This is a delightful tale about the sea urchin whose market is
continuing to grow. Successful husbandry requires an active harvest
and a healthy kelp ecosystem. With the urchins eating the kelp, it
is easy to wipe out the kelp as has often happened. On the Pacific
Northwest, the sea otter controlled the population until they were
decimated by fur trappers.
Thus a healthy harvest requires a harvest cycle to ensure
optimization. That is what is happening here. Sol far it can be
done well by one person. This has to grow into a community with
established guidelines.
This product has become a significant harvest along the Pacific coast
as well.
Rise of the Sea
Urchin
In the icy waters off
Norway, one intrepid Scot dives deep to satisfy the latest
fjord-to-table craze at Europe’s finest restaurants
Smithsonian Magazine
July 2014
When it comes to their
neighbors in Norway, the good people of Denmark and Sweden have a
limitless fount of jokes, many of which are reductive and in
questionable taste; none of which should, under any circumstance, be
repeated.
Here’s one of the
funniest:
A Dane, a Swede and a
Norwegian are shipwrecked on a desert island. The Dane finds a magic
shell, which, when rubbed, entitles each of the castaways to a wish.
The Dane says: “I wish to go home to my cozy flat in Copenhagen and
relax on my soft sofa beside my sexy girlfriend with a six-pack of
beer.”
He promptly
disappears. The Swede says, “I wish to return to my large and
comfortable Stockholm bungalow, with its sleek Ikea furniture.” He
vanishes, too. After mulling his options, the Norwegian says, “I’m
terribly lonely now. I wish my two friends were here with me.”
For much of the last
decade, Roderick Sloan has been viewed as something of a Norwegian
joke. By Norwegians, no less. The 44-year-old émigré Scot makes his
home 88 miles north of the Arctic Circle—little more than a cod’s
toss from Nordskot (pop. 55), one of Norway’s darkest, bleakest,
remotest coastal villages.
###
Inside the spiky test are five corals of roe, sometimes called
tongues—the sea urchin’s wobbly gonads. (Karoline O.A.
Pettersen)
###
The farm he shares
with his wife (Lindis), young sons (names withheld by request) and
dog (Sisko, an aged Labrador with bad joints and a worse aroma) spans
500 scraggly acres. The land is speckled with birch and encircled by
mountain—lofty, sharp-edged and shaped like dragon’s teeth. It’s
an agreeable enough place in what American travel writer Bill Bryson
might call a thank-you-God-for-not-making-me-live-here sort of way.
“Summer is special in Nordskot,” cracks Christopher Sjuve, an
Oslo-based wine blogger. “It’s everyone’s favorite day of the
year.”
Sloan embraces the
isolation. “I love the tranquility here, you understand,” he says
in a soft Scottish burr, rolling his r’s and stretching out his
vowels. “I love the clean air and the changes of the seasons. It’s
not perfection, but then if life is too perfect, it can be perfectly
dull.”
What makes Sloan
perfectly risible in the eyes of many is the precarious career he has
carved. In weather that would be considered mild only on Neptune, he
dives into the icy fjord to gather sea urchins, those wee beasties
that look like squash balls encased in pine thistles. Sloan’s
aquatic treasure hunts for krakebolle (“crow’s balls”
in Norwegian) are as dangerous as they are daring. Waves are often
treacherous; squalls, gusty; and storms can appear in an instant.
“Roddie swims alone, down to 50 feet deep,” Sjuve observes.
“You’ve either got to be drunk or crazy to do what he does.”
Crazy, say the locals.
“When I started to harvest urchins in 2002, everyone thought I was
bananas,” Sloan says. “They’re not a traditional catch in north
Norway.” He means urchins, not bananas. Though plentiful, urchins
are not exactly standard fare in Norway, a nation of largely
unadventurous eaters who annually consume 48 million frozen
pizzas—about 10 per capita. Sloan is practically a cottage industry
unto himself. “We’ve got seals and killer whales,” he says,
“but I’m the country’s only full-time urchin diver.”
