Sea-urchin
Sea-urchin:
a tasty and food specialty in Tuy Phong
BTO – Owning
rough shape with many pointed spines, sea urchins or bridges pinch is one of
valuable food specialties which can be processed into many delicious dishes…
Gift of
the ocean
Sea-urchin is a
kind of mollusk species, living in shallow waters where water-plants and mosses,
coral reef cluster in abundance. The hunting season of sea-urchin normally falls
on April until July depending on the weather. Hunters can find out succulent
urchins often at dark nights and the less tasty ones on nights with moon light,
according to Pham Van Tai – hamlet 2, Binh Thanh commune, Tuy Phong district.
Long time ago, La
Gan cape region (Binh Thuan) has become the home to many species of sea urchins
such as black urchin, silver urchin, etc. Those are portly, but the black
urchins are the biggest in the size of a hand. It is estimated that about 10-12
urchins are weighed one kilogram. Each urchin has 16 sections of firm, tasty and
fatty muscle.
As told by local
fishermen, sea urchin used to be at dirt-cheap prices and some fishermen
formerly caught urchins for the purpose of meal improvement. Nowadays, as
urchins become a food specialty, urchin-hunting also emerges as a livelihood.
The indigenous fishers compared the urchin-hunting job as familiar as picking up
“money” in the sea, so urchin is regarded as a gift of the ocean offering to the
poor.
The so-called
urchin-hunting is rather simple because the “workplace” is only few tens of
kilometers from the shore with simple tools (a distorted iron stick, a
fish-hook, diving-goggles and a basket to contain urchins). To catch urchins,
divers go diving along the pebbles and gravels and use the iron hook to pull up
the urchins and put them in the baskets. It seems to be an easy job to do, but
with a full basket of fresh urchins, it is no less hard and fatigued than
others.
Diving for
urchins or urchin-diving requires diver’s skills, good heath and endurance to
soak in the water for a long time. Moreover, sea urchin has many pointed spines
that can sting and cause pain and numbness in the fingers by a small mistake.
The fishers only catch the grown and big urchins, so the exploitation of urchins
does not affect much to the growth of sea urchins in general.
“Revenue from
urchin-hunting is quite good with the price ranging from VND 450,000 to 500,000
per kg of cut-up flesh of urchins and from VND 20,000-25,000 per kg of urchins
as a whole”, shared Nguyen Thi Huong, an urchin trader .
High food value…
Many people said
that urchin is a both lovely and hateful produce. People hate them because their
surrounding spines can make pain, but they love them because they are a high
valuable food, which is dubbed as a “natural Viagra” source. After cutting off
all the spines, cleaving it into two and discarding all the innards, the rest
(opaque golden meat) is the most precious part of the urchin. Urchin’s meat can
be processed into various dishes: gruel, dish made of raw urchins and vegetable,
grilled urchin with fat and onion, fried rice, grilled chopped urchins…
Dishes processed
from urchin provide more energy, positive and complementary effects, helping
faster recuperate, digest the eaten food well and especially increase vigor for
men. The most popular way to eat urchins of fishermen in Tuy Phong is to cut off
the urchin into two vertically and grill them over charcoal fire. By only
cursory roast, grilled sea urchin is really tasty, delicious and sweet when
dipping it in sauce made of salt and pepper with lemon.
As tourists
nationwide are flocking to Co Thach pagoda tourist area for sightseeing and
sea-bathing, many of them insist on trying dishes made from sea urchins as a
worth eating food during their arrival to the locality.
My
Thien (Source: Binh Thuan Newspaper)