11/23/2007

The Nibble: Join the (Caviar) Club

The Little Pearl:
Join The (Caviar) Club
If you already love caviar, or would like a chance to study it, The Little Pearl wants to help. A purveyor of sustainable caviars from all over the world, including those farmed in the U.S., there is no intimidation, mystery or pretentiousness here: It’s a friendly place to learn about caviar (so is THE NIBBLE’s Caviar Section).

The caviar is very fresh, with a firm texture and mild taste—no saltiness or fishiness. You can taste the species character and terroir in each bite. Each jar is packed to order.

The black caviars include American Sturgeon, Bowfin, farmed Osetra from Germany, Spoonbill Paddlefish, Transmontanus Rex (our favorite!) from the U.S. and Uruguayan Baerii (runner up). There are three types of salmon caviar—Keta, King and Yukon Gold—plus Golden Whitefish and Rainbow Trout. (Read more about them in our Caviar Glossary.)

While The Little Pearl has some products for high rollers (for $1,200 and up plus travel expenses, a caviar sommelier will come to you and conduct a tasting for eight to ten), the rest of us can enjoy a tasting sampler for $150 or can join the Caviar Club and get a different shipment each month ($65/month). It’s a perfect treat or luxury gift; low calorie and high protein; sustainable; and very special. Now, you don’t have to envy how the other half lives—you can be the other half. Read the full review below.

Sturgeon, the fish that produce the choicest caviar, have roamed the seas and rivers of the world for 250 million years—predating the dinosaurs, who first appeared around 230 million years ago.* They were enjoyed by prehistoric man and have been fished commercially for their meat and eggs since 1100 B.C.E. by the Azeris and Persians, who settled at rivers leading to the Caspian Sea, spawning grounds for the great fish.
*The dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago; fortunately, they did not take the sturgeon with them.

Rare today, caviar was a delicacy even in Greco-Roman times. The first written record of caviar is by none other than Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. He described how the sturgeon eggs were carried into banquets heralded by trumpets and floral tributes. King Edward II of England (who reigned from 1302 to 1327) claimed all sturgeon as property of the king. He was ultimately deposed and murdered, although not by caviar activists.

The Russian czars and aristocrats famously enjoyed caviar; their caviar of choice was not beluga but the golden roe of the sterlet sturgeon, which became known as “Imperial” caviar and was the most coveted type. Alas, the sterlet has been overfished to the point of near-extinction, and the three largest Caspian sturgeon, the beluga, osetra and sevruga, are on the Endangered Species List of the World Conservation Union.

Caviar has been so cheap at times that it was kept as food by the poor fisherman who sold off the meat, and it was given away free like peanuts and pretzels at American bars in the early 1900s. Today it is the most expensive food on earth. You can pay $350 an ounce for prime Iranian osetra, which makes white Alba truffles seem left far behind in the luxury race—until you realize that an ounce of lightweight truffle goes much farther than an ounce of heavy caviar (it will season a dish for the entire table, whereas one ounce of caviar leaves one person wanting another six ounces).

What Is Caviar And What Is Roe?

The answer is different depending upon where you live, and whether or not you’re a biologist or a caviar processor.

The French government legally defines caviar as the eggs of sturgeon. All else is roe.
Formerly in the U.S., caviar referred only to the eggs of sturgeon. Today, any fish eggs can be called caviar, as long as the name of the fish precedes the word: salmon caviar, whitefish caviar, etc.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines roe as unsalted fish eggs; caviar is salted fish eggs. That is how the products are referred to in the caviar trade. However, the terms are used interchangeably in retail and culinary circles—salmon roe, salmon caviar; trout roe, trout caviar; etc.
In much of northern Europe, black caviar means dyed lumpfish or whitefish caviar.
In Sweden, kaviar is a pink sandwich paste made from cod roe (see photo at right).
To biologists, caviar is the unfertilized eggs of fish, whereas roe defines eggs that have been fertilized and already laid.
Whether you call it caviar or roe, the eggs are lightly salted to preserve them. More about that shortly.

Is “Caviar” Russian for “Sturgeon Eggs?”

Nyet. One might expect the word “caviar” to be Russian in origin, but it isn’t. It derives from the Persian (Farsi), khag-avar, which means “roe-generator.” The Turkish word hayvar, for egg, became caviar during trade with Italy and France in the 16th century (the word first appears in print in English in 1591). And the Russians refer to caviar as ikroj, roe, modifying the word with the particular type of roe (beluga, sturgeon, salmon, trout, etc.).

Most people associate caviar with the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake. It is a vast body of water bordered by five countries: the Russian Federation to the northwest, Kazakhstan to
the north and northeast, Azerbaijan on the southern part of the western shore, Turkmenistan on the southern half of the eastern shore and Iran on the southern shore. The Caspian is home to seven different sturgeon species. The major caviar species fished for caviar, the enormous beluga (up to 30 feet long and 3,300 pounds), the osetra (up to 10 feet and 500 pounds) and the sevruga (6.5 feet and 175 pounds), are all on the Endangered Species List. Last year, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) developed a list of conservation measures that included the restriction of Caspian caviar sales to those nations that bordered the Caspian. This measure was meant to curtail the illegal poaching that is partially responsible for the decline of the sturgeon (pollution and damming of rivers, which are the sturgeons’ spawning grounds, the killing of the sturgeon to take their eggs, and extensive illegal poaching are the others). Over the past 10 years, other countries have begun caviar farming, for both preservation and to meet consumer demand. The beluga is too large to be farmed, but the osetra has found success, as you’ll see in the tasting notes below.
United States: Former Caviar King Of The World

It may surprise many caviar fans to learn that in the 19th century, the U.S. was the world’s leading producer. The American caviar industry began in 1873 when Henry Schacht, a German immigrant, opened a sturgeon-fishing business on the Delaware River in Penns Grove, New Jersey, where sturgeon were plentiful. Schacht created the first company to distribute caviar throughout the world, selling it throughout the U.S. and exporting it to Europe for $1.00 a pound. Other entrepreneurs soon followed, and by the end of the century, the U.S. was the largest exporter of caviar. Ironically, much of the exported caviar was re-imported to the U.S. labeled “Russian caviar,” a more prestigious product.