In the brave new world
of fine dining, the roe of the humble urchin—a shellfish once
cursed as a pest to lobstermen, mocked as “whore’s eggs” and
routinely smashed with hammers or tossed overboard as unsalable
“bycatch”—is a prized and slurpily lascivious delicacy. Unlike
caviar, which is the eggs of fish, the roe of the urchin is its
wobbly gonads. Every year more than 100,000 tons of them
slide down discerning throats, mainly in France and Japan, where the
chunks of salty, grainy custard are known as uni and believed to be
an uplifting tonic, if not an aphrodisiac. The Japanese exchange
urchins as gifts during New Year celebrations.
Sloan
supplies Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis, or “Norwegian
greens,” to dozens of the most revered restaurants in Europe, from
London’s meaty, masculine mecca of English food (St. John) to the
12-seat Fäviken in the wilds of northern Sweden, where chef Magnus
Nilsson stalks lingonberries in bearskin with his gun dog, Krut.
Master chefs buzz
among themselves about Sloan’s urchins like discoverers of a
latter-day Beatles—or, in the case of René Redzepi, beetles. The
founder of “New Nordic” cuisine, Redzepi runs Noma, a Copenhagen
eatery that Restaurant magazine has judged to be the world’s best
in four of the last five years.
Redzepi’s 28-course
celebration of local and seasonal ingredients foraged from the
woodlands and seashore is designed to demonstrate nature on a plate.
He fashions culinary bouquets from wild herbs and edible soil,
toasted hay and reindeer moss, live ants and fermented grasshoppers.
(“Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup!” “Yes, and for the next
course...”) In one signature dish, raw North Atlantic shrimp are
washed up on a “beachscape” of grasses, frozen pebbles and
dried-urchin “sand” that showcases the Norwegian green’s murky
orange innards. Sloan provides the urchins, which the Danish have
dubbed søpindsvin (sea hedgehogs). Redzepi says they’re
as luscious as anything he’s ever eaten.
“It’s like Roddie
invented a new product, a new culinary sensation,” echoes fellow
chef Esben Holmboe Bang, whose Maaemo is the most shimmering of
Oslo’s Michelin-starred chow houses. “His Norwegian greens are
sweet and tender and you can taste the wilderness in every bite. It’s
like you’re making out with the sea.”
***
The night before the
greens first appeared on Noma’s menu, a waiter asked, “Where do
sea urchins come from?”
“They grow on
trees,” said another waiter, helpfully. Which even by Scandinavian
standards wasn’t much of a comeback. It so happens that urchins can
be found in almost every major marine habitat from the poles to the
Equator, and from shallow inlets to depths of more than 17,000 feet.
Sloan mostly targets exposed reefs with rich forests of kelp, which
urchins eat ravenously.
At dawn on this brutal
spring morning, Sloan and his one-man crew—a Frenchman who answers
to J.C.—clamber onto a red polar work boat he’s christened Big
Betty. Out to sea, a white-tailed eagle is wheeling and, beyond that,
to the northwest, you can see the lumpy peninsula jutting toward the
Lofoten Islands. Under an immense sky (sea clear, light swell) Big
Betty putters along until reaching a craggy cove, where Sloan
spies the familiar dark shadows. He zips up his dry suit, yanks on
rubber gloves and straps on 65 pounds of scuba gear. Plopping
backward into the water, Sloan shimmies through dense clusters of
seaweed, propelled by the surge of each wave.
Urchins have hundreds
of adhesive tube feet and move over the sandy seafloor at a fairly
leisurely pace. Sloan collects them with diligence and a certain
tenderness, placing the prickly krakebolle one by one into the mesh
sacks that flutter in his wake. After 30 minutes he surfaces through
the surf, and is quickly hauled onto the deck by J.C., who then sorts
the urchins according to color, size and condition. A typical daily
haul is between 200 and 300 pounds.
Sloan’s frozen lips
are the same pale blue as the water; his breathing is so labored he
can barely speak.
“Welcome to my
office,” he says at last. “This is a magic place to be. Every day
I feel like I’m parachuting into the Amazon jungle, without the
piranhas. I have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s quite
exciting, but it can be terrifying as well.”
He smiles gently.
Sloan is an engagingly modest, gruff and diffident fellow with an
untamed beard and a sharp sense of humor—in three languages. “I’m
quite a sane guy,” he says, “but I’m a bit mad, too.”
