Tigers and Cranes

i remember seeing these guys for the first time.

they were deep yellow, nay, i daresay ochre in color. and they smelled a bit funky, and to my skeptical eyes, definitely slimy. i am, of course, talking about sea squirt, alternatively called “hoya” [ホヤ] in japanese and “mung-gae” [멍게] in korean.

watching an NHK special program one day about some industrious japanese fishermen(and women) who harvest these animals, i was struck by the sheer amount of bizarre creatures that inhabit the earth. even more strange is the human desire to snack on these weird critters. At first i thought the fisherman were harvesting apples. Then i thought to myself, “self, now you know that apples don’t grow in the ocean. Apples come from an apple plant, and you gotta dig them carefully from the ground and wash them thoroughly”.

So these weren’t apples, then. more like reddish, round, spiky, squirty, sea slugs(actually, a type of anemone, i think). I watched the program in fascination as the fish dudes pulled up a thick rope from the depths, and dangling on this rope were maybe a hundred of sea squirts, all of them spurting jets of water from their spiny protrusions in concerted panic. Undisturberd by this rather rude behavior from these invertebrates, the fisherman calmly pulls out his pocket knife, makes couple of neat incisions on the creature, and chomps into it as if it were an aquatic apple. With a big grin on his wizened face, he proclaims “yummy.”

A few days after watching the program, i was dining with my parents, and they took me to a sushi restaurant. Now, i’m not much of a sushi connoseur, bypassing such delicacies as fatty tuna and salmon for cooked egg and raw squid. But i was really excited because as a freebie, the sushi joint threw in a plate of sliced sea squirts. Oh, how i closed my eyes as i stuffed one in my mouth, imagining that i am the grizzled veteran of the sea, rocking on my trusty boat the “sea princess”, as i pull out my rambo knife to slice open a sea squirt and taking a bite out of it as one would with a mango. As i was lost in my reverie, my dad said “what the hell are you doing?” bringing me back to reality.

sea squirt sashimi

The taste, if you’ve never had a sea squirt, does take some getting used to. It’s definitely more pungent than uni, with sort of a… well, a minty taste. At first i spat it out in disgust, and cursed my fellow diners for ordering this disgusting slimy excerement of the sea. But now, man… i can’t get enough of the stuff.

Goes really well with beer and sake too.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 10:44 pm and is filed under random, korea, japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.