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A big row over a little roe
KIM HONEY
It's Christmastime in the big city and thoughts turn to outrageously priced luxuries we can ill afford. The biggest beneficiaries are our gullets, which are force fed a smorgasbord of earthly delights, some so rare as to be illegal or, at the very least, unethical.
And so it has come to pass that 2006 will be the very first holiday season completely devoid of the much vaunted beluga caviar, unfertilized fish eggs that are ripped from the belly of the great Caspian Sea sturgeon. The price of their precious eggs spawned a black market that decimated the stocks, and in January the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species suspended the export of beluga, sevruga and osetra species from the Caspian Sea indefinitely.
The going rate for beluga caviar in Toronto last year was more than $200 an ounce, according to John Mastroianni, general manager of Pusateri's Fine Foods.
So what's a caviar connoisseur to do?
"Get on a plane, fly to Iran, Russia or Kazakhstan and just pig out," says Mastroianni, who has received about a thousand inquiries from customers since September. It's completely okay to gorge on the salty globules in the country where the fish are harvested. Just don't even think about crossing the border with it or you're in Midnight Express territory.
The good news is that substitutions, although not cheap, are within the reaches of the great unwashed, and if you've never experienced the pop of a real caviar egg on your tongue, your ignorance might pave the way for some bliss.
At Pusateri's, perhaps the roe from a sturgeon farmed in France ($130 an ounce) might excite your taste buds, for example, or a herring caviar from Spain called avruga (about $10 an ounce).
Mastroianni says the farmed sturgeon from France is the closest thing to sevruga, though it doesn't burst on the tongue. He also recommends the avruga, which does explode though the eggs are smaller.
Here at home, the eggs from the freshwater sturgeon caught in Lake Abitibi, Que., remains a popular choice with chefs around town, though neither Pusateri's nor Caviar Direct in the St. Lawrence Market has any in stock.
Salmon roe, "a much larger egg the size of a pupil," according to Mastroianni, costs about $10 an ounce. At the St. Lawrence Market, Caviar Direct has a very limited quality of high-grade caviar from the Great Lakes for about $100 an ounce, but owner Anthony Rommens recommends customers reserve some ahead of time. They also carry chum caviar from wild B.C. salmon at $25 for about four ounces, and Arctic caviar from the northern whitefish, which has bright yellow colour, a mildly cured flavour, and costs $40 for four ounces.
Torontonians in the know have been buzzing about a tiny shipment of the only wild Caspian Sea caviar permitted under export rules, the greenish-grey Persian caviar from Iran.
At Caviar Centre Inc. in North York, owner Mark Omidi expects to get a very small share of that shipment, which he says has landed in Canada and is now being inspected. He says he'll have about 10 kilograms for sale at $129 an ounce.
He also sells Atlantic sturgeon caviar from New Brunswick for $49 an ounce, a product he likens to Caspian Sea sevruga though it has a softer texture and a higher salt content. He also offers chum salmon roe from Alaska at $14 for four ounces, crunchy golden whitefish caviar from Lake Huron for the same price as well as another Spanish caviar from wild herring called Mujjol, which costs $11 for about four ounces.
If someone does offer to sell you some wild beluga, sevruga or osetra caviar, the buyer should beware.
Julie Roberson, project co-ordinator of the Caviar Emptor campaign by the U.S. based conservation group SeaWeb, says you should ask where it's from. "If it's Caspian and not Iranian, then there's a problem." The next question is when it was harvested. It was legal to import wild beluga, sevruga and osetra caviar before January 2006, but most experts agree the shelf life is between 12 and 24 months.
Over at the Burlington office of the Environment Canada's wildlife enforcement division, director Gary Colgan is sitting on a pretty big haul: 100 kilograms of Caspian Sea caviar. Destined for Omidi's business, Caviar Centre Inc., it was seized after a DNA analysis showed the contents of the tins did not match the source cited on the import papers. Instead of the cheaper Kaluga caviar from the sturgeon that lives in the Amur River on the border of Russia and China, it was from the Caspian Sea. And it was harvested in 2000.
Omidi says the company ordered Caspian Sea caviar and paid for it, but the exporter sent documents describing it as kaluga. "It was a mistake that happened overseas in Turkey."
Given its age, the caviar be destroyed — all $305,000 worth of it — as soon as Colgan gets around to it.
Colgan said his office is notified every time a shipment of caviar lands at Pearson, but there haven't been many calls of late.
"Caviar imports in 2006 are pretty much zero," he said. "It's pretty much flat."
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