He’s never bothered
to pry out the urchin spike his right thumb has harbored since 2004.
“The first year it’s interesting. After that, it becomes part of
you.”
The English writer P.
G. Wodehouse wrote that it’s never difficult to distinguish between
a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. Though Sloan has a
copious supply of inner sunshine, he holds strong opinions—about
politicians, whaling, the sustainable and ethical consumption of
fish, the 1970s TV spy show “The Man From Atlantis” (which he
loves), Nordic mosquitoes (hates), the medicinal value of
periwinkles—and he doesn’t hesitate to express them. If he
invites you to spend a day aboard Big Betty, then you’ve
passed some very stringent, very idiosyncratic test of character.
At this moment he’s
standing astride Betty’s stern, holding forth on the perils of
his profession. He recalls a five-hour battle through 20-foot waves
to get his first tiny boat the final kilometer home. (“If you steer
the wrong way, you die. It’s as simple as that.”) He
compares disentangling himself from a clump of underwater kelp to
squeezing through a hawthorn hedge. He describes being
flung into a churning washing machine of surf and currents.
“I’m upside-down, swirling above jagged rocks, unable to see my
oxygen bubbles. During a whiteout, I can float for five minutes with
no idea where I am.”
Sloan is awed by the
milky nothingness he confronts during urchin spawning season, when
the sea teems with delicate, transparent creatures of great beauty.
The currents and low visibility make diving too risky. “Imagine if
you could see all the pollen spores in the air. It’s like
snorkeling in a tub of bathwater after you dropped a bar of soap in
it. This is the soup of life, you understand.”
He first dipped a toe
into that soup at age 5, during a fishing holiday to the Scottish
Highlands. (The family motto: Sleep long and prosper.) When the lure
of his older brother, Robbie, got snagged on some slimy seaweed,
Roddie volunteered to fetch it. “I must have walked only a few
yards, but it seemed like a few miles,” he says. “I remember
thinking that the sea is this wonderful place.”
Which, growing up in
the land-locked hamlet of Dunscore he never much got to experience.
“At 19, I kind of struggled off into life,” he says. “I was
bitterly disappointed with it.” He drifted through Europe, finding
work in restaurants as a porter, a cook and a manager. At 27, he
landed in Oslo and got a job in a sports lounge. While tending bar he
met his future wife, Lindis, a college student who had come to watch
a British soccer match on the wide screen TV. She asked him to change
the channel. He complied. They’ve been a couple pretty much ever
since.
It was Lindis’
brother who suggested that Roddie move to Arctic Norway and hunt the
feral urchin. “The big problem was not fishing them,” Roddie
says. “The big problem was selling them.” Business was never
easy, though Sloan began to source some of the continent’s top
restaurants, like Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV in Monaco. But when
his Paris wholesaler went bust in 2008, he decided to return to
school and pursue a degree in engineering. A phone call from René
Redzepi changed all that. The Noma chef asked Sloan to ship his
greens to Denmark. Sloan was reluctant, but at Lindis’ urging—and
after tripling the price as a disincentive—he gave in. “I was
ready to throw in the beach towel,” he says. “René saved my
career.” Noma now has a standing order for 100 pounds a week.
The greens are at
their prime from November to the end of February. When the season
winds up, Sloan switches to mahogany clams, which Norwegian fishermen
once used as cod bait. The clams stop reproducing after 25 years, and
some that Sloan harvests are hundreds of years old. “They’ve
spent centuries just lying in their beds,” he says. Bored, not
happy as, well...clams. “If a mahogany clam had a brain, it might
think, ‘I’ve just turned 350. Why wasn’t I born a dog? Twelve
years of this crap and it would all be over.’”
Urchins lack brains,
too. The test—its spiny outer shell—protects what is basically an
eating and breeding machine. The skeleton is divided into sections
running from top to bottom, like the segments of an orange. Inside
the body are five corals of roe, sometimes called tongues. On the
underside of the test are a muscular system and five self-honing
calcium carbonate teeth that allow the urchin to chomp through stone.
This chewing apparatus is known as Aristotle’s lantern, from a
description in the fourth century B.C. philosopher and
naturalist’s Historia Animalium. (Scholars recently proposed
that he was actually referring to the test, which resembles the
bronze lamps of ancient Greece.)
