Sea urchin pasta パスタのうにクリームソース

This was a dish I've been wanting to make for some time but it felt like a bit of a sacrilege to use  good uni this way, so I did not make it until now. Catalina Offshore products sells four different kinds of uni; two kinds of live uni in a shell, California "premium" uni and "gold" uni with the gold uni being the best. I usually get the gold uni but this time, the only uni available was "premium". The difference between the "gold" and "premium" is the color and texture; the gold uni has a nice golden color with a firm texture and the premium is yellower with a softer consistency. Both taste pretty similar to us but there is about a 100% difference in price. They also sell frozen "vana" uni which appears suitable to use for a sauce but we have not tried this.

In any case, because the premium uni has a softer consistency, I thought this was best for this pasta dish. Since this is still an excellent uni, I made sure not to cook the uni in order to preserve its fresh oceanic flavor.

Uni: I used the entire 80 gram tray for two small portions of pasta (We were going decadent here). Leaving a few pieces for garnish, I put the rest in a metal bowl and stirred to break it up and added cream (about 2 tbs) and mixed them well but did not use a bender. Because of this, it still had some small bits and was not totally homogenized but that was OK by me.

Pasta: I used Angel-hair pasta which was cooked as per instruction on the box.

While the pasta was draining, I melted butter (1 tbs) in a frying pan on medium flame. When the butter melted I added the drained pasta to coat. After I cut the fire, I added the mixture of uni and cream and coated the pasta.

I garnished it with chopped chives and nori strips and more uni on the top. I served soy sauce on the side. This is a very rich and creamy pasta. Excellent! Next time, I may mix in soy sauce before serving. Although this is a pasta dish, we stuck to cold sake which went so well with the uni.