Neri Uni: Home-Use Inexpensive Sea Urchin Paste
When I think of expensive, luxurious ingredients for Sushi, what comes to my mind right away is the sea urchin “Uni (雲丹、うに)”, because the Sushi topping is one of my favorite delicacies or “Chinmi (珍味)“.
We Japanese occasionally enjoy fresh raw sea urchin roe or Uni with rice or other foods at Sushi restaurants, traditional Ryotei, and the like in daily life, but not many people have it at home.
As a matter of fact, not many supermarkets stock raw sea urchin roe on its own. Instead, many are selling assorted Sushi packs including sea urchins.
I sometimes buy that kind of Sushi variety pack at a supermarket near my house, for the assortment is inexpensive and reasonably priced compared to hand-rolled Sushi plates served in traditional Sushi restaurants.
In addition to them, I also love a classic processed sea urchin product that is available in most supermarkets, which I actually bought this time for this blog article.
Neri Uni (練うに)
What I picked up this time is a jar of “Neri Uni (練うに: kneaded sea urchin)”, which contains a sea urchin paste mainly meant for plain white rice.
Nonetheless, not only rice, but the paste actually goes perfectly with alcoholic drinks, especially with sake. Many Japanese people like to drink with this as an accompaniment or “Otsumami (おつまみ)”.
Since this sea urchin paste is for home use, it is not that pricey and sold for about 500 yen (about 5 USD).
The reason why the product can be bought at an affordable price is that the orange paste doesn’t only consist of Uni. As I mentioned above, it is a processed, blended food, not fresh raw sea urchin roe.
Ingredients
Specifically, according to the label on the side of the glass jar, the main ingredients in this Neri Uni are salted sea urchin, wheat flour, sugar, egg yolk, ethyl alcohol, milk protein, amino acid seasoning, starch adhesive, and colors.
By the way, the sea urchin content is 65 percent.
Taste
This Neri Uni paste has a distinctive, somewhat briny taste packed with the umami of sea urchin.
Although the ingredients include sugar, the paste isn’t sweet at all, rather on the savory side. The texture is smooth like miso paste.
Hey Tomo, cool blog. I’m interested in neri-uni and any other methods used to preserve sea urchins: do you think you could help me find a recipe for neri-uni, or any other recipe for preserving sea urchin roe? I’d be happy to send you some once I’m able to make it.
Thanks,
Justin
Hello, Justin, thank you for the comment.
I wrote an article on what you want to know and posted it just now.
Please check out this post.
Thank you for the info. Could you tell me where I can buy the bottles of Neri uni to have shipped to my home in Florida?
Thank you for commenting.
There are 2 options by which you could buy Neri Uni (ねりうに, 練りうに, 練うに).
Use Amazon Japan (https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/) or Rakuten Global (https://globalexpress.rakuten.co.jp/onlineshop/).
I’m not sure if they ship the food to your country, so please check if it is possible.
Tomo, thank you so much for responding. I tried both of those 2 websites but I had no luck. Since my mom passed away (she’s Japanese) I haven’t been able to get any. My siblings have been looking as well. Thanks again for at least responding and trying for us.
Hi David,
Thank you for letting me know about the result but that’s a shame…
Although you can get Japanese sea urchin sauce such as Unihishio and Uni Shoyu on Amazon.com,
it appears no seller carries Neri Uni for now.