The Best Sea Urchins

Sea urchins are a delicious product that can be consumed in different ways, depending on taste, and their special flavor conquers even the most refined palates.

What are sea urchins

Sea urchins are marine organisms belonging to the Echinoderm Phylum.
Sea urchins consume the orange-colored pulp inside them, the gonads. To open them, there is a special “hedgehog cutter” scissor, or you can use any scissor. The best time of year to enjoy them is winter, between January and February.

Hedgehogs live at the bottom of the sea and are sedentary animals, moving extremely slowly. They have a rough and prickly outer coating called the dermask, formed by calcareous platelets joined together and contained in the thickness of the skin. The spines are articulated on the platelets and through small holes, the ambulacral pedicels are astroflexed, small tubes that end with suction cups and allow the hedgehog to move.

Not all sea urchins contain gonads: male hedgehogs are in fact empty inside. Fishing for hedgehogs on your own, besides being often prohibited in many areas, can therefore also be useless if you do not know how to distinguish full hedgehogs from empty hedgehogs.
The difference in distinguishing them lies in the color of the spines. If the hedgehog is completely black, we are faced with a male specimen; shades of brown or purple belong to female specimens.
Rare, and magnificent, is the queen hedgehog, with smaller but much denser spines. It is difficult to find it, as it usually lies in crevices and depths, protected by male hedgehogs.

Using sea urchins in the kitchen

As mentioned before, sea urchins can be enjoyed raw, cooked in pasta dishes or on their own.
To consume them raw, simply extract the pulp with a teaspoon or a piece of bread and eat them with a maximum of a drop of lemon. However, it is important to make sure they are fresh.
A good first course based on sea urchins is definitely a linguine dish: just fry extra virgin olive oil and garlic in a pan and throw in the freshly drained pasta, then add the hedgehog pulp.