Indulging in the Culinary Delight of Caviar

There’s a unique joy in sharing culinary delights, especially when it involves baguette slices adorned with authentic caviar, complemented by a glass of effervescent wine — be it Champagne, Prosecco, or Cava — while surrounded by friends and loved ones. This holiday season, thanks to Sturia, a renowned French caviar producer, I had the pleasure of indulging in this very experience alongside my beloved companion and wife of 54 years.

In the wake of overfishing in the 1990s, wild caviar production was suspended from 2007 to the end of 2010 in Russia and a number of the countries that border the Caspian Sea to allow wild stocks to replenish. In 2009, the United Nations banned five countries (including Russia and Iran) from internationally trading caviar because they failed to agree on fishing quotas.

At the time, smuggling of Caspian and Black Sea caviar from Iran, Russia and Azerbaijan to affluent markets around the world reached endemic proportions. The UN ban was lifted late in 2010, when producing countries finally agreed on very strict quotas, but since then efforts to successfully farm sturgeon caviar have been ongoing throughout the world, while the prices for wild caught product of any kind have risen to the stratosphere.

A world famous retailer’s wild caught Ossetra nowadays sells for $160 for a 30 gram tin and a department store in Manhattan sells a very similar product for $123 per ounce. Another, also well known importer retails a 1 oz. glass jar of wild caught Beluga for $175. If you wish to purchase a 1 kilo (2.2 lb) tin, the starting price for genuine Ossetra is over $5,000 and Beluga will set you back $10,000 or more. 

Traditionally, the term caviar refers to salt-cured roe from wild sturgeon (Acipenser), a fish family that has not changed since the prehistoric Cretaceous, in other words for over 100 million years. It is the closest that we will ever come to a living dinosaur!In some countries without strict labeling regulation, the term caviar is also loosely used to describe the roe of other fish such as salmon, trout, lumpfish, whitefish, carp, flying fish, and other species; but these are not actual true caviars and, to be honest, the taste of most of these other fish roes is nowhere near the exquisite taste of wild sturgeon eggs.

There are many caviar importers and sellers now in the market from sustainable farmed resources but the taste of some of the farmed product has been less than stellar. Through the years I have tasted numerous farmed caviars. I tasted one farmed in Germany which was good tasting but not as great as the wild caught; a few others were farmed in the US (Florida, California and Oregon), and some were farmed in Turkey (Black Sea), Russia and Kazakhstan.

During a Gastronomika visit, I tasted pretty nice farmed caviar from Italy’s Lake Garda and there is even farmed product from China’s Qiandao Lake. Much of the farmed product in the market looks like Beluga, Ossetra or Sevruga in size but has a slightly metallic aftertaste, or is too salty from being processed with too much sea salt to cover the off taste. The Chinese product named Kaluga Hybrid looked and tasted as if it was dipped in heavy brown motor oil but the Kaluga Queen was lighter and tastier. Pressed non-sturgeon fish egg sacks covered in wax might be nice, like the Greek Avgotaraho and the Italian Botarga, but the taste is sharper and completely different.

I have recently discovered farmed caviar from France that looks and actually tastes like wild sturgeon roe.

The brand name is Sturia, from the breeder/producer/refiner Caviar Sturia of Bordeaux, and it comes from different fish varieties such as Acipencer Baerii (Siberian Sturgeon), Acipencer Gueldenstaedtii, and Huso Huso, the sturgeon where the Beluga caviar comes from. The two Sturia samples I tasted were Vintage and Oscietra (Ossetra) and they sell a large number of other grades depending on the size of the grain and the length of ageing. The above mentioned were the ones me and my wife tasted in 50 gram tins. The retail price was very competitive.

We tasted the caviars using fresh rounds of baguette, sweet butter and, occasionally, a squeeze of lemon. The caviar was spooned onto the buttered baguette slices with traditional mother-of-pearl implements I bought during a trip to Hawaii many years ago.

These recent samples did taste as if they came from fish caught in the wild. The Vintage, the least expensive, tasted a little like pressed caviar; it was very dark grey, mild, with a slightly fishy aftertaste. After a few drops of lemon juice, it tasted exactly like wild-caught pressed caviar from the Caspian. The Oscietra, was a bit saltier but tasted great, with the nutty and buttery taste that quality aged caviar should have and we devoured it with or without the lemon drops.

The Sturia roe is sold through Kaviar USA, and marketed via 4 distributors. There are also 2 shops that sell directly to the public: Frenchery in San Francisco and PW Cellar in Louisiana

In Europe, they work with several importers specializing in fine food and distributing to restaurants in Germany, Belgium, Scotland, Spain, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and The Netherlands .

In Asia, they work with Classic Fine Food in Singapore, Indonesia and HK-Macau; Gourmet One in Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia; Gourmet Partner in Taiwan; Arcane in Japan; Indoguna in Cambodia; Chef’s Food in Korea and Jiarui in China. And they will work directly with restaurants in countries where they do not have distributors.

We enjoyed the samples very much and washed them down with sparkling Prosecco flutes.