash, she’s gone. For the next five hours, she will drift along the coves and inlets of Santa Rosa Island, deftly gathering sea urchins from their rocky lairs. By days’ end, she will have harvested 1,000 pounds of the spiny creatures, destined for the tables of some of the finest restaurants in the world.

The Santa Barbara Channel is a sea urchin’s idea of heaven. The rocky coastline, the kelp cover, and the mild water temperature—it’s just perfect. And a happy sea urchin is a tasty one. Those from Santa Barbara are widely believed to be the most flavorful and desirable in the world. Even in Japan, where the spiny animal is prized as a delicacy, “California Gold” fetches the highest prices. The fame of the Santa Barbara sea urchin is such that the name has been pirated. Unethical purveyors from Russia and Chile have taken to falsely claiming their inferior catches come from our fair waters.

Mutz has one of only about 120 active licenses to fish urchin in the state of California. She believes she is the only woman active in the field, which made her position for six years as president of the Commercial Fisherman of Santa Barbara even more remarkable. (She stepped aside last year.) The average fisherman is in his 50s or 60s; she is 36. But her reputation as an urchin diver is impeccable. Through her company, Sea Stephanie Fish, she delivers her goods—at around $5 per urchin—to some of Santa Barbara’s best restaurants, including The Hungry Cat, the dining room at Belmond El Encanto, the Four Seasons Resort Biltmore, The Lark, and Industrial Eats in Buellton.

Most Americans have yet to experience the delights of sea urchin while those who are presented with the opportunity sometimes have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea. For a small but growing number of diners, however, the briny, delicate flavor has become something of a delightful obsession. “People go crazy for sea urchin,” Mutz says. “They run me over for it!”

With her bright blue eyes, ready smile, and athletic build that speaks to years of outdoor—and underwater—activity, Mutz seems to have been destined for a life lived at sea. “TMI, but I was conceived on a boat,” she quips. “I grew up on the ocean in Newport Beach. I was taught that if you want to eat fish, you go out there and get it yourself.” Mutz received a bachelor of science degree in marine biology from UC Santa Barbara, then a master of science at the School of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. She presently works as a part-time professor at Ventura College, teaching classes in marine biology and microbiology. However, her main focus appears to be on her career as a fisherman, and most days she’d rather be in the water. As all sea urchin divers must, in order to obtain a coveted license from the state, she spent three years working as a deckhand before becoming the captain of her own vessel, a 20-foot Bellingham Workskiff, which she now keeps docked at the Santa Barbara Harbor.

Diving for urchin is hazardous business. Strong or unexpected currents are one significant danger. Recreational boats are another, especially for the diver’s critical oxygen line. The sea urchins themselves can be, well, prickly, and if a spine gets stuck in a joint it can cause infection. And then there are the sharks. “The joke is: ‘If you see a shark, you’re not working hard enough,’” says Mutz. “Knock on wood, I’ve only seen one—a six-foot salmon shark. I just got into my boat and didn’t go back in the water after that.” There was, however, at least one sea urchin diver that didn’t get away. In 1994, an urchin diver named James “Weiner” Robinson was eaten alive at “Shark Park,” a ring of reefs and rocks off San Miguel Island. Now, every year, California sea urchin divers gather at Brophy Bros. Clam Bar and Restaurant at the Santa Barbara Harbor to commemorate the event. “Urchin divers come from up all up and down the coast,” Mutz says. “We drink to Weiner. Then we tip one over to the shark as well.”

Fishermen’s camaraderie helps ease the challenges of a solitary and physically demanding life. Mutz typically leaves her house at 6 am and doesn’t return home until 8 or 9 that night. Then there are numerous state rules and regulations to consider. “You’re not allowed to fish without having someone place a market order, so I fulfill those first,” says Mutz. “I also sell directly to consumers. Then if there is any left over, I hand it over to the processors,” who put the urchin on ice and truck it down to processing plants in Los Angeles and San Diego, where the sex organs (the edible part of the animal) are extracted and soaked in preservative, sorted for size and color, then shipped to restaurants all over the world.

Chefs beyond the sushi bar are beginning to appreciate the culinary merits of this spiny sea creature, so it’s fortunate that it’s a resilient breed. Minimum size limits and limited fishing days protect against overfishing. According to Mutz, Santa Barbara fishermen are well aware of the delicate balance between harvesting and preservation that is necessary to maintain population stability. “Fisherman in Santa Barbara are some of the most well-educated, ecologically aware, and ethical people I know,” she says. “We’re not just a bunch of salty-crusty guys. We know we need to take care of the resource, or we’re out of a job.” Still, she says, turf wars are inevitable. “Outside fishing grounds, we’re the best of friends, but during fishing season it can be competitive,” she says. “If you’re not competitive, you’re not going to be a good fisherman, especially in Santa Barbara.”

Mutz has earned the trust of some of Santa Barbara’s top chefs, who rely on her to supply them with the precious ingredient. “Stephanie brings the freshest sea urchin,” says Belmond El Encanto chef Leo Andres Ayala, who has created a sea urchin dish with aji amarillo puree (Peruvian yellow peppers), citrus salad, and toasted brioche points. “I’d rather get my urchin from her because she can harvest according to a chef’s exact requirements as she is an expert in the sea urchin industry, both from a commercial and research standpoint.”

On occasion, chef Leo prepares a very rich bisque of sea urchin served in the shell and topped off with even more fresh sea urchin. He also enjoys preparing sea urchin topped with quail egg in a citrus broth, with a little scallion to cut the fishy flavor. Over at The Hungry Cat, where the animal is also served at the raw bar, urchin is the key element of sea urchin butter. And at Les Marchands, urchin is the secret ingredient of a notorious noodle dish so mysteriously delectable that it inspired weekly ramen nights on Fridays and Saturdays.

These days, there seems to be no limit to the reach of sea urchin cuisine. It is appearing in a number of unexpected places—including ice cream. “In

Solvang, chef Pink at Bacon & Brine does a sea urchin ice cream with caramel,” says Mutz, her bright eyes widening at the thought. “It’s so good!”