Perhaps the purest expression of the Sicilian sea: spaghetti tossed with the raw roe of sea urchins and almost nothing else. The coral-coloured gonads are scooped from the shells and folded, uncooked, through hot spaghetti dressed only with olive oil, a little garlic and parsley, so that the residual heat warms but never cooks them. Sweet, briny and faintly iodine, it is a winter speciality of the Catania and Palermo coasts, and a plate demands the roe of twenty to twenty-five urchins.
A dish of the Sicilian coasts, above all around Catania and Palermo, where sea urchins have been gathered and eaten straight from the shell for as long as anyone can recall. The urchin that matters is the purple-brown, short-spined kind whose shell is full of five star-shaped orange gonads; the black, long-spined sort is empty and left alone. Because each urchin yields so little, a single plate of spaghetti takes the roe of twenty to twenty-five of them, all opened by hand. The roe is best in the cold months, and today its harvest is tightly regulated to protect the beds, closed for much of the year and, in some regions, permitted only between autumn and spring.
Silky and just-warm, the roe melts over the pasta into a light cream that tastes of clean sweetness and the sea, salty and softly iodine with a faint bitterness at the edge. The oil and a whisper of garlic frame it, the parsley cuts through, and the spaghetti stays slippery and loose. Delicate above all, it is a flavour that vanishes the moment it is overcooked or overdressed.
The whole dish turns on not cooking the roe. Sea-urchin gonads are packed with free amino acids, glutamate for umami and glycine and alanine for sweetness, alongside delicate marine aromatics that are highly volatile. Even gentle heat coagulates the gonad proteins into a grainy, faintly bitter paste and drives those aromas off, which is why the roe goes in off the heat and is only warmed by the pasta. Loosening part of it with warm oil and a spoon of starchy pasta water forms a light emulsion, the oil droplets held in suspension by the roe's own fats and lecithin so the sauce coats each strand. The garlic is merely infused into the oil, never browned, so its sulphur notes stay soft and do not overwhelm the urchin.
Variations
Purists keep it to urchin, oil, garlic and parsley and forbid cheese and, above all, tomato, which would bury the roe. Some warm a little chilli in the oil, others fold in a few whole gonads at the end for texture, or lift it with a squeeze of lemon. The same roe is spread raw on warm bread, and along the coast a springtime 'ricciata' is simply a feast of urchins split and eaten from the shell with bread. Linguine or spaghettoni stand in for spaghetti.
On the Palate
Where Spaghetti ai Ricci di Mare sits in the Italian flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 4How it's made
7 steps · 30 min
- 125 min
Split the sea urchins around the mouth, open them and spoon out the five orange gonads, reserving them and setting a few aside for garnish.
- 210 min
Bring a large pot of well-salted water to the boil and cook the spaghetti until al dente.
- 36 min
Meanwhile warm the olive oil gently with the garlic, letting it infuse without colouring, then discard the garlic.
- 44 min
Off the heat, mash most of the roe with a little of the warm oil and a spoon of pasta water to a smooth cream.
Watch outMash the roe off the heat only — even gentle heat turns the sea urchin grainy and bitter and drives off its delicate perfume.
- 52 min
Drain the spaghetti, reserving some pasta water, and return it to the warm pan away from the flame.
- 63 min
Toss the pasta with the garlic oil and the roe cream, loosening with pasta water until it coats each strand.
Watch outToss the pasta with the roe cream away from the flame, loosening with pasta water — the sauce should just warm through and coat each strand, never cook.
- 72 min
Fold through the reserved whole gonads and the parsley and serve immediately, while just warm.