By the end of the 19th century, America was producing 90% of the world’s caviar. Our rivers were rich with sturgeon: 3,500 tons of caviar were harvested from the Delaware and Hudson Rivers alone, and, once that supply was depleted, similar amounts came from the Pacific Northwest, particularly the Columbia River in Oregon. Caviar was so plentiful that caviar was routinely served during free lunches in saloons (lunch and caviar were complimentary with the purchase of a nickel beer). As with pretzels and peanuts, the salt engendered thirst and beer sales.

But finally, the American sturgeon was over-fished nearly to the point of extinction. Suddenly, sturgeon caviar was an exorbitant luxury. After World War II, when America again turned its focus to caviar, affordable caviars were sought. In the 1960s the Romanoff Caviar Company, originally established in 1859 in the caviar boom days, began to promote affordable red salmon caviar, dyed lumpfish caviar, and later in 1982, golden whitefish caviar. Today, whitefish caviar is infused with wonderful flavors and natural colors to create an artist’s palette of delights, and sturgeon farming is going full-throttle in the U.S., Europe, Israel, South America and other points around the globe.

About Caviar
What makes top-quality caviar—the type you bite into and say, “Worth every cent!?”

The fish live in pristine water
They have the best feed—what the fish eat prior to harvesting directly impacts the flavor (the best farmed sturgeon are fed wild shrimp)
Preparation is also critical. The methodology—which was invented by the Chinese for the preservation of carp roe—has remained the same for thousands of years. It is very labor intensive, and one of the reasons that caviar prices are so high (although the markups of the middlemen are the principal reason—the fish do not sell for a huge amount, and an entire poached sturgeon [illegally caught by poachers] can be bought for as little as $5.00).

First, the roe is removed from the sturgeon. The most common method of extracting the eggs involves the actual killing of the fish, either before or after the removal of the egg sack—one reason why wild sturgeon, which take so many years to mature, are an endangered species. Farmed and sustainably fished sturgeon are not killed. The eggs are removed in a more laborious process (think of it as a sturgeon c-section) and the fish is returned to the water.

The roe is sieved through screens to remove fatty tissue and membrane, and then filtered into different sizes, after which it is carefully cleaned and rinsed. Next, it is classified by size and color: 000 eggs are the largest and palest, and 0 are the smallest and blackest. The most desirable—and the most expensive—are 000 grade.

Now, the roe is ready to be salted, when it will officially become caviar. The salt is used to preserve the freshness of the caviar. A special kind of non-iodized salt is used, from the city of Astrakhan, just north of the Caspian on the Volga River (which itself is rich in sturgeon). The salt has low chlorine content to begin with, but is stored for seven years to enable any chlorine to evaporate. Because of the superiority of the salt, Iranian caviar producers now use it as well, so that today the Russian and Iranian caviars are almost indistinct in flavor and texture.

The finer the caviar, the less salt is used to impact the flavor (and also, the more perishable the product). Malossol caviar—the word means “little salt”—indicates that the caviar is of the finest quality and the least amount has been used. When you see a tin marked “Malossol 000,” it’s the best Caspian caviar that money can buy. (However, caviar is not sold this way in the U.S. Like mattresses, it tends to be sold with marketing names, so that the consumer can’t compare grade to grade, apple to apple). Traditionally, borax (sodium borate, the same product added to detergents) has been added to provide extra sweetness. Borax is not a legal food additive in the U.S.; so if the caviar tastes sweeter in Europe, consider this factor.

There’s one more factor a sensitive consumer should consider: if the caviar is sustainable. Caspian caviar isn’t. The sturgeon are being driven to extinction. There are options, and based on our tasting, excellent caviar experiences to be had from sustainable fisheries and environmentally sensitive farms. The Little Pearl only sells sustainable caviar—that which is
farmed or fished in a responsible manner that does not deplete the resource. No sturgeon are killed, as with traditional caviar harvesting. The company is a member of Seafood Choices Alliance, Slow Food and the Edible Communities.

Caring For Caviar

Caviar should be stored at 28 degrees to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Unopened jars can be stored for four weeks; pasteurized caviar will keep in the refrigerator unopened for several months. Once opened, all caviars should be consumed within two to three days (The Little Pearl does not sell pasteurized caviar, since pasteurization impacts the texture).

The Little Pearl Red Caviars
We began our caviar adventure with a lovely basket of six caviars, that came with its own mother of pearl spoon, tied with a satin ribbon. Some of the caviars we sampled are wild, some are farmed, all are sustainable. One person can polish off the six ounces of caviar as a deluxe treat or a luxurious first course; but two people who are very close can share them. Our experience left us wanting more, but we knew we’d had a privileged experience.

When tasting a variety of caviars, begin with the reds (or other lighter caviars) and then move to the blacks. As with wine or any food, the less complex should be tasted first, building up to the most complex. We tasted the caviars in the order that follows.

Rainbow Trout Caviar:
Buttery