Urchins are among the
earliest forms of life known to have existed. Their fossils date back
some 450 million years. “The little buggers are believed to share a
distant common ancestor with humans,” says Sloan. Which sounds like
the setup for another Norwegian joke.
Around 800 species of
urchins are still extant. All have roe that’s edible, though not
necessarily palatable. In the kitchen of his farmhouse, Sloan
demonstrates how to cut around the Norwegian green’s mouth and
scoop out the tongues. In theory, urchins should be opened with a
coupe oursin—a tool specially designed for the job. Sloan doesn’t
own one, so he uses his wife’s nail scissors. Inserting the tip
into the mouthparts, he snips off an itty-bitty piece and trims the
top third of the shell to reveal the roe. He spoons out a fillet and
places it on your tongue: The sensation is soft and pillowy. “I
love the taste of urchin when it’s really good,” Sloan says. “You
start with sea salt, then you get a big iodine hit, and, at the end,
a distinctive sweetness that sits in your mouth for hours.”
***
Oyster farmers in the
United States have lately twisted the term terroir to create
“merroir,” which refers to the flavors imparted by different
areas of the sea. In the urchin’s case, flavor depends on the
species and the seaweed it eats, says John Lawrence, who wrote the
book on the subject (it’s for sale: Sea Urchins: Biology and
Ecology, $200, Academic Press).
The merroir of oysters
varies widely—generally, smaller varieties tend to have a slightly
metallic taste. We ask: In the urchins’ briny universe, does size
matter? “The urchin gonad is both a nutritive reserve organ
and a gametogenic organ,” says Lawrence, a professor at the
University of South Florida. “It is a nutrient reserve organ
because it produces nutritive phagocytes that store protein and
glycogen. These are produced in the gonads during the first part of
the reproductive cycle and are transferred to the gametes. The gonads
are most flavorful when they consist primarily of nutritive
phagocytes and not gametes. It is possible the gonads of small
urchins consist primarily of nutritive phagocytes.”
Simply said, Sloan’s
finest urchins are much like a juicy cut of Wagyu steak: lots of
energy stored. The nutritive phagocytes of the roe and the fat of
well-marbled beef account for their robustness. Sloan has an even
simpler explanation for why his greens are so exquisite. “By June,
when the midnight sun arrives, there’s lots of algae for them to
eat,” he says. “Everything grows slowly up here, so the urchins
taste better.”
***
Both fragile and
destructive, the urchin is a tempest in an environmental seapot. In
every corner of the planet, there seem to be either too few or too
many. The French and Irish exhausted their resident stocks years ago.
In Maine, Nova Scotia and Japan, urchin populations have been
drastically reduced by overfishing and disease.
Meanwhile, off the
coasts of California and Tasmania, overfishing the animal’s natural
predators and large-scale change in ocean circulation—believed to
be an effect of climate change—have turned vast stretches of
seafloor into “urchin barrens” that remind you of moonscapes. The
urchins multiply, chew down the kelp and devastate marine ecosystems.
“Management of the sea is the only way,” says Sloan.
He culls his wild
urchin beds on a five-year rotation, and wants Norway to adopt a
hands-on approach—instituting quotas and establishing fishing
zones. In return, a hunter of urchins might produce an underwater map
or feed them kelp washed ashore when natural supplies are scarce.
***
From a jetty in
Nordskot Harbor, Sloan gazes over the sea, but a gray mist obscures
the cliffs and slopes. “I’d like to plant maple trees on my
land,” he says, a bit wistfully. A neighbor told him the trees
wouldn’t produce sap for at least 25 years: “You’ll be very,
very old.” Sloan told the neighbor, “That’s not the point. I’m
looking to the future.”
Sloan would be happy
if the future looked a lot like the present. “I’ve got a smart
woman as a wife and an old, fat Labrador,” he says, laughing at the
Norwegian jokiness of it all. “I don’t need a Ferrari. I can’t
watch more than one TV. I can’t sleep in more than one bed. If you
have enough in life, that’s all that matters. I’m just clearing
sand off the bottom of the ocean.”
July 2014
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