Purple Urchin Possibilities
Santa Barbara Fishermen Team with Shellfish Farmer
to Build New Industry, Help Kelp Forests
By Matt Kettmann| Photos by Daniel Dreifuss | February 25, 2021
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.
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