Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/121906
✺✺✺ touch of dry seaweed. Despite being fatally wounded, the urchin continues to quiver its spines—a sign of freshness if there ever was one. Meanwhile, the only signs of Leask are the bubbles rising from his tank, the buoy connected to his net, and the occasional flash of his yellow flippers. The urchins live on reefs at depths ranging from four to 40 feet, depending on the tide, and Leask is handpicking them. Seams of current knit the water's surface, echoes of the tide surging below. Just up current and around a rocky corner is Reversing Falls, a point where the land pinches together like a thumb over a garden hose and the tide rushes through furiously. Only the boldest divers dare tempt Reversing Falls. It's an ominous stretch of water that has turned boats into splinters and dragged fishermen down to unmarked graves. Not far from Reversing Falls, past a field and a park, there is a small graveyard marked by a fence of pylons. Two of the gravestones date back to the late 1800s, while the third is of new polished granite. Its epitaph reads: IN MEMORY OF MY SON JOSEPH FLOYD JONES 10/24/1980–10/20/2009 AND THE CREW OF THE BOTTOM BASHER. Twenty-eight-year-old Machias native and urchin fisherman Joseph Jones was one of five fishermen to drown in Cobscook Bay between March 2009, just before the fishery was closed, and December 2012. He and his crew of Daryl Cline and Norman Johnson were dragging nets (another fishing method) for urchins around Reversing Falls on the night of October 20 when their boat sank. Cline's body was found the next day. Johnson's was discovered two months later. The body of Joseph Jones, however, was never PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL PIAZZA "I personally prefer the Maine urchin because it has that seawater gaminess to it." —TONY MESSINA, UNI SASHIMI BAR recovered, lost along with his 34-foot boat. (Two days after I left Cobscook, Jones's wallet was found in a fishing net. His body remains missing.) As a sliver of pink peels across the horizon and darkness descends, boats begin puttering back to the dock. To greet them are the buyers, a fleet of commercial trucks with their rear doors agape. Before the fishermen can strike their first cigarette on dry land, before the water drains from their boats, before the divers even have a chance to pull off their neoprene suits, the buyers are already aboard their vessels. They scramble around the boxes of urchins like gulls, cracking into them with specially designed tools to check their quality, specifically the color and thickness of their roe. Top-quality urchins contain bright orange or yellow roe that's, ideally, 12 to 13 percent of the urchin's total weight. These, I am told, are showing more like six percent. "That's good egg," one diver insists, "good egg for Cobscook." The buyer scoffs. Let the haggling begin. The dockside urchin auction is capitalism at its most crude. Supply meets demand, and the ever-contentious question of quality yields the price. The first price offered is $1.60 per pound. The fishermen are deflated. Just last month they were getting $5 down in Rockport. Veterans like Leask don't even bother entertaining a deal. He has a longtime buyer lined up and will rarely sell for anything less than $3. "I'd rather dump these back in the drink than get under two bucks," hisses one fisherman. Others aren't so headstrong. They're visibly exhausted and know that the only thing standing between them and a wad of cash followed by a warm bed is saying yes. The buyers know this too, and the price drops to $1.20 as the auction continues into the night. It's hard to watch these deals transpire without feeling slightly bitter toward the buyers. That is, until you talk to one of them. Sinuon Chau has been in the urchin processing business since 1999. His family owns and operates East Atlantic Seafood and has followed the urchins up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Like many of the fishermen gathered here at Cobscook, Chau and his fellow buyers are regularly turned into vagabonds by the hunt for urchins. And just as the fishermen are subject to his prices, Chau's income rises and falls with the international urchin economy. Russia recently flooded the market, and the price in Tokyo is abominable— thus Chau's $2 offering at today's auction. "I don't really know about the future," he says, securing the last of the day's purchase in his truck. "The way it is right now, if it continues like this, in three or four years it will be finished." And with that, Chau grabs the lanyard to the truck's sliding door and pulls it shut with a hollow bang. Within the truck, within a plastic container, within its shell, the uni will stay fresh for up to five days with proper refrigeration. From here, the trucks drive south three hours to processing plants in Portland, where workers dressed in hairnets, plastic bibs, and thick rubber gloves carefully crack, scoop, clean, dry, and grade every urchin. After being cleaned and dried, the roe looks more like a fresh orange slice than the watery mucus that pooled in my palm just hours before. These slices are stacked neatly in rectangular pine containers, about four ounces each, then loaded back onto the trucks and driven to Logan Airport, where they catch the first flight to Japan. And so it is, from the churning waters of Cobscook Bay to the bustling Tsukiji Market of Tokyo, that Maine's green urchin is fished, processed, and shipped in just over a week. N ot all of Maine's sea urchins are bound for Japan, however. Some are shipped live, spines and all, to restaurants in Boston—like the urchin that sashimi chef Tony Messina now has in his hands. "These are really for adventurous diners," Messina tells me as he carves it open. "It's delicious in the same way that offal is delicious, like how some people love a sweetbread—it has that funkiness to it." The chef stands behind the open-air sashimi bar of Ken Oringer's Back Bay restaurant, Uni Sashimi Bar. Stacks of tuna, octopus, and eel from Japan, salmon from the Faroe Islands, anchovies from Spain, amberjack from Hawaii, and urchin from Maine and California surround him behind a display that catches the candlelight. "I personally prefer the Maine urchin because it has that seawater gaminess to it," Messina says. "California urchins are creamier and a lot cleaner. I like the funk of a Maine urchin." The purple urchin from Santa Barbara is the size of a grapefruit and looks Jurassic next to its Maine counterpart, almost like a medieval weapon. "Plus, the Maine urchin is a lot easier to open and fresher." After cutting a circle into the urchin, Messina frees up the roe with a teaspoon, then drops the orange eggs into a bowl of sake. He cleans the shell under a faucet, the urchin's spines folding back neatly in the running water, then delicately returns the roe to the shell for presentation. He places the shell on the rim of a white plate, then divvies out sections of the California uni around it like satellites. Pomegranate tamari is drizzled over the plate, along with pickled huckleberries and pomegranate seeds, micro greens, a pinch of fleur de sel, and a dusting of bacon powder. What was once a bizarre creature ripped from unforgiving waters is now a sophisticated dish that pairs well with warm sake and costs around $20. Chef Messina comes around the bar and places the plate before me. After briefly admiring the presentation, I gingerly pinch the Maine uni between chopsticks and raise it to my mouth. I can't help but think how curious it is, the story of this bite. All the toil that went into harvesting it, all the hands it passed through, all the lives it touched—a dangerously procured nub of nourishment, transformed into a work of art. BC BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 104-109_BC_F_Uni_LateSpring13.indd 109 109 4/10/13 11:43 AM