Can the long-lost abalone make a comeback in California? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can the long-lost abalone make a comeback in California?

#31

Post by jboggan » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

daotoad wrote: post #25

jboggan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly inedible, just not commercially practical for the effort versus the amount of meat inside. I prefer their taste over the commercially sold reds, they are sweeter in a wider range of seasons. Purple uni crushed up with soy sauce is the perfect sauce for sheephead sashimi.

Spread this information to any sushi chefs you know. The opportunity to help sustainable fisheries by eating puple urchins into obscurity is huge. It's what our economic system is best at.

Even if there were an increase in demand for the purples you'd still be hard pressed to get them commercially, California has been squeezing the number of licensed commercial boats down to about 100 and the market's flexibility is constrained by that.

Re: Can the long-lost abalone make a comeback in California?

#32

Post by teh_klev » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #28

teh_klev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I visited New Zealand's Stewart Island in 2005 to stay with my brother's in-laws (who run a sea food business there) I had the pleasure of a home cooked dinner of locally dive caught abalone and my own line caught blue cod. The abalone was cooked in garlic butter and was utterly delicious. I'm not really a huge fan of things that live in shells in the sea, but I could certainly get used to abalone. Afterwards I…

teh_klev says ". The abalone was cooked in garlic butter and was utterly delicious. I'm not really a huge fan of things that live in shells in the sea, but I could certainly get used to abalone." But anything cooked in garlic butter is utterly delicious! The abalone is merely a carrier for the hot garlic butter.

Well, yes I admit this is true. But the abalone had a nice texture, like nicely cooked mushrooms I guess. Having thought about it, it was actually like eating a really nice plate of foraged-in-the-wood mushrooms cooked in garlic butter but with a background taste that I couldn't properly identify (maybe the sea), but it wasn't unpleasant.

Re: Can the long-lost abalone make a comeback in California?

#33

Post by a_bonobo » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 1:05 AM UTC

wil421 wrote: post #14

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #3

These things sound delicious.

They are really tough and you need to pound the crap out of it. There are Asian restaurants where you can give a wink or secret handshake and get native abalone. Mostly Chinese IIRC. The Asian poachers were busted on a wildlife show I’ve watched and they are contributing to the problem. I heard about the Chinese restaurants in California from food blogs and other shows.

Similar problem in Australia - lots of Chinese in Western Australia leads to overfishing of native Abalone stock: https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/the-ch...

Restrictions on fishing are getting tighter every season since more and more people go in

Re: Can the long-lost abalone make a comeback in California?

#34

Post by daotoad » Fri, Nov 15, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #29

daotoad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spread this information to any sushi chefs you know. The opportunity to help sustainable fisheries by eating puple urchins into obscurity is huge. It's what our economic system is best at.

By "inedible" I didn't mean that purple urchins taste bad necessarily (acquired taste). It's just that shelling them takes so much work that it's not worth the effort for chefs. There are millions and millions all along the coast; convincing a few people to eat them won't make a dent in the population.

That's what we thought about abalone, dodos, passenger pigeons and buffalo.

Fugu isn't exactly easy to process for eating, but people are willing to pay a LOT of money for the privilege of eating it.

All you need is the right marketing, and purple urchins will be like hen's teeth within 10 years.