The 4 Most expensive seafood

Everyone probably has taken away sushi once in a while or even dine in the Japanese restaurant, but have you ever known that one of the most expensive seafood is from Japan, (drum roll) those are Stone crab claws, sea urchins, Japanese eels, and gooseneck barnacles.

Join me as we review the factors that contribute to the seafood's high cost.

Let's start with Eel. Young eels are the costliest fish in Japan; half kilogram of baby eel, sells for more than $2,000 in 2022, making them more expensive than blue fin tuna. These eels must first be caught, but it may take a year of labour before they are large enough to be sold. You might raise your eyebrow and wonder why??

Japanese eels are consumed by people in Japan and can be found throughout East Asia but overfishing and changing habitats have led to a significant decline in eel populations. Since 2001, the global catch of eels has increased by more than 75%, which has had a significant impact on price.

In contrast to other types of fishing, young eels are caught in the wild and raised on farms because no farms have been able to successfully breed eels in captivity, so farmers rely on the catch of young eels to make a profit.

However, the future of Japanese eels is still unknown, and demand will probably drive-up prices.

Stone crab claws are among the most expensive seafood items you can purchase. Depending on their size, half kilogram of these claws at a restaurant can cost as much as $70, but catching these crabs is difficult though. You can only fish for stone crab on the south-eastern coast of the US, in Cuba, the Bahamas, moreover the extreme weather condition, changes of currency, global warming are also factoring that cause picking stone crab difficult.

These crabs are expensive in part because they must be caught laboriously and are only available for harvest for a short period of time each year.

Sea Urchin is the third one on our list. Sea urchins, also known as "Uni", are prized delicacies in many parts of the world today. The yellow and orange gonads are frequently served in sushi and even straight from the shell. Hundreds of urchin species exist, but only a small number are prized foods, such as the red sea urchin, also known as California gold, here in Santa Barbara. Sea urchin has a spikey shell, you have to crack shell open in order to taste soft and fresh sea urchin. One 200-gram tray of urchin yellow part " Gonads " like this can cost $100.

There are typically only five yellow fresh inside each urchin, and without enough kelp for the urchins to feed on, the gonads begin to shrivel up. In some cases, an urchin will be completely empty inside. That doesn't sound good, isn't it? To make things more difficult, we crack urchins on the bottom so that we can see what we're picking and determine whether there is enough product inside.

The last expensive seafood of our list is gooseneck barnacles.

To obtaining these barnacles is riskier than you think, and there is even a chance of death. I will explain you why are gooseneck particles so challenging to get, and is this the reason they are so expensive?

The highly sought-after meat that you can eat is held in a long, fleshy stock called a peduncle by gooseneck barnacles, also known as Persebes in Europe. People claim that it has a lobster crab flavour or clam.

To pick those, you don't have a whole eight-hour window to go harvest as many goosenecks as you can; you only have this very brief window when low tide. Barnacles are hidden by water and too unsafe to gather.

Because the densest, meatiest barnacles on the island are those that grow on the edge of the rocks where the waves crash against them constantly. These barnacles eat more frequently in order to grow bigger and withstand the surf, which allows them to cling to the rocks more tightly but also makes them more challenging for us to remove.

Personally, I haven't tried the barnacles, I have never seen this in Australia where I live. For me the banacles look like a tiny dinosaur claw, too cute for me to eat. If anyone already tries those, please let me know in the comment how the taste is. I hope you like my article, I will connect with you again in the next article then. Thank you for reading.