Fresh eggs
by Jane Whitehead

Caviar connoisseur Richard Brauman ’98

In his junior year at Boston College, economics major Richard Brauman interned at an experimental fish farm. After graduation, while working as a senior research fellow at Boston’s Federal Reserve Bank, he earned a master’s degree in aquaculture and then an MBA focused on entrepreneurship and seafood marketing. You could say he is schooled in the business of fish.

Related Links
Little Pearl website
In September 2005, Brauman founded the Little Pearl, which sells caviar harvested in sustainable American fisheries and packaged without preservatives to restaurants, retail markets, and online. He offers 10 different caviars (defined as salted, unfertilized fish eggs, as opposed to roe, which have been fertilized), including Transmontanus Rex, from Idaho-raised white sturgeon, and Yukon gold salmon, from its namesake river in Alaska. His caviar has won praise and awards from the New York Times, Bon Appétit, and Food and Wine.

On a November afternoon Brauman, just back from a four-day trip to the Southwest running “caviar classes” for Whole Foods Markets, is at Little Pearl headquarters, a former catering kitchen and attached warehouse in Somerville, Massachusetts. Flattening his springy dark hair under a white baseball cap and donning blue latex gloves, he genially leads the way from his office, a windowless cell off the warehouse, into the kitchen, which has the gleaming stainless-steel look of a laboratory. He opens a one-gallon jar of rainbow trout caviar from North Carolina and gently spoons the glowing amber beads onto blinis, topping them with a dab of crème fraîche. He follows this with paddlefish, a light gray caviar that connoisseurs compare with classic sevruga from the Caspian Sea. The tiny eggs burst against the palate with clean, intense flavors.

Brauman credits the fresh taste to the absence of additives other than salt in his products. Borax, commonly used as a preservative in Europe, is not allowed in American caviar. Little Pearl caviar is also milder and firmer, according to Brauman, because it is younger. “We sell most of ours within 30 days of harvesting, whereas importers age theirs a minimum of 30 days, often 60 to 90, and frequently more than a year,” he says. He is currently testing new aquaculture technologies at a research fish farm in Maine that he hopes will yield fresher, better-tasting caviar. “Our goal won’t be met until we can use our own farm system to produce fresh caviar year-round.”