With his 25-seat restaurant, Mendocino County chef Matthew Kammerer is doing what he can to make a dent, though he admits a single chef is a bit outmatched.
And yet on a recent typical gray Mendocino morning, Kammerer delicately made his way across treacherous slippery rocks to collect urchins. Some he cracked open with a special tool to check the amount of gonad, or mango-colored uni, inside.
Researchers at the Bodega Bay laboratory in Bodega Bay have been experimenting with a process of feeding food pellets to purple urchin in an effort to fatten up the uni. The hope is that by making them a desirable delicacy, they can establish a commercial market in which divers would be motivated to haul in purple urchins by the thousands, giving the kelp a chance to rebound.
But Kammerer's effort on this day is more a revelation about the challenges of creating that commercial market, and why efforts to fatten up the purple urchins will be necessity if they're going to ever become a highly desirable food product. "We can’t sell this," Kammerer said somewhat dejectedly."This is five-minutes and it’s completely gone."
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